All men go through a midlife crisis.
It is either in the open air with fireworks and upside worlds or in a more quiet way, hiden role, but still there. It is either in the mid-thirties or forties or even later…but it’s coming.
So the question is why and not if…
- Why the constant need for external validation, why the need to prove that we are good enough, that we still matter, that we are still useful?
- Does this have anything to do with self-esteem? Or maybe with love and affection? Or is it about a purpose in life, a higher mission we try to understand?
- And where do these emotions come from?
- Is it the childhood, is it the relationship with the mother, is it the lack of male role models or is it something that we don’t do at the right time so we need to live it later on?
Some might agree that the source lies in childhood days, in the way we got love from our parents, in the way our parents solved their own issues and encouraged us to do something we like and we are good at.
Most of the time, that wasn’t what we expected because they either did not pay too much attention to our emotional needs or they did that too much…I guess many people nowadays came to realize what they missed as kids only from far away, after many years and with a spicy price to pay.
But one thing is clear: that early environment influenced us deeply and left serious marks in our character, thus shaping our future to a certain degree.
Focus on needs
We all need to be appreciated, to be loved, to be respected and validated. It’s like a big hole in our soul we constantly need to refill. It’s nurturing our ego. When we run out of it, we look for it somewhere else. Because there is a big world out there with many buckets of love, affection, respect and validations. So we take what we can get, without considering the quality, circumstances, effects nor the consequences.
We just try to fill our gap in a rather selfish way.
At first, we try to find excuses and look for other people to blame for our dried-in fountain. We pretend we were never responsible for filling up this gap with our own resources and inner treasures.
Then, we take a step out and feel brave and proud about confronting the change. Then we get scared and are not very sure if we did the right thing…
In fact, we are so much discontent with our own lives that we just want to reinvent ourselves and have no idea how to do it. We don’t really reach out, as it might appear, we just want to experiment, to play. Of course the outer help we get is never random. It is more an artificial external string pulled out to justify our wild actions.
I think a more fair way to look at this turmoil would be more towards inside than outside, get the guts to confront our own demons and fears, accept them and face them.
But that can be pretty scary and you need to take care.
And that can be the starting point of a pretty interesting journey…