by Connie Zweig
When our trade-offs no longer satisfy the soul, they begin to feel obligatory. We become weary with the burden of the persona, which has lived under the domination of a tyrant character for so long. We dream of throwing over the burden, tearing off the mask, walking off in another direction.
For these reasons, at midlife many people feel grief-stricken and mourn their lost youth, like Demeter mourning the lost innocence of Persephone. Some feel bewildered, as if they are wandering in a desert, dry to the bone, with no landmark in sight. Their feet are blistered, their throats unquenched, their bodies wooden from a lifetime of mechanical acts. Others, whose disillusionment becomes dissolution, drown themselves with drink. And many others, who have served a life sentence as caretakers, feel like the Greek Danaids who, at the river’s edge, forever fill water jars that are full of holes. Like the water, their hope leaks out in daily tasks of self-sacrifice.
At these times, as outworn personality styles lose their charm, undeveloped traits or latent dreams may emerge with a vengeance. Like glowing coals lying dormant under piles of ash, they catch fire and light up our fantasies of another life. Henry, forty-three, married for twenty-two years and a father of two, worked as a highly successful architect. Deeply invested in his marriage and career, he felt a bit complacent and did not anticipate any drastic midlife realignment.
Henry began to spend time on the Internet having anonymous conversations in the chat rooms. He discovered to his own surprise that he enjoyed chatting with men about male sexuality. After a few sessions he began to feel compelled to turn on the computer in the evening, dreading and at the same time anticipating these chats. With alarm, Henry began to question his own sexual preference. He had no early memories of an attraction to boys and had been moderately sexually satisfied in his marriage.
But as weeks went by and Henry’s curiosity grew, he began to feel a growing sexual panic: He had been visited by the god Pan, whose hot, hairy body and erect penis bring panic in his wake. Pan, an abandoned child with unknown parentage, wrapped in an animal skin, brings a nameless kind of anxiety which, like hunger and sex, connects us with our instinct and the natural world.
Henry was caught: He set up an appointment with a man for sex. Then another. He told his therapist, “I can’t believe it, but I feel like I’m coming home.”
Before too long, Henry’s newly discovered sexuality threatened all that he had built and eventually forced him to question his entire identity. “If I’m not who I thought I was sexually, then who am I?” Emotionally overwhelmed, he opened his closet and asked, “Whose clothes are these?” He looked around his house and asked, “Whose furniture is this?” He sat still at his desk at work, staring straight ahead, and asked, “Whose life is this?” Like an adolescent awakening to sexual energies for the first time, Henry’s midlife change in sexual orientation was explosive. His old life began to feel too tame, too domesticated, and eventually too inauthentic. His new life whispered of Pan’s wildness, his instinctual spontaneity; it called to him.
For the first time, Henry began to be interested in non-career oriented activities, such as playing music and gardening. The foundations of his identity as a husband and hard worker crumbled. As he began to do shadow-work, he traced some of the roots of his midlife sexual issues: His father had been cold and distant, even punishing; his mother had been helpless and weak. Henry had become “the best little boy” at an early age to protect against rejection. Eventually, he had become the best husband and provider as well; his competence protected him against his father’s aggression and his mother’s weakness. But it also forced him to deny his deeper feelings, permitting him to repress his own taboo sexuality.
When Henry faced his sexual shadow at midlife, he was forced to face the cold rejection of his father one last time. He had to admit, at last, that he could never win his father’s approval. He also faced the helplessness of his mother in his own feelings of depression and thoughts of suicide. But as he stood for his new sexual orientation, he began to feel free of her within him. Eventually, after a turbulent struggle, Henry decided to leave his family and follow a new imperative. He felt deeply alive; however, lacking a role model for a gay man with a family, he faced the potential loss of his ties to his children. Suffering terribly, he fought hard to discover his newfound identity and to maintain authenticity with his family.
