ICAN'T SEE ME, mid life crisis and it's effects

There comes this terrible point in our lives when we realize that we are invisible. This is mainly an age thing, but I guess it can be applied for anytime for any reason. It’s almost like joining a secret club.

Now in our life times we join lots of these. We usually don’t know about them till we are in the middle of some experience and realize that we are not alone, when prior to that whatever the experience has been, has been endured alone and we can feel isolated and lonely as we are surely the only person ever to be feeling as we do right now.

The times that are the most common for this feeling are this are when we first have a baby. When we start to become menopausal. When we loose people around us, whether to ending relationships or death. The latter has been dealt with in a more detailed chapter of it’s own. So I want to focus on the experience of menopause.

But before doing so, just a few words on what having a baby feels like. I am not looking at this experience from an angle of post natal depression, more from a place of normality.
That is not saying that post natal depression is abnormal, more that when a woman has her first child the experience is so extreme emotionally and however well prepared she is in terms of having all the necessary equipment, crib, clothes, whatever that she can feel very alone, even when surrounded by family and friends.

The deep emotion of bringing a life into the world, even though she has had 9 months to prepare does nothing to prepare for the feelings at all. In exactly the same way that when told to rest up during pregnancy, because she will need her energy for coping with a baby, makes no difference to actually dealing with the tiredness of the sleep deprivation that dealing with that baby will actually feel like.

So as this new mother struggles to deal with the day to day tasks involved in caring for her new baby, she will be aware that however many books she had read, how many other woman she had talked to prior to birth, she had not been ready to assimilate this information now flooding through her self. This information can be better described as love!

We all generally make assumptions that we will love our children, but until we have that child present in our arms no amount of preparation will be the same as the actual feeling that takes over us. That is, this new capacity to love in a way that is beyond our comprehension prior to the baby’s arrival. And it is only when that baby is there that this emotion occurs. Of course many women have a sense of love during their pregnancy, but this is on the whole very different because of the intensity of this totally wondrous experience.

One of the most precious memories I have is having my mother around long enough in my life to be able to share this knowledge of being in this secret society with her. In that prior to my having my eldest son, I had always sighed in slight exasperation when my mothers love leaked out over me, in that “Oh Mum’ sort of way when I thought she was being soppy. Having my son, made me profoundly aware that I knew exactly why now she was that way. It was unconditional pure love. The love for me that allows me to say that the only people I would willingly lay my life down for are my to sons.

Now if that is the wonder of a secret society then the menopause at the start is most definitely not.

There we all are woman, who have been through all the angst of teenage relationships, more mature ones in our twenties, and at some point may have settled down with a partner. We may have had children, we may have had a career, or nowadays most likely both. As it is rare for there be enough money in any home for woman not to have worked to contribute to the household coffers in this day and age.

We go through are thirties not thinking about the future other than most often in terms of bringing the children up. We enter our forties, quite often with a feeling of dread. As if getting to the Big 40 will suddenly mean a massive change the day we turn it! Which as we find isn’t strictly true.

But what does happen as we go through our forties is we start to become more invisible to people around us. Our families take us for granted. When was the last time your partner looked at you with the same degree of lust that when you first met? Now if that still happens then you have a rare relationship indeed and should cherish it. But for the majority of people we have settled into a routine of behaviour when we react to our partner, maybe built on affection, maybe on contempt.

If we have made this far in a relationship, we now enter the most dangerous time for it’s survival. We get to a point at which both men and women ask themselves is this it? Is this what I’ve got to look forward to for the rest of my life? And people start to question whether or not it is worth staying in the relationship as it is. The easiest option at this point is to have an affair. That will certainly stop being invisible in it’s tracks. You’ll feel sexy, vital, attractive and lustful. Whatever state your long term sexual relationship had been, having an affair and you can rediscover your sex drive big time.

Or another route is, and this is particularly true of women, who have gone from being their parents child ,to the husband’s wife ,to their children’s mother, only to decide that suddenly it is time they did something for them. University’s and colleges are full of women of a certain age retraining. Finding out that they do have a brain, it having rotted over soggy cereals for the last few years. This is another way to beat the invisibility as women learn to value their brains and the skills they are learning.

