Madness and Method, Part 3

Passages
by Gail Sheehy

(Page 3 of 3)

Each of us stumbles upon the major issue of midlife somewhere in the decade between 35 and 45. Though this can also be an ordinary passage with no outer event to mark it, eventually we all confront the reality of our own death. And somehow, we must learn to live with it. The first time that message comes through is probably the worst.

We try to flee the task of incorporating our own shortcomings and destructiveness, as well as the world's destructive side. Rather than accept the unacceptable spooks, we try to drive them away by resorting to the coping techniques that have worked before.

The first is: turn on the lights. It always made the spooks go away in childhood. As adults we translate that technique into acquiring the correct knowledge. I looked first for a clear and simple medical explanation. Only part of my symptoms were ascribable to a chemical reaction to pills; I wanted that part to be the whole explanation. It wasn't, and turning on the lights did not take the fear away.

A second technique is to call for help. When the child is afraid he calls a Strong One to interrupt the fear and make it vanish. Then he learns the technique for himself and is able to dismantle most irrational fears. Now what happens when we come to a fear that we cannot make vanish? No one has any magic against mortality. Everyone to whom we assign that task disappoints us. My call from Ireland, of course, failed.

A third method is to ignore it by keeping busy, pretending to carry on as if nothing has changed. But the same sensations are likely to persist. I couldn't shake the questions about where I had been and where I was going, the overall feeling of losing balance. Balance is, speaking symbolically, standing on one's own two feet. It is the status we first achieved as children breaking in our first hard soles. Even then, by virtue of learning how to take over some of the responsibility for ourselves, we felt both winners of grand new powers and losers of our protective supports. The major task of midlife is to give up all our imagined safety providers and stand naked in the world, as the rehearsal for assuming full authority over ourselves.

The fear is: What if I can't stand on my own two feet?

The thought of death is too terrifying to confront head on, and so it keeps coming back in disguise: as pitching airplanes, swaying floors, precarious balconies, lovers' quarrels, mysterious backfires in our physical equipment. We elude it by pretending to function as before. Some people press down harder on the career accelerator. Others play more tennis, run more laps, give bigger parties, find younger flesh to take to bed. I flew on to a political convention. But sooner or later a rockslide of thoughts, distorted and sharp-edged visions of aging, aloneness, and death, can gather enough force to temporarily crush our most basic assumption: My system is in fine working order and I can stand up whenever I wish. What happens when we cannot rely even on that? The struggle begins in earnest between a front-door mind that tries to brush them away and the piercing questions of the second half of life that keep tumbling down the backside of the mind, saying: You can't forget about us!

Work is another way of keeping busy. In my case, fear made work impossible. The story that I was trying to write in Miami concerned a woman coming to the end of her rope. One who is left alone, falls unconscious, loses her faculties, and is transformed with a Dorian Gray stroke into an old lady.

The story was the inner psychic drama that I was living. My structure, too, was disintegrating all at once. I was leaving that whole world of the girl I wanted to think I was — the loving, generous, fearless, ambitious "good" girl who lived in a silk-print, sensible, humane world — and now I was seeing the dark side. The unfathomable fears were: I'll lose my stable pattern and all the skills that work for me . . . I'll wake up in some alien place . . . I will lose all my friends and connections . . . Suddenly, I won't be me anymore . . . I'll be transformed into some other, execrable form . . . old woman.

Well, i wasn't. I survived. I grew up a little, and all that seems a hundred years ago. An awesome life accident had coincided with a critical turning point in my own life cycle. It was this experience that made me eager to find out everything I could about this thing called midlife crisis.

But no sooner did I begin seeking out the people who are the case histories in this book than I found myself drawn into a subject infinitely more complicated. There were crises all along, or rather, points of turning. The more I interviewed the more I noticed similarities in the turning points people described. Not only were there other critical points than at midlife, but they came up with a relentless regularity at the same ages.

