Understanding Midlife Crisis- Jungian Perspective

 

Those going through a midlife crisis may find these passages helpful,  taken from James Hollis's book, The Middle Passage – From Misery to Meaning in Midlife,   written in 1993.  He became very helpful in my own journey to find inner peace, freedom and my authentic Self.   James has written several books regarding growth and development through the life cycle from a Jungian perspective. 

Help with the Midlife Crisis -

 

The Middle Passage – From Misery to Meaning in Midlife – James Hollis 1993

 

Love is the capacity to imagine the ‘other’ so vividly that we can affirm that other ‘Being’. This is the only antidote and treatment for immature, self-absorbed narcissistic preoccupations.

 

Martyrs make neither good wives nor Mothers. There is always a price for women who attempt sainthood. Both she and others will pay.

 

When asked what one ‘feels’, of course, the location is inside, most will incorrectly answer what ‘one think of out there’.

 

On men, there is the enormous pressure to play out the old roles of warrior and conqueror that are both deeply rooted in our animalistic base nature. Both are social roles with its emphasis on power, hierarchical thinking and aggression.

In therapy men have to face the fear of their essential powerlessness and the many failed paths they have used in their quest for what ultimately was only weak hollow “power masks’.

 

An encounter or collision with oneself and your with your rigid, conditional Ego structure, one finally faces their True Self, their True Nature, instead of the fake, phoney mask, they were wearing their entire life.

 

Life is a daily struggle against the demons of doubt and disapproval whose progeny are depression and stagnation.

 

Persons possessed/controlled and driven by their base impulses within the unconscious are unable to be realistic, as most of the REAL is missing in their awareness of themselves, resulting in self-estrangement.

 

The power(s) of the unconscious needs to be respected and acknowledged more than any type of intellectual achievement, ability or content. It is a greater determinate of our thoughts and feeling and hence our behaviors more so then our persona social-cultural determinates or traditions of any kind.

 

There is nothing more important at Midlife than the separation from parental complexes for the simple reasons that these powerful influences are created and supported by the False Self, the provisional/conditional identity acquired in early life.

 

 Until we recognize that our False Self is only a contextualized conditional Self, a family scripted self an identity socialized and shaped then expressed in our first adulthood, we are not yet our True selves. Our True Selves includes the universal within mankind that is unconditional to context or family/tribe or cult affiliation.

 

At the most visceral level, the early relationship with the parent was the primal message of how supportive or hurtful “reality out there”.  Was it cold and unwelcoming or warm and loving?

 How well did the parent mediate the child’s normal anxiety? Therein lays the formation of the core ‘angst’, which underlies all our attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. It is also the first encounter with power and authority where all lessons are learned regarding submission or rebellion to authority figures. 

 

Those with False Selves, who are in positions of authority, will always attempt to force by various means infantilism of those under their control by imposing a lack of freedom to express their feelings without guilt.

 

Levels of Guilt and the threat of exclusion from the family of origin or community serves as a powerful determinate to the development of the individual’s level of trust, mistrust, mastery, of self-doubt.

 No child can withstand exclusion from parental approval and protection, and so reflexively learn to curb, the repressed instincts and impulses that fuels rebellion.  Under parental abusive conditions, overtly through aggression or covertly through neglect, for survival reasons the child must dissociate the hurt and pain of the violations to maintain the bond with the abusive parent.   If the bond is broken the helpless child will perish without parental protection and access to at least nourishment. 

 

The name for this defense against the ‘angst’ of exclusion is Guilt. So great is the threat of exclusion, and loss of any home and the loss of parental bond that we all continue to ‘check-in’ to seek approval from the greater group and be deeply validated or invalidated by being either in or out of favour from those closest around us. 

 

 Any type of maturity into adulthood can only occur when we finally become aware of our enormous inner dependence on outer authority that we have projected onto a spouse, boss, our church or the state.