Go to any Graduation ceremony and watch the pride on the faces of all those women , who three years previously ‘knew’ they couldn’t ever get a degree!
But if you don’t do either of these things, and neither is compulsory! Then the invisibility blanket starts to surround you. Walking down the street, it’s no longer the majority of the 40 something women who get a second glance. Certainly youth don’t see us, they push past us as if we don’t count. You can start to get discounted in queues in shops, you don’t matter cause you cannot be seen.

It is a shocking revelation to women, and so what do we all do, we start chasing youth, we buy into products that will get rid of our wrinkles, give us fresh skin, make us look young again. And at it’s most extreme we have plastic surgery.

Now I’m not knocking any of this, I put expensive face cream on, I lather the body lotion on to give me soft skin. And I can’t say if I had the money that I wouldn’t have a face lift. I’m just pointing out that, this is why we buy into it.

We also go the gym, take up sports, start walking. Now obviously we are also doing this to keep fit, to stave off out bodies crumbling totally, but you can’t tell me that if you make differences in your body through exercise that you don’t walk taller down the street, have more confidence, feel better about yourself. And in so doing suddenly start getting noticed again. This then increases your feelings of self worth, and you find heads turning to check you out. And I won’t believe any woman who says that she doesn’t care about being noticed.

Being noticed , not being ignored is the fundamental drive of our lives. If we were ignored as a baby we would not have survived. Our crying to let someone know we were hungry or uncomfortable was got us here in the first place. So being part of the society you live in is vital. Being ignored is a living death.

This being invisible, has to be challenged, not by us donning miniskirts and bright red lippy, well unless we want to do that. More we have to look to our own resources.
Obviously if we are using outside agencies, an affair, a college course then we are half way there. But if we are not, we have to find a way to make sense of these feelings.
We do matter and the person we need to matter to most, is ourselves.

We have to be kind to ourselves, we have to learn that by looking after ourselves other people will not take us so much for granted. Being taken for granted starts in us, not other people. We start when we begin a relationship and set up our behaviour as the carer of our partner. How many women take on the roll of buying, sending his family Birthday cards? How many women, remind their partners to phone their mothers. How many women, hold down a full time job and still manage to know whether his favourite shirt is clean? How many women, act as a taxi to their children’s social life. How many women cook as many different meals as there are people in the house as no-one will eat the same thing….. The list is endless and the answer is WE DO!!

What happens when we do this to ourselves, when we treat ourselves as lower in importance than the mouse in the skirting board, is that oddly enough we get treated with the same amount of respect as that mouse would get, that is, none.

So a vicious circle starts, of neglect of ourselves by us, then by others then we follow that up with feeling more and more that we don’t matter. This effects self esteem, confidence, dignity, and ultimately happiness. If we feel like a drudge, then we behave like one and get treated like one big time.

To change this really horrible cycle we have to start with us. It doesn’t work wanting someone else to look after us, if we don’t do it first. Why should anyone else bother, if we continue to be full of self hate, whatever they tell us about being loved, important and all other such like stuff.

As an example lets just look at getting a complement. Someone says something nice to you, say about your hair, or outfit. When you are full of self hate you dismiss the complement as your hair needs cutting, or this old outfit.

Lets just stop and look outside you for a moment here, why has that other person said something nice to you…. Have they got nothing better to do, are they trying to get in your knickers, is it just sport to wind you up? Or, is it that when someone gives us a complement they are reaching out a hand to us and saying I like you, and I can’t say that. But if I say something good to you, you may notice that actually I’m ok too and think I’m good enough to be your friend.

That is what people are doing when you get a complement nothing more or less. They are NOT trying to increase your self hate, they may not even know you have it. So next time someone says something nice to you, how about saying Thank You. Not only have you then received a stroke to your battered ego but you make the giver of the complement feel good. Cause they feel validated in their opinion of you. Which lets face it here, is never going to be the same opinion you have of yourself.

