Midlife Mastery Journal » family

Turning Obligation into Celebration

Les Brown — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 13:00:00 +0000

Remember Charles Dickens’ opening lines to A Tale of Two Cities? “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” These words apply to more than just Paris before the French Revolution. Welcome to the holidays! If you’re older than 5, these are the days that we genuinely love to hate. Depending on who you are, it’s either a time to squeeze an enormous amount of work into your already over-full schedule and pouring out money that you can ill afford so that you can entertain people (some of whom get on your nerves unmercifully). Or, you find yourself depressingly alone with no one to care about or for. Has the Grinch got me this year? No, not really. Only, as a student of the midlife transition, I see holidays as an opportunity for an already difficult situation to become desperate.

One of the principal difficulties with the holidays every year derives from the fact that people go into them without sufficient reflection. Isn’t this the same issue that lies at the heart of so much of the unpleasantness that surrounds the midlife transition? People (especially men) charge headlong into potentially stressful situations without forethought and without sufficient mental and emotional preparation. It’s all about your expectations, when you come right down to it, isn’t it? Somehow, you really want this year to be ‘perfect’. You couldn’t manage to squeeze out a hearty ‘Bah! Humbug!’ regardless of how much you want to shout it out. Because we as a culture have, for the most part, forgotten how to celebrate, we replace what should be celebrations with ritual obligations that, if not performed ‘correctly’ cause us shame. That’s an emotion that people in midlife can ill afford!

It’s no easy matter to transform a holiday obligation into a celebration. It requires some skills that are in rather short supply these days, I’m afraid. First, it takes reflection: the ability to go deeper than the surface, down to touch what sentiments you genuinely want to experience during the holiday celebrations. Next, it takes communication: sharing with the important people in your life your insights and asking them to share theirs with you. Unless this goes beyond asking, “Whose house?” and “What time?” and “What should I bring?”, you’re not going to be able to escape the magnetic pull of the old routine. In addition, it’s going to take creativity: having a shared vision of what you want the celebration to express and to feel like and then taking the effort for everyone to contribute her (or his) creative energies. If it’s going to be different this year, the women can’t be stuck in the kitchen while the men watch TV. Finally, it’s going to take shared responsibility: everyone doing his or her part with a sense of joyful anticipation to pull it all together.

If you really want to break the mold, there has to be a spiritual aspect of the holidays — regardless of the religious tradition members of your chosen ‘family’ come from. Saint Theresa of Lisieux wrote that if you so much as pick up a pin with love in your heart, the gesture has infinite worth. If everything that your family does to prepare for, to celebrate, and to clean up from the holidays is done with only just a little love, the drudgery and obligation of this time of year can be transformed into a real celebration. Without it, I have my doubts.

One last reflection on the holidays before I close. Most of the ‘obligations’ that you and I are so used to striving to live up to are all self-imposed. That saying ‘no’ can be an act of love appears as one of the hard-learned lessons of midlife. If saying ‘no’ does not save your loved ones from a difficult, stressful, even agonizing ritual that masquerades as a celebration, it will at least rescue you from that fate. Not only can you choose whom to celebrate with, if it’s truly to be a celebration, it becomes your duty to choose wisely and well. There is a Japanese saying that goes, “Rarely are the members of a family born under the same roof.” At midlife we get the gift of being able to separate our family of choice from our family of origin. Sometimes they’re the same; sometimes they’re not. At the holidays, once we’ve freed ourselves from external expectations and we’ve started listening to and acting upon the expectations of our hearts, the holidays may well become transformed into the kinds of celebrations that even surpass our hopes. It could happen!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

Is The Man in the Mirror a Fraud?

Les Brown — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 02:14:07 +0000

For the past few days, I’ve been reading Dr. Jed Diamond’s newest book, The Irritable Male Syndrome with rapt attention (in advance of interviewing him on my upcoming internet radio program). In my estimation, this book is required reading for anyone in the helping professions. It explores a complex of issues that work together in men to create a raging animal out of concerned and loving person. Many of these issues have been explored and addressed separately from a variety of perspectives: psychology, sociology, anthropology, biology, physiology, etc., but never (to my knowledge) has anyone brought all these perspectives (and more) to bear at one time and in one place to provide a holistic presentation of 21st Century man. In particular, he looks at 21st Century man in transition. Since change is of the essence of humankind in history, it’s a close-up and personal (and sometimes unsettling) look at us.

