Midlife Mastery Journal » addiction

You’re Part of a Massive Cover-up!

Les Brown — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:58:26 +0000

Yes, that’s right. It’s true. You are personally implicated in an emotional cover-up of massive proportions. You and I (and almost everyone else I know) are accustomed to calling on an ineffective, self-destructive, and basically useless emotion to cover up how we really feel. I’ve spent the last few articles talking with you about some common midlife emotions like grief and fear. Now, I’d like to talk about another one: anger. I suspect that you’re no stranger to anger, particularly at midlife! The irritability of menopausal women has been legendary for centuries, while the same condition in men has only fairly recently been identified (see The Irritable Male Syndrome by Dr. Jed Diamond). Anger is fast becoming one of the universally-recognized hallmarks of midlife (morphing later into the caricature of the aging curmudgeon).

Still, the more I experience anger in myself and others, and the more deeply I consider it, the less certain I am that anger should be classified as an emotion at all! Instead, my observations seem to indicate that anger is a pseudo-emotion, or, rather, an emotional substitute. It seems to me that we use anger as a cover-up to hide what we’re really feeling — whatever our true emotion(s) may be. When you use anger as a mask to keep people from seeing what’s actually going on emotionally with you, it provides you a secondary (but equally important) benefit: it also hides what you’re really feeling from you. When abused children (who stuff their emotions for survival) are later taught how to identify feelings, professionals often use a simple “mad, sad, glad, scared” chart to help them. Often, this chart has drawings of faces to assist in the identification. I wonder what would happen if we simply removed the ‘mad’ category entirely. I have good reason to suggest this, even for you and me, and whether or not we were ever abused as children.

I was taught a simple but profound truth when I sought help during my own midlife crisis: that anger — particularly repressed (or ‘stuffed’) anger — blocks all other emotions, positive ones as well as negative ones. That’s why, if you ever visit a psychologist who does somatic or gestalt work, you’ll invariably find a padded bat and cushion. People store repressed emotion in the very cells of their bodies. You may not be consciously aware of the emotions that are hiding there, but your body is. Very often it will tell you by aches and pains, or by succumbing to frequent illnesses or disease (note: ‘dis-ease’). When, under the supervision of a professional, people are allowed to let their body really go in a safe environment, whacking the stuffings out of the cushion with the padded bat, the first ‘emotion’ to come pouring out is generally anger. Once the anger has been released, the emotions come unblocked, and all sorts of unsuspected feelings come pouring out.

There are many ways in which we can stuff emotions. In most cultures like ours, the show of emotion can be taken by others as well as ourselves as a sign of weakness or being out of control. For many reasons, emotions are suspect, and therefore uncomfortable. Rather than identify them, face them and express them openly, we find it easier to medicate them whenever possible. These days, our choice of anti-emotion medications is very extensive, from legal and illegal drugs and alcohol, to gambling, shopping, eating, and, our hands-down favorite, TV. From our apartment window in DC, we can look across the courtyard into the building next door, and we see a huge wall-mounted TV that is running when we get up in the morning, and it’s still running when we go to bed at night. It’s never off. These days, we can scarcely go anywhere where there’s not a TV staring us in the face. Even my cell phone a TV function on it! I think we need to face the facts: ‘information’ has become simply an excuse for providing entertainment for ourselves during every possible waking moment. Why is this so necessary, if not to avoid uncomfortable feelings?

People use medications like this to avoid having emotions. Strangely enough, that’s exactly the effect that anger has on us. Anger blocks other emotions. Furthermore, anger masks what’s really going on. I invite you to take a few minutes to think about the last few times you can remember getting really angry. Can you remember the event(s) that triggered your anger (many times, the anesthetic nature of the anger itself will cause us to forget even what made us mad)? Anger is a powerful reaction. Can you think back to what you were reacting to? Now, I invite you to ask yourself, “What was causing me to have such a strong reaction?”

