Mid-life crises

While we are young, we lack the imagination to see ourselves at the end of our lives. Our parents and teachers inadvertently teach us a rosy picture of the future: They tell us we are capable of endless achievement and unlimited options. If we work hard and do right, finally we will be rewarded with happiness. The reward at the end of the rainbow is the pot of gold that keeps us striving without too much thought about our day-to-day lives. We are on the tracks leading to a golden sunset, and all we have to do is keep on keeping on, hang on through difficult times, keep our heads down and cope with problems as they come to us.

Many of us, as we reach the latter part of our lives, become increasingly restless. We are more and more aware of the passage of time, and of how little time remains to us. We begin to see the arc of our lives, and instead of going upward forever we see it levelling out, and even glimpse the downward sweep to the end. The promise of limitless possibility no longer exists. We are forced to recognize the limits of our accomplishments. We find ourselves thinking, "Is this all there is?" Where is the pot of gold? Where is happiness and when will it be granted to us?

Even more importantly, we recognize how unimportant our lives are in the "grand scheme of things', and that we, like everyone, must end the same way, facing the dark, knowing that we leave nothing of importance behind. We fear or deny finality, limits, death, loneliness, meaninglessness, while at the same time our recognition of their reality becomes more and more unavoidable.

To avoid this awareness we thrash about, sometimes desperately and frequently unwisely. We want off the tracks down which our personal train is traveling. This is the time of life when people have affairs, not because our sexual drive has increased, but because we desperately long for new possibilites, a different life, a different outcome. We imagine or buy the famous red sports car or something else captivating to the child within us, something to calm our fears and distract our minds. We seek distraction through sex or a religion that seems to offer us an escape from the finality of death. Some chase fame or recognition, hoping to make a mark on the sands, all the while knowing how meaningless and brief such marks are.

Our existential despair is real and is frequently accompanied by anger. We have done all the "right things" without having given much thought to our alternatives. We have lived on automatic with our eyes fixed on the future without much thought. Suddenly the end of the line looms ahead and we feel cheated of our promised rewards. Where is the happiness we sought? How did we miss our opportunities? Were there other roads we could have taken that would not lead here?

There is no cure for the limits of life. Whatever path we take leads to the same terminal. We all grow old, we lose our health and our friends. We realize how little and unimportant our contributions have been, and we die. Much of our anger comes from the realization that whatever joy and happiness we have were on the way, not waiting at the end of the road.

The thoughtlessness, the automatic choices we made all along, make us realize how little power over our lives we have actually exerted. We didn't make conscious choices, and as a result we feel powerless and cheated of our opportunities. Even at this point, we can consciously begin choosing our lives, and recognizing and owning our past choices. We can recover our sense of ownership and power, even though we cannot change the end. We can know that even when we were on automatic pilot, we were making the choices that created our lives, and that we have shaped them all along. Whatever happiness and satisfaction we have, we have ourselves created. We stop being disappointed because we no longer carry the illusions of eventual reward. Our lives are our creation. They belong to us and to no-one else, and that has to be enough.

Boundary exceptions

“Rules” are values which prescribe or prohibit certain behaviors. We grow up with rules, but as adults few of us follow them rigidly. For the most part we follow our rules, but we sometimes allow ourselves to break them under certain conditions and engage in behavior that we might not normally condone. Of course, such exceptions determine the actual boundary of the rules.

Even in the law, rules are never completely rigidly enforced. Instead of mechanically imposing a consequence on a breach of rules, a human being such as a judge can consider the particular circumstances. For instance, we have a rule forbidding murder. Courts have held, however, that under certain conditions the consequences of breaking the rule can be modified or an “exception” made. Such a condition might be that the murderer was experiencing a strong emotion, such as passion, anger or fear. While we may punish a premeditated or "cold-blooded" murder to the fullest extent, a murder based on strong emotion might be assessed a lesser penalty. The rule forbidding murder may be granted an exception under these circumstances.

I chose this particular example because the “strong emotion exemption” to laws is based on a common to many cultures. We tend to excuse to some degree an otherwise illegal act if it was motivated by sufficiently strong emotion. We believe an emotion that is strong enough may justify a temporary exception to our rule. The “strong emotion” exception is of particular importance in understanding human behavior.

It's as if we said to ourselves "I will never do X", and then privately to ourselves, we add "…unless I'm very angry/frightened/depressed/sexually-aroused”. As a result, the test of all our rules is whether there is a hidden or at least unspoken "exception". As a psychotherapist, I want to know the exceptions to someone's rules and boundaries; I want to know under what conditions they are willing to make an exception to a rule they espouse. Often people are unaware of their own exceptions to their rules, or they may take it for granted that “strong-enough” emotion” automatically grants an exception.

We talk about strong "justifying" emotions as if they were something that "comes over us", that overwhelms our judgment, as if they were something outside of our control. There are truly moments like that, such as in catastrophic events or in combat, but these are fortunately rare. Other than in such emergent or catastrophic situations, much of our extreme emotion is self-induced. We increase or sustain an emotion by going over and over a series of thoughts justifying our emotions. We call this tactic “ramping”. With each repetition of these thoughts our emotion grows stronger until we stop it or until we allow it to reach the level of intensity that "justifies" breaking the rule.

