Health
May, 2000
Dare To Be Happy
Ann Japenga
The mid-life crisis is dead,
says a recent study: Women over 35 are more fulfilled
than ever. But what if you're among the one in four who
feel the world is closing in rather than opening up?
You worked in the next cubicle over from
Susan Hall, you'd never guess her secret weekend vice.
The Susan you 'd know would be a rim, competent database
administrator in her mid-forties. You'd figure she spent
her weekends at the beach with her son or competing in
ocean swims with her equally athletic and successful friends.
But here's how it really was: When
Friday evening came, Susan would drop off her son Nick
at the airport so he could spend the weekend with his
dad in another town. Then she'd go home and hold up in
her California beach house. With no children to care for
and no coworkers to impress, Hall gave in to her guilty
pastime: watching the neighbors. She knew she shouldn't,
but she did it anyway - and felt worse every minute. As
she studied the young pair toting in groceries or laying
sod in the yard, Hall couldn't help but remember her own
younger days and mourn what she'd lost.
Her neighbors were in the throes of fresh
love, but Hall, recently divorced, felt there'd be no
second chance at romance for her. The twentysomething
woman in the couple was smooth-skinned and vital; the
skin beneath Hall's chin had started to sag, and it took
her longer to recover from hard swims. The neighbor had
a glamorous job in the fashion industry; Hall felt out
of place and exhausted trying to keep up with techies
20 years her junior.
Despite all these anxieties, it never occurred
to Hall she could be having a midlife crisis. Sure, she
felt depressed and withdrawn. But like many of the baby
boomer generation, she thought of midlife crisis as an
experience from another time, something that happened
to our mothers who'd given over their lives to their families
and didn't have much to fall back on when the kids left
home. We're the generation that has it all: the freedom
to choose children, a career, or both. So why should we
be falling apart when we hit our forties or fifties?
Besides, a much-publicized national study
recently declared the midlife crisis dead. Of the 3,000
men and women surveyed between the ages of 25 and 74,
around three quarters of those between 35 and 65 claimed
not to have gone through anything like it. The majority
reported feelings of well-being and a greater sense of
control over their lives than they had in earlier years.
Yet what about the remaining 25 percent?
Hall's experience would certainly place her in that unlucky
minority for venom the midlife crisis was very much alive
and well.
Lou Marinoff, a philosophy professor at
City College of New York and the author of Plato,
No, Prozac! isn't surprised that some people hit
the skid: when they reach 40 or 50. And he's not just
speaking from the ivory tower of academia. In addition
to lecturing undergrads on Heidegger and Kant, Marinoff
is head of a group of therapists called philosophical
counselors, who draw on intellectual teachings and help
people apply them to daily life. Call him a shrink for
the existentially inclined.
One thing's for sure: He sees plenty of
women in his practice who are troubled by the classic
pitfalls of middle age: fading looks, career disappointments,
broken relationships, a sense of waning involvement in-and
importance to-family. What's more, he sees some new variations
on these old standards. His typical midlife client is
a woman who has built a successful career but is troubled
by what got passed over. "She's missing the relationship
or the kids she never had," he says. "Or she
resents the hours she's devoted to her job and wishes
her life were more exciting."
The sense of unlimited options can itself
be overwhelming. "The Tibetans say there are two
kinds of misery in the world: the misery of not having
and the misery of having," says Marinoff. "When
you've got so many choices, as women do today, it can
be tough to figure out which ones to make."
The problem is compounded by a lack of places
to turn to for guidance. "You can't look back, because
our mothers led drastically different lives from the ones
women lead today. And when you look around to see how
your peers are handling these issues, what you mainly
find are women on Prozac and other antidepressants."
Marinoff isn't the only expert to suggest
that antidepressants are being overused. Prozac and its
sisters are prescribed more frequently than any other
class of drug except blood pressure pills. But he has
a particularly resonantway of summing up what gets lost
in a purely medical approach.