One of the aspects that I really like about Dr. Jed’s book is that he agrees with me so perfectly! Seriously, though, I do feel very supported and affirmed as I read such a scholarly and scientific presentation of the issues that I’ve seen at work in the midlife male, but, up until now, only verifiable by anecdotal evidence. Both Dr. Jed and I have understood that the midlife transition, when it’s misunderstood and mismanaged can lead, in the extreme, to divorce, bankruptcy, and even suicide. Men face enormous hurdles as they attempt to deal with the forces of the irritable male syndrome (IMS), so that only a relatively small number of men can make this transition smoothly. In many cases, it’s up to their life partners to understand and appreciate what’s going on, and to call upon all the love and interpersonal skill at their command to assist the man-in-transition through his period of crisis.

At this point, I think it would be helpful to look at the context where IMS in the midlife transitioning male most often first shows itself: the family. It shouldn’t be surprising that the family would find itself on the front lines of a midlife transition, because generally this is where the man’s most intimate relationships and most powerful bonds are found. When a guy’s inner world starts to come unglued, the first to notice it are those who love him. In most cases, they even notice it long before he does. The man in midlife transition tends to deal with his inner discomfort with the dual escape mechanisms of denial and blame (either ‘it’s not happening: I’m fine’ or ‘it’s not my fault: if only would change, everything would be fine’). Regardless of the opacity of the smokescreen that the midlife male puts up to hide his own inner truth from himself, it does nothing to mask his erratic attitudes and behavior from those who have to learn to cope with them. His life partner, his children, his parents, everyone who truly loves him knows that something very troubling is going on, although they’re most often at more or less a complete loss to understand what that might be.

The psychological defense mechanisms that the mind engages in to avoid having to deal with uncomfortable — or painful — truths are really awe-inspiring. Take ‘projection,’ for example. The mind has a sort of innate adeptness to project outside of itself what it fears seeing within. Of course, part of this adeptness comes from sets of, so to speak, emotional ‘raw nerves’ that cause it to pay attention to the very things on the exterior that it has most difficulty dealing with in the interior. In this way, the ‘midlife male’ sees all around him in his most intimate surroundings reflections of his own (supposed) shortcomings. He will have as much trouble accepting theirs as he does accepting his own. The root fear at midlife boils down to the suspicion that he’s not the man he appears to be. He’s a fake, a phony, a fraud. He’s grown increasingly more ashamed of the person he’s become, and his wife and family take on the role of mirror to him of his shame. The more they try to appease him, the more wrathful he becomes at them for reminding him of the person whom he fears that he really is.

Although they are simply innocent reminders to him of the person he always wanted to be, thought he could be, and tried to be (although now he believes he’ll never be), his refusal to look at (let alone accept) the truth about himself turns him into the man who kills the messenger. Sometimes disparaging their best attempts at pleasing him for falling short of the mark (an impossible mark at that), and at other times berating them for not trying (when they back away in frustration). It becomes the family version of the classical double-bind: ‘damned if you do; damned if you don’t’ or ‘I love you; go away.’

If what the man sees in his family is but a constant reminder of how he has failed, then what the family sees in the man (although they’re seldom able to put their feelings aside to recognize it) is the reflection of how he’s feeling about himself. When he’s screaming at them, that’s mild compared to how he’s screaming at himself. When he’s alienated from them, it’s only a shadow of how alienated he feels from himself. You know, I find it difficult to describe in words the magnitude of the havoc that shame can wreak in the male psyche. At the same time, when the core of a man’s self-esteem (built as it most often is on a combination of cultural bias, faulty assumptions, and dysfunctional belief systems) begins to dissolve, the principal (if not exclusive) emotional pain that a man feels is exactly that: shame.

When you move, the image in your mirror moves with you. If you weren’t self-aware (like a budgie in a cage), you might believe that your image moves on its own (the way the budgie pecks at its image, acting as though it were another bird). Yet, you are aware that your reflection changes only because of the changes in you. Look at the difficulties that you, as a man in midlife transition, may be having with your closest family members. In addition to their own individual personalities and transitions which certainly have a bearing on their behavior, to a larger extent than you might imagine, they’re mirroring your own behavior back to you. If your household was once quiet, peaceful and loving, but now has (almost overnight) seems to have become a violent contest of wills, it may not be they who have changed — it may very well be you. The ones you love may be the mirror in which you’re seeing your own reflection: the reflection of a person you may not want to meet face-to-face. Yet, this is exactly the person you’re going to need to confront, and, in spite of your fears, he’s not a fraud; but he’s not the man you thought he was either. It’s someone that you’re going to need to get to know all over again for the first time.

