I met David Wolfe via email. Someone told him about this website and he was kind enough to write, say hello, and enclose this essay. It's nothing short of amazing.
David is the founder of The Institute for Developmental Relationship Marketing, which he describes as "a knowledge resource for individuals and organizations seeking a better understanding of marketplace behavior, whether it be in consumer markets, business-to-business markets, investor markets or job markets."
What's hidden in that language is a dazzling understanding of human behavior that might be the framework that redefines it all.
You can reach David at
dbwolfe@idrm.com
and find him on the web at:
http://www.idrm.com/cgi-bin/WebIC.exe
By David B. Wolfe
When midlife – or middle age – begins and ends is inconclusive. One fiftyish woman, clearly not liking the idea of middle age, told me, "It won't happen if you don't let it.” But, of course, it does happen in spite of her aversion to it. So let's establish what we mean by "midlife."
Assuming life expectancy of 80, the midpoint of adulthood is about 50, with young, middle and old adulthood each spanning 20 years. Thus, the middle adult years lie between 40 and 60. The infamous “midlife crisis” tends to erupt in the earlier years of midlife.
Carl Jung, the first psychologist to seriously study midlife, thought the soul-wrenching midlife years begin around 36 to 38. What follows is approximately a decade or so of time during which we seem unusually subject to structural changes in our lives and worldviews. This is The Change of Life Decade.
The Change of Life Decade can be a time of major upheaval in which family and personal lives take dramatic and sometimes sad turns. We frequently think of midlife changes in terms of such events as our children moving into adolescence, starting college – or leaving home! Midlife often is also accompanied by increased professional recognition and expanded life options due to greater affluence and children leaving our care. These represent changes in our Social Self.
We also experience changes in our inner self during the Change of Life Decade. These often do more to alter the course of our lives than social events. Our worldviews change as we grow more concern with life’s purpose and meaning in the context of our mortality. This dampens somewhat our appetite for the materialistic life path.
The agnosticism or atheism of youth often subsides and is even replaced by newfound faith we probe for the higher meanings of life. At the same time, anxiety about physical changes often arises. Plastic surgeons love the Change of Life decade. It is when – bereft of svelte form, taut skin and naturally hued hair – we begin thinking about deceiving others about the wear and tear of time on our bodies and faces. But cosmetic corrections only mask the structural changes taking place deeper in the psyche.
The Civil Wars Within
Throughout our lives we strive for soul-satisfying completeness only to often find ourselves in one situation after another that resists such felicitous outcome. Much of this is due to tug-of-war contests between the pretentious Social Self and the more reclusive Inner Self. The Inner Self is the nucleus around which the True Self struggles to take form. To do so depends on balance between the Social Self and the Inner Self. As navigators must distinguish between apparent North and true North to reach their destinations (compass needles point to apparent North, thus are not fully accurate), reaching a state of soul-satisfying completeness depends on distinguishing the apparent Self from true Self.
Mighty clashes between the social Self and the Inner Self first arise in adolescence. The civil wars between the social and inner selves often burdens young people striving to succeed both socially and academically. The statements "I want to be popular" and "I want to do well in school" frame the commonly experienced adolescent dilemma. Much of an adolescent’s stress can come from the struggle to achieve balance in responding to the demands of the two Selves.
To secure social acceptance and get ahead in the first half of life, we hide the Inner Self from view of the external world, binding up the part of us that in childhood was irrepressibly energetic, joyously creative, wonderfully curious, and securely open-minded. We shove this lovely part of our nature into the innermost recesses of our being and forget about it. We ignore its needs. The unabashed expressiveness of childhood is bottled up. It will be years before the Inner Self will be rediscovered – if ever. Some people lose touch with their inner selves following childhood, never again to experience that part of their psyche through which the path to the True Self runs.
