4 Aspects of Self Compassion In Midlife Transition

November 10th, 2013 · midlife, midlife transition

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To have compassion for oneself during midlife transition can sometimes feel like a tall order.

Often, midlife transition can be a time when the inner critic shifts into high gear, and it can be all too easy to find oneself deeply caught up in self-reproach, regret and self-criticism.

What are the most important ways self compassion needs to prevail during midlife transition?

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Lost

It can be hard for a person to admit to a strong sense of lostness during the midlife transition, yet, more often that people would care to admit, that can be the truth.

Is it possible to find compassion for the person whose maps no longer work?  Can we accept and be kind to that aspect of ourselves that doesn’t know where to go and what to do?

Often, the experience of lostness calls for compassion for the lost person within us, often a lost child.

It can be fundamentally important to simply acknowledge the state of being lost.  To recognize and admit this, to emerge from behind our omnicompetent mask: these  may be key parts of theprocess of finding a new direction.

With Specific Regrets

As life progresses, regret can become one of the most powerful of anti-life forces.

As anyone who has ever faced its full impact can attest, regret can feel overwhelming and devastating.

Full-blown regret can become a sink hole for our energy, sapping our will and seemingly eliminating our ability to get past it.

To truly move beyond regret involves the gradual development of forgiveness and compassion for the suffering self.  From this important psychological work gradually comes the capacity to find a way live beyond the regret.  Such work is neither fast nor simplistically easy.

Suffering and Humiliation

Similarly, it’s essential to move beyond contempt for the suffering and/or humiliated self.  Often people are subjected to states where they experience humiliation or a genuine sense of suffering and weakness largely through no fault of their own.  This can often be associated with suffering as children, although it can certainly happen at other key stages of life as well.

It’s often very hard to forgive ourselves for child-like weakness and neediness, and we often cannot forgive the self that has undergone humiliation.  We have contempt for our own weakness and vulnerability.  Attempting to get away from this humiliation can play a key role in obsessions with success and power, which often shield us from shame and self-contempt.  Yet no amount of success or power will ever shield us enough: only compassion for ourself can ever begin to heal.

Compassion for the Shadow

We also need to find acceptance and compassion for the shadow, the unacknowledged self.  As I have tried to suggest in a number of blog posts, the acceptance of those parts of the self that are not acknowledged by the ego is a very important matter.

Shadow work is acknowledging the person in us who is less kind, less knowledgeable or competent, less moral, more angry or vindictive, more self-centered — or even more full of life — than we would wish to be.  This is a major work of compassion and self-acceptance.

Discerning the Path That I Am

Jung seems to me to embody self compassion in the following quotation:

But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders… that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved— what then?

What if the biggest and most difficult task of love is to love the weak, wounded and shamed parts of ourselves? Yes, what then?

The journey to accept who and what we are, and to have compassion for all aspects of ourselves is the core of individual psychotherapy, and an essential dimension of moving through midlife transition and all major life transitions.

With every good wish for your personal journey,

PHOTOS:    Some rights reserved by zhezr he2010 ; BinaryApe

© 2013 Brian Collinson, 2238 Constance Drive, Oakville, Ontario (near Mississauga)

4 Relationship Facts for Midlife Transition & Later On

June 4th, 2013 · midlife, midlife transition

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In the midlife transition, and later on, relationships take on incredible importance to individuals, an importance that they retain throughout the second half of life.

As we journey through the second half of life the questions around what is fundamentally meaningful in life become more and more important, as do questions around truthfulness and authenticity.  Nowhere are these concerns more powerfully alive for us than in the context of the deepest personal relationships — friends, lovers, mentors and family (where possible).

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1. The Ever Present Realities of Personal Commitment

At every life stage we need relationships; if we are alive to them, they continually change us.  As Prof. Aldo Carotenuto tells us,

“the encounter is continually being recreated… we feel we are pervaded by something new and something old: the new thing is the transformation underway and the old is nothing other than the rediscovered subjectivity in the relationship….  But here we come to the question of personal commitment….  The beloved has a reality as legitimate as my own, one which my desire must come to terms with.“

As legitimate as my own, that I must come to terms with…  As I move through the second half of life, do I have the courage to let the other be who they are — and to let them in?

2. Relationships That Abide Through Transition

Moving through life transitions, and especially midlife transition, our awareness of who we are changes, as does our awareness of those with whom we are in intimate relationship.  If we are honest, this means that our relationships face the challenge to either grow with our changed understanding of ourselves and perceptions — or else to face death.  Death can come as the quiet drifting apart of two people, or the fiery end of long-standing connections.

Will our relationships truly abide midlife transition and later life?  Or must we find new relationships that will?

3. Relationship Trauma

It is often an experience of shock and anxiety for an individual to come to the awareness that a key relationship upon which he or she has relied is not a secure and resilient.

This knowledge can come in the dramatic form of marital infidelity, various kinds of betrayal rooted in issues such as addictions, or in the awareness that the other no longer holds me as a person.  This last can manifest itself in an awareness of studied rejection by the other, or in the form of a lack of curiosity about the other, and the ways that they differ from oneself — the person simply does not want to know about the differences.

4. At Home with the Other

The opposite of the above is a fundamental kind of welcome or hospitality for the other.  An openness to both the mystery of who the person is, and who he or she may be becoming.  You have to be gentle for that.  And tough.