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that your last anger attack was a case of road rage. (Was I close?) Let’s say that you “saw white” when another driver cut you off in traffic. You know how you felt. Now, can you identify why exactly you felt that way? Was it because the other driver was ‘stupid’? No, not really. Was it because s/he behaved badly? Yet, we watch other people behave badly all the time and we don’t get upset by it. It must have been something much more personal. Did you get upset because the other driver got into your personal space? Did you see it as a personal affront and a case of disrespecting you? Were you outraged because the other driver took you for granted? Possibly. I do sometimes become annoyed when someone comes up from behind me just before a lane merge and pokes her/his car’s nose in front of me as if gaining that millionth of a second will actually accomplish something. But, generally speaking, most time you react to other people’s bad driving, isn’t it because it’s scary?

There’s my point, exactly (and it’s a point the Dr. Diamond makes really well in his book): anger is simply a convenient drug that people use to mask from others — and from themselves — what they’re really feeling. Somehow, it’s OK to get angry, when it’s not OK to feel scared, lonely, hurt, disappointed, or any number of other emotions that we’d rather not have. People in 12-step recovery are told that anger is a luxury that they cannot afford to indulge in. Evidently, derives from the fact that anger works just like any other drug: it covers up what’s really going on. And, whenever someone finds her/himself getting angry frequently, s/he will have to ‘detox’ (let go of the anger) before s/he will be able to identify what’s really happening.

Here’s something you can try, the next time you’re angry (or enraged, furious, outraged, or indignant): remove yourself from any and all distractions. Then, rather than stewing in it, use whatever methods you need to employ to release your anger (breathing deeply helps enormously). When you’ve calmed down sufficiently, get the anger-triggering event clearly in mind. Then, begin asking yourself, “Why am I feeling angry about this?” Clearly identify the new emotion that comes up. Then ask yourself, “Why am I feeling [new emotion] about this?” Do this until the real underlying reason and its accompanying emotion are very clear to you. You may not like what you find out about yourself, but that’s alright, too (we generally don’t need to mask what we find perfectly acceptable and allowable). You’ll probably come up with one of these: ‘I feel hurt’ or ‘I feel disvalued’ or (the most fundamental hidden feeling) ‘I feel scared.’

Whatever the source is, you’ll find that, once you’ve identified and faced the underlying cause and its accompanying emotion(s), you’ll no longer need to be angry and you’ll find that there’s something positive that you can do to address what’s really going on for you. Remember: nothing that you can do can change other people’s thinking or behavior. You only have the power to change yourself. By getting behind the anger, you give yourself the opportunity to do just that by identifying the underlying causes in you. In midlife, your perspective must shift from the effects that the outside world is having on you to what you need to do to behave more authentically. The most important step you can take in that process is to part the curtain of anger, annoyance and irritation and face head-on those personal issues that you might prefer not to have to face right now. I suggest that you do yourself the favor of dealing with them whenever your anger arises.

Sadly, hard experience teaches that issues left untreated remain not only to continue to haunt you, but, you pass them on to your loved ones: your spouse or partner, parents, siblings and/or children. As we enter the holiday season this year, perhaps the gift that your loved ones would most appreciate (and most benefit from) might be to stop the cover-up and to face courageously whatever issues your anger may be masking. Isn’t it worth a try?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

Midlife Narcotic Relationships

Les Brown — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:20:15 +0000

The word ‘narcotic’ doesn’t necessarily have to refer to pharmaceuticals. The root ‘narco-’ comes from the ancient Greek, and it means ‘sleep.’ In fact a ‘narcotic’ is anything that makes you sleepy or puts you to sleep. By inference, it also means anything that numbs or dulls your senses, or makes you become soporific or unaware. Like mood-altering drugs, narcotics can have a paradoxical effect, like making you feel more alive and aware, while robbing you of the ability to relate effectively with your environment. They can cause you to feel invulnerable, while you can be doing some pretty dangerous and stupid things. Oh . . . and I almost forgot: narcotics always turn out to be very, very, expensive.

Love is a drug

In 1980, singer Grace Jones recorded the hit song, Love Is a Drug. That reference to love as a narcotic can be remarkably accurate, particularly at midlife. I see huge differences in the forces that drive people to ‘hook up’ during adolescence and young adulthood as compared with what happens at midlife. Obviously, youth is made for experimentation, getting involved in new situations, or trying on a variety of relationships to see which ones might be a good ‘fit’ for creating a family of one’s own. By midlife, all this should have become ‘old hat.’ All, that is, but the desire for companionship, and the thrill of the hunt and the excitement of conquest. There’s enough of the narcotic in relationship-hunting at both stages of life, but at midlife, there’s a lot less of the ‘family-building’ motive going on. For most people, by midlife, that’s a “been there; done that” experience.