Midlife in large part is about reconnecting with the more open, spontaneous and honest Self of childhood. For some, this reconnection leads to a state of wildness, like seen in children’s behavior when teacher leaves the classroom. Beliefs and responsibilities formerly held to be sacred are abandoned, often with contrived justification in a person’s mind. In a tragic example of this, a 38-year-old woman legal aide recently abandoned her children and lawyer husband for a client she fell in love with – a convicted serial killer. She said, “No one can understand what I have found, and what I feel.” Her worldview had changed to make possible the validation of behavior she previously would have found unimaginable.
Behind the Mask of the Social Self
Our Inner Self is the most vulnerable part of our being. We learn in adolescence the danger of exposing it to the outer world. So, we mask the Inner Self with the Social Self which often subordinates to others to gain their acceptance. Yet, paradoxically, the Social Self also is prone to trying to control others. We put mighty effort into persuading others that we are on their wavelengths even as we stridently proclaim our individuality.
Social fears arising in the first half of life discourage us from revealing our Inner Self. But in midlife, we experience a waking of the Inner Self as it struggles to break the chains forged by the Social Self that bind it. In a materialistic society such as ours, the inner Self must work harder to gain its release.
Advertising and entertainment do much to shape the character of our social Selves. Tough guy strident individualism has dominated the images of advertising and entertainment for decades, promoting an ethos of bravura, machismo and false identity. Many of us internalize these hollow values, modeling much of our behavior on what advertising and entertainment represent as the ideal. Business profits more by encouraging people to effect contrived images than to disclose the unadorned Inner Self. Countless products are sold via the idea that a person needs to appear stronger than he or she is, be more sure of self than is true, act more stable in demeanor than is actual, and look more competent in performance than possible.
Sometimes we are brutally shocked by discrepancies that show up between apparent success and true reality. A man reaching his prime in midlife blows his brains out. A pillar of the community is suddenly revealed to be a closet pervert with a history of abusive relationships with young boys. A deacon of the church turns out to be a philanderer. Such cases make it painfully clear that behind an image of success and respectability often lies a deeply disturbed psyche that has been skillfully masked by a finely developed, though grotesquely-formed social Self.
I once read that 75 percent of famous people surveyed in a study lived in dread of their "real selves" being discovered. Their "real selves " were concealed from the outer world by what Jung called the persona, which in Latin means "mask."
The persona of the yet-to-be-fully-developed person is something of a con artist, or at least a super salesperson. Its chief product is the person behind the mask, its main strategy is manipulation. Without shame it can be insincerely deferential on one occasion, and brutally assertive on another. It is the source of the cocktail party smile, and in fact, the source of all social lies – the sins of exaggeration, incomplete renderings of fact, and outright lies we use to gain and retain the confidence of others.
Nevertheless, the persona is necessary. Like a box of breakfast cereal, it is the outer package whose surface carries artful representations of inner content. The persona imagines the character of the Inner Self in idealized images. Those images stand for the Inner Self until it has achieved the maturity necessary to assert itself over the persona. We cannot act fully true to the True Self until the early battles to secure solid social footing are largely over. When that happens, the Inner Self moves to bring the persona under control. This is much of what early midlife is about.
Confronting the Shadow
To understand the psychological dynamics of midlife, it is necessary to know how years of suppression of the Inner Self invite a midlife explosion. As midlife approaches, many a person's Inner Self begins recoiling against the shallow caricatures of the True Self represented by the persona. Urges to remove the mask well up. As those urges transform into actions, the Inner Self begins revealing itself. Jung said this is part of the process of confronting the shadow.
In Jungian theory, the shadow stands for the best and the worst in our psyches. No normal adult lives who does not recognize the shadow within – the ever lingering phantasm of good and evil that resides in us all. In the shadow, good and evil do not have separate existence; they coexist as two sides of the same coin. Failure to acknowledge the dark side and come to terms with it can lead to such behavior as that of the woman mentioned earlier.
I have elsewhere proposed that five motivating underlying values (MUV) systems are the ultimate source of all behavior. MUV systems encompass the shadow, much like the Force, in the movie Star Wars, encompasses both the dark and light side.
