Must couples in trouble necessarily fail? No, not necessarily: no healthy couple is doomed to failure. In fact, the only ‘doomed’ relationships are those where one or both partners are unapologetically physically or emotionally abusive . Without a doubt, the only realistic option for someone who finds her- or himself in a fundamentally abusive or exploitative relationship is to exit immediately. Apart from that, I believe that many (if not all) relationships “on the rocks” could be healed under the right circumstances. From my perspective, the fact that this healing so often fails to take place could be an indication that one or both of the partners have stopped listening. Additionally, ceasing to listen indicates a spiritual problem. Let me explain.

It would seem that the  person who hears another’s voice, but is no longer committed to listening to what the other has to say has given up on her or his partner, as well as their relationship together. If you look more closely, however, it soon becomes clear that the person has actually given up on him- or herself. Empathetic listening and appreciative inquiry represent a three-fold choice: 1) to accept the other, 2) to trust the other, and 3) to engage with the other. Closing off the lines of communication also represents a choice: to cease accepting, trusting and engaging with one’s partner. Before I relate this to fundamental spiritual principles, let’s look briefly at each choice.

The choice to accept another human being is foundational. True acceptance represents a fundamental option to see in the other person another self, with exactly the same sorts of strengths and weaknesses that we ourselves possess. This choice to acknowledge the other person as another self  has two destructive opposites. The first perversion of acceptance we call ‘exploitation‘. Philosopher Martin Buber contrasts these approaches with the terms I-Thou (for true acceptance of the other), and I-It (for exploitation). To see your partner merely in terms of his or her usefulness (like a tool or a piece of furniture) or her or his capacity to satisfy you represents a fundamental denial of humanity on your part. The second perversion of the choice to accept your partner shows itself as conditional acceptance. In brief, “I’ll accept you if you do such-and-such or so-and-so.” Conditional acceptance of another puts you in the position of being their judge, jury and executioner. In fact, it represents nothing less than your attempt to usurp the position in your partner’s life properly held by God alone.

Next, let’s look at the choice not to trust your partner. Why don’t you trust her or him? Because you’ve been hurt before? The refusal to trust your partner goes way beyond self-preservation. Once again, it is passing a judgment of condemnation on another person — another self — who exhibits the same sorts of faults and failings that you yourself exhibit. In fact, if the truth were known, the faults and failings that you find most easy to condemn and most difficult to forgive in others are the very ones that you exhibit most strongly yourself. In fact, the two keys that are absolutely essential to unlocking both acceptance and trust are these: first, to acknowledge an identical humanity in both yourself and the other, and, second, to commit yourself to the path of unconditional forgiveness. Who cannot look at the plight of even the most desperate of people around us and not be able truthfully to say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I?” The greatest message of Christianity — and also, I’m afraid,  its most forgotten and neglected — is simply this: unconditional, unlimited forgiveness. If you cannot forgive unconditionally, you cannot trust for very long.

The final choice is the choice to engage with your partner. If you refuse to engage with her or him, you thereby give credence to the (Jungian) ego’s false belief that you are vulnerable and need protection. It’s the same force that drives people’s frantic searching for that illusive (and illusory) ‘security’ that they believe will fix everything and protect them from danger. Once again, it would be foolish to put ourselves in harm’s way by engaging with an abusive partner. We owe it to ourselves and to them to take the necessary precautions so as not to allow ourselves to become victims of deliberate abuse. However, if you imagine that refusing to engage with your well-intentioned partner will grant you some sort of immunity from harm and from hurt, you are mistaken. Do you believe that spiritually you are invulnerable and that nothing outside of yourself — not even death — can destroy the essence of you? “Greater love has no one,” we have heard, “than to lay down his life for another.” Oddly, dieing for someone can actually be a whole lot easier than living for them.

Finally, what does the choice not to listen say about that person’s spiritual condition? The testimony it gives is nothing short of damning. Personally, I would liken it to what Christians refer to as the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ or the ‘unforgivable sin.’ Here’s what I mean. Whenever I write, I use the terms ‘acceptance,’  ‘trust’ and ‘engagement’ as  synonyms for what are called the ‘theological virtues’, namely: faith, hope , and love. The ‘sin’ against faith is the decision not to accept the will of God exactly as we encounter it in our world. The ‘sin’ against hope is the choice not to trust that our only Source of genuine security is divine providence. The ‘sin’ against love is the refusal to become meaningfully engaged with those we were sent to serve: our fellow creatures who, along with us, share the “image and likeness of God.” If the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ is a refusal to believe that the love of God is powerful enough to forgive us (and so we refuse to ask for forgiveness, and therefore refuse to accept it), then turning a deaf ear to someone we once claimed to love is a ‘sin against love’, for, as we know, the opposite of love is not hate, but deliberate indifference.

