Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

Highlights

Why, even when things are going well, do things feel not quite right?

Why do you believe that you have to hide so much, from others, from yourself?

Why is the life you are living too small for the soul’s desire?

Powerless as all children are, he knew Mother’s will had to be his, and so he lived out her ambitions for him.

for who among us will willingly leave his reinforced castle and stand undefended before that which he fears?

No amount of good intentions, conscientious intelligence, forethought, planning, prayer, or guidance from others can spare us these periodic encounters with confusion, disorientation, boredom, depression, disappointment in ourselves and others, and dissolution of the plans and stratagems that seemed to work before.

We may grudgingly admit that even the suffering enlarged us, and made us more richly human.

We are the meaning-seeking, meaning-creating animals.

The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.

How often I have sat with couples who profess good intentions toward each other, but whose archaic agendas continue to impose themselves on each other. When I ask them, “How much do you want to live with a depressed, angry, reluctant partner?” each quickly responds that they desire the contrary. Yet their own actions, driven from hidden sources, create precisely that fractious, reluctant partner they dread. Relationships that are supposed to make both partners larger so often diminish

Today most therapists are behaviorists, seeking to modify non-productive behaviors and replace them with more effective strategies.

Once the biological playing field has been leveled, these individuals can then begin to deal with what Freud called the normal miseries of life. But I also believe that pharmacological treatment is vastly overprescribed because it is simpler, cost-effective, and relatively available to all. These are virtues, but more troubling is the possibility that, as a hidden agenda, pharmacology may conveniently allow one to avoid the larger questions of life, which, if ignored, are the secret source of suffering.

Re antidepressants

Perhaps Jung’s most compelling contribution is the idea of individuation, that is, the lifelong project of becoming more nearly the whole person we were meant to be—what the gods intended, not the parents, or the tribe, or, especially, the easily intimidated or inflated ego.

A larger presence, which we all intuited when we were children and then lost contact with, moves and directs the total organism toward survival, growth, development, and meaning.

Who we think we are is only a limited function of the ego, that thin wafer of consciousness floating on an iridescent ocean

If we are in service to the Self, we can seldom be in service to the herd as well. And how often do we have to learn that one cannot serve two masters without paying a crucifying cost? Your Self is seeking itself, so to speak,

Isn’t this egocentric ?

As Jesus is reported to have said in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Kae Tempest

It is wholly false to think that individuation cuts a person off from others. It cuts a person off from the herd, from collectivity, but it deepens the range in which more authentic relationships can occur. It may be necessary for us from time to time to absent ourselves from the world in order to reflect, regroup, or revision our journey, but ultimately

We learned very early that the world exacted conditions that, if not met, could result in punishment or abandonment.

Fuck…kids…

Rather than ask, what does my tribe demand of me, what will win me collective approval, what will please my parents, we ask, what do the gods intend through me?

The false gods of our culture, power, materialism, hedonism, and narcissism, those upon which we have projected our longing for transcendence, only narrow and diminish.

Your journey is your journey, not someone else’s. It is never too late to begin it anew.

One has to have separated from the parents long enough to be in the world, to make choices, to see what works, what does not, and to experience the collapse, or at least erosion, of one’s projections.

As anyone who deals with any form of addiction knows, we have to acknowledge that there is a world of hurt inside these persons who are desperately trying to “medicate” their distress with increasingly costly medication.

Intimate relationship, which will be the subject of a later chapter, is especially freighted, because it is the carrier of our deepest expectations for home, for confirmation of our identity, for nurturance and protection. As time goes by, our partners prove flawed and mortal, as we are to them, and we blame them when our projected scripts erode and deteriorate into conflict.

We find ourselves asking, “I have done the expected things, according to my best understanding of myself and the world, so why does my life not feel right?” These

Our dilemma was best described in the nineteenth century by the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard when he noted in his journal the paradox that life must be remembered backward but lived forward. Is it not self-deluding, then, to keep doing the same thing but expecting different results?

These truths include the recognition that this is our life, not someone else’s, that after our thirtieth birthday we alone are responsible for how it turns out, that we are here but a fleeting instant in the spinning shuttle of eternity, and that there is a titanic struggle going on within each of us for the sovereignty of the soul.

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually contained within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.

It is generally through the experience of unsolicited suffering that we grow larger, not because the unexamined life proved easier.

We learn to exercise a form of discipline that requires the daily scrutiny of life: “What did I do, and why, and where did it come from within me?”

The quality of our relationships, the quality of our parenting, the quality of our citizenship, and the quality of our life’s journey can never be higher than the level of personal development we have attained.