Identity Values, which promote our will to be and fundamental existence, can be deployed for either noble or demonic ends. I-Values exist between the poles of dependence and autonomy, either of which can operate out of balance with the other, leading to behavior that is either unduly dominant or unduly subservient.
Relational values provide connections we need to orient ourselves, both temporally and spiritually. They lead us to resources we draw on to fulfill our agendas and secure social validation. R-Values can also drive us toward excess materialism or excessive asceticism and promote fanaticism or benign devotion, depending on balance between the social Self and the inner Self.
Purpose values are reflected in the shadow as both our most altruistic and most egocentric potentials. Altruism most concerns survival of the species, egocentrism most concerns individual survival. Either orientation can be carried to pathological extremes, but both obviously are necessary to human survival.
Adaptation values promote development through interplay of the bipolar forces of novelty seeking and habitude. A-values represent a range of behavior extending from extreme rejection of existing order to fanatical resistance to change. Though skill development for successful adaptation (survival) is the primary function of A-Values, behavior can manifest in extreme forms from obsessive control to excessive synergy.
Energy values concern the health and well being a person, and his or her physical and psychological functional competence. Behavior promoted by E-Values extends from wanton hedonism and socially perverse diversions to benign renewal and re-creation of the Self to yield physical and psychological health and well being.
Maturity depends on achieving balance between the dark and light forces of the shadow. To accomplish this, the persona must be dissolved because it masks the dark side so that others – and often we – see only the light side. Advanced maturity requires breaking through the mask so that we can see ourselves at the core. Only then can we integrate the dark and light sides of our shadow into our True Selves.
Of course, when the persona begins dissolving, what appears can be disconcerting. The image that materializes may be that of a grossly underdeveloped Inner Self. Steve Martin’s character in the movie, Grand Canyon, experienced such a horrific self-revelation. Unable to cope, he slammed the door shut on his inner Self, returning his Social Self to its former role in his unnaturally affected life.
Becoming More Like Yourself
Think of someone you know who seems more cynical, bitterer, and more regretful in midlife. You might be inclined to think that person has fundamentally changed. However, those attributes have likely been present in that person's makeup for years; they simply have become more visible because of a dissolving persona. A classic idea in gerontology is, "The older you become, the more you become you."
The persona is never really totally dissolved. Even very old people want to "put on a good face" when they think it matters. Rather than disappearing altogether, the persona becomes integrated into the True Self so that it harmonizes with the total Self rather than functioning at odds with this part or that. What does disappear is narcissism – the inordinate love of self. Narcissism is the driving force behind the unintegrated persona, and is discordant with the True Self.
Jung called the process by which the persona becomes more integrated with the True Self the process of individuation. Individuation leads to self-realization or in Abraham Maslow's terms, self-actualization. Applied personally, these terms simply mean, "realizing your potential." However, realizing your potential is less about what you accomplish on the world stage than about what you accomplish on the stage of your inner consciousness.
Midlife Explosions
Until you have heard it, it is not easy to understand the power and the potential pain of the midlife wake-up call sounded by the inner Self.
The reawakening of the Inner Self in midlife may be gentle or it can be explosive. Years of inattention to the Inner Self can build powerful unrelieved tensions that mount in the form of unspent energy coursing through a person's emotional structures. Beyond some threshold of stress buildup, a critical point is reached, and change of major proportions -- whether it comes explosively or gradually -- becomes inevitable.
Some people may hardly feel tensions accompanying midlife changes in worldviews, even though significant alteration in life outlook lies ahead. They may simply wake up one day surprised by how much their worldviews have changed.
However, for others, years of accumulating tension produce a roiling reservoir of compressed energy ready to blow at any time with devastating results. Something happens – likely as not, it is something not very significant – the straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back sort of thing. Then – at BOOM! An overstressed middle-ager takes an action that forever changes his life as well as the lives of those around him. Such explosively wrought changes are usually discontinuous, that is, not directly predictable from recent events. "I wonder whatever got into George," people say in bewilderment.
