by Jane Fonda
ON TEMPERAMENT
Psychologists generally agree that our temperaments are mostly hereditary and that while they can be modified to some slight degree, we are pretty much stuck with them. Temperament is what determines the level of our tested IQ and “the genetic component of our social intelligence”5—whether we are introverted or extroverted, sullen or positive, rigid or resilient. I saw clearly, while reviewing my first two acts, that my genetic temperament makes me someone who was dusted with a sprinkling of depression; this became more acute during my adolescence and early twenties. The trait came mostly from my father’s genetic line; I consider it blind luck that I didn’t inherit my mother’s bipolar genes. Time, therapy, and a decade of psychopharmacological assistance during the end of Act II allowed me to mostly banish my depression to a corner; it lurks there still, trying occasionally to send out negative, “who do you think you are” scenarios that I refuse to read. I am also someone who likes solitude for long stretches (my father’s genes). But when I’ve had enough aloneness, I become very sociable, outgoing, and even garrulous (my mother’s genes). Maybe this is why the animal I have always identified with is the bear, which hibernates during the long winters and then loves to play and socialize.
I am always alert to people whose genetic inheritance makes them positive, able to turn lemons into lemonade. I try to hang with these types as often as possible, because their attitude rubs off. And, as you will learn in Chapter 9, most of us have a fair chance of becoming such people in our Third Act, even if we didn’t start out that way. On the other hand, I try to steer clear of people who walk around with a perpetual dark rain cloud over their heads, like Eeyore, the “woe is me” donkey in Winnie-the-Pooh. Often such people’s conversation focuses on themselves and their problems and how unfair the world is to them. They embody the Victim Motif. When I am with such types, I invariably wonder if they are aware of their negative vibe and if they’ve ever tried to get help moving out from under their cloud. It was only in the last decade of my Act II that I became aware of my own cloud and realized I had to try to do something about it. That is when I began taking medication, which helped me change gears and allowed me to open up to the benefits of talk therapy, after which I no longer needed the meds. We need some mileage under our belts before we are able to see that it is ourselves rather than others who are responsible for our willingness to accept rain clouds instead of going for the sun.
Me, fly-fishing with my golden retriever, Roxy, in 2001.
© VERONIQUE VIAL
I know that some of you reading this book don’t believe in therapy; maybe you view it as self-indulgent, the way my father did. But, according to author and therapist Terrence Real, “most psychological conditions can be significantly improved with the right care. Treatment for depression, for example, has been shown to be 90 percent effective. Yet only two in five depressed people ever get help.”6
If temperament is inherited and relatively immutable, why are so many of us able to change how we feel and behave? My interest in the possibility of change stems from a sense I had, starting in my late twenties, that if I was to make my life all that it could be, I would have to change certain things about myself. My belief in the possibility of behavioral change is also what motivated me to found two nonprofits that aim at reducing risky sexual behavior among teenagers—the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention and the Jane Fonda Center for Adolescent Reproductive Health at Emory University’s School of Medicine.
In Georgia, around 1997, with some of the young men and women my nonprofit, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, worked with.
ON CHARACTER
Dr. George Vaillant addresses the issue of personal change in his book Aging Well. He says that while “temperament to a large extent is set in plaster,”7 our character does change because it is influenced by environment and by our resilience, assuming we have inherited any. Resilience means that we can commandeer the resources, the good coping mechanisms, to deal with stressful situations. An example would be a forty-year-old woman who, in her young years, was sexually abused by her father. Instead of marrying a fourth abusive husband, she decides to run a shelter for abused women. I like Vaillant’s definition of resilience. He says it “reflects individuals who metaphorically resemble a twig with a fresh, green living core. When twisted out of shape, such a twig bends, but it does not break; instead, it springs back and continues growing.”8
When I reviewed my Act I, I could see that I was blessed with resilience. My mother may have been MIA when it came to parenting, but my radar was constantly scanning the horizon in search of a warm, nurturing person from whom I could receive love and learning. Usually it came from the mothers of my best girlfriends. A child who lacks resilience may be in the presence of love but unable to take it in, to “metabolize” it, as George Vaillant puts it.
ON PERSONALITY
Okay. I have discussed temperament (permanent) and character (able to evolve). Where, then, does personality fit in? According to Dr. Vaillant, personality is the sum of temperament and character. This means that some of our personality is permanent (my needing solitude and my tendency to melancholy, which has been banished to a corner, yes, but hasn’t disappeared) and some is changeable (I am less judgmental and negative and more optimistic and loving).
Cognitive therapy has been shown to alter a person’s behavior. Working with a talented cognitive therapist, a person can begin to think differently about the past, for instance, and over time this new thinking activates different structures in the brain. This is referred to as “cognitive restructuring.” With practice and time, a person can begin to automatically think—and act—differently.
