Midlife: A Crossroads, Not a Crisis

Midlife is a very important life stage, a stage filled with wonderful opportunities. But if you don’t understand what midlife is all about, and if you don’t know how to negotiate it properly, you’ll not only miss those great opportunities, but you’ll also pay a steep price.

Midlife Can Be Risky and Very Stressful

Consider this: When compared with people who move through midlife “well and wisely”, people who don’t

• Live a less satisfying second half of life
• Have more stress and more health problems
• Are less successful at work and in relationships, including family relationships, and
• Die younger

Do You Want to Move Through Midlife “Well and Wisely”?

If you want to move through midlife well and wisely then let me explain what’s involved.

Recall for a few moments when you went through an earlier important life stage-adolescence. Your adolescence was a bridge between childhood and adulthood. Once you were on that bridge you were no longer a child.

Now in many ways your midlife passage is an even more powerful life stage. It’s a bridge between the first and second half of your life. Once you’re on that bridge, the first half of your life is over and the second half has begun.

Now imagine if you went through adolescence with no clear idea about what it was. Think of how you might feel if you thought your increase in size and your growth of facial hair, if you’re male and breasts if you’re female , were evidence that you were weird and that something was wrong with you.

Well most people today go through the stage of midlife unaware about what it is and what it involves or what it requires. They have no map for the territory they’re in, and so it’s no wonder they get anxious, stressed out and lost.

It wasn’t always that way, but today too much attention goes to our outer life, and too little to our inner life. But because of the superficial view of life portrayed today by the media and other quarters, few people are aware that midlife is an important stage of life or that the first and second halves of life are very different.

To go through midlife “well and wisely” you have to know

• what midlife is,
• what it involves and
• how to meet the challenges and opportunities it brings.

Turn Toward Your Deeper Identity

At midlife you arrive at a crossroads where you encounter a “natural movement within yourself” to shift your identity and dive deeper into life. This is as much a natural part of midlife as the growth of breasts or facial hair is a natural part of adolescence.

If you recognize this “natural movement”, you can turn in its direction and begin to write a new screenplay for the second half of your life. But if you don’t recognize it, then you live the second half of your life with the wrong script, the script for the first half. This mistake breeds a ton of stress, heartache and lost opportunities. Perhaps if you look around you can see it in many people’s faces.

You can feel a lot of chaos, anxiety, depression and imbalance during your midlife passage. It comes with the territory. The turmoil of midlife usually enters into your consciousness as anxiety over who you are.

These Cultural Biases Cause Great Harm

Both men and women go through midlife changes. But for women it’s more intense, because of menopause-the physical signature of midlife for a woman. And menopause signals a much more dramatic life change for a woman. The culture tends to wrongly regard menopause as a medical condition and the gateway to decline. It locks women into a first half of life screenplay where they feel the second half of their life is downhill and their best years are behind them. This is baloney. But unfortunately, it’s powerful baloney.

It’s not so much that a woman can’t have children anymore, it’s that she’s DONE having children and it’s more accurate to say menopause and midlife are the beginning of her “beyond child bearing years” rather than the end of them.

Menopause Problems are Not “Natural”

You need a New Mindset to protect yourself from getting dragged out to sea by powerful cultural biases against aging, biases that are blind to midlife and to what the second half of life is all about. Menopause is not a medical condition and midlife and menopause are primarily a psychological and spiritual time, the biology is secondary.

Women get caught in difficult menopause problems because of hormone imbalance. That’s not natural. Far Eastern women have few if any of these problems, because their adrenal glands are not depleted by years of chronic stress. Western women get caught in what we call the Menopause Vicious Cycle^TM, a dangerous problem that not only drives hormone imbalance and menopause problems, but heart disease as well.

Let’s continue our focus on women for now. Much of what we say about women has relevance for men too. In a later article we’ll focus on men exclusively.

Women in the Wrong Mindset Miss the Music

Think of it this way, women with the wrong mindset about eating out, go into restaurants to hold the utensils and use the bathroom. They miss the food.

Women with the wrong mindset about menopause, go into midlife as if it was about medical symptoms like hot flashes, getting older, looking less attractive and slowing down. They miss the growth and the adventure. They miss the turn toward the “deeper parts of themselves”, the parts begging for a new screenplay and an adventure that does justice to the second half of their lives.

Women need a “New Mindset” that honors their midlife and menopause as a time of natural and necessary turmoil. This turmoil signals and announces important inner changes, changes that lead into a deeper and more meaningful phase of life.

If you look at menopause without understanding the deeper goings on of midlife, it’s like you’re watching people dance without hearing the music.

