Drawn from a prior post on my forum–another piece of the journey to wholeness and healing.
This is about looking within, reclaiming your Individual “I”.
OK, so once upon a time, you were somebody’s child. In time, you became somebody’s girlfriend, then somebody’s wife, then somebody’s mother, and somewhere along the way, you merged yourself with your husband in your marriage.
Somewhere along that same way, you became “lost” until his midlife crisis got your attention.
So, where did your collective “I” get lost? Get busy finding her, because she is the key to your personal identity. WHERE do you find her? Deep within YOU.
I think we all had dreams of some kind before we fell in love, got married had children, settled into a routine of relationship, marriage, raising children, and dealt with a partner whose life’s mission seemed to be changing us to more “fit” their ideals of how they thought we should “be”.
However, IF the midlife spouse were questioned, they would claim it was the other way around–but both of you would be telling the truth.
Why?
Because both of you lost your individual identities within each other during those years of marriage. Both of you took God’s concept of “One Flesh” several steps too far, developing a co-dependent relationship, instead of an interdependent one. You forgot how to think for yourself, so did the midlife spouse. Even in those rare times that you did think for yourself, you were still pressured into doing it THEIR WAY, but hey, at times, you did the SAME thing to the midlife spouse, too—if you thought honestly about it.
So, with both of you in the same boat, you are on the same journey in this particular aspect–to reclaim your individual identities. Eventually, both of you will hopefully grow up and become whom God meant for you to be. However, this involves a journey of major proportions, and a quest that leads deep within yourself to achieve this reclaiming of the person you once were.
It always takes the midlife spouse longer to do this, because, unlike you, they are not looking within. They are still busy doing the same old thing they did with you–looking at the outside solutions to try and “fix” an inside problem.
If you think about it, before the midlife crisis, they were always looking to YOU to fix THEM. When the midlife crisis began, they became different, their needs changed, and they began looking elsewhere for the same “fix” they had always gotten from you, but do not seek it from you, because they do not see you as the same person they did before their perception shifted, altered, and skewed.
You think it is wrong, but really, it is not, because people change all of the time. It is not changing that is wrong; it is what is done to respond/react to that change that makes a person’s actions right or wrong.
No matter what you say, by the time the emotional bomb dropped, you were not that same person you were when you got married. You CHANGED. Was it wrong? No, change is a part of life, and it stands to reason we are all going to change as we get older.
Where the midlife spouse goes wrong is when they decide the problem is their spouse, their life, their marriage, etc. Because of this wrong state of mind, they decide to “remake” some things, and in that process, take a dead-end road, or even several wrong turns that is going to lead them to nowhere.
Therefore, they buy themselves a lot of trouble they could have avoided had they simply done what you are doing now-look within for everything that was “lost” and needs to be “found”–but they do not do that until they have exhausted every avenue of escape they dare to try and get away from their emotional pain.
It is not until later in the midlife crisis when the midlife spouse will hopefully figure this one little detail out (to look WITHIN for their answers), and choose to do the work they should have done to begin with. But hey, you find that you are ahead of them, because you began your own journey, and learned this important lesson for yourself.
Change really does have to start with you as an individual. We all have to learn to fix ourselves, learn to reclaim our individual identity, and like all other types of change, growth and becoming–it all takes time.
More food for thought and another piece of the Journey to Wholeness and Healing.