During their First Acts, most people are too young to think much about whether and how their character and personality ought to change. They haven’t had enough time to experience the ways in which they affect other people, to become aware of their behavioral patterns. Perhaps that can happen in Act II. As the playwright Nigel Howard once said, “The beautiful thing about learning a theory of your own personality is then you are free to disobey it.”
CHAPTER 4
Act II: A Time of Building and of In-Betweenness
Perhaps the practice of crossing the boundaries of work and rest, the habit of navigating transitions, of trying on new roles and personas, should be established earlier, allowing people to become familiar with, and adept at, reinventing themselves.
—SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT
We now have an opportunity to exchange the wish to control life for a willingness to engage in living.
—ZEN PRIEST JOAN HALIFAX
Marching for welfare rights in Las Vegas in 1971.
IN MY VIEW, ACT II SPANS AGES THIRTY TO FIFTY-NINE, AND DURING those three decades most of us go through a number of very significant transitions. These can be particularly dramatic for women.
Transitions
You may be looking back over this time in a life review, or, if you’re young, looking forward to it; in either case, these years typically can include the transition into parenting, then suddenly out of it, when you face the empty-nest syndrome (which can be a wonderful time for a couple, or hard to adjust to); the transition into more power in a job, then perhaps less, or losing a job altogether; and the hormonal shifts that mark the beginning of menopause, which may make us feel we are losing our minds. I felt this way! Because so many of us have postponed motherhood due to careers—births to women ages forty to forty-four increased 71 percent between 1990 an 1999—many of us go through the menopausal transition while we are still trying to cope with our teenagers’ own hormonal turmoil, and these difficult-to-navigate events may coincide with our being laid off from work because of age and our—in the company’s view—onerous seniority! To add to all this, we may find ourselves having to care for ailing parents and in-laws. All these things, together with potential changes in looks, weight, and self-image, can make us feel that our lives have peaked, that it will all be
downhill from here on. That is certainly how I felt at this stage! But trust me, for many if not most of us, the best may be yet to come.
Try to think of this time as noted ob-gyn Dr. Christiane Northrup does when she calls it the “springtime of the second half of life.” I will write later about why this can be so!
In 1969, holding my daughter, Vanessa.
Vanessa in 1970.
Vanessa at ten years old.
Around 1985, with Vanessa.
© 2001 SUZANNE TENNER
In My Life So Far, I called Act II “Seeking” because, as I looked back, I could see that, for me, the defining feature of this act was the search I undertook to find meaning in my life. I’d ended my First Act playing Barbarella! With the start of my Second Act—and, with it, the birth of my first child—I left my marriage of eight years, profoundly changed the way I lived, and began asking, What am I here for? What are other people’s lives like? Can I be useful?
For most people, Act II might be called “Building,” because this is when we are building families, careers, our place in society, and our egos. As a result, during this act we are so vulnerable to the many challenges to our egos: Am I being recognized as much as she is? Am I getting paid what I deserve? Why has his business plan worked and mine hasn’t? Why does no one love me? That sort of thing!
Dr. George Vaillant writes, as mentioned previously, that in early midlife, childhood is still significantly important, whereas “unhappy childhoods become less important with time.”1 Those of us with challenging early lives may have a harder time of it as we enter our Second Acts. We’re supposed to be becoming someone, but we can’t quite find our footing and may—involuntarily—still resort to immature coping mechanisms such as acting out, projection (imposing one’s own thoughts and feelings onto another), or passive-aggressive behavior. A number of long-term studies over the last forty years have shown that maladaptive coping mechanisms such as these can mature into altruism and sublimation as we age, but while we’re in the midst of it, life can be so hard.
It seems to me that those who do the best in their Act III are those who began to manage their egos while they were younger; they became aware of their character traits, how and why others responded to them the way they did, and, if the responses were problematic, asked themselves if perhaps their own behavior, their own thinking, might have been the problem. Often people with immature coping traits blame everyone else for what goes wrong. They have what I call a “the world is full of assholes” attitude. This is especially true of people with addictions. If the same problems keep arising, one should consider getting help, either with individual therapy or group therapy, or with a twelve-step program.
In our parents’ time, it was common to graduate from college and go right into a career or, for many women, into the unpaid but challenging jobs of marriage and parenthood. These days, many more—perhaps most—women are working, and for both women and men, changing careers not once but numerous times during the Second Act is not unusual. Nor is starting a career, marrying, divorcing, and reentering the workplace. Maybe Act II should be called “Churn.”
Finances
Act II is the optimum time to take a careful and honest look at your financial situation. Your future security may depend on your starting a savings plan now. Midlife is also the ideal time to develop a healthy lifestyle, if you haven’t done so already—it will help maximize Third Act potentials. I will discuss this in later chapters.
