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

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