“I shall now try to look calmly at myself and begin to act inwardly, for only in this way will I be able as the child in its first consciously undertaken act refers to itself as ‘I,’ to call myself ‘I’ in a profounder sense.” Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals

The phenomenon of consciousness is both traumatic and the great gift, and these apparent opposites forever remain comrades. Out of the separation of child from womb— consciousness, based always on splitting and opposites, is born.

The birth of life is also the birth of neurosis, so to speak, because from that moment on we are in service to twin agendas—the biological and spiritual drive to develop, to move forward, and the archaic yearning to fall back into the cosmic sleep of instinctual subsistence. These two motives are at work within each of us always, whether we consciously attend them or not. (If you are the parent of a teenager, you see this titanic drama every morning. If you are mindful, you see it in yourself as well.)

The daily confrontation with these gremlins of fear and lethargy obliges us to choose between anxiety and depression, for each is aroused by the dilemma of daily choice. Anxiety will be our companion if we risk the next stage of our journey, and depression our companion if we do not.

Faced with such a choice, choose anxiety and ambiguity, for they are developmental, always, while depression is regressive. Anxiety is an elixir, and depression a sedative. The former keeps us on the edge of our life, and the latter in the sleep of childhood.

The spirit of evil is fear, negation . . . the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious. . . . Fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated.10

The Prague-born poet Rilke expressed the paradox this way: Occasionally someone rises from evening meal, Goes outside, and goes, and goes, and goes. . . Because somewhere in the East a sanctuary stands. And his children lament as though he had died. And another, who dies within his house, Remains there, remains amid dishes and glasses, So that his children must enter the world In search of that sanctuary, which he

How scary is it that what we don’t do in the surprising adventure of this journey, our children will need to do, for they will be limited by our sad example, or overwhelmed by having to do it for us?

These questions are troubling to us all, but the reader needs to ask them in order to gain a measure of freedom for the precious moment that is now, this moment which, for a short time, is yours.

is this true?

When the desire to “go home,” prevails, we will choose not to choose, rest easy in the saddle, remain amid the familiar and comfortable, even when it is stultifying and soul-denying.

(This ancient practice is not too far from the modern idea of therapy, which attempts to read the texture of one’s life, identify the locus of wounding, and outline the program to which the ego consciousness submits in order to provide correction, compensation, healing, and right relationship to the soul.)

From this encounter with our limitations the wisdom of humility comes: to know that we do not even know what we do not know, and that what we do not know will often make the choices for us.

Recall that our life’s journey begins with a traumatic separation, a shock to the system from which we never wholly recover. The core message that we derive from this event called our birth is that we are expelled from home and are set adrift in an unknown world with many intimidating powers.

Again about birth. Is this scientific ?

The presence of loving parents and sustained reassurance in a child’s life goes a long way toward moderating the severity of this message and activating the natural empowering resources that are latent in each of us. Other children, less fortunate, experience disempowering messages and feel even more overwhelmed by the world.

Fundamental values are framed in this primitive fashion, and are internalized in a way we may be serving decades later in quite different settings: trust/distrust; approach/avoidance; intimacy/distance; vitality/depression; and so on.

First, given the message that the world is larger, more powerful, we may logically try to evade its potential punitive effect upon us by retreating, avoiding,

The second logical response to overwhelmment is found in our frequent efforts to seize control of the situation.

the child who has been profoundly abused may evolve into the sociopathic personality in service to the core message he or she internalized: “The world is hurtful and invasive. You must hurt or invade it first, or be hurt and invaded instead.”

Others, giving up on the notion of gaining power overtly, resort to what we commonly identify as “passive/aggressive” behaviors. Such a person appears to cooperate, even be congenial, but surreptitiously sabotages, turns up late, inserts the chilling, critical remark, fails to carry through, and thereby gains power through apparent powerlessness.

Thirdly, with the power of the world inordinately impressed upon us, there is another category of logical response, surely the most common: “Give them what they want!” Beginning with Mom and Dad, most children learn to get love by providing others with what is demanded, expected, or merely implied.

When these labels repeatedly apply to someone’s behavior the consequences to the person’s inner life may in fact be ugly. We are conditioned to be nice, yet if we find ourselves repeatedly, reflexively being nice, we have not only lost integrity through reflexive responses, we have lost the power to conduct our own life.

become so common as to earn its own pathologizing name, “codependence.” Recently, the American Psychiatric Association, which writes the book on psychological disorders and their diagnoses, seriously considered including codependence as a diagnostic category. Finally, it was not included, at least for now, because this adaptive behavior would prove so common as to flood insurance companies with claims from so many, and because its very ordinariness makes it suspect as a mental disorder. Codependence may or may not be a psychiatric category, but it is certainly an estrangement from our souls.

