The ‘midlife crisis’ is a lie – now go and buy yourself a motorbike

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/17/midlife-crisis-lie-motorbike

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The midlife crisis is just a cliche. That’s the conclusion being reached by researchers such as Susan Krauss Whitbourne of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. You will be delighted to know that life events and a realisation of mortality can hit you at any age, forcing you to reconsider everything you’ve ever been told, and have assumed or thought.

Falling apart and putting yourself back together again, possibly in a different way, is not something that is more likely to happen when you are between 45 and 55 than it is at any other age.

It seems to me from my work as a psychotherapist that we could each be placed somewhere along a line with chaos at one end and rigidity at the other. If we are way over into the chaotic end of the spectrum, we are likely to live our life from drama to crisis, and you may find that labelling your experience of those years “a midlife crisis” helps you construct a narrative around it. If, on the other hand, you are very rigid and rule bound, and keep all your feelings under lock and key, there may come a time when these feelings rebel against their imprisonment and break free. If this happens during middle age, you too may find it meaningful to call that “a midlife crisis”.

I believe, though, that we are too fond of labelling our experience with a diagnosis, as it helps us to disown it to think it of it as something that has invaded us, like a virus, rather than as an integrated part of ourselves and our development that we can do something about.

We don’t just reach adulthood and stop developing. We are kept emotionally fit by an ability to respond as our circumstances, our environment and our body changes. We have to keep learning, adapting and working with the ebb and flow of life’s circumstances rather than being disappointed when immovable objects don’t bend to us. The only certainty is change, so if we can be aware of what is likely to happen and plan for it, and accept that not everything can be planned for, it is possible that crises can be kept to a minimum at any stage in life.

As well as what are sometimes experienced as inner demons such as anxiety, depression or paranoia, there are stressful aspects to every age: getting into university, getting a job you want, sticking at a job you hate, conflict, wanting a mate, drought, wanting children, the trap of baby jail, financial worries, housing worries, loneliness, divorce, relevance, meaning, striving for bigger accomplishments, more money, later babies, stronger bodies, better sex, smoother skin. By middle age, you either face up to the fact that these things might not matter so much, and you’ve found different meanings, or you decide they matter very much but you are a failure because you haven’t achieved them.

Or, worse, you have achieved them but you don’t feel the relief you would have supposed they would bring. Perhaps we may respond to these pressures with a crisis, but it is just as likely to happen at 25 as it is at 55. And at any age we can be faced with the challenge of having to reconcile our inner picture of ourselves and our life to the outer reality.

To manage stress we develop certain coping mechanisms. Some may use talking things over openly; others use meditation, psychotherapy, religion or exercise. Other coping strategies are not as helpful – alcoholism, overworking, being obsessed with how things look at the expense of how they feel. The less healthy ways of coping sometimes tend to become unsustainable and trigger a crisis when the body cracks or rebels about how it is being used.

Midlife crisis is not biological certainty, like the menopause or death, but if you experience such a crisis I hope you enjoy the outcomes of it. With a bit of luck we can learn to inhabit our own skin, strive for authenticity and dare to be who we really are, rather than continuing with patterns that no longer fit us or trying to project on to others a version of ourselves as we think we ought to be.

Oh, and its OK to spend the kids’ inheritance on a sports car or a motorbike. I think we should try to enjoy what time we have left, if we can.