What can you do if you find yourself failing to listen? Remember the futility of protecting yourself. What can you protect yourself from? Even more importantly, what are you protecting yourself for? After all, your mission here in this world is not to try (futilely) to keep yourself safe. It’s to share with your fellows (and especially those in relationship with you) the same kind of acceptance, trust, and engagement that your God has shown to you. God hears his people’s cry . . . can you do any less?

And what about you who find yourself ‘learning to love one another’ and your words keep falling on deaf ears? You, too, have the opportunity to pass on the love of God. Your acceptance of the other can be renewed continually. Your trust of the other need never fail or fade. You may stand ever at the ready to engage. However, engagement (love) requires reciprocity. God does not condemn, so how could you? God does not constrain, either (because love can never be forced), but rather waits for all eternity for the other to emerge from his or her isolation and re-engage. You can have the willingness to re-engage, whether or not the other ever seeks it. You may never re-engage as you once did: time and the world goes on while the other chooses to isolate, stagnate, or (what’s worse) repeat the same self-defeating choices and behaviors with other partners. You, on the other hand, have the opportunity to accept and trust and engage with people at every stage and every condition of your life: people who, like you, have chosen to listen not only with their ears, but with their hearts.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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Today, I’d like to share with you the (always-tentative) response that I seem to be getting from my six decades of  reflexively auto-dialing a universal ’411′. It seems — to the best of my ability to understand the answer — that the universe and all it contains is nothing but a mega-University that’s only function is to educate Consciousness (in all its known and unknown iterations) in just two interrelated subjects: what I’m calling the Two Great Lessons of Life. I won’t keep you hanging there in anticipation. The First Great Lesson of Life comes down to this: learning how to love. The Second Great Lesson of Life is its complement: learning how to let go. That’s it. That’s all there is. Once you’ve mastered both subjects, you’re ready to graduate. If it were only that easy.

We were all born selfish. You may know that in biology there’s what they call the ‘recapitulation theory’ that suggests that every life form goes through all the stages of evolution on its journey from fertilized egg to viable organism. I have no idea whether or not that’s exactly accurate, although there does seem to be a general pattern observable across all forms of life. It seems clear to me that at least human consciousness in its earliest stages develops along the lines of how consciousness emerged on this planet. At birth, our consciousness makes a giant leap forward that takes the developing distinction between “me’ and ‘mine’ to a whole new level. Birth can be seen simply asa quantum leap in the ever-increasing viability and independence of the organism. Early life outside the womb closely parallels life inside: the infant remains totally dependent on its care-givers for all the conditions necessary for its survival. From that point on, the nascent person must assume ever-greater responsibility for his or her own independent existence. Life begins with the understanding that I must get what what I need in order to survive. I learn to value who I am and what I have been given. ‘Love’ and ‘need’ start out life as synonyms.

As I lead you through this ‘recapitulation theory’ of mine, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to reflect back on your own life’s experiences to see where the crises you’ve encountered indicated ‘sticking points’ in your own evolution. If you try, you can see how they imitate the earth’s plate tectonics: the plates in the earth’s crust push against each other and their energy imperceptibly builds until, at one random moment, they suddenly become unstuck and shift — sometimes with catastrophic seismic results. Each of the crises in your own life represents a seismic shift across every aspect of your life: physical, mental, emotional, relational, economic and spiritual.

If childhood can be defined as that epoch of life during which we learn to take care of ourselves and to become increasingly self-reliant and responsible (we gradually take on the responsibility of  providing for our own survival) then that life transition stage that we identify as ‘adolescence’ must be that period where we are forced by nature and culture to confront our own self-centered self-interest and begin very tentatively to open ourselves to others as well as to the Other. It’s the time when we learn to both value and care for others above and beyond our own selfish needs, even our own need to survive. Love and need split apart in adolescence’s tumultuous soul-quakes. The adolescent transition from childhood to adulthood takes on the features of a transformation.