Learning as much as possible about the irritable male syndrome (IMS), andropause (so-called male menopause), and the almost impossibly difficult set of choices with which men at midlife find themselves confronted will help you to appreciate what’s happening to the man you love (if you’re a family member) or what’s happening to you (if your the man). Remember: knowledge is power, and understanding what’s happening (although it won’t necessarily solve everything) will at least keep you from jumping to faulty conclusions and making some desperately bad choices. The male midlife transition in the 21st Century can be very difficult to navigate for everyone. Nobody wants to see themselves or the ones they love in pain. But, the midlife transition is a process and, sooner or later, it will eventually work itself out in some significant way in spite of all the pain. You’ll find yourself in a new (but, we hope, familiar) world of your own creation. The decisions you make in the meantime will decide what that world is ultimately going to look like.

H. Les Brown, MA, FCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

Are You Part of the Problem?

Les Brown — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:17:19 +0000

If you’re in business or running a business, you’re probably familiar with the classical SWOT analysis: a survey of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats that should be used in the evaluation of any proposal for a new process or approach. If you’re at all successful, you’ll realize that these four elements of your process are anything but static: they change from day to day, and often from hour to hour. As you pursue any goal in either your life or your business, each step forward changes the landscape: often dramatically. So long as you’re the decision-maker, you’ve also got the additional burden of realizing that everything that affects you similarly affects your decision-making process, and, by extension, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that confront you.

Way too often, people just want (in the words of Larry, the cable guy) to ‘Git ‘er done!’ But, business projects — to say nothing of all the plans and goals of you life — never come at us in a once-and-for-all package. On the contrary, every decision that we make — in business or in life — has ongoing consequences. Plus, there’s one other factor that you probably discount way too often from your considerations: you. Do you realize fully enough that, whenever you make a deicision (whether or not you’re going to be the one who’ll carry it out), you are an inescapable part of the equation? It’s like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle all over again: the observer (you) change the observation simply by your presence.

What happens when you approach the ‘event horizon’ of your midlife transition? On one hand, there are all the defense mechanisms that culture and upbringing have made your most convenient ways of dealing with these issues: denial (pretending that none of this is really happening, or, at least, that it’s unimportant) and projection (trying to put the blame on people, places, and things other than yourself). How, I wonder, could you effectively process a SWOT analysis while, at the same time, pretending that some of the data don’t exist, and pretending that some of your own weaknesses really belong to your competition. For example, you could blame both the low morale in your organization and its poor bottom-line performance on the dip in the economy. "If we hadn’t had this recession," you tell yourself and your staff, "we’d be doing just fine." Really? Then, why are there organizations just like yours that are at least holding their own, if not prospering, in the same economic environment? Here’s a note to consider: fortunes were made during the Great Depression.

The midlife transition that you’re going through (or, sooner or later, will be) can very easily turn you from an asset into a real liability for every group or organization that you’re a part of: from your family to your career, to your circle of friends and acquaintances. From their perspective, it’s painful to watch someone self-destruct, especially someone with as much potential as you obviously have. Look over the events of the past few decades. History is littered with the shattered remnants of careers that smashed on the rocks, wreckage brought on by what seems like unbelievably bad decisions. No matter how famous or powerful you may be, no one has immunity from the midlife transition and all that goes along with it. Yet, your only real danger comes from self-delusion: pretending that it’s not affecting you, and pretending that it’s all somebody else’s fault (or concern).

If you’re having trouble with your relationship with your family, that’s going to have a negative impact on your performance in your career. If you’ve become bored with your career or your current job, that’s going to show up in your performance (and the quality of your decision-making). If you’re feeling tired, dispirited, fat, ugly, or old, that’s going to determine the attitude that you’re going to bring into all your affairs. When you begin to see signs that your hopes and dreams are starting to spiral out of control, rather than looking around for the causes all around you. Start by finding the common element in all these areas of your life: yourself. Begin asking yourself whether any of your beliefs or attitudes are contributing to what you’re experiencing. After all, if you want the truth: you can’t change any of then; the only one that you’ve got the full power and authority to change is yourself. What, then, are you prepared to change about yourself, and how do you plan to go about it?

H. Les Brown, MA, FCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

Can You Win the Uphill Midlife Battle?