Clarisse, at forty-eight, whose singing career rocketed her to stardom in her twenties, today feels alone and bereft. Unable to sustain her creative efforts and pay her bills, she fell into despair, but soon found a new source of energy: shoplifting. When she steals discretionary items, such as cosmetics, she feels giddy with cleverness. Taken over by this irresistible self-destructive behavior, despite her awareness of its danger, she felt that she had to steal whenever she shopped.
As Jungian analyst Murray Stein pointed out, for some people Hermes may appear at midlife in kleptomania, when the impulse to steal is so charged with energy that the ego is rendered helpless and cannot resist the act. Stein suggests that through this unique kind of acting out, Hermes, as a messenger of an underworld complex, can lead us to discover hidden wishes that remain tainted with shadow. By romancing this character and listening to his voice, we may uncover those secret wishes and take back for ourselves lost gifts that have the power to nourish the soul.
Who has come to thwart your efforts at midlife? Does this shadow character appear in the domain of your marriage, family, friendships, creativity, or work? What is its deeper, underlying message—the gold in the dark side?
MIDLIFE AS THE EMERGENCE OF NEW PRIORITIES: STEVE’S STORY
On approaching fifty, I, Steve, felt physically exhausted and emotionally depleted from overwork. Although I had created my ideal therapy practice and enjoyed the work tremendously, I began to resent having to be in position hour after hour to tend to the needs of others. My work had become Sisyphean. My sleep became fitful and my marriage suffered. My wife, Paula, identified the loss of our soulful connection and paraphrased an old adage: “The shoemaker’s wife gets no shoes.”
Slowly, I became aware of the senex character at the table who continued to tell me that I needed to work harder and harder to be a dutiful husband and provider. It was he who carried the fear of reducing my income; it was he who believed that to be a man is to be a nonstop worker.
But at the same time, another voice soon could be heard: at first a whisper, then a cry from Eros told me that I needed to explore other arenas of life, such as deeper intimacy with my wife and son. As I romanced this character, listening to his voice to get a point of view that was radically different from my habitual one, I felt energized and began to realize that I was being called to another life transition.
I imagined taking drastic action, such as stopping work or changing careers, so at first I saw no way out of this situation. I longed for more time alone and for other creative outlets. I experimented with carpentry and music, spent more time with my young son, and took more vacations than usual. When Eros’s longing for a different life became intolerable, I had an idea: to reduce my psychotherapy practice to three weeks per month, permitting me to spend the fourth week in any way that I chose.
When I spoke of my excitement and my fear of this new possibility in my men’s group, the members fully understood, and each man recounted a unique story of this universal dilemma. Then one man noted an obvious truth: “It’s unrealistic to think that you should feel no fear when you make a lifestyle change like this. Don’t let the fear stop you.” With their encouragement, I took the leap.
Readdressing the senex character at midlife, I seem to have found an appropriate place for him at the table. Unlike my youthful solution, I did not take flight to puer spirituality, although I may meditate during my unscheduled week. Instead, I struck a different kind of bargain, a more conscious agreement to maintain my commitment to work, as well as to the demands of soul. Soon, my passion for life and work returned.
From the point of view of ego, Henry, C
larisse, and Steve each faced a midlife crisis that looks like a terrible breakdown. But from the point of view of shadow, each crisis is a breakthrough: These threatening feelings and disruptive acts point to buried gold. They hint at a longing for something more.
At midlife, our longing typically looks in two directions at once: Standing on the mountaintop, we look backward and long for a return to an image of youthful beauty, a sensation of bountiful vitality, a vision of limitless options. We long for a carefree time before sacrifice was required, before losses were suffered. And as we look back, we buttress the walls of denial.