Learning to love . . . learning to accept unconditionally, to trust unconditionally, to become fully engaged with another . . . committed to another. These lessons of love take a long, hard time to learn because the real lesson (that love is a choice, a decision) only begins when the ‘other’ love — the emotional surrogate of love — starts to fade away. Love is what’s left after all the needing and wanting has dissipated, been satisfied or disappointed.

My first prayer as a young man entering the chapel on my first day in the major seminary was: “Lord, teach me to love.” That was the prayer of a foolish youth who didn’t understand that the prayer to learn to love, like the prayer for patience, is one that’s always answered and always in startlingly unexpected ways. “Greater love has no one, than to lay down life itself for another.” What they don’t tell you is that it’s much more difficult to live for others than it is to die for them.

Just as some people never quite learn the ‘independence’ lesson from childhood, others never quite get what it means to love selflessly. There’s a type of grieving involved in every act of true love, because it means letting go of all of our expectations. We want to be loved back, to be unconditionally accepted and trusted, to have someone somewhere somehow commit unconditionally to us. We feel as though we need that affirmation of self: if we don’t receive it, we’ll just die.
But, we don’t fully receive it — we don’t fully give it either — and we don’t die. Instead, we learn life’s Great Lesson number one.

Then comes midlife. Just when we think we’ve gotten our Master’s degree in loving, life turns the tables on us. We positively freak out when we first turn to that page in the book of life’s instructions that our parents and our whole culture and upbringing gave us for guidance and we read, “Everything in this book may be wrong.” Here begins life’s Great Lesson number two: letting go.

Letting go begins with relaxing our death-grip on our opinions, starting, of course, with everything we were once so certain and sure of. Today, on the other side of the midlife divide, I am certain of very few things. As certain as I am that there exists a universal Truth, I am equally certain that I will never fully know or understand it. And, as far as God is concerned, the God of my understanding has been replaced with the God of my lack-of-understanding. In fact, all that I really need to know about my God is that I am not he. Everything else is open to interpretation. In life, as both Martin Buber and Karl Jung so clearly saw, there is an I (a Self) in constant dialogue with a Thou (an Other) and, as with all true dialogues, meaning is always given by the receiver, not the giver. Contrary to popular belief, what God said is relevant only in regard to what we actually heard and understood.

The crises of midlife arise from the difficulty that each individual has letting go of the certitude that we hold with regard to our beliefs and opinions. At midlife, we are brought face-to-face with the great transcendental ideals that Plato and Aristotle proposed: absolute Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Unity, and we begin to recognize that we in this world enjoy only their analogates: relative goodness, truth, beauty, and unity. We will never know (nor can we as humans really adequately even understand) such things as Life, Love, Security, Health, Peace and Freedom. The famous midlife crisis is the struggle that we wage against having to give up our pretensions to these Divine attributes. When the crisis is over, we find that we have let go a little bit more of our pretensions to the divine. The answer to the great question, “Why me?” (as though we had some divine right to Life,  Love, Security, Health, Peace and Freedom) is always the humiliating, “Why not you?”

Our topic today of the Two Great Lessons of Life has brought us to the understanding that all of life is, in fact, one great process in two distinct stages: learning to let go of self (what we call love), then learning to let go of everything else (what we call death). It makes me think of the Jewish proverb that says: Shrouds have no pockets. All of this lifetime of learning to let go is just preparation for the Great Letting Go that silently awaits each of us. Like all lettings-go, life’s Great Lessons involve grief in (at least) five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. How you think about death and how you feel about the lessons that life is handing you right now, today can be very good indicators of where you are in the learning process. The more you learn to let go, the more grieving there is. The more grieving you do, the farther along you progress toward acceptance. So, where are you?

And, just a final word to the wise, if the Roman poet Horace was right when he wrote, “Non omnis moriar” (“I shall not wholly die”) — and I believe he was — then whatever letting go and whatever grieving you don’t get done in this life, you will carry with you into the next. That’s just something to about it.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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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

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I’ve been working on a program to help guide people who are recovering from a serious (perhaps painful) life experience and are having trouble getting back up on their feet. It gave me the opportunity once again to explore the grieving process. Keep in mind that almost all life transitions result in the grief process, not just the physical loss of a loved one. Whenever change occurs, something must be lost, in order for something new to be gained. That ‘something’ that is passing away has, at least for a time, been an integral part of you. In the context of midlife, there are many things that we value highly that pass away so that full maturity can emerge. Those things that age takes away can be deeply missed.

