There is a model in therapy that discusses some of the fundamental needs of all people. Following is a little insight into my understanding of how they can play out in this intersection of midlife for women.
First is a need for certainty and comfort. This is the things and people, the little ways that we find security and a sense of stability. When things get rough these are the things we reach for or do that help us to feel certain. Being the bundle of contradictions that we are, the second human need is for uncertainty. We demand or create variety so that we are challenged. In this way we exercise our emotional and physical range of motion. This can be our pursuit of achievements, diversions or a challenging project. This can be uncomfortable, digging into those places inside of us that create fear, crisis and can become the myriad emotional catalyst that throws us into change. The third is the human need we have to feel significant. The very fragile and real need to be seen. This need is primal and goes back to infancy where we all required, for our survival to feel that we were number one. If we had siblings we competed with them for love and attention. We developed our niche in life. We were the smart one, the black sheep, we became the scrappy one, or the obedient and loving one. That need is still with us. We find our significance by building things in our lives, by achieving goals or we can feel significance by tearing something or someone down. In ALL cases significance is created by comparison to others and in this, it separates us from one another as well. Comparison is weaved in the construct of our culture and our human lives with it's inescapable hierarchal pecking orders. In it's most positive form it pushes us to strive and create but when we over focus on our significance or our sense self and our significance is threatened, we have trouble connecting with people. Our differences become magnified. We feel disconnected, on the sideline. All our deep issues of worth, of being "good enough" come bubbling to the surface.
We are like snakes, shedding skins as we enter new phases of personal evolution. The crone years, the years we experience empty nest, the falling away of youth, the death of our parents, the realization of our own mortality, the end of relationships, the realization we will never marry or have children or perhaps have the life we dreamed, is a revolutionary time in which many, many of the ways we had of experiencing a sense of significance is lost. As these things come to pass, the constructs in which we found our significance pass with them. Often this loss is not something we are consciously aware of.
Until we develop new ways of being and create fresh platforms in which to we find meaning and significance the sense of loss in us without a name (we only know a parent has died, children have moved away, we have a health change the indicates our youth is gone, a friend dies) is the perfect storm for a personal crisis. Each area of change or loss is it's own complex cosmos providing us with status, a place where we experience a sense of belonging, a feeding ground for our need of significance.
Without conscious awareness and a name for the secondary loss of significance that comes with change and losses; grief can be overwhelming. Imagine what we might project onto those closest to us when we are without understanding yet reeling from the feeling of invisibility and lack of meaning in certain daily endeavors. The same endeavors that fed that first human need of certainty and significance. When we don't realize these losses, when we are unable to give them a name and to grieve them fully, they come out side ways in our shadow. We become martyrs, we keep our children dependent in some way so we do not lose them to their own lives, we put unbearable pressure on them to achieve in order to derive a sense of significance via their lives, we send out passive aggressive messages that say, " you owe me" We project onto your significant other the feelings of emptiness inside of us, our inexhaustible need, the search for meaning and our need to recreate ourselves all of which may contribute to some marriages crumbling beneath the pressures of this time period.
Better to take that crone's year away. Better to lick our wounds and marvel in our solitude at the right and growing distance of our children as they fully realize themselves. Better to recognize that with the fading of our youth we have the opportunity to go inward and harness a new kind of beauty that includes a knowing, a compassion for our shared experience. Better to have the wisdom to realize we create each day the life of next year and that there are still dreams to be spun.
The opportunity to realize that there is no separation. Our true significance lies in our shared connection, in our sameness, in the parts of a life that not a single one of us will ever avoid. We come to others not looking for how we might compare but with wiser eyes and hearts seeing reflected inside them the same struggles and hopes. The same beautiful human truth, that we must let go again and again of what we have had that was certain for a moment only to be stripped bare and tender into life's uncertainty where the spiral can begin again.
