The Mid-Life Crisis

Mid-Life Crisis

The psychologist Carl Jung was the first person to use the term ‘mid-life crisis’. He experienced it himself when he went through what we’d now call a nervous breakdown, when the intuitive and deep insights he had been previously resisting broke through to become the foundation of a new and holistic approach to the human condition.
In the natural course of things, we all experience times in our lives when we’re jolted out of our usual routines by events in the real world around us that we can’t control. These include illness, redundancy, financial worries, the loss of a loved one, or just the growing awareness that we’re growing older and can’t physically deal with the world around us in the same way as we have done in the past. Bad things happen, and there’s nothing we can do about it. If, during our life so far, we have kept in touch with the reality of our true natures, then our in-born and innate coping mechanisms will enable us to face up to the difficulties of a changing world – to adjust to whatever hand that fate deals to us. In other words, we stop worrying and start to act, trusting our basic human nature to go with the flow and instinctively find its own authentic place in whatever new situation it finds itself. Which, if left to itself, it will.

But what if we don’t? What if your personal past history – your fixed attitudes, your lifetime need to be accepted, to conform to other people’s expectations – has led to a false idea of who and what you really are? There are two quite separate definitions of a mid-life crisis. The true definition – the one we’re dealing with here – is that which is caused, not so much by what’s actually going on in the outside world, but by your own internalised fear, your worry that you won’t be able to cope in new, difficult and challenging circumstances. You’re locked into a Pandora’s box of indecisive thinking, an unending intellectual output of unresolved possibilities that never get put to the acid test of action.

The ability to be who you really are – to act intuitively, in your best interests –is the greatest gift you can give yourself. To get in touch with your authentic being is to recognise your real needs and desires, to express them effectively in the changing world about you, and use their strength to move out of the ineffectuality, worry and tension of the mid-life crisis. Once you broaden the horizon of your consciousness and unlock the door to your instinctive feelings and intuitive knowledge you’ll regain the ability to transcend your past, outdated and problematic outlook on life and become free of the habitual patterns of self-denial that may be presently preventing you from effectively responding to the changing flux of events in the here-and-now.

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