Going back to starting to learn to be kind to yourself as a way to feel better and increase your self worth, esteem and confidence.

One of the things that really works is a hit list of treats that you have just for you that are not of any use to other people. It could be treating yourself to a half hour with a magazine and a large cup of your favourite coffee. It could be buying some fresh flowers. It could be booking a manicure /facial/ massage. It could, if you felt you really deserved a real big treat could be a new handbag.

The list is endless of lovely things you could do for yourself, if only you would let you! Maybe it is time to stop caring for everyone and sacrificing yourself. No-one needs a martyr who doesn’t matter. Start mattering… to you, and then miraculously others will start to treat you better too. After all, if you start to feel that you matter, what do you want to hang around people who treat you like dirt for?

So as you slowly start to change it has a knock on effect with the rest of those around you.
Just try saying the word NO now and again. Your teenager wants another lift and wants it now…. Say NO, but because you don’t want to go into aggressive mode as already discussed, then you opt for an assertive touch, you explain why it can’t happen that exact minute and that you will do it in 10 minutes or whenever suits you.

Doing this has a miraculous effect on your self esteem, suddenly you are no longer the dogsbody, you matter. You of course always have. The family couldn’t do without you, or wouldn’t want to be without you. They have just taken you for granted because you have let it happen.

Now you have started this change in the home, your confidence is given a shot in the arm and you can start to look at other areas of your life and start the same process there. After all why shouldn’t you think you are OK, or even gorgeous, or wonderful. Who except you says you can’t?

Confidence or rather lack of it can be turned round, Just think about the word itself, CONfidence, all you have to do is con yourself that you can do something difficult and allow yourself to know that it will be scary, you might make an idiot of yourself… but so what, so does everyone else.

We all, everyone of us do or say stupid things and wish the earth would swallow us up. We can hold on to our mortification for a very long time if we let ourselves. It’s part of being a martyr again, “Oh look I’m so stupid and did such a stupid thing, how can anyone think I’m worth anything?” Except that if we dared to ask the people around us that we thought we had been a pratt in front of they wouldn’t know what we were talking about. That I can personally guarantee!

When we do this to ourselves the words that need to spring to our lips are, get over it, it’s human nature to say the wrong thing some of the time, and even the Queen/ Prime minister/ or put in any name of a person who you’d think would never do something as silly as you! And know that they have all done just that more than once in their lives.

The other things you can do to help boost your self esteem, are if it’s not shifting is to go to your doctor and ask to be referred for counselling, to join a group to learn assertion, to start learning something like a computer course, massage, sign language. Anything really that pushes you a bit, but not so much that your fear takes over and you sabotage going as your sure to be the only stupid one there.

Right! If it’s a beginners course in anything at all, it’s just that, a beginners course and everyone going is doing so cause they don’t know something and want to learn about it. The course will not be full of people who are just waiting for you to join so they can make fun of you, it really isn’t.

All of the people on the course will be using the same three letters as you need to, they are CONing themselves that they can do something scary, just like you.

The first time, you do anything new and unfamiliar it will be frightening. But once done for the first time it will never be as scary again. The number of people who come into my counselling room scared of how I’m going to be or what I’m going to say is huge. By the end of the hour when I check how they are feeling, without fail they will all say, that they are not as frightened as before they came. Now that of course is nothing to do with my abilities and everything to do with confidence growing in my clients as they relax into the session.

To sum up, the more you care about yourself, the better you feel. The better you feel, the more confidence, self esteem and assertion you have. The more other people will notice you, and in a good way. So what have you got to loose? Nothing, except being Mrs Invisible. No competition then is there?