Certainly, illicit relationships (going out on your partner) can happen at any time of life. When they do, I believe that they’re always narcotic relationships. I mean that seeking or permitting a new relationship while you’re already committed to another partner always represents your attempt to medicate something going on inside you that you don’t want to deal with. For someone who’s already in a relationship to allow her- or himself to get involved with someone else, means that you’re letting yourself get ‘hooked’ on love as a drug so you won’t have to feel (or deal with) what’s going on inside and around you. Narcotics always offer the promise of pain relief. But at what ultimate cost? Nobody who’s ‘hooked’ really looks at the facts (they’ve become too numb) and recognizes that, when the drug wears off, the pain will still be there waiting for you. Even worse, when the drug wears off, you’ll have the additional pain of having to deal with the guilt and shame you’ll eventually have to face for having compromised your values. Oh . . . and I almost forgot: narcotics wind up being very, very, expensive.

I have been in a committed relationship now for over fourteen years (it took me a long time to find someone worth committing to). Like all relationships, we’ve had our ups and downs, our laughing and crying, and our shouting matches. As someone who used to have chronic relationship issues, I find myself often amazed that, although I find other people attractive, and thoughts of what ‘hooking up’ would be like sometimes show up, they’re no more attractive to me than a huge serving of [fill in your favorite grossly fattening desert here]. In both cases, I can genuinely say, “Yum!” without actually wanting to indulge. That’s what people do when they’re committed to living life on life’s terms, rather than looking for the next ‘narcotic’ escape.

Virtual Addiction

“But,” you say, “all I ever do is flirt. I’d never actually do anything about it.” I have to tell you: that doesn’t matter. You don’t actually have to consummate a narcotic relationship to have it give you the escapist ‘high’ you’re looking for. If you’re at all wise, you know that going out on your partner can be very dangerous. A messy divorce or breakup with everybody knowing all about your private business can really mess up a good fantasy. No matter how you look at it, ‘hooking up’ is really risky business. How can you get the thrill of the hunt and the ecstasy of conquest while minimizing the risk? Behold the internet! It’s private: just the two of you can know. There’s no possibility of being observed by a casual onlooker. There’s no risk of disease. Nobody (so you lead yourself to believe) will be the wiser, and nobody will get hurt. You imagine that you can medicate your problems away through this other person (or people) and thus you can have the best of all worlds.

We call this delusional thinking ‘virtual addiction.’ By ‘hooking up’ over the internet, you get your narcotic at a fraction of the price. If this describes you, you’re missing the hidden costs. While you’re busy numbing your pain (and getting high) with your virtual relationship(s), the pain that’s coming from your primary relationship is growing . . . but you’re unaware of it. In a word, a healthy, fulfilling relationship doesn’t need a narcotic to mask what’s really going on. As you experience the midlife transition, it’s normal for you to experience huge changes in yourself: how you look at your life, how you look at all your relationships, how you look at your career, how you look at your future. All these things shift — often dramatically — during the midlife transition. Regardless of the changes that are going on around you (in your spouse, your family, your job, etc.), the biggest changes are happening in you.

All those things that narcotic relationships may be telling you may be correct. Maybe your spouse no longer loves you. Maybe you made a mistake in your choice relationship. Maybe your future will be entirely different from the one you had imaged for yourself. Any or all of these things may be true. It doesn’t matter! Getting yourself involved in a narcotic relationship (physically or virtually) isn’t going to solve anything. You can look at whatever seriously good feelings you may be generating for yourself from stepping out on your relationship as just a down payment on the pain that you’re storing up for yourself. While you’re off chasing feeling good, the problems you’re escaping are busy festering and getting worse. Sooner or later, your house of cards is going to come crashing down and, strangely enough, you already know that’s true. Guilty people subconsciously want to get caught.