 

 Too many parents project their own unlived lives into their children. This grave burden on the targeted child is the parents’ own unlived life (all of what is hidden or unrealized in the shadow / unconscious of the parent) that was projected then introjected by the child to carry on behalf of the parent. Parents with ‘False Selves’ only live through their projections onto others, unable to ever be responsible or accountable for themselves as an independent adult. They can only be co-dependents with these children, merging their selfhood with ‘others’  their children who now are forced into taking the parental identity on as a ‘yes man’ under threat of rejection of the parent and usually other family members. 

 

 

Mutual toxic dependency occurs between child and parent when the parent has over-identified with the child and the child now is forced to over-identify with the parent as the child under threat was not allowed his own separate identity from the parent.

 

The desire to control, to have their children live out the patent’s incomplete lives, to replicate the parent’s value system, is not love at all, it is selfish narcissism and it impedes the child’s journey towards independence and adulthood by arresting their normal emotional development in servitude to the emotional needs of the narcissistic parent.

 

The parental complexes as described by Jung are emotionally charged clusters of energy within the psyche, which are split off from the conscious ego and therefore operate independently, within the unconscious. These complexes can remains there for a lifetime by all of the repressive defenses that protect ever having conscious awareness of these complexes.

 It is essentially an emotional complex, reflexive in nature whose strength depends on the power and duration of its genesis.

 

The parent’s role is both archetypal, prototypical. This parental imago becomes the bedrock and comparisons in all future relationships.

Whatever the child experiences in the parental relationship will activate similar capacities within the child itself. The legacy of wounded souls, partial souls are passed from generation to generation, now called intergenerational transmission.  

 

The two greatest needs of all children are to have nurturance and to be empowered.

The inner child is frightened, co-dependent, and will withdraw into themselves through various compensatory mechanisms as compensation.  The individual’s essence is deeply denied.

 

 

The word Nostalgia comes from the Greek meaning “pain for home”.

 

When the models of relating to the world by the parent are through the lens of caution, fear, prejudice, co-dependency, narcissism and powerlessness, the child’s early adulthood is now contaminated and undermines normal growth and development particularly both inter –psychic and intrapersonal. The various compensatory mechanisms and behaviors are expressed.

 

Differentiating one’s own ‘knowing’ from the messages or ‘indoctrinations’ of the parent is the necessary prelude to the second half of life, allowing for growth into adulthood to occur.

 

 

Shame means that you feel you are implicated and responsible for the wounds of others.

What remains in the unconscious, that which is not yet conscious from our past will infiltrate our present and determine our future. The Past is Prologue to our Future.

 

The degree that we feel nurtured determines our own ability to nurture others. The degree to which we feel empowered directly affects our ability to lead and live our own lives.

 

The degree, to which we can risk in relationships, or even imagine it as being, in fact, supportive rather than hurtful, is a direct function of our level of conscious dialogue with the parent complexes laid down in early life.

 

Psychotherapy is sometimes viewed as always blaming the parents for one’s miseries. Quite the contrary it is to become aware of how sensitive and vulnerable we are in youth to the fragility of the human psyche.

 

Betrayal, broken trust makes it much more difficult to trust others and therefore to risk relationships

Self – betrayal occurs when we betray our individualization.

 

The soul has its own basic and unique needs not served at all by paychecks, perks and privileges.

 

Jung simplest definition of neurosis was “disunity with oneself”, an one-sidedness of the personality. Neurotics are left with only a reactive/reflective character structure.  The adult Self, self-determined personality structure had not been realized or accomplished.

At Midlife we often have coasted on what was easy for us. We were rewarded for our productivity to ‘the World out there’ not by any wholeness of the Self we may have achieved.

 

One aspect of the appointment/collusion with ourselves during the Middle Passage is to reclaim those parts of ourselves left behind through ignorance or prohibition as told to us by authority figures most importantly our parents.  

The persona represents a necessary face or mask to present to the outer world designed to protect our inner life.

This protection we build and use to protect ourselves from the outer world leaves the much wider, unexplored inner world of our psyche/soul as waiting to be acknowledged and explored.

 

The shadow refers to everything that has been repressed/ sealed and buried in our unconscious.

 

All of our aberrant actions represent a blind groping for more life, for renewal and expression of the unlived life in the unconscious.

 

The shadow should not be equated with evil, only with life that has been suppressed. And repressed and not allowed expression.