As I went through Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ famous five stages of grief, I noticed how each of the four preliminary stages, in its own way, represented a refusal to accept the loss that is staring you right in the face. Certainly, you can see it in denial, where the mind simply refuses to allow the reality to sink in: “This can’t be happening.” In anger, you rage against what’s going on in a futile attempt to force it to stop. “I won’t allow this!” Once the anger has played itself out, then comes bargaining where you try more gentle coercion techniques to try to buy your own way. “If I do this, maybe that won’t happen.” Finally, depression represents the full impact of the refusal to accept things the way they are by turning the frustrated energy inward against one’s self. Depression, they say, is anger turned inward. “It’s useless; I give up.” How does fighting against the facts make the midlife transition more difficult?

We’re all familiar with the term ‘aging gracefully,’ and most of us manage to accomplish that — at least occasionally. But we also have those moments when we find ourselves leaving some youthful aspect of ourselves or other behind after much kicking and screaming. You may not be aware that those midlife tantrums of yours are just another form of grieving. Whether you’re prone to moments of not ‘acting your age’ or becoming enraged at yourself or others when your performance doesn’t live up to your expectations, or trying to replace some facet of your life with another piece that just doesn’t ‘fit,’ or even just turning yourself into a ‘couch potato” . . . it’s all your way of refusing to accept things as they are.

When you try to use these grief modalities to fight against change, you’re probably not fully aware that you’re simultaneously fighting against growth. Can you imagine what your mouth would look like if your body refused to lose your baby teeth? I’d guess it would look really bizarre. The same is true with your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual growth: unless you allow the old and used-up parts of you to be sloughed off, there’ll be no room for the growth that’s coming.

Take, for example, what happens with all sorts of addiction. Because all change involves loss (to make room for the new), all change also involves pain. Pain is never punishment; rather, it’s your Higher Power trying to get your attention so that you will make the choices necessary to support the change that’s happening in your life. People who are prone to addiction, however, are determined to fight against the pain by using whatever is available to medicate it. When people medicate the pain associated with growth, the growth doesn’t happen the way it was meant to. It becomes stunted, like the stem of a plant trapped underneath a rock. The growing pains only increase, and the addict has to increase his or her ‘dosage’ to counteract it until, at some point, the pain caused by the medication itself becomes unbearable. Yet, even after the addict has been ‘detoxed’ from his or her drug of choice, the unaddressed growing pains remain, only so much worse now, because they’ve been neglected for so long.

Make no mistake: the human mind is the most powerful force in the universe. You can fight against the facts as much as you want to and for as long as you want to. You can use any modality at your command: denial, anger, bargaining, depression,  — even medication — to ward off having to face change. That won’t stop it, however, and it certainly won’t make things any easier for you in the long run. The more you fight against it, the harder you’ll fall when you run out of steam. Your mind in denial may be the most powerful force in the universe, but the energy required from you to keep reality at bay is so great, that, sooner or later, that great power will just poop out. The universe’s energy is inexhaustible; yours just isn’t. If you’re fighting the facts about anything — particularly midlife — just pray that you give up before you give out. Refusing to accept the transition into maturity isn’t a cause worth dieing for.

Look around you. You’ll see people in various stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. Some of these people are still fighting against the change from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. They’re grown-up kids, enmeshed in adolescent naivety and rebelliousness. Then there are those you can identify who are trying to re-live their adulthood with new jobs, new houses, new cars, new wives or husbands, only to avoid the unavoidable midlife transition to maturity. If these people only knew what they were missing!!! I’ve said over and over again that maturity is that stage of life for which everything else has simply been the prelude. If you’re stuck in a stage of grief, take a look at what you’re struggling to hold on to, then let go! You’re fighting a losing battle against your own best interests!

I’m very fond of writing in my articles about the midlife transition. The term serves my purpose to separate the idea of change from one stage of life to the next (adulthood to maturity) from the popular conception of a midlife ‘crisis.’  Transition implies change, but it doesn’t necessarily mean traumatic change.  And yet, the word ‘transition’ is not the most accurate word that I can use to describe what’s happening. Midlife involves much less of a ‘transition’ than it does a transformation, and, regardless of how easily or well-done that transformation may be, it will necessarily involve dying a little bit and therefore, grief.  You don’t have to go through a crisis to feel pain, and you don’t have to suffer a tragedy to experience grief. Here’s how it works.