Midlife Mastery

If you’re involved in a narcotic relationship, what do you need to do to get ‘clean and sober’? First and foremost: tell yourself the truth. Perhaps the biggest betrayal that you’re experiencing here is your betrayal of yourself. Put aside for a time your fears of not getting your relationship ‘fix.’ Recognize that your perspective has become warped. Get a confidant in whom you can have total trust (for example, hire a therapist). Start talking out loud about what’s going on with you. You’ll be amazed how ridiculous your addictive thoughts sound when you’re speaking them aloud to someone else. Explore with your confidant all those things about your life that you’re trying to avoid dealing with. Be courageous now (in facing your fears), or go down to flaming defeat later (when your relationships blow up in your face). The choice is yours.

I’ve often said that midlife presents each of us with the opportunity to come to terms physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually with the person who we really are. It’s perhaps the greatest challenge to our courage and integrity that we’ll ever face. There are so many and varied ways that we humans can avoid having to deal with these issues; but the only way to resolve them is head-on. Every minute that you continue to use things like narcotic relationships to maintain your avoidance, you also continue to accrue emotional and spiritual interest in terms of the suffering you’re going to have to face eventually. As they tell us in the ad: “Eventually . . . . why not now?”

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

Staying Stuck – What’s Your Drug of Choice?

Les Brown — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:56:17 +0000

By now, you’ve heard Albert Einstein’s most famous quote a thousand times: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, each time expecting different results.” Today, I want to apply that saying to your experience with the midlife transition. People can easily get stuck in both of life’s transitional periods: adolescence and midlife. Yet, there’s a subtle difference between the two that makes them dissimilar: if you’re stuck in adolescence (doing the same things over and over again), chances are that merely growing into adult responsibilities may shake you out of it. There’ are few similar external forces to force you to change at midlife.

You can tell when you’ve entered the transition that we call ‘midlife’ when the strategies that you’ve been using to move forward in your career, your relationships, and your personal sense of health and well-being just don’t work for you anymore the way they used to. It seems that, the harder you work at it, the less progress you seem to be making. You begin to experience real emotional (and even physical) pain from the frustration that goes along with your increased efforts — yet, with no discernible results. Stubbornly refusing to rethink the tactics that used to work so well, your focus shifts to making the pain stop. Where do you find your relief? Whatever you’ve adopted as your principal method of stress relief: that’s your drug of choice.

When you encounter the term ‘drug of choice,’ you may be thinking of pills or needles or booze or whatever else an addict can obtain (and get hooked on) to make him (or her) feel better. You may be thinking right now, “I don’t do any of these things (too much)!” The awful problem with this type of thinking (and the thinking behind the whole ‘war on drugs’ thing) comes down to a confusion of the symptom with the cause. Once you’ve gotten a deeper understanding of what the real underlying causes of addiction are, then you come to see the symptoms in a whole new light . . . a light that many people would rather not have shined on their habits.

What’s the most pleasurable activity that you can think of? Probably, for most people, it’s sex, and, among sexual practices, orgasm has got to be right up there. Think about how orgasm works: from the beginning of sexual stimulation, tension builds in the entire organism: mentally, emotionally, and physically. There’s a lot of truth in the saying that a person’s principal sex organ is the one between his or her ears. In most cases, the longer the build up and the higher the sexual tension, the greater the release, and the higher the pleasure. We’re all aware of how sexual pleasure eclipses all other sensations in the body, including pain: a pain that can quickly return (sometimes with interest) later on!

Does this description of the tension-buildup-release-pleasure cycle remind you of anything? It should! Addictive behavior mimics this cycle again and again. Tension (discomfort, or pain) builds to a high point, the medication is applied that supplies the release, and pleasure ensues. It feels good. It’s easy (and readily available). Most often, it’s a lot of fun. You may feel let down or exhausted afterward, but your mind may very well already be looking forward to the next time you can do something similar. “That was satisfying. I’ve got to do that again sometime.”

In the normal cycle of life, people deliberately choose to build inner tension (like getting into a roller coaster, or bungee jumping, or watching a horror flick, or going into a ‘haunted house’) so that they can experience the fun of the ensuing tension release. Why do some things that used to thrill you now seem just boring? It’s because you’ve become used to them, and you no longer experience the tension build-up. No tension: no release. No release, no pleasure. No pleasure, no fun. Let’s do something else.