As such, the shadow is rich in potential. Becoming conscious of it makes us more fully human.   A willingness to allow our darkest impulses, as well as repressed creativity, to surface and be acknowledged and validated is a step toward their integration. Negative shadow contents such as rage, lust, anger, etc., can be destructive when acted out unconsciously, but when consciously acknowledged and challenged they can provide the individual with a new directions filled with newly accessed energy that was previously walled off.

In concrete terms, the shadow will come out, whether in unconscious acts, projections onto others, depression or somatic illness. The shadow embodies all of life which has not been allowed expression.  It represents all of our creativity, that if abandoned, locks us up inside in stagnation.  It embodies our spontaneity, which is suppressed by routines stifles our lives. It represents a life force greater than our conscious personality. If not yet utilized, its blocking leads to diminished vitality.

 

“Nothing human is alien to me”, occurs when we have faced our demons which in reality are our previously unknown parts of ourselves.

The shadow is only the life that has been repressed. It is rich in potential. It is all of life that has not been allowed expression.

 

What remains unconscious is suffered inwardly or projected outwardly.

The common Midlife affair, often with a younger woman is a vain and often disastrous attempt at the renewal of the inner spirit that has been dead for so long.

 

The more unconscious we are the more we project.

 

 

Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, besides other things it is a profoundly searing encounter with the Shadow. Few have written of the inner darkness with such honesty or such depth of insight. The Underground Man is like us all, namely reacting to life’s wounds and woundedness.  We build a set of wound-based behaviors and live out our handicapped vision with rationalizations and self-justifications.

 

Kafka once wrote that a great work of art should be like a great axe that breaks the frozen sea that lies within us.  All great art is the careful application of such a pickaxe into the frozen sea of our True Selves within us. Genuine Art speaks to no one but you. It reveals your deepest, truest self, rarely a comfortable, cozy experience undertaken on the dock at the cottage.

 

Encounters with the Shadow are not uncommon in literature, from Hawthorn to Melville, to Poe, to Twain, to Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

 

Anima represents a man’s internalized experience of the feminine, influenced initially by the mother and later by other women. It represents his relationship to his own body, his instincts, feeling life and his capacity for relationships with others.

 

The fundamental truth of relating and of all relationships is that one projects all the unconscious material that one does not consciously experience of oneself onto the ‘other’. We simply say that can’t be me. I’m not and never have been like that so it has to them”. Often it is our projected transference of the internalized image of the Mother/Father – Parents, within. Much that is Love and Hate is projected by such means. One falls in love with missing parts of oneself.

 

The sense of homecoming to oneself and connectedness back with and to our original self feels so good and was the occasion of so much hope, that its loss feels catastrophic.

                                                 

The Animus is the equivalent for a woman as Anima is for a Man.

Living together on a daily basis remorsefully wears away the projections, either good or bad of those around us.

 

The facts of one’s life are far less important than how it is remembered. Every night the myth-making process is at work as our unconscious stirs up the detritus of daily life. The memory then serves to sustain, anchor us to infantilism or to deceive us as the case may be.

 

Fate and Destiny- What did the Athenian tragedians have to say about this 25 centuries ago. Neither the parent nor the child chooses each other or all the sufferings that results from this entirely Fate produced relationship. . It was simply Fate or Fates that caused this intersection in time and space, that later caused each to wound the other. Out of such wounds, we, both the parent and child create that assemblage of behaviors and attitudes, which serve to protect the fragile child. That assemblage, reinforced through the years becomes the acquired personality, the false self.

 

Destiny is not the same as fate. Destiny represents one’s potential, inherent possibilities, which may or may not come to fruition. Destiny invites choice. Destiny without choice is only fate replicated. To heal is to transcend fate and have a personal destiny. Only through taking personal responsibility does make destiny possible.

 

Without painful efforts towards consciousness, one stays in the wounded identity. When one is wound identified one will hate the face in the mirror for its similarity to those responsible for the wounding, and feel self-hatred for one’s failure to break free from the past. As long as the person in the mirror is only a reflection of the other, most often those parental complexes, you will remain Trapped in the Mirror in not being your True Self with all its potential. You will never be able to Love yourself or another fully as too much self-absorption remains to truly connect to someone other than yourself.

