leaving home
Most Americans recognize the old American Express slogan: “Don’t leave home without it.” The warning is playful, but it rests on a serious truth—leaving home unprepared can have consequences.
Some departures are necessary and healthy, even transformative. Others go badly wrong, leaving deep psychic imprints. Lately, I’ve been wondering whether a leave-taking that falters can be redeemed. What does it take to set it right, and under what conditions is that possible?
This is a question I’ll return to often here at The Third Eve. I invite your thoughts and stories.
tales of leave-taking
Though it risks oversimplifying a complex and often painful process, we can loosely categorize leave-taking into a few recurring patterns: the developmentally healthy departure (which is rarely without peril), and the more troubled versions—leaving too soon, leaving too late, or never leaving at all.
Archetypal stories of departure and separation are everywhere. In literature, the theme is foundational. The “Coming of Age” genre alone—reflected in over 100,000 Young Adult titles on Amazon—thrives on tales of necessary leave-taking and the search for identity that follows.1
Scripture offers its own powerful examples. In Genesis 2, we find the principle of leaving and cleaving—departing from one’s family of origin to forge a new bond in marriage. Soon after, Adam and Eve are cast out of Eden: a leave-taking not by choice, but by consequence. These two stories alone provide fertile ground for reflection.
Fairy tales and classical myths also teem with leave-takings, trials, and returns. These narratives—whether literary, religious, or folkloric—teach us that leaving is never just about geography. It’s about growth, risk, and transformation.
theoretical underpinnings
Developmental psychology offers archetypal frameworks for what is, on the surface, a simple biological fact: we grow up. From infancy through toddlerhood, childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood, children navigate a largely predictable sequence of developmental milestones.
Analytical psychology, particularly as developed by Jung and those who have expanded on his work, echoes this idea through the concept of individuation—a psychological maturation process thought to unfold in identifiable stages. To better understand how this process can falter, however, I want to begin with a theorist outside the Jungian tradition: Melanie Klein.
Klein, a pioneer in child psychoanalysis, developed what is now known as object relations theory. Her insights into early relational dynamics offer a powerful lens for understanding the foundations of the psyche. In fact, modern attachment theory—now widely applied in adoption, foster care, and child welfare—is a direct outgrowth of Klein’s work. For our purposes, her framework is particularly useful in exploring how early disruptions in connection can complicate or derail the natural course of separation and individuation.
bon voyage
There are countless tragic leave-takings—stories of orphans and others whose basic developmental needs for safety, containment, and nurturance were never met. For these young people, departure is not a step into autonomy but a forced evacuation from a landscape already barren. Their leave-taking is often chaotic, premature, and riddled with psychic fallout. No map was ever drawn for them; no one waited at the threshold to offer guidance or blessing.
Even in cases of older child adoption—where adoptive parents do stand at the threshold with open arms, guidance, and blessing—the support often comes too late to be fully received. By then, the child may be too defended, too wounded, too accustomed to fending for themselves to trust the very care they so desperately needed.
In other cases, where the early foundations were more or less intact, a different drama unfolds. A common thread in many strained leave-takings involves the adolescent who begins to diverge from the family script. Once seen as the perfect child, they are now labeled the problem—the identified patient. Under the banner of “tough love,” parents may expel this inconveniently large, iconoclastic offspring. Often, this act is less about the child’s rebellion and more about the parents’ own unfinished work—their projected fear, grief, and unintegrated selves.
“And good riddance,” the parents say.
But time has its own curriculum. Sooner or later, often in the quiet of late middle age, the tune of Cat’s in the Cradle begins to play—and the unexamined echoes of leave-takings past return for reckoning.
featured art
dorothea lange, “family walking on highway,” 1938
notes
- Amazon, Coming of Age Book List, four-star ratings and higher, 2025. ↩︎
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