The key to mature change begins with the reacquisition of your personal emotional power. This will positively influence the gradual evolution of the dynamics within a given relationship. Additionally, this involves one who is willing to walk the ongoing journey toward wholeness and healing for themselves. In this process, one learns the lessons of life, learning more about who they are, what they stand for, what is right and wrong behavior, and learn to stand on their own, strong and sure. It all takes time, but time is never wasted when you use it for the purpose of change, growth, and becoming.
As a result, this yields one who is willing make a solid Stand against manipulating and controlling behavior. If the left behind spouse does not throw down the gauntlet of change, and become strong enough to directly challenge wrong behavior as they come to know it, the situation will either cycle around repeatedly, or become much worse.
It is time to grow up, and take charge of your own life. Stop allowing other people to decide everything for you. Do not give your personal power away to any emotional terrorist, which includes, but is not limited to, your midlife crisis spouse.
The midlife crisis process, as a whole, does not really contain a right or wrong way of dealing. There are many pieces of advice that are given to people who are seeking wisdom in how to deal with this major life’s event. Some are right, some are wrong, but each person knows what will work, and what will not work, within their personal situations.
When you look at your own lives, you should begin to realize one aspect that does not vary: There are only crossroads that lead to choices, which lead into the decisions you are asked to make. The resulting responsibility for the consequences that follow each decision made, right or wrong, will lie solely upon your shoulders. In other words, you make a choice; you will live with, and within, the consequences of these choices. This is true on both sides of the equation; whether it is the midlife spouse, or the left behind spouse.
Each person has a decision to make for each path chosen. The most important decision you will make for yourself involves the matter of retaining, or releasing the emotional power you hold.
For the left behind spouse, who is walking their journey toward wholeness and healing, it is difficult some days to know the right thing to do. However when you start with learning about yourself, which leads into proper boundary setting, change occurs, and your growth increases.
If you have learned to connect with your Godly Intuition, and remain open to this guidance, it seems that you will automatically begin to “know” what is happening, and what to do about it. In time, you will learn for yourself what is best to do and say to protect yourself so you are more able to minimize the damage the midlife spouse seeks to spread within your mind and heart.
Hurting people seek to hurt others to make themselves feel better. However, this becomes a vicious circle for them, because their hatred spewed outward only increases the hurt within themselves. The typical midlife spouse seeks to hurt the ones they love the most, but in turn, this actually hurts them. Their negative behavior against those they love creates a negative “strike” within that causes a serious wound to form upon the connection to the left behind spouse from whom they are unable to disconnect.
Each negative “strike” creates more damage within the midlife spouse. This increases their shame, their guilt, their fear of abandonment, and greatly increases their anger. The longer they seek to use “outside solutions” to solve that “inside problem,” the more damage is done inward. It really does result in a deeply damaged person, as their desperately sought-for relief shows in their childish antics that show this increased rebellion. They will try anything and everything to relieve the never-ending emotional pain, but nothing works, and the increasingly oppressive emotional pressure, driven by their inner pain, always spills outward.
Learn to detach, and emotionally distance from this emotional fallout. Drop the emotional rope that ties you to this hurting midlife spouse. As long as you hold on, you cannot let go, and this will do nothing but hurt you even more. Remember the midlife spouse’s immature antics only affect you indirectly. These antics can only hurt you directly, if you internalize these, and make them all about you, when they were never, and will never be, about you.
All people that seek to hurt others are reacting from the inward emotional damage they sustained, and suffered from past emotional wounds they have not yet healed. Because it is painful to look within, these hurting people will focus themselves outward. I can promise you that this is not personal. You did not break them; therefore, you cannot fix them.
Misery loves company, but then misery breeds misery, so you learn to remove yourself from misery, and find your own happiness within yourself. The happier you are, the more miserable they become because THEY know they are not the source of this happiness. Therefore, they seek to sabotage it. As long as you are miserable, their justification for wrong behavior against you remains well fed.
Therefore, in order to “starve” their justifications, and to stop feeding their continued anger, you refuse to allow them to bring you down. You become determined to go your own way, to feel your own way, detach from their drama and let them go to be miserable all by themselves. As long as you allow yourself to continue being drawn into their drama, misery, anger, etc., they have no incentive to change themselves, because they will use you for an excuse to stay stuck in their negative emotional rut.
A negatively charged situation always becomes worse before it ever begins to become better. This is where TIME is important, because you learn to hold your ground against the midlife spouse’s control and manipulation. They, like you, have to learn they cannot have “other control”–which is control of other people, including you. You are not them, you are not an extension of them, and when you take away this “other control” from their grasping and greedy hands, you are removing their right to control you, thereby removing any emotional power they once had over you. Since you decided to let them have emotional power over you at an earlier time, it is up to you to remove that aspect, and force them to let you go, to separate themselves from you.
You are not the source of their misery, though they would seek to make you think you are. Rebellious people have to be shown that you are no longer willing to be used and abused. This comes through your protective actions that “close” and then “lock” every emotional door they have sought to hold open against you. These “locks” represent the emotional boundaries that tell the midlife spouse, and other immature people, “You can come this far, but no farther.”
Of course, when denied what they think they want from you, (the emotional ammunition for the continued justification that supports their bad behavior) they are going to throw tantrums, fling themselves against your emotional “doors”, screaming, yelling, and insulting you. Failing to succeed, they will then seek to emotionally “punish” you for daring to stand up against their clearly disrespectful behavior. However, for your own mental health, you cannot allow them to cross certain emotional lines, pass through certain emotional doors, or otherwise influence you to back down on the mature changes you have made within yourself.
People will only do what you allow them to do, and treat you as you allow them to treat you. When you learn to set limits on what the midlife spouse can do to mistreat you, you are reclaiming the power that lies within you. Long before your spouse’s midlife crisis, you had allowed them to take the emotional power within you, because you trusted they had your best interests at heart.
That is no longer the case because now, within the depths of their deepest rebellion, they are using your own emotional power against you. It is up to you, and you alone, to put a stop to bad behaviors that will hurt you, if you allow this to happen.
You are the one who will determine what you will and will not tolerate from people in the way of good and bad behavior. You do not allow anyone to take that right away from you. Other people cannot determine this aspect, unless you allow them to cross your boundaries, to have “other control” that no one person should ever be allowed to have over another.
Do not give over, give in, nor give your precious emotional power away. It will only hurt you, not the people, including the midlife spouse, who will seek to steal it away to misuse for their own selfish purposes.
Food for thought.