IT HAS TO START SOMEWHERE

There are two certainties about being born, one we are going to die and the other is we will have pain in our lives.
We can’t do much about the first, which will happen when it’s meant to happen. And we can’t stop the second happening, but we can decide how we react to it.
If we deal with pain in a healthy way, we learn to let go of it, we cry, scream, rant and rave, whatever is needed to rail against the terrible event that has befallen us, of which more later.
Sometimes however we don’t deal well with the pain and anguish that befalls us, and we block our feelings of pain and hide them inside ourselves. This then causes problems for us.
This book then, is going to be about those ways of dealing with issues, how the pain inside stays somewhere inside usually situated in the chest region. How we deny that pain, which in turn causes our bodies and minds to react in unhealthy ways in an attempt to keep the pain safe.
To give a simple example suppose someone you love died, now in a healthy response you will cry, feel guilty and get angry and do this for as long as you need to, so as enable the grief process to take place. This process is vile, but it is normal. It hurts terribly and the grief stricken person can feel they are going mad with the horror of the feelings they are experiencing. They are not; they are being really healthy in letting go of their pain. After all as the quote says “Grief is the price we pay for love” so why wouldn’t it hurt. It will hurt for as long as it takes as well, there is no length to this piece of string, for some it will be over relatively quickly and for others, they never get over it.
I wanted to use this example to illustrate what happens when this process is not used. Firstly the pain as already stated stays inside, and the person tries to kid themselves that they are fine. Almost as if they put all their feelings inside a big trunk , which they wrap in chains and sit on defying the contents to escape and make them feel anything!
So these feelings of pain, and by this I mean great emotional sadness/ anger/ grief/ lonlieness or any other feeling that is difficult to own, get internalised. Then what happens is slowly the person starts to use other ways to let go of their feelings.
I refer to these as stress related disorders, that a person will hook into as a way for the mind to keep itself safe. There is a nice long list that people end up using, and although each one presents with slightly different issues I believe that the all have happened as a result of not dealing with painful internalised issues.
I see the job of this book then is to bring these out into the open, to help anyone suffering with any of the disorders to feel that there is hope for feeling different.
The list is comprehensive and in no particular order comprises of:
Anxiety, Agoraphobia, and Panic attacks, these three frequently all run into one another.
Depression, by this I mean the type of depression that is being used reactively, as a result of not being able to deal with a painful situation in a healthier way.
Eating disorders of any description; anorexia, bulimia and compulsive eating, any way that food is used as a way to control feelings.
Drug and Alcohol abuse, when they are used to stop someone feeling something because it’s too difficult.
Some obsessional behaviour, when someone can spend a long time focusing on some minute detail that stops them thinking.
Cutting, this is an age related response, but like the others is used to deal with the build up of pain inside, used as a release for the anguish inside.
Psychosomatic illness, that is always feeling ill, but never actually having anything wrong but needing to get checked out as it’s easier to have headaches than admit there is emotional pain going on.
I’ve yet to encounter anyone who has got all of these difficulties! But certainly it is possible to get more than one.
What happens is; the trigger occurs, this is sometimes a very obvious one and sometimes a slow build up of reactions to events. Frequently the triggers happened in childhood.
There are two points going on here, the first is what is happening today, and then I’ll discuss the childhood issues.
If we just take it as read for the moment that the something that is making us more stressed just happened, whatever it was, and we look at how we react to this build up. As already stated if we are letting go of the feelings, then we are being healthy. If not then what happens is, the pain sits inside us, it is unbearable. (And wherever these decisions are made inside us and let us use the word mind here) So we unconsciously reach for one of those things on the stress related list, say depression, and fantastically whilst we are suffering depression then the original source of pain gets forgotten, as we are too busy dealing with the affects of depression.
So what do we do, well we might hot foot it down to the doctors and he might give us a pill or potion to help alleviate the symptoms of depression. Again fantastic, we now have a sticking plaster, one which we have put on our original sticking plaster of depression. And it may do the trick. But equally it may not. If the latter then we reach deep inside ourselves and find something else to use on the stress related disorder list..... Maybe a panic attack with increased anxiety, maybe an increased use of alcohol, maybe just constantly feeling ill, whatever of that list that makes sense to our unconscious.