Codependence is predicated on one’s reflexive assumption of powerlessness and the inordinate power of the other.

For some, the absence of the supportive other is internalized as “I am not met halfway because I am not worth being met.” Such a person has a tendency to hide out from life, diminish personal possibilities, avoid risk, and even make self-sabotaging choices.

One chooses the safe option, be it in work or relationship, rather than one that challenges and opens new possibilities. Through the power of this internal program, one repeatedly makes self-defeating choices, believing each time that they have come from outside and are but further confirmation of an impaired self-worth.

Deficits had once been brought to him by an indifferent fate, but his subsequent adult choices subtly reinforced his diminishment as a steady state of being, indeed the “story” of his life.

The second pattern we may elect in response to the insufficiency of our early environmental setting is to overcompensate and seek power, wealth, the right partner, fame, or some form of sovereignty over others.

Another of the saddest, and most destructive, of these power stratagems is that employed by the narcissist. Narcissists works very hard to conceal their inner poverty from recognition by others. They may boast, inflate their reputations, swagger and belittle others, or they may fall apart at the first hint of neglect and

The will to power of narcissists is, however, a fearsome thing, and wreaks havoc in their psychological domination of their own children, usually abetted by a compliant spouse, or in workplaces where others are obliged to cooperate and comply.

Tripplw fuck me

The core message of that field was that their well-being depended, as indeed it did, on serving the impaired parent.

The third, and most pervasive reactive pattern to the experience of deficit is embodied in the anxious, obsessive need to seek the reassurance of others.

Even in normal marriages this sort of disappointment arises, for each of us has a lifelong need for fulfillment that no other person can ever meet.

But when she learns that there is no magic, that her hurt will follow her, and that she alone is charged with the responsibility of filling her own emptiness in more durable ways, she glides on to the next therapist.

WHat the hell is emptiness

Sadly, Susan is unable to assimilate the insights she obtains in therapy, because of the desolation within, and therefore nothing changes.

Almost everyone has some addictive pattern. Any reflexive response to stress and anxiety, whether conscious or not, is a form of addiction.

Whenever we are fatigued, stressed, or whenever conscious control is lessened, these old patterns are especially prone to reactivation.

Do not judge this history, for it was as it had to be, but do not abdicate the possibility of the present either. Learn the reflexive patterns, see where they show up, what activates them, what damage is done to self or others, and learn anew that the adult can manage so much more than the child.

No freedom is possible, no authentic choice, where consciousness is lacking. Paradoxically, consciousness usually only comes from the experience of suffering and the flight from suffering is why we often elect to remain in the constrictive yet familiar old shoes. But the psyche is never silent, and

DESPITE WHAT WE SAY TO OURSELVES about wanting to know who we really are, there is a very strong chance that we will steer clear of decisive meetings with ourselves for as long as possible.

The provisional personality, an interwoven fabric of adaptations, may be far removed from the inherent Self, but, “for good or ill, it brought us this far,” so we are afraid to let go of it now.

A man, still on the career track, still invested in the notion that burdens most men, that their worth is a function of their performance, realized that he had topped out in his corporation, that there was no more “up” up there, and spiraled down into depression.

Whoever has not discovered this truth about the fragility of our journey, and the pervasive power of our necessary adaptations to this vulnerability, is living in a form of self-delusion that psyche, fate, or the consequences of our acts will sooner or later bring to the surface. What we do then will make all the difference in the rewriting of history. None of us is pleased to encounter the false self, the necessary fictions in which we invest, until even we can no longer believe them.

His prognosis was not good, obviously, because he was so separated from his emotional life.

How separated am I

There are many kinds of depression. There is biologically bused depression, which typically slides in and out of family histories. Almost all studies indicate that this kind of depression may best be treated with antidepressant medication, especially when combined with some form of short-term therapy. And there is reactive depression, which is appropriate to a significant loss in our lives and tends to vary in intensity in proportion to the amount of energy we invested in who or what was lost. The child going off to college, the end of a relationship, downsizing at work or retirement—all can occasion a reactive depression, as the psychic energy that was once invested externally loses its object or container and reverts to the personal psyche.

Grieving is an honest affirmation of the value of the original investment of energy. No grief, no true investment occurred.

But even with reactive depression in grief there is always a task that awaits us, namely the invitation, indeed the necessity, to examine where we may have been overinvested in the lost other, where it was carrying too much for us.