Here’s where the addictive monkey wrench gets thrown into the works: what happens when the tension and the release are unrelated? For the sake of argument, say you’re under a tremendous amount of pressure at work. You come home and can’t get out from under the stress. So, as frequently happens, you drink . . . maybe a lot. You feel better. There’s a kind of release. You feel the pleasure of the high. Relaxation comes. Ahhh! In the morning, you feel awful: your mouth is cottony, your mind is foggy, your head feels a dull ache and you feel queasy. You drag yourself around, dreading going back to work because . . . obviously, the tension and stress are still there, only now you’re even less up to dealing with it than you were yesterday.

My example used drinking (a very common ‘cure’ for stress), but you may seldom drink at all. However, if you’re stuck in the midlife transition, chances are pretty good that you’ve got another ‘drug of choice.’ What could it be? Here are some very common ones that the ‘war on drugs’ never thinks of addressing: working late (to avoid relationship stress), seeking out new relationships (to avoid problems at work or at home), sex (to avoid almost anything), surfing the ‘net (ditto), gambling (ditto), watching TV (ditto), overeating (ditto), shopping, and/or getting obsessed with anything you may have or do (your car, cleaning house, gardening, clubbing, politics, even charity work)!

Any pleasurable (fun) activity can be used effectively as an analgesic to mask the pain you’re experiencing in any other area of your life. Because these activities are unrelated to the source of the tension (pain), they do nothing to relieve it. It’s still there, unresolved and festering, now only with interest from whatever fallout you may be experiencing from the ‘fun’. Yet the mask is somewhat effective in stopping the feeling, so it’s a quick and easy ‘fix.’ To the extent that it ‘works,’ you’ll tend to go back to it again and again and again until it becomes, at first, habitual, and then, compulsive. Eventually, it’ll just stop working at all, and you’ll find yourself doing it (whatever it is) just for the sake of doing it. In fact, should you try to stop, you’ll probably find the tension getting even worse.

Medicating the pain of your midlife transition with compulsive behaviors only makes moving forward that much more difficult. All along, your mental, emotional and physical tensions have been growing because you have refused to change those long-term strategies and short-term tactics that no longer serve you. You’ve declined to make those fundamental changes in your attitudes and approaches that would have allowed you to begin moving forward again. Additionally, you’ve spent considerable time and energy stuffing and medicating your feelings. They’re no longer able to serve you as reliable guides for your choice-making. Finally, your misplaced relief-seeking has turned on you and left you with considerable wreckage — within yourself and in your outside world — that you now have to figure out how to clean up.

You have the choice whether or not to engage as an active participant in your midlife transition: clearing out those ideas, values, feelings, attitudes, and behaviors that no longer serve you; and doing the work necessary to enter into the next phase of your life as a renewed (and more independent) person. Or, you can attempt to use whatever drug of choice most suits you to avoid dealing with the painful tension that comes from remaining stuck in old ways of thinking and behaving. That choice is always yours. All I can suggest to you is that taking on the challenge of the midlife transition head-on, without flinching or faltering, in the long run, is the easier, softer way.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

The Heartbreak of Midlife Addiction

Les Brown — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 13:00:00 +0000

One of the most obvious signs of the onset of midlife is the appearance of those dreaded signs of physical aging. It seems to start with the hair: graying hair, hair loss, and/or hair growing profusely where it never grew before. Then there's the midriff bulges that go both laterally and fore-and-aft. There are many other unmistakable signs, like wrinkling and splotching of the skin, and so on. All these things tend to appear long before we feel the effects of the hormonal changes (menopause and andropause) that we associate with midlife. Therefore, the first signs of midlife attack us where we're most sensitive: in our self-image — our sense of health and well-being. When you start hearing yourself saying things like, "I've got to watch my weight" or "I really need to get more exercise" or (even worse) your doctor starts saying those things to you, the guessing stops: you're at midlife!