People were baffled by these periods of disruption. They tried to connect them to outer events of their lives, but there was no consistency to the events they blamed, whereas there was a striking consistency to the inner turmoil they described. At specific points along the life cycle they would feel stirrings, sometimes momentous changes of perspective, often mysterious dissatisfactions with the course they had been pursuing with enthusiasm only a few years before.

I began to wonder if there were, in fact, turning points in the lives of adults that were predictable?

Is There Life After Youth?

It occurred to me that what Gesell and Spock did for children hadn't been done for us adults.

Studies of child development have plotted every nuance of growth and given us comforting labels such as the Terrible Twos and the Noisy Nines. Adolescence has been so carefully deciphered, most of the fun of being impossible has been taken out of it. But after meticulously documenting our periods of personality development up to the age of 18 or 20 — nothing. Beyond the age of 21, apart from medical people who are interested only in our gradual physical decay, we are left to fend for ourselves on the way downstream to senescence, at which point we are picked up again by gerontologists.

It's far easier to study adolescents and aging people. Both groups are in institutions (schools or rest homes) where they make captive subjects. The rest of us are out there in the mainstream of a spinning and distracted society, trying to make some sense of our one and only voyage through its ambiguities.

Where were the guidelines on how to get through the Trying Twenties, the Forlorn Forties? Could folklore be trusted, for instance, when it tells us that every seven years we grown-ups get an itch?

We have been taught that children develop, by ages and stages, that the steps are pretty much the same for everybody, and that to grow out of the limited behavior of childhood we must climb them all. Children alternate between stages of equilibrium and disequilibrium. As parents, we are educated not to blame these extremes of behavior on a teacher, the other parent, or the children themselves, but to accept them as essential steps to growth.

Yet having applied this understanding of personality growth chapter and verse to guide our offspring from crib to college, we leave them at the door to adulthood like windup dolls: technologically proficient, geared for problem solving, trained to maneuver around obstacles. But equipped with any real understanding of the inner works, of the notion that even as grown-ups we may alternate between being in step and being off balance both with ourselves and the forces in our world — no, that's not part of the cultural programming.

The years between 18 and 50 are the center of life, the unfolding of maximum opportunity and capacity. But without any guide to the inner changes on the way to full adulthood, we are swimming blind. When we don't "fit in," we are likely to think of our behavior as evidence of our inadequacies, rather than as a valid stage unfolding in a sequence of growth, something we all accept when applied to childhood. It is even easier to blame our periods of disequilibrium on the closest person or institution, our mother, our marriage, our work, the nuclear family, the system. We seize on the cop-out.

Until recently, whenever psychiatrists and social scientists did address themselves to adult life, it was only in terms of its problems, rarely from the perspective of continuing and predictable changes. The concepts handed down by Freud were based on the assumption that the personality is more or less determined by the time a child reaches the age of five.

What do these concepts have to offer the 40-year-old man who has reached his professional goal but feels depressed and unappreciated? He blames his job or his wife or his physical surroundings for imprisoning him in this rut. Fantasies of breaking out begin to dominate his thoughts. An interesting woman he has met, another field of work, an Elysian part of the country — any or all of these become magnets for his wishes of deliverance. But once these objects of desire become accessible, the picture often begins to reverse itself. The new situation appears to be the dangerous trap from which he longs to take flight by returning to his old home base and the wife and children whose loss suddenly makes them dear.

No wonder many wives stand aghast, spectators at this game of chance, able only to label it "my husband's craziness." No one ever told them that a sense of stagnation, disequilibrium, and depression is predictable as we enter the passage to midlife.

And what do traditional Freudian concepts have to say to the 35-year-old mother who, having tried to provide the ideal Petri dish for the growth of her children's egos, suddenly feels her own to be about as solid as a boiled turnip? No matter what your age, you might identify with the apocryphal experience of a 35-year-old woman named Doris.

For the fifteen years of her marriage, Doris's husband had never pressed her to entertain or to go with him to business affairs. One night he came home with the news that he was being considered by his firm's major competitor for its top spot.

"And listen to this," he said. "The retiring president has invited both of us to a dinner party next week. This will clinch it."