Encounter The false self

Inevitably, we misread the world, overpersonalize it, and fall into the fallacy of overgeneralization. This “misreading” is of course based on the child’s or youth’s limited range of experience, constricted imaginative alternatives, and limited capacity for experimentation outside the range of the family or tribal sphere.

Even though we might later come to recognize that these influences had nothing to do with us, nothing to do with the infinite, precious soul that lies within us, the damage is done and we are invested in the mythologically charged value system called the provisional personality with all of its misreadings of self and world.

Again, the wisdom of Greek tragedy cannot be overemphasized. All of them dramatize this universal confession: “I created my life; I made these choices; and, stunningly, this flood of unimagined consequences are the fruits of my choices.”

A mystery so profound that none of us really seems to grasp it until it has indisputably grasped us, is that some force transcendent to ordinary consciousness is at work within us to bring about our ego’s overthrow. No, it is not some malevolent demon, though we often project our search for such a slippery spirit on our partner or our employer or even on our children. That force, paradoxically, is the Self, the architect of wholeness, which operates from a perspective larger than conventional consciousness.

The ego wishes comfort, security, satiety; the soul demands meaning, struggle, becoming.

Accordingly, stronger souls seek therapy; the more damaged seek someone to blame.

We may miss them, but if we cling to them we are not loving them; we are revealing our own dependencies. To love them is to empower them to live without us, as surely they will be obliged to in any case.

To grieve the loss of an intimate relationship is to celebrate what was received as a gift, but it may also raise the question of what we were asking of the other person that we need to do for ourselves.

Even amid the grieving, a reactive depression is always going to bring home to us an agenda for growing up. It takes a great deal of psychological honesty to be able to look directly at our sorrow and take responsibility for what personal task has now emerged.

This form of depression is a manifestation of the autonomy of the psyche. The ego, the conscious sense of who we are, wishes to invest energy in a certain direction, perhaps in service to economic goals, but the soul has another agenda.

!!! Most common type of depression

Indeed, a close cousin to this form of depression is boredom, or ennui, which means that the object or the goal that has carried our projections of psychological energy thus far no longer sustains the agenda of the

Wise is the ego, strong is the ego, that can stop reinforcing the old investments and ask, “What is going on here, why does the psyche not cooperate; what might its desire be?”

For these reasons, our choices are necessarily biased by our own security needs, insufficient permission to live our own life, constricted imaginative alternatives, and the limited options actually available at any given moment in our history. This biasing, this partiality, this limitation is frequently, and unintentionally, wounding to the soul.

She was living in constrictive service to parental complexes, as we mostly do, and not in service to the larger summons of her talent. Why would she not be depressed? She was very good at dispensing medication to others who suffered biochemical depressions, but was so close to her own problem that she could not recognize intrapsychic depression when she saw it.

At the bottom of this well, and there is always a bottom, there is a clear task and a summons. The task is to ask what the psyche wants, not what the parents want, not what the parent complexes want, not what the culture wants, not what the ego wants.

Even when we bring these pockets of depression to consciousness, so often the way forward is fraught with anxiety as it takes us into new territory, asks more of us than ever before, and causes us to grow up by demanding full responsibility for how our lives turn out. But, as we noted earlier, this anxiety must be chosen over depression, for it is developmental, and depression is regressive.

Anxiety is the price of the ticket to life; intrapsychic depression is the by-product of our refusal to climb aboard.

Clearly, a person, often with the help of a therapist, needs to differentiate the forms of depression; namely, does it come from a biological base, a reaction to loss, or an intrapsychic conflict that, becoming conscious, has great information for us about the next stage of our journey?

We seldom appreciate how much freight is imposed on us by our partner, or by us upon them. In the many agendas of our histories, the deep desire to heal old wounds, to repeat them, or to find the good parent in the other person rises to the top.

For relationships to survive this freight one needs luck, grace, patience, and an enormous devotion to personal growth.

Thus, we project our vision, or our parent’s vision, or our culture’s vision of the good life onto our jobs, our partners, our children, homes, and possessions, without knowing how much we are asking of them.

Our projections rise from issues, values, tasks we have not yet made conscious, so they spontaneously arise from the unconscious and enter the world in seductive ways. Thus, we jump from job to job, believing a promotion, a new title, a fresh start will do it; or the companion at the gym is suddenly surrounded by a celestial aura and magically promises the fulfillment of an archaic agenda while one’s actual partner proves flawed, limited, demanding; or the child within us, confused with this outer child we have borne, this other who has come into but is merely passing through our life, forces upon him or her the additional burden of being asked to carry our unlived lives, achieving what we could not, and continuing our narcissistic agenda for

So we are always, always, projecting some vital, meaningful aspect of ourselves upon the other, whether the “other” be career, partner, or child. In other words, we are seeing some unknown part of ourselves in the exterior world—no wonder it has such compelling power.