"Sure, women in their forties and fifties
may feel depressed," he says. "But it's not
because of their brain chemistry. The real problem is
that they've lost a sense of meaning and purpose in their
lives, and you can't cure that with a pill. The art in
midlife is to find the gain in the loss. When the kids
leave home, of course you'll be bereft. But if you realize
you've also gained time to do things you'd been too busy
for, the future all of a sudden looks brighter."
Some people may need more than a shift of
perspective. Paula Hardin, a former model and actress
in Chicago, realized her career was coming to a halt when
she entered her late forties. The day she hit 50 she crawled
into bed, pulled the covers over her head, and asked herself,
"Who the hell are you, and what are you going to
be when you grow up?"
No one in her family could help her-her
mother had died young, her father had turned into "one
of those irascible old men," and her aunts were nuns,
with concerns entirely different from her own-so she started
searching for role models. Eventually she turned her problem
into a solution. She went to graduate school and wrote
a dissertation about adult psychological development,
for which she interviewed hundreds of men and women about
how well-or how poorly-they were handling the second half
of their lives.
"Those who negotiated the midlife transition
with grace had found a way to do something they could
feel passionate about," Hardin says. She used what
she learned to start Midlife Consulting Services, where
other distressed middle-agers can turn for help. Her advice?
"Dare to enter the process," she says. In other
words, don't just sit at home watching the neighbors.
Take a leap. Do something.
SUSAN HALL'S CHANCE to follow Hardin's passionate
decree came in the form of an invitation to scale Mt.
Rainier, in Washington. Hall wasn't particularly looking
for any sort of enlightenment. The trip was just an opportunity
for her and her two friends to stay fit and have fun together
on a guided climb.
Summit day started out tough but generally
uneventful. After 12 hours of slogging uphill, the three
women and the other climbers arrived at the top of the
14,410-foot mountain. Hall refueled on a sandwich and
snapped a few pictures.
By the time the group was ready to leave,
the snow was beginning to turn to mush-a worrisome development
since soft snow increases the risk of an avalanche. At
about 2 P.M. the party came to a tricky section of the
trail, a narrow exposed ledge with a steep drop-off. Hall
was shuffling cautiously along it when she heard someone
shout, "Snow!"-And then, "Run!" She
felt something flowing around her ankles. "Oh, so
this is an avalanche," she thought. "Piece of
cake."
Then, like a monster wave grabbing an open
sail, a swell picked up Hall and dragged her down the
mountain. The slight, blue-eyed woman clung to a secured
climbing rope with her left hand and jabbed her ice ax
into the snow with her right. The momentum of her fall
instantly ripped the ax out of her hand. A nearby climber
prayed aloud, "God save us," before his mouth
filled with snow.
Hall was filled with her own sense of doom.
"Is this it?" she remembers wondering to herself.
Still, as an endurance swimmer who was comfortable in
the open ocean, she wasn't totally unnerved by the blurry,
slow-motion sensation of sliding down the mountainside
in a wave of snow. "This feels a lot like water,"
she thought. "Let's keep swimming and see what happens."
Right then the line Hall was hanging onto
played out, and she jerked to a stop. Overcome by exhaustion,
and perhaps a bit of shock, she blacked out.
When she came to, she was hanging upside
down from her climbing harness, just 15 feet away from
a 300-foot drop. The waist strap of her backpack, which
had ridden up and lodged under her chin, made it hard
for her to breathe, and she felt a shooting pain in her
left hand. Her arms were pinned over her head, her helmet
jammed over her face. Doubled nearly in two, she couldn't
see or move.
After several attempts to wriggle loose,
Hall managed to squeeze her shoulders together to send
her backpack crashing down the mountain, freeing her arms.
She righted herself, took a deep breath, pushed off her
helmet, and examined her hand. Her little finger had swollen
to twice its normal size, and her ring finger was bent
at an unnatural angle.
Thankfully, help was already on the way.
But Hall and her fellow climbers would be forced to ding
to the rock face, aptly named Disappointment Cleaver,
while rescuers painstakingly reinforced frayed climbing
ropes. It took five hours to secure the lines and move
the climbers to safety. Finally, in the day's fading pink
light, the climbers boarded the toasty-warm cabin of an
army rescue helicopter.
