Although Thelma's family moved around during her early years, they always lived in small, homogenous towns in the Midwest, almost identical to each other. In spite of the fact that they remained relatively uninvolved, they benefitted from these communities, which provided stability and continuity even to an unstable and dysfunctional family like theirs. Thelma did not fully appreciate that benefit, however, and decided to move to New York, expecting to fit better into the city's disjointed models of life. But it requires much greater effort and determination to belong to a community, where heterogeneity is the norm.

Even those who come from stable families are relatively vulnerable without a mooring community. The crystallization of the sense of self requires not only affirming, validating parents but also a synchronous community. Only a family that is congruent with a stable and homogenous environment can prevent alienation of its individuals and maintain cohesiveness of the family unit. The identity confusion that plagues youngsters in large cities is only partly caused by the fragmentation of families; even the children of intact families are subjected to disjunctive lifestyles in large, diverse communities. What seems to be a deviation from the norm, and thus not necessarily a desirable model for identification, in small communities becomes an alternative lifestyle in larger communities. These alternatives become desirable for counteridentification, that is to say, convenient avenues to reject one's parents' values.