| |
Mid-life can include:
- Discontent with life or the lifestyle that may have provided happiness for many years
- Boredom with things/people that have held great interest and dominated your life
- Feeling adventurous and wanting to do something completely different
- Questioning the meaning of life and the validity of decisions clearly and easily made years before
- Confusion about who you are or where your life is going
Middle age is a time in which adults take on new responsibilities at the workplace and therefore often feel a need to "reappraise previous life structures with an eye to making revisions 'while there is still time'" (Huyck, 1997). Canadian psychologist Elliot Jaques, who wrote an article titled "Death and the Mid-life Crisis" for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1965 and thus coined the term "mid-life crisis" referring to a time when adults realize their own mortality and how much time they may have left in their lives.
The mid-life transition or crisis can also be approached using a Myers-Briggs personality model stemming from the works of Carl Jung. The stages are as follows:
- Accommodation—presenting ourselves as different people in different situations, called "personae"
- Separation—taking off the masks or personae we wear in different situations and assessing who we are under the masks; rejecting your personae, even if only temporarily and feeling largely uncertain about who you are
- Reintegration—feeling more certain of who you are and adopting more appropriate personae
- Individuation—recognizing and integrating the conflicts that exist within us, and achieving a balance between them
Symptoms
Small, nagging doubts may appear, perhaps followed by a series of dramatic, apparently irrational events leading up to great change. During it all, men and women ask themselves questions such as: Is this all there is? Am I a failure? Symptoms and behaviors during mid-life crisis can range from mild to severe, including:
- Boredom and exhaustion, or frantic energy
- Self-questioning
- Daydreaming
- Irritability, unexpected anger
- Acting on alcohol, drug, food, or other compulsions
- Greatly decreased or increased sexual desire
- Sexual affairs, especially with someone much younger
- Greatly decreased or increased ambition
|
|