After the luminescent power of a projection does its work upon us, the second stage begets disillusionment.

Then, thirdly, we begin to do whatever we can to reinforce the projection, to recover its pristine attraction. We redouble efforts at the job, seek further advancement. We start cajoling, hectoring, nagging, controlling, or withdrawing from our partner or child to bring them back into line with our projected expectations.

The fourth stage is to suffer the withdrawal of the projection.

The discrepancy has become painfully evident, no longer deniable. The other is finally, and always, another, and not our intrapsychic content. (Often, this recognition occurs after the affair, after the job change, after the plastic surgery, or other precipitous choice.)

(Often, this recognition occurs after the affair, after the job change, after the plastic surgery, or other precipitous choice.) The fifth stage of a projection,

The fifth stage of a projection, if we reach that point at all, is to become conscious that a projection has occurred. This sounds easier than it usually proves to be.

If I grow depressed after having achieved, or failed to achieve, my goals, what has the ego projected upon

Fix projections

Can we bear to take the step to own the projection, see that its agenda may not be realistic, may be infantile, may not have legitimacy when flushed out of hiding, and then redirect our lives more fully, more responsibly?

As we lift the burden of our unconscious traffic off the other, we free them to be whatever or whomever they are meant to be when we are not interfering with them.

Job is a good person, who, having done no harm to others, has a ton of grief fall upon his head. Naturally, he asks why, and how justice, as he perceives it, and the restoration of the old comforts, as he desires them, might be reclaimed. He is visited by so-called comforters who represent the orthodox tradition, which maintains that humans have a contract or covenant with God.

presumptive contract we have with the universe. For some, the presumption begins in a compliant interaction

There are many modern versions of this presumptive contract we have with the universe. For some, the presumption begins in a compliant interaction with parents, and later their surrogates in social institutions, who have explicitly imposed a code that promises reward when one behaves according to the rules. (Thus, we expect that the company for which we labor so diligently will not let us go when downsizing.)

appears in the assumption that if one acts with goodwill, always, one will be met by goodwill, always.

This betrayal by the other—by God, by our lover, by our friend, by the corporation—is a betrayal of our hope that the world might be manageable and predictable.

While we are rendered more uncomfortable by this discovery, it is a humbling that deepens spiritual possibility. The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young.

How to apply this humility

But then the second half of life asks of us, and ultimately demands, relinquishment—relinquishment of identification with property, roles, status, provisional identities—and the embrace of other, inwardly confirmed values.

such a turn is occurring for all of us in the second half of life. The old sense of self wears thin, and the new is yet uncovered. Such moments of crisis are typically very painful, but they constitute an invitation to the ego to reorient its priorities, an invitation that the ego will resist until it is forced to do otherwise.

portrays. Beneath the symptoms, the variety of our stories, such a turn is occurring for all of us in the second half of life. The old sense of self wears thin, and the new is yet uncovered. Such moments of crisis are typically very painful, but they constitute an invitation to the ego to reorient its priorities, an invitation that the ego will resist until it is forced to do otherwise.

The old sense of self wears thin, and the new is yet uncovered. Such moments of crisis are typically very painful, but they constitute an invitation to the ego to reorient its priorities, an invitation that the ego will resist until it is forced to do otherwise.

Not the first time i experience this

When the ego gets conscious enough and strong enough, or battered enough, it will be begin to say: “What new thing do I have to learn about myself in the world?” “Since I can no longer manage all this perplexity by my former understanding, what does the soul ask me to do in the face of this overthrow?” While the ego seldom frames these questions in

good questions

Why not emotional maturity?

i dont get it

Fuck me. Search For impossible. Expectations. Something i can never have

Soulmates never die?

!!!!! Fuck me

Seen this in many parenting books, but don’t understand the practical, day to day side of things.

Opposite to expectations in my family

Feel thr support . I dont feel it

I dont get this paradox

Typical???!

Fucking fuck me

How come they were so smart?

Wonder what he’d say about 2023

Hello morning show :)

Is there some science behind this attenion to dreams?

Read about Comte

Shitting onto psychology ?

Olya understood this way before

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!??

Define fears

Daily scrum

why 4 centuries