It is not only traumatic events that can render an adult or child latently motivated. The more the components of a person’s life fail to affirm the adult individual or the figures in the child’s social atom, the greater is the risk that he will be latently motivated. Take a father who is the cause of a motor accident in which his wife and children die; he then finds out that he has malignant cancer and is wrongly convicted of false accounting, leaving him with a fine that will irreversibly cripple his personal finances. When will his pain prove unbearable?
The weaker a person’s positive core, the less external strain is needed for him to become latently motivated. In some cases, ordinary life crises such as unemployment, divorce, serious disease, or grief are enough to cause intolerable pain.
Even if the person’s life force in the personal conceptions he developed from childhood is not that strong, he might still draw a measure of support from some isolated aspect of his life context that has the resources to empower him with positive affirmation, such as being good at his job or having a healthy network of friends (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 293 -303).
Case Study
Yngve is an established artist. After ten years of marriage, his wife divorces him. It comes as a serious blow to him and he takes to the bottle. His artist friends help to get him into a detox center and continue to support him until he soon finds himself back at the easel.
Discussion
Here, Yngve has an asset in his network and in his artistic creativity, which gives him the energy he needs to prevent a deterioration of his drinking habits. We can imagine that his divorce caused pain that he will always carry with him, and as long as his life remains unproblematic, the energy inherent to his social atom and within himself should suffice.
However, a person’s life situation is often geared to the strength of his positive core, so that the stronger the former, the greater capacity he has to arrange an affirming existence.
When someone goes from being manifestly to latently motivated, the same phenomenon arises as in childhood, and his contact rebuses become increasingly filled with demotivation.