Les Brown — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:26:50 +0000

‘The more things change, the more they stay the same.’ Have you ever had that thought? Have you also noticed that, the harder you push to change the way things are, the less progress you seem to make? Although this experience isn’t confined to guys passing through midlife (it’s a common experience for anyone motivated to implement change), for most people, the midlife transition, buy its very nature, takes the option out of change. Midlife elevates change from a want (‘I’d really like to . . .’ ) to a need (‘I’ve got to . . . ‘). At other times, and in other situations, there are plenty of ways to avoid having to deal with change as a necessity. At midlife, such avoidance has consequences, and some of them can be serious.

Sadly, our cultural expectations about how men are ‘supposed’ to think, feel and behave (refusing advice, help or support) put many guys into an emotional bind: on one hand, they confront their current path as heading nowhere; on the other hand, they lack the tools to discover or choose other viable options. As a result, the more indepent-minded a man may be, the more likely he is to adopt avoidance techniques — any of a number of self-destructive addictive behaviors — rather than surrender his cherished self-reiiance and to admit vulnerability. The resutls, if not disastrous, can result in a great deal of unnecessary pain and suffering, not only for him, but also especially for those who truly care about him.

The classical midlife crisis scenario is so avoidable. If you are frustrated facing the challenges of the midlife transition, let me assure you that the solution consists in a simple (but not easy) two-step process: 1) understand and accept the nature of change, and 2) change your mind. The miracle of this approach to the midlife transition comes from the fact that you don’t really have to do anything special. Consider this: if you keep coming up with the wrong answers, perhaps it’s because you’re asking the wrong questions! In the case of change (yes, any change), seeing the situation differently can fundamentally change your attitude not only toward the situation, but also toward your response to that situation.

Here’s an example from this morning’s paper. A woman wrote in to Carolyn Hax’s advice column about people’s reaction to her children. Her two kids, generally well-behaved, would occasionally become upset and make a scene in public. She disliked the general disapproval of the people around her. What would you do if a child were having a tantrum in the restaurant where you were eating, or behind you on the plane you were on? Think about it. Now consider this: both of her children were autistic, and, at times could become completely overwhelmed by being overstimulated by noise, by bright lights, or by the activity around them. Now how do you feel about the situation? Now what would you do? What changed? Why?

Here are the two principles of change that could fundamentally alter your approach to the midlife transition. First, trying to change your environment directly just won’t work. Whether or not you’re aware of it, your entire environment (your career, your business, your family) is a system. Besides the purpose for which it was created, every system also has an equally essential secondary function: to remain in existence. Therefore, whenever you apply pressure to a system to change, that system will push back. It doesn’t matter at all whether or not the change would benefit the system. The system will see your intervention as a threat to its existence and will resist you. I can offer you a number of good examples:

Trying to motivate a teenager to assume more responsibility in the home
Trying to get your life partner to stop doing something you find annoying
Trying to motivate your employees to be more productive
Trying to convince any group to make changes in its culture

Once you realize that you’re actually powerless to change persons, places or things (this may take some convincing, but, after enough trial and error, most people eventually get there), then the question must arise: ‘How am I to deal with a situation that I consider to be unacceptable?’ The realization that you can’t change anything outside of yourself leads you to stop asking the wrong question (‘What can I do to change this?’) and to start asking the right question: ‘What can I change?‘ Posed like this, the answer appears obvious: if you can’t change anything outside of yourself, all you have left to change is you.

Basically, for any midlife situation (or any situation at all, really), you have only three options: avoidance (self-destructive escape mechanisms), confrontation (provoking retaliation from the system), or changing your attitude and behavior to model the change that you want to have happen around you. It’s very much like the Japanese martial art called Aikido, which Wikipedia describes as, "Aikido is performed by blending with the motion of the attacker and redirecting the force of the attack rather than opposing it head-on." Changing yourself (and allowing yourself to take advantage of all the advice, help and support available to you) can result in some very surprising results. They may be surprising because it’s all too easy to forget that you’re a part of any system that you want to change. Therefore, like in Aikido, when you move, your system must also move to adjust to you. Systems also exist to support their members in self-actualization. So, instead of your system fighting you, you could actually find them becoming your support. How about that?

Can you win the uphill battles of midlife? No, and yes. No, you can’t ‘win’ (the odds are stacked against you), but yes, you can actively surrender and become involved in the process and achieve even greater results than you had previously imagined. Now, how about that?