What probably happened to George is that after years of unmitigated neglect suffered by his Inner Self, it comes crashing through the walls of its prison in a state of intense outrage. "I have not been me!" George uncontrollably cries out. Like many others experiencing the same thing, he may complain in self-pitying fashion, "I have sacrificed too much of myself for others. Now it's my turn!"
In blaming his lack of life satisfaction on others, George selectively finds fault with others in order to define conditions that justify a sudden turn of path in life. Boss, spouse, and children may seem to be barriers to happiness. His fault-finding with others provides grist for the rational mills of his mind to make easier what he is inclined to do in any event: break ties with the past because he believes the cure for his midlife unhappiness is radical change in his life scenario.
People entering midlife in a state of deep unsettlement often attribute the lack of joy in their lives to failure of others to meet their expectations. Such feelings can strike with the force of a tidal wave, disrupting a person’s functioning in his or her current social and work environments. Beliefs that formerly guided their behavior begin to wobble and fall apart. New thoughts about Self sear the landscape of the mind like flames consuming the understory of a great forest to reveal what scrub growth formerly concealed. Long-held beliefs fall to the forces of emotionally driven imperatives of the moment. The slumbering Inner Self is given expression, at whatever cost.
The central question of midlife is not unlike the central question of adolescence: "Who am I, and what am I to be?" The question can return in midlife with a rudeness that shakes not only the person experiencing it, but those around him. Midlife is when people are most likely to discontinuously undertake dramatic reversals in life – like impulsively leaving a spouse or telling a boss in effect, "Shove it." Such in-your-face actions of a newly awakened inner Self signal the defiant charge, "I've had it. I'm going to do for myself, be for myself."
The primary issue now is not whether or not the new path chosen is practical or morally defensible, but whether or not the new path appears – to that person – to be leading in the direction of True Self. This is a common rationalization: “I must find real me.” The path chosen may make zero sense to others, as seen in the case of the hapless woman who fell in love with a brutal killer on death row. Her Social Self was not moderated by the midlife awakening of her Inner Self; her Social Self was obliterated. But that is of no importance to people whose sense of emptiness in midlife causes them to reshuffle their lives.
Midlife crises are crises of identity more than of anything else. Marriages and jobs may be characterized as intolerable by people to justify dramatic changes in life directions, but the Holy Grail of midlife is True Self – not a more compatible mate or more fulfilling job. The True Self cannot be accessed through another soul, be it a professional or friend advisor, or an intimate partner. The quest is a solitary one. Others can only provide clues. The riddles are ours alone to solve.
The Ghosts of Midlife
Experience accounts for only a portion of our midlife course. This time of life is when forces of personal developmental anticipated in our genes work on us like a sculptor's finer grade chisels making the last climactic cuts on the way to the completed work.
Our natal blueprints predispose us toward greater introspection in midlife. This brings us face-face with our Inner Self in profound ways, sometimes for the first time in adulthood. The experience can unfold in a fashion remarkably reminiscent of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Unsettling visits by the ghosts of our past, present and future appear to us as they did to Ebenezer Scrooge. They exhort us to inventory our lives, and infuse them with new meaning in ways a younger person cannot. Too little life lived deprives us of the wisdom needed when the really big issues of our beingness present themselves to us. The ghosts know that, for they do not often come before midlife when they appear in many venues. We may encounter them in reveries, in counselors’ offices, or in movies like The Big Chill or Grand Canyon. We are quite likely to meet them in some symbolized form in nocturnal allegories as we sleep.
Some people – as was Ebenezer Scrooge – are motivated by such experiences to change. Scrooge found salvation because he was willing to confront his shadow. Others, like the disconsolate Jacob Marley, try to hide from their shadows. Resisting the call for change in midlife to move to the next plateau of personal growth is dangerous. It increases risk of high angst, bitter regret and deep depression. Yet, misreading the messages in that call can have similar results. For these reasons and others, making major life decisions during the dawn of the inner Self’s midlife awakening is fraught with peril. Better to make such decisions when the soul has again become quiet to better inform the ever evolving restless Self.
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Last modified:
07/24/05