A patient of mine, "Fred", who was driving on the highway was "cut off" by another driver, in what Fred felt was a rude and inconsiderate way. He was outraged. He followed the driver almost sixty miles, all the way "steaming" over his mistreatment. He pulled in behind the other driver in a parking lot, went over to the man's car, opened the door and pulled him out, with the intention of "teaching him a lesson". However, the man obviously didn't even know what Fred was talking about, and was frightened. Fred suddenly recognized the inappropriateness of his own behavior, let the man go, went back to his car and drove off. Later, in my office, Fred said "I drove 60 miles, enraged, ready to hit this guy, and he didn't even know he had done anything! That's just crazy! I don't know what's the matter with me. I would never hit another person."

Of course Fred would hit another person. His rule against hitting has an exception in it. He doesn't mention the exception because he doesn't like to think of himself as a person who hits others, but his exception is clear. If Fred feels sufficiently wronged, he goes over and over his “wrong” thereby becoming increasingly “righteously angry”. When angry enough, he allows himself an exception to his "no hitting" rule. A more precise description of what occurred shows that at the time of the “infraction”, Fred decided almost immediately that he was angry enough that he was justified in hitting the other driver. While he was driving, by going over and over his grievances, he was keeping his anger “ramped up” so that his anger could overcome his rule and allow him to strike a blow. It took a lot of energy to keep his anger going for an hour.

In the parking lot Fred realized that the offending driver was totally unaware of his driving infraction.. Another of Fred’s rules which conflicted with hitting someone popped up: "It's not right to hit someone who doesn't even know they've done anything wrong". His anger dissipated as he recognized that he had been wrong in his thinking. He no longer felt “justified” in breaking his rule. As a result, he stopped ramping his “righteous anger” to the exception point.

We can increase any emotion by ramping up in this way. Whatever the thoughts we have which create or renew our feeling, we can continue cycling through them over and over. Sometimes the rule we are considering breaking simply doesn’t fit our self-image. Someone who is normally proud of “self-control”, for instance, might mentally ramp up sadness in order to justify wallowing in self-pity or simply withdrawing for a while. In a more extreme (but not unusual) instance the self-pity might justify substance abuse or a suicidal gesture. A person who thinks of himself as “brave” might ramp up fearful thoughts in order to justify running away or “backing down”.

We might conceal our unspoken exceptions in order to hide our real intentions or plans. A depressed patient, for instance, might state that he would "never kill himself", but when pushed to state the "exceptions", said "… unless my wife left me... I couldn't stand that". Sometimes the exceptions are so clearly dishonest that the person doesn't admit them even to himself until after the exception has occurred. A married patient admitted to having sex with his wife's best friend, but commented that he "had had too much to drink, and besides, I didn't think my wife would ever find out." He would never have admitted his rationalization PRIOR to the unfaithfulness. It’s interesting to speculate what a marriage service would sound like if the prospective partners had to announce the exceptions to their vows.

The "ramping up" process is a familiar one in cognitive therapies. We use it to whip ourselves up emotionally in order to justify our breaking a rule/boundary. When we do so, we manipulate our own emotions in order to “motivate” our own behavior, rather than making a more rational and cognitive decision. Such apparently impulsive decisions, being dictated by a more primitive and emotional part of ourselves, tend to be of more or less poor quality. We may find ourselves doing things that at a less emotional time we would find unacceptable.

Stopping ourselves from “ramping” is easy to describe: We simply recognize cognitively the cyclic pattern of our "ramping" thinking and choose to break it. By doing so we stop creating more emotion and thereby protect ourselves from arriving at the point where our boundaries have exceptions. Without using strong emotion as a justification for action, we must make behavioral choices based on intellect and logic. Unfortunately, for many if not most of us, intellectual and logical choices do not provide very strong motivation. We may not be so accustomed to making choices coolly by an act of the will. However, by acting on our more mature values we strengthen them and our own emotional maturity. Knowing and admitting our exceptions is an important step in limiting or eliminating them, and every time we are able to do this, we move in the direction of greater emotional maturity.

Self-deception

We can understand why people lie to each other. They lie for some sort of advantage, personal or financial; they lie to avoid disharmony or disagreement, to impress, to mislead. Why do we lie to ourselves?

As a psychotherapist, I spend a lot of time listening to people lie to and about themselves. Generally we lie to ourselves to maintain an image of ourselves more or less false to fact. We reassure ourselves that we are stronger, braver, more able to tolerate pain than we really are. We present to ourselves the image of ourselves we would like to have others see. We deny our age, appearance, weight, sadness, disappointment and grief. As when we lie to others, we lie to maintain a stable and manageable world, one in which we do not have to adapt nor change.

On a deeper level, we always know when we are lying to ourselves. It takes energy not to know what we know. Turning a blind eye to ourselves in spite of all the evidence is effortful.

I think it was Fritz Perls who said that change begins with who we are, not with who we want to be. We have to be willing to let go our fantasies of ourselves before we can recognize what we can or cannot change. So our conversations with others are full of dishonesty and pretense, as we try to present ourselves in accordance with our self-delusion. Others pretend to be deceived because it is easier, more comfortable, and certainly more socially acceptable to be dishonest. Besides, when we accept the dishonesty of another we have a sort of bargain that they, in turn, will accept our dishonesty in return. In this way our social and internal psychological systems remain stable and predictable.

People who promote instability and change in relationships do so by being honest and hopefully kind as well. Psychotherapists make a living by doing this, but loving friends can also serve this purpose. It takes a strong relationship to withstand much honesty, but any relationship that embodies honesty promotes change and growth. Kindness is optional in the encouragement of growth, but as I get older it seems to be a more and more important option.