For many people, midlife can be a significant wake-up call. The midlife transition can begin as early as the age of 30 and as late as 60. Midlife is a time when many people find themselves stepping back and evaluating how they want to live for the rest of their lives. They’ve had the chance to build a life and reap the rewards of their endeavors. As they look toward the second half of their lives, they may find themselves asking: Who am I? What’s the meaning of my life? What do I really want?
Women approaching midlife are confronting many of the same life changes that adolescents experience: Their bodies are changing, and, for those who have raised children, their life purpose may be shifting. They’re embarking on a new phase of life that leaves them asking: What am I going to do now? The physical changes they’re experiencing may add an edge to those questions. And if you have unresolved issues in your life that you haven’t dealt with by the time you get into menopause, they’ll come up and hit you right between the eyes. Of course, in midlife, men and women face many of the same questions—about mortality, what they’ve achieved, their life’s purpose, and whether or not they’ve fulfilled their life dreams.
This kind of intense reappraisal often lends itself to feelings of turmoil, insecurity, or even despair. In response, some people do a lot of acting out—they buy that wild sports car, have an affair, leave their life partners, or resort to addictive behavior involving alcohol, relationships, sex, or work. In his book, The Seasons of a Man’s Life, Daniel J. Levinson writes: “Every genuine appraisal must be agonizing, because it challenges the illusions and vested interests on which the existing structure is based.” In other words, it’s threatening—even frightening—to examine your life, particularly if you’ve reached a point where you recognize that your life might be based primarily on illusions.
This reappraisal process can lead to the dismantling of what Levinson calls The Dream. The Dream, according to Levinson, can be “modest or heroic, vaguely defined or crystal clear, a burning passion or a quiet guiding force,” but it’s the thing that’s kept you going—the thing you wanted to achieve, the focus of your life, or even the thing that you couldn’t really find. The Dream can be a reflection of your authentic self—your purpose—but for many people The Dream is based on the conditioned self, the layers that have overridden the authentic self.
The Dream is whatever you’ve imagined you need that will make you happy, whether it’s the perfect relationship, a successful career, your dream home, successful kids, or a trendy lifestyle. The truth is, when you reach midlife, you know whether or not you’ve achieved your dreams. That knowledge can be a double-edged sword. If you didn’t achieve your dreams, you may feel like a failure. But what if you succeeded in realizing your dreams but you still didn’t achieve the sense of happiness and fulfillment you’d imagined? When that happens, you feel a tremendous sense of despair. Midlife is the time when you start to see the cracks and holes in The Dream. Then, when the wake-up call comes—in the form of a divorce, a life-threatening illness, the death of a parent—it can turn into a full-blown midlife crisis. Your dream is falling apart; your life is losing its meaning. That can trigger a profound transformation. What feels like a breakdown can be a pathway to breaking open.
When I work with clients who are going through this experience, I encourage them to listen to what I call their inner voices. Often, these are the parts of them that became submerged when they were younger—the parts that often start to reemerge during our work together. We all have lost parts. These lost parts are components of the authentic self. By listening to your inner voices and allowing those lost parts of you to resurface, you’re taking an important step toward reclaiming your innate wholeness. Maybe it’s your creative part, the voice of your sensitivity. It may be the part that longs for independence or the one that loves adventure. Perhaps it’s the assertive, strong part, or the playful, spontaneous one.
In order to become aware of what parts of yourself may have gone underground as the result of your conditioning—and that long to reemerge and find expression in your life—it’s important to begin to listen to and embrace what they are communicating to you. What is perceived as a midlife crisis, may in fact, simply be your lost parts trying to get your attention.