In midlife transition and beyond, depth psychotherapy can open the way to finding soul in individual life and relationship.

PHOTO:  Some rights reserved bravenewtraveler ; jenndurfey

© Brian Collinson, 2238 Constance Drive, Oakville, Ontario (near Mississauga)

Can Midlife Transition Bring Renewal? 3: Teenage Kids

April 7th, 2013 · midlife, midlife transition

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Those undergoing midlife transition often have some surprising things in common with their teenage kids.

…& caution, midlife?

You might not think that these two stages of life have much in common with each other, but they actually have some important common dimensions.

Teen years and midlife years initially look so different.  But there are two things that they have in common: 1)  the individual is often undergoing tremendous life changes during these two periods; and, 2) individuals often have to find a whole new way to move forward in their lives.

The Teen’s Questing Can Re-Open Questions for the Adult

A recent National Geographic article outlines some of the normal developmental challenges teenagers face to making the transition to the first adulthood.  Very often, this entails questioning key parts of the value system that the teen has grown up with, and exploring aspects of the self, and new options for living — taking risks.

Similar challenges exist for many in midlife transition.  This stage of life may entail questioning some of the key values that the individual has held until this point in life.  It may also be that, in a number of new ways — occupation, way of life, family and relationships — the individual has to explore new patterns.

Moving out of the Familiar

Many psychological authorities consider the teen’s movement out from the family of origin to be one of the most difficult psychological tasks that humans accomplish.  That would seem true.  But it’s rivalled in importance by the process of adaptation that has to take place in the second half of life, to allow life to stay full and vital, and for individuals to find true, lasting values.

Hunger for Experience

Now, not surprisingly, there are some important places where the challenges and the experience of a teenager and a person at midlife diverge.  For instance, where a teen may well have to learn to temper a tendency towards excessive risk taking, individuals at midlife transition, such as professionals, may need to learn to move beyond excessive inertia, habit and caution.  In some respects, it’s almost as if the person at midlife “needs more teenager” inside of them, to spur them to willingness to move in new directions.

One characteristic which the teenager and the individual in midlife transition most definitely do share is a deep hunger for new experience — to connect with something in life that is alive, vital and meaningful.

Adaptation to a New Form of Life

One of the characteristics that neuroscientists point to in the teen brain is its plasticity, a staggering capacity for adaptation to new situations.  Teenagers require this to complete the enormous, creative process of adaptation to a new world.  What is often not appreciated is that midlife transition requires a similar kind of open-ness, and a willingness to explore aspects of self and life that are unknown territory.  This exploration is at the heart of individual depth psychotherapy.

PHOTO:  Some rights reserved by c g p grey ; aamylindholm ; Mary_on_Flickr

© Brian Collinson, 2238 Constance Drive, Oakville, Ontario (near Mississauga)

Can Midlife Transition Bring Renewal? 2: Rigidity

March 8th, 2013 · midlife, midlife transition

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A great danger for individuals going through the midlife transition is that, as life progresses, rigidity may start to encase the personality.

This fear is not groundless.  Often, we see people around us become more and more entrenched in set opinions and ways of doing things as they age.  We often readily spot this lack of open-ness in others.  But is it a danger that we need to be aware of in ourselves?

Roots of Rigidity During Midlife Transition

The unknown is fearful, especially when it’s near to home.  It’s also easy to find psychological security in established patterns.

In midlife transition, we encounter disturbing forces very near to home.  To our great surprise, we may find those disruptive forces within ourselves!

Uncharacteristic yearnings may start to emerge within us.  Also, we may find that things that formerly attracted us now do so no longer.  The business mathematics major may find himself writing poetry.  The dedicated teacher may find that her work flavourless, and may want to start her own business.

These are manifestations of shadow, that part of our nature that remains hidden and unacknowledged by consciousness.  What calls to us may be the undiscovered self, the aspects of ourselves that have gone unacknowledged to this point.

A related experience is the call of the unlived life.  Individuals may experience regrets and yearnings surrounding the major choices they have made in the past that start to surface during the midlife transition, or in later periods.

Adventures in Ourselves

Unexpected thoughts and feelings may bring the individual surprise and alarm.  He or she may recoil from such thoughts, or repress them.

Midlife transition can be a time of confusion and difficulty as individuals confront realities that may bubble up from the unconscious mind, often accompanied by anxiety.  The individual may choose to reject them, and to lapse into a more and more single-minded and less flexible approach to his or her life.  In such a case, life tends to get grimmer and grimmer, and less full of colour: the rigidity that besets the aging can deprive the person of any vitality in later life.

Midlife Transition ; Rigidity or Exploration

The alternative to closed off rigidity is a spirit of open-ness and exploration, the kind needed for the journey in the second half of life, which Jung called the night sea journey.  T.S. Eliot captures eloquently the nature of this exploration at the end of his poem Little Gidding :

Free

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

So writes Eliot, and so it is with the journey of exploration in mid-life and beyond.  We explore the place from which we started, adventurously opening up possibility in ourselves through the middle of life, rather than rejecting them — and sapping our vitality.  This is the journey of renewal during midlife transition, and a key part of the exploration in the work of depth psychotherapy.

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© Brian Collinson, 2238 Constance Drive, Oakville, Ontario (near Mississauga)