Hall would eventually have to endure nine
hours of surgery on her crushed hand and many months of
painful rehab. But the woman who entered the aircraft,
cradling her injured hand, was not the same woman who
so recently had brooded her weekends away and given up
on life.
Before the climb, Hall says, she viewed
her life as a movie in which all the juicy scenes had
ended, and she felt powerless to spice up the story line.
But the accident and its aftermath taught her she had
more control over the plot than she'd thought.
She was struck by how, as she tumbled out
of control in a wave of snow, she instinctively analyzed
he options and decided to try to swim her way out when
she found herself suffocating, she experimented furiously
until she came up with a way to get free of her backpack.
Later, left with a badly injured hand, she flexed her
fingers a hundred time: a day. It didn't matter that the
exercises hurt; shi would do what it took to regain her
dexterity.
Hall realized she'd been selling herself
short it assuming she couldn't deal with her midlife difficulties.
She discovered a crucial fact about herself: She's a problem-solver,
a solution-seeker. And what is midlife, she decided, but
a knot of small and large problems? The woman who thought
to paddle free of an avalanche could surely come up with
ways to surf through the big breakers of her forties and
beyond.
"I no longer expect things to stay
the same," she says. "I don't even expect them
always to work out. I've simply decided the point in life
is to keep looking for new solutions."
Her attitude has produced some profound
changes. She moved away from her oh-so-perfect neighbors.
She left her demanding job and took one that allows her
to get home in time to have dinner with her son, and she
takes on free-lance projects to make her work life more
satisfying. And while she still is focused on making others
happy ("I know I try too hard to please"), she's
more determined to speak up for herself and follow her
own desires. Last fall she and her friends tackled another
strenuous mountain.
Marinoff would certainly approve. Not that
he tells his clients to rush out and court disaster as
the way to find happiness. But Susan Hall accomplished
exactly what he says is the goal of philosophical counseling:
She took a look at her life and figured out which events
she could control and when it was best to acquiesce. Then
she decided where to go next, and did what was needed
to get there.
In Hall's revised narrative, she stars as
a more hopeful version of her pre-Rainier self. "I
realized I could sit there and be engulfed by these feelings
of `everything's over,'" she says. "Or I could
explore what might still be. Yes, I've lost some of who
I was. But who's to say I can't find something better?"
TAKING A PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH
Move over, Freud. A whole new type of therapy's in town,
and it soothes your psyche by engaging your soul. It's
called philosophical counseling, and it may be just the
thing for someone suffering a midlife crisis. We asked
Lou Marinoff, the head of the American Philosophical Practitioners
Association and the author of Plato, Not Prozac!, to tell
us all about it.
What, exactly, is philosophical counseling?
It's a type of therapy that draws on the teachings of
philosophers, both ancient and contemporary, to help people
deal with problems in their everyday lives.
How is it different from traditional therapy?
Therapists start from the premise that if you're feeling
crummy, there must be something wrong with you-a chemical
imbalance, maybe, or some deeply rooted trauma. They'll
help you figure out why you feel the way you do, and these
days they'll probably put you on a drug. Philosophical
counselors, on the other hand, assume most people are
basically healthy and just need guidance on how to lead
more satisfied lives.
Do you refer to specific philosophers when
you counsel someone?
Sometimes. One woman came to me because she felt trapped
in her marriage. To help her see she had more choice in
the matter than she realized, I pointed to the teachings
of Martin Buber, who said the first step toward having
liberty is thinking that you do. But my main goal is to
help people adopt a philosophical way of thinking, which
puts the emphasis on reexamining all your assumptions.
How do I know if I'm a good candidate for
philosophical counseling?
If you were abused as a child and have emotional problems,
you've got a psychological issue and probably need a traditional
therapist. However, if your unhappiness stems from a sense
that your life lacks meaning and purpose, you're dealing
with more of a philosophical issue.
How can I find a philosophical counselor?
Call the American Philosophical Practitioners Association
at 212/650-7827 and ask for a list of counselors in your
area.
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