What do you do? If you're like many people, you begin watching your diet and getting involved in an exercise regimen, because you want to hang on to the appearance of youth for as long as possible. Doesn't that sound terrifically healthy? On the surface, that seems to be not only the obvious, but also the best choice, when, in fact, that could be the start of a downward spiral that very often ends up not only damaging your health and robbing you of your sense of well-being, but could also destroy your career and tear apart your family. Am I exaggerating? Not in the least! Nobody sets out to ruin his or her life; that outcome only results from a steady stream of small, seemingly insignificant poor choices that eventually lead to a bad end. We call this an error cascade: when a series of small, almost unnoticeable missteps conclude in catastrophic results. For the person entering the midlife transition, it most often begins with the mistaken belief that he or she is 'going downhill' and that somehow the process is reversible. How this one seemingly innocuous idea can lead to heartbreak represents the rest of this story, and 'getting' the moral of this story all depends on understanding the nature of addictive behavior.

Let's start with an example from recent news: specifically a study by three Tufts University psychologists (Robin B. Kanarek, Kristen E. D’Anci, Nicole Jurdak, and Wendy Foulds Mathes) published in the August, 2009 edition of the journal, Behavioral Neuroscience. What they discovered was that the famous 'runner's high' that people who exercise strenuously may experience is caused by "exercise-induced increases in endogenous opioid peptides [that] act in a manner similar to chronic administration of opiate drugs." In other words, strenuous exercise creates a neurological state that mirrors the addictive use of opiates. "Exercise, like drugs of abuse, leads to the release of
neurotransmitters such as endorphins and dopamine, which are involved
with a sense of reward," Kanarek said. Furthermore, according to a report by National Geographic News, "This brought on 'anorexia athletica' in the food-restricted running rats: They dramatically increased their running and started losing weight. In humans, anorexia athletica can be a fatal mental disorder that makes its sufferers compulsively exercise to lose weight."

Although the authors certainly recognize the phenomenon of the "sense of reward" involved in the opiate experience, I believe that they're missing the key factor that makes addictive behavior so nefarious: addiction depends less upon the promise of a "sense of reward" than it does on a fear of not experiencing that feeling. Read that sentence again, because it's very important. Addictive behavior is based less on the pursuit of pleasure than it is on the fear and avoidance of (perceived) pain. People who have become addicted to a behavior will pursue that behavior even through excruciating pain simply to avoid what they fear they'll experience otherwise. Therefore, addiction is all about fear, avoidance, denial and escape — usually from a person's own feelings and emotions.

What exactly are these 'addictive behaviors' I've been talking about? When most of us hear the word 'addiction,' we tend to think of the use of illegal substances, the abuse of alcohol or prescription medications, or perhaps compulsive gambling. We seldom think of work, sex, shopping, eating, TV or browsing the internet in the same vein. The truth is that any behavior can be addictive. It's not so much what we do as why we do it that turns common everyday tasks into behaviors that threaten our health, well-being, careers, relationships, and, ultimately, our very existence. When we insist on escaping the discomfort of leaving the security and comfort of the environment we know to embrace the insecurity and discomfort of facing the unknown, we're inviting addiction.

When we fear that our stress will become unbearable (whether that stress comes from forces outside of ourselves, or is self-generated), addictive behavior always presents itself as an attractive stress reliever. Two of the consequences of adopting addictive behavior for stress relief are 1) addictive behavior provides only temporary relief: eventually the pain of the addiction becomes worse than the pain that was being avoided; and 2) addiction stunts mental, emotional, and spiritual growth, leaving people less capable of dealing with the underlying issues (which continue to worsen during the course of the addiction).

If you're in or approaching midlife (or you're unsure but have started addressing issues related to aging), you need to ask yourself this question: "What am I doing to numb my feelings?" That's an excellent indicator of the presence of addictive behavior(s). Another equally good question is this one: "What activity in my life would drive me to distraction if I weren't allowed to do it anymore today?" Remember: whether the activity is 'innocent' or 'harmless' or not is totally irrelevant. What matters is that you're using that activity to avoid looking at some nagging issue in your life, to stuff your feelings, and/or to support or foster an unhealthy dependency.