The Challenge of In-Betweenness
During the middle to latter part of the Second Act, especially between the mid-forties and the mid-fifties, many women feel they’re losing control of life and have nothing to hold on to. I certainly felt this way. I call it the challenge of in-betweenness, and it’s scary. As Marilyn Ferguson has written, “It’s not so much that we’re afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it’s that place in between that we fear.… It’s like being in between trapezes. It’s Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There’s nothing to hold on to.” How we handle our time between trapezes can determine much about how well we swing into the rest of our lives.
I THOUGHT I WAS DISAPPEARING
In my late forties, joy seemed to be leaching out of my life. When I look at photos of myself during that period, I see a blankness on my face. It’s as if nobody was home. I watch my movies from that time—Old Gringo and Stanley & Iris, in particular—and I can tell. It felt as if I was uninhabited, going through the motions—sometimes fairly well, but with no hookup to the heart. Those were the last movies I made for a long time. I quit the movie business after them. Fifteen years later I went back, but at the time I thought I was finished with it forever. I felt so empty, so low, that it was just too painful to try to be creative. You see, the only instrument an actor has to bring a character to life is her or his own body and spirit, and if those are shut down, there’s nowhere else to turn—no violin, no canvas, no pen and paper. That’s not to say that many actors don’t continue their work despite personal meltdowns. Work may provide their only escape, or maybe it’s their only source of income. I was fortunate in that the Jane Fonda Workout business was bringing in enough money for me to be able to stop acting.
I looked ahead and saw no future beckoning, yet I had to plow onward. I had a family, organizational responsibilities, and myriad other duties. Besides, it’s not as though I understood what was going on. What was I going to say to those who depended on me? “I don’t know why, but I feel like I’m disappearing, like I’m getting all blurred around the edges”? They would have thought I was mad, and in a way I was.
Me in 1988, as my marriage to Tom was falling apart—and so was I.
MARY ELLEN MARK
I was sure that if the approach of menopause was to blame I’d be experiencing hot flashes and night sweats; since that hadn’t happened, I lay the blame for my sadness, confusion, and irritability on my deteriorating second marriage of seventeen years, to Tom Hayden.
In the 1970s—Tom Hayden, our son, Troy, and me, with my daughter, Vanessa, peeking from behind.
Despite the fact that I was researching and writing Women Coming of Age, it didn’t occur to me that what was happening, at least in part, were the effects of perimenopause, that varied stretch of time leading up to menopause when women begin to experience the erratic cycling of hormones, and the estrogen and oxytocin levels in our brains begin to drop. These substances support our mood-elevating serotonin-releasing cells, the ones that make us feel good. According to the neuropsychiatrist Dr. Louann Brizendine, at the University of California, San Francisco, perimenopausal women are fourteen times more at risk of depression than younger and older women. Of course, many women sail through this hormonal transition with very little difficulty. But according to the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States, life can take a downward turn for more than two-thirds of women between the ages of thirty-five and forty-nine. After that, once the hormones have stabilized with the completion of menopause (which happens, on average, at age fifty-one and a half years), life can take a surprisingly upward turn for a great many women.
One of the last Christmases Tom and I had together. Troy is behind and Vanessa is on the right.
Hormonal Shifts
Another factor comes into play as we approach and enter menopause, one that can have a complex effect on our interpersonal relations: Our estrogen and oxytocin levels begin to drop below those of the more masculine, goal-oriented testosterone. Those feel-good hormones were what encouraged us to take care of others, smooth things over, and avoid conflict. Now we may find ourselves not caring so much about keeping the peace, and we may express our previously repressed anger more openly. Old Let-Me-Take-Care-of-It-for-You-Honey morphs into I’m-Going-to-Class-See-You-Later-and-the-Cleaning’s-Ready-to-Pick-Up. Contrary to what we may think, 65 percent of divorces after age fifty are initiated not by men wanting to leave their wives for younger women but by the wives themselves. They may start to ask themselves, “Have
I lived my own life or the life others have wanted me to live, making decisions others wanted me to make rather than my own?”
Had I known what was behind my depression and anxiety as I approached fifty, I might have sought help from a doctor who specialized in hormone therapies. This, I have since learned, is the optimal time for healthy women who are experiencing perimenopausal symptoms to consult their doctors about hormone therapy in low doses. (I will discuss hormone therapy at greater length in Chapter 14.)
Breakdown
Even with pharmacological help, my marriage would have ended sooner or later. I was fifty-one when it happened and, always the late bloomer, still going through perimenopause. All the sadness and despair I had been experiencing over the previous several years crashed in on me. My lifelong, ever-ready carapace fell apart, and I had a nervous breakdown. I couldn’t eat or speak above a whisper or move quickly. I was in free fall. Everything I had relied on for self-definition—marriage, career—was stripped away, and I hadn’t a clue about who I was or what I was supposed to do with my life.