Without an understanding of the developmental process, some people try to make an end run around midlife: Reinforcing persona, a man may desert his wife and marry a younger woman, feeling pride once again with her on his arm, but perhaps avoiding the developmental tasks of his own life. A woman may seek multiple plastic surgeries, feeling self-esteem once again as her image is restored, but perhaps failing to come to grips with her own aging. Compelled by preverbal images, others may follow romantic fantasies in an effort to meet the shadow’s need for shelter in a projection, returning to the eggshell stage of relationship for safety and security. And still others may turn to religious teachings or spiritual teachers in a regressive way, projecting the Self onto another person in an effort to gain the acceptance that they did not gain from their families. If these people lose their autonomy and maintain a childlike naïveté, they may remain caught in a puer/puella complex, avoiding the tasks of developing a more mature spirituality.
Yet this longing backward with nostalgia at midlife, like the longing for the disappearing nuclear family or for the romantic fantasy bond, is a yearning for the impossible: to recapture the past. Possessed by Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, filled with regret for deeds undone and remorse for roads not taken, we suffer, but we do not change. For nostalgia is inauthentic grief, and it cannot free us from the past or prepare us for the future. Instead, it holds us in its grip, in abeyance between worlds, like the soul passing through the Tibetan bardo, caught in its attachments on its way to freedom.
Only authentic grief carries us to the other side; only it permits rebirth. With authentic grief, we process the past and digest it, thereby assimilating a larger range of who we are as a result of our experience. On the other hand, with inauthentic grief, we deny or romanticize the past, thereby banishing into shadow an aspect of who we are. With authentic grief, we carry our losses consciously, so that they give us substance and strength. On the other hand, with inauthentic grief, we deny and bury them, carrying them unconsciously, so that they merely weigh us down. With authentic grief, we separate our black-and-white beliefs and naïve, high ideals from our newfound, more mature convictions, which contain contradictory impulses and paradoxical desires. On the other hand, with inauthentic grief, we cling to outmoded beliefs and pine for the old ways, separating the opposites as if they have nothing to do with one another.
Authentic grief, like shadow-work, is sobering. As Robert Bly puts it, “The person who has eaten his shadow spreads calmness and shows more grief than anger.” Authentic grief is humbling; it causes the ego to face forces that are much greater than it can even imagine and it teaches us how to find gain in loss. With authentic grief, then, our profane wound becomes a sacred wound, permitting us to molt out of the cocoon into a wholly new life. Going through the wound like a gateway, we emerge transformed.
Still standing on the mountaintop at midlife, we recognize that in some ways we have arrived: If we have found our Beloved, the search for love is over. If we have children, they are being tended. If we have found soulful work, that longing, too, has been met. And yet, deep in the soul, there is another longing, a longing forward: We yearn for security and peace of mind. We long for freedom from the daily tasks of responsibility, freedom from Cronos time. We yearn for grandchildren, to see our line extended into the future, to play with young ones without the dutiful chores of parenting. We long for reconciliation with those we have betrayed and with those who have betrayed us.
Perhaps most of all, at midlife, we long for meaning. We pose again the questions that are scattered throughout this book like seeds. The timeless questions of meaning and purpose become suddenly more immediate, less abstract. We feel that we must respond to them in our own way; we no longer need to answer them, but to live more consciously in relation to them. And in this way we discover the wisdom in poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s suggestion that we live into our questions.
How can your apparent breakdown be transformed into a breakthrough? What images lie buried in your longing backward? In what direction does your longing forward point?
MIDLIFE AS DESCENT TO THE UNDERWORLD: CONNIE’S STORY
When I, Connie, turned forty, the solid ground beneath my feet cracked open. I dropped through a fissure, down, down, and disappeared into a great blackness. I lived for a long while at the bottom of a dark hole looking up.
Nothing had prepared me for such an eclipse. No betrayal, no wound had shown me the way. I had not felt depressed since adolescence, when I first discovered existentialist writers Sartre and Camus. I had not felt depressed when some of my friends dog-paddled and sank beneath the surface from addiction or failed marriages. I had not felt depressed when world events turned grim and human cruelty stared back at me with hollow eyes.