Let's look at just three of the ways that midlife addiction can bring about heartbreak. When sex and/or relationships are used to avoid feelings, the most obvious collateral damage will be to your primary and family relationships. Rather than have to face and manage the difficult conversations and negotiations that arise in any close relationship, it's so much easier to find 'relief' in sex, porn, and spending time with people who 'understand' you better than your spouse and family members do. When you do that, you relegate those relationships to a secondary, subordinate position in your life: relationships that you'll get around to 'someday' (if ever). When your primary relationships suffer, every other relationship in your life becomes distorted: all your work relationships, as well as your relationship with yourself and your Higher Power. You lack the energy and the time to deal with the issues that are confronting you here and now, because you've allowed yourself to get caught up in a more comfortable distraction. You've become addicted.

Another common midlife situation occurs when your career takes center stage in your life to the exclusion of your primary and family relationships and your own health and well-being. "What I've sacrificed for my career" should not be seen as a badge of honor, rather a sign of an inability or unwillingness to take the necessary steps to bring balance and harmony into your life. Creating balance and harmony requires a willingness to wrestle honestly and openly with your values and your ambitions and impose a priority on your choice of how you spend your time. Keep in mind that there's always a 'road not taken,' always something that must be left behind. It's always easier to allow addictive behavior to keep you from making responsible — and often painful but necessary — decisions. Very often being a 'slave' to your job really means simply an unwillingness to take responsibility for your choices and, ultimately, the direction of your life.

The third and final example relates to those 'luxuries' that you 'owe' yourself because of all the 'hardship' that you're 'forced' to endure in your life. I've put so many words ('luxuries', 'owe', 'hardship', and 'forced') in quotes because each and every one represents an excuse that you make to yourself for getting your own way and avoiding taking responsibility for your decisions. Have you ever heard yourself saying, "You'd [insert addictive behavior here], too, if you had my life"? Using this approach, you can justify almost any kind of unjustifiable behavior imaginable. Using this logic, other people or situations are causing — really forcing — you to do things against your will. But it's hardly surprising to realize that those things you're being 'forced' to do are precisely the things that you'd do anyway if you were given free reign without any burden of responsibility. This approach is equally effective in eventually destroying your health, well-being, relationships and career because, after all, none of it is your 'fault'. In essence, "the devil made you do it!"

Midlife presents the perfect conditions for spawning addictive behaviors, because it's at midlife when the emotional 'training wheels' have to come off, and, for perhaps the first time in your life you're being forced to look seriously in the mirror at the unvarnished you. You have to come to terms with your own values and principles. You experience the need to challenge your assumptions and 'obligations'. It's at midlife when you really have to come up with an answer to the question, "Who am I and what do I really want?" For many people . . . OK for most people . . . these are terrifying questions. People, especially men, will very often do almost anything (particularly adopting addictive behaviors) to escape having to face and answer these questions, because, fundamentally, they're spiritual questions.

Addiction, particularly at midlife, is most certainly a disease, and it's a spiritual disease, at that. As such, it requires a spiritual treatment. That's why 12-Step programs (like Alcoholics Anonymous) offer such effective treatment for addictive behavior: they suggest that people give up trying to remake the world according to their own standards, get in touch with a High Power of their own understanding, clean house by addressing the wreckage caused by past behaviors, and, finally, learn to live their lives according to spiritual principles and values. Those are the very steps that every individual must necessarily take to navigate a successful midlife transition. They're also the very steps that can break the bonds of midlife addiction as well as salve the heartbreak it causes, and lead people to maturity and, ultimately, to midlife mastery.

How Do I Avoid Thee? Let Me Count The Ways!

Les Brown — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:42:28 +0000

I think that one of the biggest differences between the way women approach the midlife transition and the way men do derives from the very strong tendency that men have toward avoidance of significant midlife issues. It's also one of the biggest dangers that men face going into midlife, because it effectively prevents us from making the shifts in perception and understanding that characterize a successful midlife transition. There's a popular saying that goes: when you avoid a lesson from the universe, it will keep coming back to you until you learn it. There's a lot of truth in what 'they' say. In fact, in this case, the lessons not only keep coming back until they're learned, they get progressively worse with time and repetition. Avoidance tends to aggregate the problems, like a snowball rolling down a steep hill.