When we talk about a transition, we are referring to the way that we move from place to place or condition to condition or stage of life to stage of life. In that sense, midlife is certainly a ‘transition.’ It’s the time of life that we move from mere (self-interested) adulthood to full (self-possessed) maturity. However, midlife is much more. Just like in adolescence, midlife is a time of transformation. Transition implies a change of place; transformation refers to a change of being. When an entity changes in the sense of transformation, it has to leave behind part of what it was so that it can become something different. That’s exactly what people experience at midlife: when you transform into full maturity, you necessarily need to leave behind you huge chunks of yourself that made up the ‘adult.’ In that sense, you can never go home anymore (any more than, as an adult, you could go ‘home’ to childhood).

Although there are parallels between the transformation from child to adult and the one that takes you from adult to maturity, there are big differences, too. Childhood is a time of apprenticeship for life, and, by the time we reach the teenage years, we’re more than anxious to leave that stage behind to experience the full emancipation that comes with being an adult. At midlife, however, we enjoyed being an adult, and the benefits of maturity are often well-masked beneath the veneer of aging. People in our culture generally approach midlife with a sense of anxiety, at best. What we were anxious to leave behind in our transformation from child to adult, we’re not sure that we want to let go of, going from adult to maturity.

Consider the trap that awaits the adult on the verge of maturity. There are many things about adulthood that are wonderful: the physical strength and stamina, the sexual drive, the capacity to endure hardship and high stress with few obvious consequences, the thrill of new relationships, new commitments, new experiences, new opportunities, new challenges, all leading to a new sense of empowerment and self-esteem. What’s not to love about being an adult?

Now, contrast that with what the adult understands about maturity. She or he sees physical decline and fatigue, a blunted sex drive, the onset of chronic illness, stale relationships, breakups, boredom, an uncertain future, a sense of renewed dependence, all leading (it appears) to a sense of weakness and obsolescence. What’s not to dread about maturity?

Behold the mental and emotional trap! Although both adolescence and midlife involve a transformation that requires us to leave something behind, the losses involved in adolescence is masked with the opportunities to come, while the losses that come with midlife are heightened by our perception of the perceived decline that we will have to face. That’s why, at midlife, we begin to feel the pain that arises from a sense of acute loss. We grieve the losses of midlife in a way that we never grieved the losses of adolescence, although both changes involved a for us a little death. In fact, it’s only at midlife that most people really begin the process of grieving for the loss of childhood ‘innocence.’

I’ll repeat what I said before: every change — every transformation — involves a death, a loss, the consequent pain and entrance into the grieving process. Every time we lose a part of ourselves, a part that we loved and valued, we have to undergo the sometimes-painful process of letting it go and leaving it behind. Although these little ‘deaths’ are very necessary (they make room for whatever is yet to come), they exact a price.

That’s why it’s so important to begin the conscious entry into the midlife transformation by understanding and embracing your grief. As Elizabeth Kübler-Ross demonstrated, grief has five well-defined stages that each person passes through at his or her own speed. When we understand what’s happening to us during this transformation, it begins to make more sense and we gain the opportunity to work with the process rather than fighting it or denying it altogether. Only when we can appropriately grieve our perceived losses at midlife can we more clearly see the less obvious but extremely significant gains that maturity brings to us. For those of us on the other side of the ‘midlife divide,’ it seems that what had to die (and to be grieved) from adulthood was a small price indeed to pay for the spiritual, mental, and emotional gains we’ve made since moving into maturity.

Every change is a little death. Every death is followed by grief. All grief is a process of surrender that we must walk through to get to the other side. The surrender of what has been — and what might have been — to what is and what will be constitutes the essence of faith in a Power greater than ourselves that will unfailingly carry us through each ‘little death’ and into every new phase or dimension of our human existence. This ‘passover’ that we experience in big and little ways every day of our lives serves as our promise of constant renewal (at an ever-deeper level of our humanity), regardless of the apparent cost. The great Truth that midlife serves to teach each one of us who is open to listen and learn is that in our surrender of what was or might have been, we will find our hope for what will be.

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

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