Midlife’s Inner Territory

The turn toward your deeper, more essential identity often meets with strong resistance from forces within you, forces that would like to maintain the status quo. Because to them, it feels like you’re leaving known territory for some foreign land. This is one reason why your midlife passage can be filled with stress, doubt and fear.

It is as if your identity loses its solid ground while you are in movement between different possibilities within yourself. Psychologically you can feel like you’re living on a suspension bridge. Any emotional upheaval is like a strong wind that can leave you feeling out of control as the familiar images that have defined you in the past no longer seem fixed, secure and reliable.

Like a lobster who becomes vulnerable when she sheds her shell because she needs to grow into a bigger one, in midlife you’re breaking free from a role and an identity that’s too small for who you truly are. Don’t believe the commercially driven propaganda. It’s a time of growth, not of decline. Don’t miss it.

If you resist change and rigidly hold on to the old images of your first half of your life identity, you run the risk of missing life’s deeper opportunities. You then might develop a kind of chronic dread about having to face growing old and, inevitably, of having to die. Life, in such circumstances, can lose its bright colors and become something that you merely endure with fear and worry rather than living with any gusto and passion.

Midlife Chaos and Opportunity

In the chaos of midlife, your deepest possibilities and opportunities emerge most clearly. You’ll enter midlife with well established and familiar patterns of identity, many of them part of your “conditioned self-image”. Your work and family life may have become predictable sources of identity and enjoyment.

Then all of a sudden you can begin to feel depleted. What you have worked hard for and what you have valued starts to seem lacking in some vague way. This doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It means that the deeper forces within you are stirring. They’re grabbing for the wheel of your life.

Your everyday life can begin to feel like a drama that someone else has arranged. You lose energy for what you do every day; it becomes repetitive and boring. Even your most prized possessions may all of a sudden appear to be just “things”, things that no longer mean very much to you.

You can find yourself worried and anxious as the old wounds in your self-image begin to feel very sore again. As a kind of panic sets in, you might find your connections to people in your family and work lives feel strained. You begin to question everything that seems to have a hold on your time and energy. And you can feel a strong appetite for freedom.

Midlife is a time when the old images that you had relied upon for self definition no longer seem to work well. But, as yet, there are no new images on the scene that could provide you with a clear sense of identity. As a consequence, your experience of yourself, of the “I” or “me” that you tend to identify with, can become uneasy and indefinite.

If you fail to understand this territory, you might become rigid and inflexible in an attempt to hold on tightly to what was. This can result in a narrowing and constricting of your life as you forfeit the opportunity to claim options for growth that are possible at midlife’s crossroads.

Beware Your Surface Identity

Your surface identity will try to find and cling to some sense of certainty that could keep it secure and safe. You could say that when your first half of life identity travels in the second half of life, it likes to have an itinerary clearly and precisely mapped out. It does not like surprises. It even avoids the scenic routes so that it can stay on the main road where everything feels familiar and predictable.

Midlife can be a time when your old maps for life no longer fit the territory that you find yourself in.

As the great writer Dante put it in his Inferno,

“Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.”

Midlife Triggers

Circumstances that can make you intensely aware of midlife turmoil are both internal and external. The external ones include such realities as the physical evidence of your aging, the death of a parent, your children leaving the nest, and the closer view of your own death on the visible horizon.

These situations are depressing, but this kind of depression is in the service of midlife change because it destroys obsolete values. In the same way that changes in sunlight trigger the growth of plant life in the spring, these tough and painful situations are also triggers. In fact, they trigger the awakening of the deeper you, the “you” that should naturally move onto the stage at the second half of your life. See it for what it is.

Your Bottom Line and MESICS Training

The bottom line is that in the second half of life you need to live from who you deeply are and what you truly want and love. If you don’t, then stress will follow you around like a heat seeking missile with your name on it. The kind of nagging stress that you feel when you’re driving along and you realize you made a wrong turn and you’re heading in the wrong direction, but you don’t know how to get back.

MESICS Training includes training in the art and science of going through midlife well and wisely. For now, just know that the turmoil you feel represents life working on you rather than evidence that you are defective or lacking in some way. Don’t give yourself a hard time. If you can learn how to loosen up any inflexible ideas of who you “should” be, you might then become sensitive to a kind of internal guidance. Midlife change actually comes with a good manual, if we know where to find it and how to read the language it’s written in.

---

 Dr. Jim Manganiello is an award winning clinical health psychologist, teacher and author. He’s a longtime innovator in the areas of stress, well-being, personal growth and “inner fitness”.

---