Midlife Crisis in America: An opportunity for transformation

As the author of the popular blog MidlifeCrisisQueen.com and the new book Midlife Magic: Becoming the person you are inside", I was shocked to find how many of my readers did not believe women as well as men experience what they would define as a midlife crisis.

Sue Shellenbarger’s book The Breaking Point: How today’s women are navigating midlife crisis" from 2005, showed how much research has already been done in this area, while also helping to normalize the broad range of difficulties and transitions we all may experience in midlife.

Sue was the author of the "Work and Family" column in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago when she happened to write a column about her own struggles in her 40s. Reader response was overwhelming! Sue said, "The column drew one of the biggest reader responses I had received in twelve years as a columnist." So Sue decided to do her own research into the apparently controversial idea of midlife crisis in women in America.

First she found that a number of national studies had already been completed, most notable the creation of the MacArthur Foundation's "Midlife in the United States" database. Elaine Wethington, a Cornell researcher, analyzed some of this data with the expressed purpose of laying to rest the "myth" of midlife crisis as a predictable psychological life stage that besets American men around age 40.

Instead she found a startlingly higher number of Americans have experienced what they consider to be a midlife crisis, broadly defined as a stressful or turbulent psychological transition that occurs most often in the late forties or early fifties.

Even more surprising was her discovery of the number of women reporting midlife crises. The data showed that by age 50, even more women than men reported a turbulent midlife transition, a full 36 percent, compared with 34 percent of men.

Applying these findings to the 42 million women who are nearing or in midlife, more than 15 million boomer women will have or are already having what they regard as a midlife crisis. What an interesting myth!

Most surprising is the apparent cultural bias against accepting that American women think and feel deeply enough to question their choices in midlife and make some major changes.

According to Sue's book, "The idea of midlife crisis has taken deep root in American culture since it was first set forth in scholarly research in the 1960s and 1970s and in Gail Sheehy's popular 1976 book Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. But these crises were all for men, and seen as foolish self-indulgences (sports car, trophy wife) driven by a fear of death. Women were thought to develop differently and were relegated to "supporting roles as victims or temptresses to their leading men."

Thankfully, we have come a long way baby! Women stopped listening to the "experts" years ago and instead began acknowledging their own spontaneous midlife epiphanies. These life transitions sometimes catapult us into whole new ways of looking at our own definitions of meaning and purpose and can become one of our most crucial life transformations.

This is why I wrote Midlife Magic. My goal was to describe my own up-close and personal journey through the psychological process of midlife change. First a divorce caught me by surprise, and then a job layoff two years later left me traumatized, but then slowly convinced me that I could now do anything.

In those unusual moments in life when we feel as if we have little to lose, we feel freer to take major risks and in this way prove to ourselves how adept we can be at navigating through unexpected changes and uncertainty, all the while building new reserves of self-respect and confidence.

The question is not whether women experience midlife transitions but rather whether we can take charge of our life at this crucial moment in time, and transform our crisis into a golden opportunity to change everything, all while loving ourselves like never before!

Please see "About the Queen" on my blog and my website for more information about me.