Reform Time Or Midlife Crisis

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Earthly life, halfway through,

I found myself in a gloomy forest."

/ A. Dante

Age in the region of 40 years - a time when much in life has developed, this is the time of adulthood and personal pleasure

Children have grown up, a career has been built, there are also relationships, but there is a feeling that something is missing. There is a vague premonition that youth is over, that middle age is not a question of days lived, and I want to look younger than my calendar.

Mental well-being is replaced by blues and disappointment, regrets about the past begin to outweigh hopes for the future. It is at this time that we lose our usual supports, not understanding how it can be so bad with external well-being. The transience of life opens up for us. Thinking about our purpose, we go in search of the meaning of existence.

Psychologists explain this phenomenon, calling it a midlife crisis, a place of transition to a new level. After a period of accumulation and growth, the time for changes comes, which means it is necessary to change the way of life, this is the essence of the crisis.

Let's try to understand, first of all, the reasons for these experiences.

Where do the roots of the crisis come from?

1. According to one theory, the roots of the crisis lie in the fear of approaching old age

This fear is veiled, so escape can take different forms from getting hooked on cosmetic procedures to "old age in a beard - a devil in a rib" (now I'm talking about addiction, and not about a healthy desire to be well-groomed and beautiful). There may be other experiences that hide fear.

Everything is there, but what next?

There is a loved one, there is comfort, there is even someone to talk to, but there is also an experience - something is over; everything we went to was done. There is a home, a family, a career, money, but I want something new, and there is so little time.

Something Happened in Life

Life did not turn out quite as dreamed of; it cannot be changed quickly and easily, and part of the path has already been passed. The partner is not quite the same, the job is not the same - disappointment comes in their expectations.

A midlife crisis is also the realization of how cruelly deceived in childhood. This is a transition from naive sincerity to harsh truth.

Sometimes the arrival of a crisis is associated with repeated failures in attempts to change oneself.

There may be absolutely different realities behind the crisis, and they will be lived in different ways. Fear of old age suppresses the will of the weak, and gives the strong the opportunity to live even more fully.

2. In the second theory, the roots must be sought in one's own past

The choice that was made in his youth was wrong: for someone this choice was made by parents, someone himself went astray. It is impossible to live as before, otherwise I cannot.

In the first half of our lives, we justified the expectations of our parents, receiving guidelines for life from them, and there is nothing wrong with that, this is how a natural development process looks like. Now is the time to set your own goals, which is difficult.

And if we have accumulated many unsolved problems at the previous stage of development, the chances of falling into apathy, melancholy and depression are great enough.

Crisis symptoms

• You began to notice that you analyze your past and present a lot, finding the differences between reality and dreams, feeling the "collapse of castles in the air", disappointment, farewell to illusions.
• Tension builds up from a misunderstanding of what is happening in the soul.
• A crisis can be perceived by us as a disease accompanied by fatigue, apathy, loss of energy for life. During this period, many turn to magicians and sorcerers, someone to doctors in search of an ailment.
• Suddenly, out of the blue, depression develops. When all is well, there is a home and a family, but I don’t want to see it.
• Old loyal friends are suddenly annoying. Against the background of external well-being, conflicts arise with relatives and at work.

Men and women experience their crisis differently.

Men inspire themselves that they should be healthy and vigorous, corresponding to some ideal image of the breadwinner, leader, guardian, core of the family. It is necessary to live with reason, not emotions, so a man becomes squeezed, unable to feel the surrounding reality, remaining with his inner experiences one on one. Hence, insomnia, hypertension, ulcers, impotence. Men experience limitation of their capabilities ten times more painful than women. Some withdraw into themselves, others indulge in all grave problems.

Women live through the crisis much easier due to the emergence of new roles (mother-in-law, mother-in-law, grandmother), in which they actively participate, finding the meaning of their lives. A woman's crisis can take the form of a battle with her own old age - "time will not take me." Alternatively, life is memories.

There is no way out of the crisis or a way back

How is the crisis resolved? There are two options.

1. The first may look like this: I will meet a person who will relieve suffering and heal my wounds. He will be attentive, interesting, caring, self-confident, reliable, he will provide everything that I do not have. He will fill the inner emptiness, love so much that I feel good. Having met such a person, we stick to him in the thirst to really love ourselves.
2. The second option is to recognize an internal fracture. Accept your spiritual nature, which, going through pain, is ready to rethink life, set priorities, find new goals.

The second half of your life will be devoted to the themes of love and death, and what could be more important.

There are things along the way that can be a support

First of all, this is the knowledge that a crisis is a temporary period, a wave of life. It happens to almost everyone and has a time frame, it is not dimensionless. Someone has it in a mild form, someone in a severe one. If a person has gone through his crisis, learned from it, the consequences of the crisis will be less noticeable. There is no such person in the world who would develop out of the blue without crises. There is no such person who would say about his life that everything he dreamed of happened.

All man's misfortunes are not in what he does not have, but in what he thinks he does not have. In the notion that happiness is family, or happiness is money, happiness is a career without noticing everything else.

How can I support myself?

I really like the words of François de La Rochefoucauld:

We enter different ages of our life, like newborns, with no experience behind us, no matter how old we are.

• Treat yourself first and foremost with warmth and love.
• Revisit what you came up with in mid-life. What is time to leave and what to take with you. Psychologists, friends, colleagues can help with this.
• Try to answer yourself the question: "Who am I?", And then "What do I want?"
• Push away from what you do well. Live realizing yourself.
• Learn to live by yourself. Endless comparing yourself with others, excessive interest in someone else's life, envy - things that kill.
• Don't make drama about how you look, embrace age-related changes.
• Have a person next to you who will watch your new takeoff.

We all go through crises, but how else? When we come to a point of crisis, we have a lot behind us. We have the strength and experience, we have passed half the way, and there is much more to come.

Any crisis is partly a choice, it is a time for reforms.

A difficult choice, complicated by the history of our life.

Remember that at forty, life is just beginning

it is the age that gives us the chance to become ourselves.