Midlife Crisis
If you're lucky enough to be over 40, you know what it is. If you do not, you may be in the middle of it.
Different people experience their crises differently: some change careers, some divorce their long-time spouses and get into love affairs, some drop everything and start from scratch, and some buy a Lamborghini. Whatever the stories are, emotional turbulence unites them all. We differ in money and energy budgets. If you are rich and determined for example, you may do it all - get a Lamborghini, change career and remarry.
Brilliant psychoanalyst James Hollis says that we spend the first half of our lives building our “provisional selves.” We work on strengthening our Ego, which is our first task.
We are born into environments we didn’t choose, and at first we either adapt to or rebel against what was given to us.
Whether we follow in our parents’ footsteps or do everything to resist their influence, the constant remains the same: we deal with what was handed down by our parents.
On top of that, we face pressure from society, and we build—careers, families, success stories, loyalty to countries...
For the first three or four decades of life, all we do is respond to external stimuli and, in the process, build a persona. A provisional self. An Ego whose main focus is to survive the war between “I want” and “I must.”
What happens when, over time, we’ve completed some of these tasks, or when we realize we’ll never complete them all? That’s when we begin to see that our provisional self no longer fits. But what should we do with it? Decades of hard work, our plans, values, and beliefs—they’re still part of us, but they don’t fully serve the person we are becoming.
It’s like a seed that has sprouted. What was necessary and true for the seed underground is no longer enough for the plant growing above the surface. The seed’s purpose wasn’t wrong, but now we need to grow in a way that aligns with what we’ve become.
And that’s when we go nuts. We intuitively realize we are missing something. Something big, valuable, strong, and authentic.
We frantically search our memories looking for it, and what comes to mind is the excitement of first love, the recklessness of youth, the blind trust in a bright future from childhood. From this intuition, people try to recreate the context—a new lover, a new car, a new job, a “screw it all” moment—but generally, it’s the wrong direction. The new lover, car, or job becomes dull pretty soon, and the “screw it all” moment quickly turns from excitement to depression.
We need help in this transition. We need education and support.