I'm sorry to have to report that I think that there are an awful lot of snowballs out there, growing at an enormous rate — especially now that all of us 'boomers' are into the midlife transition (at least). The extent of this growing epidemic is at least partially the result of the vast number of avoidance opportunities that we men have at our disposal . . . and they're growing every day. Almost anything that enhances our quality of life can also be perverted into an effective (and addictive) avoidance behavior. For example, let's take our ubiquitous computers (and related computing devices like PDF's, Blackberries and cellphones) and our consequent capacity to surf anywhere in the world for anything we desire. Push-button escapism was never so handy nor easy-to-use 24/7! Welcome to one of the newest fields of study in the universe: virtual addiction.

I'd like to introduce you to an acquaintance of mine, Dr. David Greenfield, the founder of The Center for Internet Behavior in West Hartford Connecticut. Dr. Dave is the psychologist who popularized the term 'virtual addiction' (see virtual-addiction). Essentially, a virtual addict is someone who loses himself (or herself) in a virtual world. It can be computer games, social networking, cybersex or any other foray into a computer-generated (or assisted) fantasy world. These worlds — these mental constructs — can be inescapably attractive because, one the one hand, they lack the soul-challenging conflict that can make real life so disgustingly complex and painful, and, on the other hand, they supply liberal doses of adrenaline- and endorphin-induced highs. The simplicity of devolving back to childhood patterns of pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance can be irresistibly attractive when you contrast them with the challenges demanded of us by the real world. Yet, even apart from the compulsive grip of addictive behavior (remember the rats that starved to death pressing the pedal that triggered pleasure-generating electrodes in their brains), getting stuck in the pleasure principle not only means avoiding pain, it also results in avoiding growth.

There are so many inventive ways available to a guy so that he can almost effortlessly avoid having to grow up. Virtual addiction using a computer and/or the internet represents only part of the story. There's an older, more venerable (and, at one time, more socially acceptable) means of keeping yourself safely ensconced in childish fantasy: it's called work. Obviously, work provides the necessities of life: from hunter-gatherer times, through agrarian societies, through the industrial revolution, all the way to our knowledge-based economy, work has made both life and progress possible. As such, work represents a means to an end (survival and progress). Addictive avoidance turns work (the idea of survival and progress) into an end in itself. Work brings with it such side-effects as creative expression, a sense of accomplishment, a boost in self-esteem and, from time to time, acknowledgment from others (even fame). Once again, the pleasures of achievement (like the fortunes amassed by Scrooge and Marley) become their own reward. In fact, workaholism, like its cousin, virtual addiction, brings rewards without your ever having to address the grimy nitty-gritty of the bigger picture. What's it all for, after all?

I don't know for sure, but I'd be willing to bet that most of Dr. Dave's patients are men. I'm going to say something pretty harsh here, but I hope that it's taken in the spirit of challenge in which it's given: men generally lack courage. Of course, it takes courage to face and meet external challenges. In fact, it takes even more courage to face internal ones. Most women face personal pain with resolve: they undergo the agony of child-birth (like Carol Burnett said, it's like taking your lower lip and stretching it up over your head) and they confront the discomfort and emotional disorientation of having to adjust their worldview during midlife head-on. They're not shy about admitting how they feel; nor are they too proud to share their feelings with others. That takes courage. There's really no 'high' associated with self-examination and self-revelation. There's no enjoyment of the victory or the kill to celebrate. There's no escapist pay-off for embracing maturity. The only reward that mature men and women enjoy for facing the scary prospect of feeling your feelings comes down to the unanticipated serenity of a life lived in alignment with your purpose.

What's my biggest challenge as I strive to get the message out about the most effective ways that men can manage their midlife transitions? It's that one 'stopper', avoidance. It's not so much an issue of men disvaluing my insights as it is men choosing to remain willfully ignorant of what's going on inside them. It's as if they're saying, 'If I ignore it (or cover it up with good feelings), it'll go away.' Sadly, it won't. As I said at the beginning, like a snowball, the avoidance simply compounds the immaturity and the resulting problems become gradually worse, until they explode in the loss of a relationship, the loss of a family, the loss of a career, or a breakdown in your health. By then, the consequences of a midlife crisis are unavoidable, and you're into damage control. Here's a challenge, guys: e-mail me and let me know that you've read this far (and congratulations on your courage for having done it). If you've reached this point, it means that you've got the courage to look seriously at your feelings and behaviors. The rewards for your bravery will be greater than you may have imagined!