Now we have three or four sticking plasters trying to keep the pain in our chests under control. This is why I see it as a trunk full of stuff, I see it as, us pilling all our clothes into a too small suitcase before our holidays and sitting on it trying to force the lid down. And now we are doing that with our feelings. The feelings are desperate to escape, but they feel so awful that we will do anything to stop them being released.
This battle is then what is happening inside people. The desperate need to keep safe, to not cry, or let anyone around us know how bad we feel. This is then when therapy comes in, as it is the therapists job, in my opinion to help us find healthier ways to deal with the pain in our chests, by opening the trunk, in a safe and secure emotional environment and help us tidy the trunks, keeping only what needs keeping and getting rid of the stuff that is no longer of any use to us.
This is what this book is for, to help you in the absence of therapy to be able to see that there is a better way to deal with the emotional pain that is carried around, and that by looking at different methods then we can be liberated from our own fears.
As it is fear that keeps us using these wretched plasters, the fear of letting go, what will happen if we let go, will we be able to stop crying, being angry or whatever. This is the trust moment, as I know that by letting ourselves look at what’s inside us that we can start a journey into recovery. But I can’t prove it to you. The only person who can prove it to you is YOU.
I can guide you, I can hold your hand, but I can’t make you believe what I say is right. And nor should I, as I can only know about myself. Now obviously I know what I’m talking about, I have been a therapist for twenty five years. So I know my stuff!
But we are all individuals, who may share the same or similar feelings, but our stories are different. So who am I to tell you that my way is, the right way. That would be as conceited as telling you that you have to have the same breakfast as me; toast with marmite, if you’re interested! And that is so not right for everyone else, but may be right for some.
Therapy is unique in its ability to help people. If you are ill for instance and you need an operation, then you will hand your body over to medical science and the doctors and nurses will make you better, and you will hardly think about what part you played in your recovery. So on discharge from hospital you might hand over a larger box of chocolates as a thank you. Therapy on the other hand can only tell you about your options and allow you to make the decision as to whether or not that you embark on change within yourself. So when it comes to boxes of chocolates then it will be you giving them to you for being so brave or clever to have found a new way to deal with that inner hurt.
We always have choices, and sometimes we have to stay with the devil we know, as the unknown feels far too scary. But it is this risking looking at the unknown that moves us and allows us to start feeling different about ourselves. There would be no-one in their right mind would volunteer to have anxiety/ depression/ alcohol abuse or any of the others. There just hasn’t been any choice as that’s was the minds way of coping, because of the scare related to dealing with our deepest feelings in any other way.
By giving ourselves a different choice then we open the door to see our experiences in a new light, to be able to feel differently, to no longer need the wretched sticking plasters that we’ve been coping with for however long. To face our fear to learn that there is nothing to fear but fear itself, is so liberating.
People want to be happy, but happiness is always something we had in retrospect, as in being really happy last year/week / yesterday. It is very difficult to be happy in the moment, when we are spending our moments battling with ourselves to stay sane!
At the same time we are running away from being frightened as the black pit looms in front of us and we are back peddling as fast as we can not to fall off the edge into who knows what.
I do know though!
I know that if we take a step towards that edge then there is a ledge to stand on and what’s more there are steps all the way down this pit to the bottom. So that by moving forward with that first step then although it may be frightening it’s not terrifying as the fear would have us believe. Change is difficult, awareness of what is hurting us is really tough, and if we could do it then surely we would all do it straight away and not use these sticking plasters in the first place!
In starting to let ourselves examine the contents of our emotional selves, unpacking the trunk, then we are taking the first steps towards liberating ourselves from the torture of depression or whatever we have been using to keep safe.
When we do this another effect is that we actually can start to live in the moment, rather than our memories or our future dreams when our worlds will be better. Because we can be aware right now of what we feel, and this liberation allows us to start to experience joy and happiness in the moment. But it does have to be said that that feeling of being happy is very fleeting so a place that I think is better to achieve is contentment within ourselves.
If we become content with who we are then we can let go of how others have wanted us to be over the years and just be ourselves as Marmite eating or not Marmite eating people. Knowing that whichever camp that we fall into, then being who we are is just fine and that if accept ourselves as fallible human beings who are just doing our best in life then we can do no more.
We are not perfect, no-one is , and all any of us can do is our best, which on a good day is fantastic and on a bad, then maybe a duvet should be put over the head till it passes.


