Many clients who seek inner therapy are in their Midlife. Midlife is an important stage of life and can be considered a fork in the road. The well-known psychologist Erik Erikson called this stage “Stagnation vs. Regeneration. We can go one of two ways.  A number of issues and questions arise during this important stage including:

• What is the meaning of life?
• How to have a purpose-driven life?
• How to find your purpose or meaning?
• How to heal your childhood trauma?
• How to heal from emotional trauma?
• How to heal from generational or ancestral trauma?
• How do we change the emotional and relationship patterns that no longer serve us?
• It includes the individuation process, meaning how do you find your unique personhood.
• It includes your heroine’s journey or hero’s journey
• It is about self-transformation

One must learn and determine how to grow internally. There are 3 stages when it comes to any inner growth. First there is a small death (with a small “d”); a part of us must die emotionally and let go as when the leaves fall from a tree in autumn.  Second, there is a threshold stage or liminal stage which includes shaky ground, disorder, and chaos in or lives.  We are not sure where we are going. This is like when the fallen leaves slowly go into the ground and dissolve into the soil. The third and final stage is the actual growth. This is when we do the hard work to change things in ourselves that we have been doing for decades. This is likened to the fallen leaves being absorbed back into the tree through its roots becoming new growth.

We can navigate midlife in an adult way consciously and learn about midlife or we can have poor behavior at this stage and do things like have an affair or develop an addiction or buy a corvette. It is important to learn about this stage.

First off, we learn everything about relationships from our parents. We soak in our parents from  year 0 to year 18. That part of us is called the adaptive child. We learn to do things as children  to adapt to our parents’ behavior. But we keep doing the same adaptive behaviors as we go into adulthood. We do immature things in relationships because we do not know better and are unconscious of them. During this time, we are living  the “arc of the ego”. We get busy with life and build a career, get married, have children, buy a house and are so, so busy. We are so busy. We get very distracted, and we have no time for ourselves until midlife. Then in midlife  we become aware of the “arc of the Self”. The true Self we are meant to be.  We realize we only have so many years left in this life and ask what do we want to do with the rest of our life? What is the meaning of it all? What type of person do we want to be? What is the legacy we want to leave behind? This is also called the Individuation Process.  In order to make positive changes we must first become mindful and aware of the emotional and relationship patterns we learned from our parents and decide which patterns serves us and which patterns we need to change. Then the second part of this work is actually changing some of these patterns. This can be very difficult because we have been doing the same behaviors for decades. Change is not easy, but it is extremely rewarding. Tara Brach, a well-known mindfulness teacher uses the anacronym “RAIN” in doing some of this inner work. “R” stands for Recognize it, “A” is  Allow it to be, “I” means to Investigate what you want to change, and “N” stands for Nurturing it.

Midlife can be a challenging time of life, but if we become aware of it and work with it, the rewards are so beautiful in many ways. This is your one and precious life.