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Midlife Crisis’ is something that happens to many of us at some point during our lives (usually, at about 40, give or take 20 years).

Midlife Crisis is a natural process (first identified by the psychologist Carl Jung) and it is a normal part of ‘maturing’. However, Midlife Crisis can sometimes feel very uncomfortable, and cause people to seek psychotherapy or counseling, or to make radical lifestyle changes that can be very damaging and are regretted later.

It can help to view Midlife Crisis from the perspective of differing personality types, as this will give you a greater understanding of what is happening.

If you are going through midlife crisis, you might experience a wide range of feelings, such as:

* Discontent with life and/or the lifestyle that may have provided happiness for many years
* Boredom with things/people that have hitherto held great interest and dominated your life
* Feeling adventurous and wanting to do something completely different
* Questioning the meaning of life, and the validity of decisions clearly and easily made years before
* Confusion about who you are, or where your life is going.

These feelings at mid-life can occur naturally, or they can be brought on by external factors.

One external factor can be debt. The availability of credit has become easier in recent years, through credit cards and telephone/internet loans. This has made it easier to accumulate debt, and many people turn to debt consolidation or debt management services in order to find their way out of difficulty.

Another external factor can be a bereavement, such as the death of a parent - or other significant loss or change, such as redundancy or divorce. These things can cause significant grief which can be difficult enough to come to terms with on their own. But if they are compounded by the natural process of ‘mid-life transition’ this can make the whole process of adjustment bewildering and overwhelming.

However, even in the absence of difficult external circumstances, there is still an internal process of change that takes place during midlife. If you don’t understand that process it can feel like a ‘crisis’ and as you attempt to come to terms with it, you may find yourself making poor or irrational decisions that you regret at a later date - eg.: leaving your job or spouse and throwing away the security that you have built up in the first part of your adult life.

If you do understand the process of midlife transition, it can make it easier (though still not easy) to navigate your way through it.

However, if you are finding midlife difficult to deal with, it is worth considering psychotherapy or counseling, as these services can help you steer your way through difficult midlife circumstances without going off the rails.

Carl Jung, a famous psychologist, identified 5 main phases of midlife:

* Accommodation (meeting others’ expectations - actually, this takes place in the first part of life, but is the context in which midlife processes take place)
* Separation (rejecting the accommodated self)
* Liminality (a period of uncertainty, where life seems directionless and meanders)
* Reintegration (working out ‘who I am’ and becoming comfortable with that identity)
* Individuation (facing up to and accepting the undesirable aspects of our own character)

It is assumed that our preferences are innate - they are with us from birth and not influenced by the environment. What is influenced by the environment is our behavior and our perception of ourselves. These are influenced by many factors, such as parents, siblings, other children at nursery school, television, the surroundings to our early childhood, etc..

As young children, eager to please, we adapt to those around us, in order to be accepted by them. Our behavior and perception of ourselves is therefore modified in order to ‘fit in’ with the various social situations in which we find ourselves. This process, called ‘Accommodation’, results in us presenting ourselves as different people in different situations, called ‘personae’. As in Greek tragedy, we put on a mask to demonstrate to others how we think we are feeling inside.

Sometimes, the way in which we ‘accommodate’ to others is different to our true preferences. As an example: suppose a child born with introvert preferences finds that she has to be very extrovert in order to get the love and attention that she needs as a young child. As she grows into adulthood, she continues to act like an extrovert, and believes that she is an extrovert. The real preference for introversion is not recognized. There can also be cultural, social or environmental pressure to behave in certain ways, and these create a “tug o’ war” with our self-perceptions. An example is shown in the diagram. In this case, the pressures, and therefore his personae, may lean so heavily towards introversion that he may believe that he is an introvert, whilst his real preference is for extroversion.

It can sometimes take a lot of energy to maintain these personae if they are in conflict with our true preferences. Jung spent much of his life counseling people who had ‘accommodated’ to become people different to their inner preferences. For these people, mid-life transition can sometimes be a difficult and painful process.

Sometimes there is little difference between our ‘true selves’ and the personae we present to others. Such people may find mid life transition a less difficult process than those individuals whose personae and inner self are quite different.

It is a fluid process - but recognizing the stages can help to make sense of what is otherwise chaos and confusion. Perhaps understanding of mid-life transition might help some people to move from thinking ‘there is something wrong with me’ to seeing that the feelings and changes associated with mid-life are quite natural. In fact, they are experienced by most other people at a similar stage of life.