This brings me on to the subject of our childhoods, as it is our childhoods that train us in how we deal with our emotional and inner selves.
When a child is born it is a screaming mass of humanity who is totally dependent on someone else, usually the mother in working out what its needs are, feeding, changing or winding. All it can do is cry to get its needs met, but within a very short time it starts learning to communicate in other ways, smiling then talking.
It is our relationships with our mothers that shape how we will be as adults. 60% of adults say that they had secure parenting, in which they knew they were wanted and loved. The remaining 40% did not have such a secure start in life. For the majority then, they grow up being able to cope with what life throws at them for the most part. Although when faced with massive issues of loss even this group will lose its equilibrium for a while, and that is normal. Where this group may go wrong is as already discussed in choosing not to let go of feelings in a healthy way.

The 40% group, will have a tougher time of it all round, one of the important lessons to learn in life is one of being able to self soothe. We get that lesson from our mothers, when they comfort us when we get pain as children, whether physical or mental. The magical kiss better, when a knee is cut. The hug when we don’t understand other people’s behaviour to us. The whispering words of love when we need them. All of these and a hundred other little touches make up our self esteem. We get to know we are loved. And if a child feels loved, they flourish and feel secure. Not so those who don’t get that sort of parenting, they doubt their worth they don’t feel secure around other people.
When as adults we can self soothe, we have an internal voice that tells us we’re alright when we are faced with adversity. We can accept that we might make mistakes sometimes but we don’t hate ourselves for long for doing something daft.
The person with low self esteem does not have that internal voice saying nice things to them, they have critical voices. Voices that destroy any confidence they may try and have. The voices that were critical when they were children are still echoing around their heads as adults.
These internal voices then lead people to use other methods to self soothe, food, alcohol and drugs being the main ways that a sense of self liking can occur, but it is very, very short lived as the person using these methods cannot sustain the feelings of wellbeing for long, and the feelings of disgust about themselves are far bigger than the good feeling so a vicious circle is perpetuated when the person is always needing the next fix to take their self hate away.
The aim therefore of this book is to look at how we use our behaviour in a damaging way to ourselves, which ever group we find ourselves in, as no amount of security as a child will necessarily make someone deal say with bereavement in a better way than anyone else.
We as human beings have the capacity to fuck it up big time when it comes to dealing with our emotions. We get frightened of them, and we do that because we’ve been trained to not show them, the stiff upper lip and all that complete rubbish.
As toddlers we are taught not to have tantrums when we want sweeties and we want them now! We are taught that if we are good and put our feelings away then we will be rewarded with sweeties later. But all the toddler is asking for really is be given proof that they are still loved, they have just moved from the breast to a bar of chocolate. A child is born wanting to feel loved, safe, cared for and warm. They get that initially from the breast, but as the time passes that comes from the increasing ability to connect with their mothers in the first instance, then other significant people in the child’s life.
We are taught the value of rational logical thought and it is this voice that people learn to listen to far too much, like a controlling parent, telling us what we can and can’t do. So we listen to this internal voice and we forget to love ourselves.
And really that is all we need to do in life, we need to be whole people, who are at peace with our abilities to be children and want our needs met, to accept that sometimes we need to be tough on ourselves to push ourselves to be rational and logical. But is it a mixture of both these things not one more than the other. It is about balance; get that and whatever the universe throws at us we will be able to deal with it, eventually! Even if we lose the plot for a short time first. But that is the way to a healthy life, an integrated one, in which we are not frightened of a part of us. That we know that it is ok to feel sad/angry/love/fear/ happiness or whatever as long as it’s all part of us and not we can let ourselves feel those emotions and not be frightened of them.
I suggest that to get what you want out of this book, you go first to the chapters that make sense to you, as it may not be essential to read it all, if all you need to know is how to deal with your panic attacks or whatever. But then reading all of it may help you understand the people around you a little better and that will lead to healthier relationships with them, which has got to be a good thing!