Sounding the Emotional Depths

We know one thing for certain regarding midlife: it's an emotional maelstrom. The principal difference between your reactions to the emotions that you experience during the midlife transition and the ones you endured during puberty lies in the fact that you're so much more adept at finding creative ways to stuff, deny, and project your feelings away from yourself so that you won't have either to show with them or deal with them . . . at least for now.

What do you think that midlife feels like? I suspect that most people going through this experience would say, "Confusing." Yet, any first-year psych major would be able to tell you that 'confusion' isn't a feeling. Feelings, when boiled down to their basic essences, come in only about four flavors: 'mad,' 'sad,' 'glad,' and 'scared.' The confusion comes from an inability (or unwillingness) to get down and dirty and really identify the feelings that are churning around down there. It's often the case that, on one hand, you do recognize how you feel, but, on the other hand, your intellect tells you, "That can't be true! I can't be feeling that way!" As a result, your mind and your emotions end up at war with each other. It's not pretty.

Let's take a look at the kinds of feelings that you can expect to experience during the midlife transition.

1. First of all, the majority of what you're going to be feeling during this period of your life isn't all that comfortable. Probably the least common experience will be to be feeling 'glad,' so I suspect that this one is the most superficial of your feelings. When does a guy in midlife feel glad? Most often, when things are going well for him and he's getting his own way. Often, there's an 'I'll show them' attitude attached to it, or a rebellious sense of thumbing your nose at customary propriety.

2. But, what happens when you're not getting your own way? Evidently, you'll probably be feeling 'sad.' For whatever reason, your career, your relationship, or your health may have hit a wall. Or, even more likely, they're not at an impasse, they just aren't getting any better. You're tired. You're emotionally spent. You're sad. You may feel so sad that you just want to give up, or, alternatively, just chuck it all away for good. At least on the surface, that may seem like the only way to get out of the dumps and to start feeling 'glad' again (see #1).

3. When you're finally tired of the 'sad'-'glad' merry-go-round, it'll be time for you to dig deeper inside, because neither feeling 'glad' nor feeling 'sad' are telling you anything like the whole, true story. "Depression," they say, "is anger turned inward." Underneath the furious rebellion that makes you feel 'glad' and the self-punishing depression that makes you feel 'sad' lies a complex of emotions that you'll eventually be able to recognize as 'mad.' You're angry! You're pissed off! You've been following your convictions about what was the right things to do all the way along (and working rather hard at it, I'm sure), and now it all feels worthless. So, you've become furious. You're furious at your career; you're furious at your family; you're even furious at yourself. And, when you're tired of being furiously sad, you break out and become furiously glad. When you look at it all like that, it doesn't look too pretty: in effect, you're having a tantrum.

4. Yet, getting yourself in a rage over your situation is really a powerful — but only a thinly-veiled — attempt at hiding the truth from yourself and everyone else. Underneath the manic gladness and the depressive sadness, underneath the rageful anger, there lies the most unacceptable emotion of them all. Deep down, you're scared. For a man, almost all emotions are unacceptable (except anger, occasionally). And, the most unacceptable emotion of them all is to be 'scared'. Still, that's the operative emotion at the core of the midlife transition. You've lost your way; you don't know which way to go; and there's nobody there you can trust to help you, In fact, merely acknowledging that you might need help may well be the most unthinkable thought of all.

Glad -> Sad -> Mad -> Scared: every step down the emotional ladder takes you closer to a core reality that you really don't want to have to look at (or even let into your conscious awareness). Midlife works on your core of self-esteem rather like having your own personal Three Mile Island: you've uncovered your nuclear core and you're in meltdown. If you'd only allow the transition to do its work properly, you'd gradually become aware that your whole life is just a facade built upon other people's expectations (and your own assumptions) and that you haven't any clear idea who you really are, what you really want, or where you're really going. If you have enough courage to push away the denial and smokescreens to look coldly at the facts, you'd see how true that is.

You'd also see the utter simplicity of the solution. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to change anything about your life. The only thing you have to change is your mind. The Greek philosopher, Epictetus, learned this lesson dramatically. As a young man, he was captured by the Romans and sold into slavery and bought to tutor the children of a wealthy Roman family. His midlife transition came when his rebellion, sadness, and anger had played themselves out in pure frustration over his condition. He looked through all that was left (his fear) and saw his condition as it really was — not like he wished it would be. That day, he said to his master, "Master, from this day forward, I am no longer your slave; because, starting today, I choose to serve you freely." For the structure of his life, nothing had changed. From the core of his life, nothing was the same.

As I just mentioned, the midlife transition is actually perfectly simple. Yet, in its simplicity lies its power to terrify even the most courageous of men and women. God, they say, is utterly simple. Yet, in God's perfect simplicity lies his ineffability. In Hebrew, אהיה אשר אהיה (ehyeh asher ehyeh): "I will be who I will be." At the core of your own being, laid bare by the transformation at midlife, is the simplicity of the personhood who you are. In your own being, in your own connection with Being, lies the meaning that's waiting only for your permission to infuse your life. It's in that act of acceptance of the person who you are and who you're meant to become that you can find the courage to lay down (at long last) the need to prove anything to anyone. When you stand there within your personhood, without the layers and walls of pretense, go barefoot: the place where you stand is holy ground.