 

We must address the making of our own myths, illusions more consciously or we shall never be more than the sum of what has happened to us in the past.

 

The first Adulthood, before the Middle Passage, we are usually stuck in the neurotic aversions, which constitute our operant personality and therefore our self-estrangement.

 

Jung said, “I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek social status high position, marriages, reputation, and other outward successes like money but remain unhappy, even when they finally obtain the very things they have been seeking. They live within the constrained lines of only their own contextual temporal time frame, place and personal history. We must instead come to understand the family system/context within which we were raised.”

 

 The implicit premise of our culture, that through materialism, narcissism or hedonism we would be happy is bankrupt.

In midlife, tremendous forces are pushing from the unconscious. There is now a decreasing personal efficacy as the stress below continues to rise. When the increasing pressures from within become less and less containable by old strategies, a crisis of self-hood erupts. We don’t know who we really are, apart from our social roles and psychic reflexes. We don’t know what to do to lessen the pressure. The self has sought growth but failed by exhausting the old and now ineffective strategies of the ego. The ego structure which one worked so hard to create is now revealed to be petty, frightened and out of answers. At midlife, the Self maneuvers the ego assemblage into a crisis to bring about a correction in our life’ path and journey.

 

The traumas of early childhood, and later our culture, alienated us from ourselves. We can only get back on course by reconnecting with our inner selves.

 

In the Gospel according to St. Thomas, one of the lost transcripts of the Bible, it is alleged that in it Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

 

The Romantic poet Holderlin wrote nearly two centuries ago, “The Gods are near but difficult to grasp; where danger is greatest, however, deliverance grows stronger”. Only through a new Mythos can we find out new path, our new direction for we are guided by images, consciously or unconsciously, towards our deliverance.  

 

I lived with the false myth “I must forever be a good child, without anger and serving others”. This was my guiding imago; so deeply unconscious that one has always reacted that way and can hardly conceive of another type of life.

 

In his 1939 speech to the Guild for Pastoral Psychology in London, Jung notes that we are forced to choose between outer ideologies or private neurosis. Only the path of individuation could serve as a viable alternative. This is still true.

 Individuation for Jung represented a set of images, which guide the soul’s energies. It is the developmental imperative of each of us to become ourselves as fully as we are able, within the limits imposed on us by fate. Unless we confront our fate we will remain only slaves to it. We must separate who we are from what we have acquired. I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to be. Otherwise, we are prisoners of our fate.

 

Jung stated: “the individual has an ‘a priori’, unconscious existence, but exists consciously only so far as a consciousness of his particular nature is present. The conscious process of differentiation, or individuation, is needed to bring the individuality to consciousness. It is to raise it out of testate of acquired False Identity with the object, the parent, the child’s first object.

 

The first identification with Reality is through and with the parent, and later with outside authority figures seen through this early lens, through the transference of these parent complexes onto the institutions of society. As long as we remain primarily identified with the outer world, the objective world we will be estranged from our selves.

Individuation cuts one off from further personal conformity to ‘others’ and hence from the collectivity of family and society.  All the previous guilt created by others is erased.  the individuate leaves this guilt behind him in the world,  then continue his life journey forward to further find redemption from this past wounding.

 

The goal of individualism is important only as an idea, writes Jung, the essential thing is the “opus” which leads to its attainment.  That is the goal of a lifetime.

 

In Middle life, the axis of our life moves from the Ego-World to Ego-Self

 

Over the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the priests inscribed the admonition “Know Thyself”. An inscription in one of the inner chambers is a collateral inscription - “Thou Art” These injunctions capture the individuation dialectic well.

 

A relationship to the self requires that the psychic state within is wholly present to oneself.

To Heal:

You must absorb the trauma of separation and Loss.

Take the loss and withdrawal of all your projections you have cast out into the world

 

We must return and become childlike once again. That is to say to be in touch once again with our original childhood, the awe and wonder of it. But as well we will also encounter the tragic found there. If this journey is never taken we risk being childish and navel gazing throughout the remainder of our adult life.