"Omigod," Doris said. "I haven't had dinner with anybody above waist height for years. What'll I talk about?"

"C'mon, honey," her husband said, "all you have to do is glance through last week's newspapers."

Dutifully, Doris read four weeks' back issues of the news of The Week in Review, and every night before she went to sleep, she memorized the name of another Arab leader.

The party was studded with the worldly and the wise. Her dinner partner was the company head. "Oh no," she thought, but valiantly she plunged in and began expounding on the problem of air rights when cities start using solar energy. The man's mouth was full, so she went on to explain Hubert Humphrey's philosophy of democracy for the Third World. Taking a breath, she noticed to her delight that she had the full and transfixed attention of all the dinner guests at her end of the table. Encouraged, she ad libbed for five more minutes. The president was obviously impressed. In fact, he couldn't take his eyes off her.

She looked down modestly. And discovered that all the while, out of habit, she had been cutting up the man's steak.

The pith of this story, and the man's predicament before it, concerns something we might have sensed but were never told to expect: that life after adolescence is not one long plateau. Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one's own unnecessary vegetation.

A new concept of adulthood, one that embraces the total life cycle, is questioning the old assumptions. If one sees the personality not as an apparatus that is essentially constructed by the time childhood is over, but as always in its essence developing, then life at 25 or 30 or at the gateway to middle age will stimulate its own intrigue, surprise, and exhilaration of discovery.

The mystics and the poets always get there first. Shakespeare tried to tell us that man lives through seven stages in the "All the world's a stage" speech in As You Like It. And many centuries before Shakespeare, the Hindu scriptures of India described four distinct life stages, each calling for its own fresh response: student; householder; retirement, when the individual was encouraged to become a pilgrim and begin his true education as an adult; and the final state of sannyasin, defined as "one who neither hates nor loves anything."

The first psychologist to view the life cycle by stages was Else Frenkel-Brunswik. Drawing on the intellectual opulence that was Vienna in the 1930s, she later brought her insights to theorists at the University of California at Berkeley. Hers was a pioneering effort in the linking of psychology with sociology. Working from the biographies of 400 persons — a dazzling cast that included Queen Victoria, John D. Rockefeller, Casanova, Jenny Lind, Tolstoy, Goethe, and Goethe's mother — she examined their histories in terms of external events as well as subjective experiences. Frenkel- Brunswik's conclusion was that every person passes through five sharply demarcated phases. The phases she described foreshadowed the eight stages (three of them for adults) in the life cycle later outlined by Erik Erikson.

It was Erikson who began to make the life cycle a clear and popular concept with the publication of his first book, Childhood and Society, in 1950. We know only obliquely of Erikson's own suffering in the lifelong effort to build a personal identity. The son of a Jewish mother and a father who abandoned the family before his birth, he repudiated the name of his German Jewish stepfather. He created his own name — Erik, son of Erik — thereby casting himself as his own father. After leaving Europe in 1939, a victim of Nazism, he became an American citizen in California and at Berkeley began to concern himself with the universal crises of development.

Erikson constructed a chart showing life unfolding in observable sequence. Each stage was marked by a crisis. "Crisis" connoted not a catastrophe, but a turning point, a crucial period of increased vulnerability and heightened potential. He was careful to point out that he did not consider all development a series of crises. He claimed rather that psychosocial development proceeds by critical steps — "critical" being a characteristic of moments of decision between progress and regression. At such points either achievements are won or failures occur, leaving the future to some degree better or worse but in any case, restructured.

Copyright © 2006 by Gail Sheehy. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

www.gailsheehy.com
Bestselling author and cultural observer Gail Sheehy made history with the publication of Passages, which was an international bestseller, appearing in twenty-eight languages. She followed up with The Silent Passage, New Passages, and Understanding Men's Passages. Sheehy is also the author of Hillary's Choice, a biography of Hillary Clinton, and Middletown, America, about a New Jersey town devastated by the World Trade Center attack. A contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 1984, Sheehy is the recipient of the Washington Journalism Review Award for Best Magazine Writer in America.