Instead, I had felt some strange immunity, as if I were vaccinated against descent, as if I walked on buoyant ground filled with helium perhaps, or hope. And I saw this as a sign of grace, a sign that the gods winked at me and smiled.
Then I turned forty. And, like an unforeseen natural disaster, the earth yawned open, a long hand rose up from the depths of the underworld, grabbed me by the foot—and stopped my dancing.
The music of the underworld plays in a minor key. It hums constantly like a droning lament. The inhabitants of the underworld, shrouded in black, speak in whispers, as if they could awaken the dead. The sky in the underworld is not a blue envelope; it is a dusky tunnel that swallows every particle of light. The colors of the underworld pale and fade to gray, not an oceanic blue-gray, not a shiny silver-gray, just gray, flat and unending. Tastes—sweet, salty, bitter—turn to ash on the tongue. Life in the underworld is a still life, drawn without motion in two dimensions.
For a while, I faded into the background, monotone and colorless, part of the still life. Then, like Theseus holding on to Ariadne’s golden thread, I began to follow the plumb line through my dreams. Slowly, I opened my eyes to the darkness; slowly, I opened my heart to the pregnant possibilities that gestated there. Slowly, like a blind poet, I groped my way toward images and words.
I sought an acquaintance with the journeyers who had descended before me: Inanna, Persephone, Orpheus, Dionysus, Theseus. Their strange-sounding names grew familiar to me. I recited them like a long litany … and slowly began to feel that I was not alone, but rather that a family of souls encircled me. Then I began to feel that I was not off the path but had stumbled onto another path, a hidden, more treacherous road that led not to enlightenment but, perhaps, to endarkenment.
———
The Greeks had a name for this downward path: katabasis, or descent. Our ancient forebears understood that we needed not only to fly above with the birds, lightly and full of grace, but also to crawl beneath with the snakes, slowly, silently, on our bellies. We do not choose this lower path; it chooses us. At midlife, we do not have depression; rather, depression has us. And if we can allow the ego to take a backseat and go along for the ride, then the real journey can begin: Depression can become descent; the refusal to go down can become the choice to go down. And the appointment with the shadow can be kept.
We propose here a symbolic approach to midlife depression. It does not preclude a psychological perspective or a biological one. In fact, we suggest that the ideal approach to depression might include all three—body, mind, and soul. But we wish to address a specific kind of depression here, the kind that typically appears at midlife. A
nd often this garden variety does not stem from early childhood trauma or from neurochemical imbalance.
Instead, midlife depression is an archetypal event, a meeting with the daimonic. It is a symbolic turning toward the second half of life, an irreversible turning. And just this quality—its irreversibility—carries a depressive weight. For an individual to carry this weight alone, the task may be arduous, even unbearable. But if we can detect footprints on the path, we might learn the stories of those who have gone before and in this way lighten the load. We may uncover the pattern that connects us to the past and to the future. For the underworld of midlife depression is the ancestral realm and the mythical realm; it is the land of the dead and the land of the dream.
As James Hillman says, the underworld is the psyche. An experience of it radically alters our experience of life. For some travelers who identify with the depression, a katabasis leads to total despair. Jung, who saw descent as a stage in the individuation process, pointed out that “the dread and resistance which every natural human being experiences when it comes to delving too deeply into himself is, at bottom, the fear of the journey to Hades.”
For this reason, Jung suggested that we need to be led downwards by another because it is not easy for us to descend from the heights alone and remain below. We fear a loss of social prestige and a loss of moral self-esteem when we have to admit our own darkness. We fear that we may never ascend again. Yet, he said, “ ‘below’ means the bedrock of reality, which despite all self-deceptions is there right enough.”
This hell-realm is bankrupt of feeling, empty of meaning. Some journeyers, unable to heed the call, refuse to walk through the door to Hell by feverishly doing more of the same: more work for more hours, more alcohol, more jogging, more sex, more gambling, even more books about the promise of immortality. For them, midlife looks like an uphill marathon race, anything so as not to stop—and hear the call to descend.