Midlife needn't be a crisis

‘Transition’ years offer people the chance to make the changes that will improve their lives

MIDLIFE CAN be an intense, emotional turning point in our lives, according to UK-based psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, Antonia Boll.

“It’s a crisis for a lot of people, although I prefer to use the term transition because it can happen at any time from about 35 onwards,” says Boll, who will give a public lecture on midlife transitions in Dublin on Friday.

“It’s really a time when things that used to work don’t work anymore; when the joy goes out of things or when you don’t seem to belong in the way you used to,” she explains.

According to Boll, the classic things we associate with midlife – men buying motorbikes or sports cars and men or women having affairs with younger versions of each other – are really only the superficial aspects of deeper changes. The challenge is, she says to work out what these behaviours are telling us about ourselves. “Will replacing your wife with a younger model really resolve your inner longings?” she asks.

In her talk, Boll will draw on examples from psychoanalytic literature and her own clinical practice. For example, she describes a middle-aged woman who finds herself compelled to steal cosmetics from a department store.

“She’s married to an upright citizen and is the mother of several fine children and she’s mortified, ashamed and terrified of being caught as she is stealing things she could easily afford to buy. It turns out that her husband is involved with another woman and, without knowing the details, his wife senses the loss of his attention. She’s spent her whole life being good, pleasing others and the theft of the cosmetics reveals her longing to be valued for her own personal beauty,” explains Boll.

She mentions a 42-year-old businessman who consulted her because he couldn’t stop crying. “He’s running his own successful little business, but he is racked by continual anxiety that the firm is one step away from disaster,” explains Boll.

“So often, at midlife, compulsive symptoms seem to come out of the blue. This is the moment when the mask cracks and we find out that life is not a rehearsal and we have to ask ourselves how far we have been able to live our authentic self and to what extent we have remained stuck in meeting parental and societal expectations and avoiding our true potential,” she says.

Boll says that sometimes when people come through a serious illness or survive a stroke or heart attack, they have the clarity to know how they want to live the rest of their lives. Yet, there will be others who are too rigid and deny the possibilities their experience has revealed to them. Or indeed, those who, she says, are too depressed to let go of the heavy burden of despair.

Swiss psychotherapist Carl Jung described the journey through midlife as the journey of individuation. He believed that we all seek wholeness or completeness in our lives – even if not many of us reach it. “Our neurotic symptoms are like the grit in the oyster, and working to understand the meaning of our suffering can feel as uncomfortable as the formation of a pearl,” says Boll.

Boll says that midlife is particularly about identity, authenticity and disorientation. “Typically, we feel that the whole world can see our shame or loss of face, as the Chinese put it, and this contributes to the feelings of isolation,” she explains.

Jungian analysts describe four phases of a midlife crisis – separation, isolation, incubation and re-integration. Carl Jung wrote about how the psyche has “a self-regulating principle” that will move us into awareness if we allow it to do so. “He had absolute belief in the reality of the psyche and he took seriously the visions and dreams that came to him,” says Boll.

Jung himself described the midlife period as the most fruitful of his life.He said it had taken him “virtually 45 years to distil within the vessel of my scientific work the things I experienced and wrote down at that time”. The private diary he kept during these years has just been published as The Red Book.

Midlife crises offer men and women choices that will influence the rest of their lives, according to Gail Sheehy, whose best-selling book, Passages, charted the crises of adult life. As one moves from the “forlorn 40s” as she calls them, one can either emerge “refreshed or resigned”.

These latter years, according to Sheehy, offer “the best of life for those who release old roles and find a renewal of purpose”.

When the Mask Begins to Crack – Surviving the Midlife Transitionis a public lecture by Jungian analyst Antonia Boll on Friday at 8pm in Room 3126, Arts Block, Trinity College Dublin.