You Can Usually Tell A Woman Is Having A Midlife Crisis By These 5 Signs, Says Clinical Psychologist
panitanphoto | Shutterstock No organism stays the same throughout its lifespan, and as they say, the only constant is change. I talk about midlife often, as I work with many clients at this stage of life as a clinical psychologist, and I’m in this stage of life myself.
The idea of a midlife crisis gets a bad rap in the popular media, although I am of course the first to say that any major life change should be processed and explored in depth to prevent impulsive decisions that harm others.
You can usually tell a woman is having a midlife crisis by these 5 signs:
1. She feels a strong urge to figure out what truly fulfills her now
When you’re in the thick of finding a partner, parenting young kids, getting established in your career, and becoming financially stable, you are completely consumed minute to minute with this important work of early parenthood. You don’t have the time or mental space to think about the deeper meaning of what you’re doing with your days.
When kids get older and more independent, and you don’t feel as much pressure to make money or solidify your place in your chosen field, you end up with a lot more time and brain space to think. Often, one of your first thoughts is whether what you’re doing moment to moment in your life is truly reflective of your deeper values, goals, and priorities.
2. She feels lonely in her marriage
Alex Green / Pexels
When you are in the stage of parenting little kids, issues with closeness and intimacy in the marriage are necessarily deferred. There is no way to both parent little kids and have deep, introspective conversations regularly. It is evolutionary that both parents focus on the care of vulnerable offspring. However, when your kids get older and start spending a lot of their time at school, with friends, and doing activities with peers, it starts to become very obvious that your marriage is disconnected.
The constant noise and bustle of small kids means that you can’t have much of a conversation at dinner, kids crawling into the bed makes intimacy more sporadic, and vacations with little kids are focused on kid activities. But when there is time and space for conversation, connection, and spending time together, and you STILL are unable to make this happen, or it feels awkward when it does happen, you feel slapped in the face by the loneliness in your marriage that was obscured before.
3. She questions whether her career still fits the person she's become
Some people, in fact, never enjoyed their career and viewed it as a necessary way to make money to survive and provide for themselves. Others used to enjoy their career, but find it monotonous and unfulfilling after years or even decades.
If there is nowhere else to go in your career, you may feel trapped and stuck at the prospect of doing the same thing every day until retirement. If you were always trying to get to the next level of management, you may be disappointed by the politics at play in upper management and cynical about the very nature of higher-level administration at any organization.
Or you may no longer feel that you are a “fit” with your career, because you have changed deeply over the course of the past decades. Many therapists are no longer interested in the same issues that interested them when they were training or earlier in their career; for example, I used to work primarily with young parents and discuss issues related to parenting young kids.
This is no longer as personally salient to me because my kids are teenagers. If I were working with clients on issues related to baby sleep and postpartum depression all day, it would be difficult to remain as interested as I was in these topics when I was younger.
4. Her body and brain are begging for years of deferred self-care
Yan Krukau / Pexels
It is extremely common to defer self-care, including going to the doctor, exercising, treating mental health issues in therapy, getting a handle on substance use (like drinking), treating chronic pain, and more, when you are in the thick of the small kids stage of life. There aren’t enough hours in the day, and you end up kicking very important cans down the road.
Enter midlife, when you no longer have as much energy to power through pain and mental/physical issues. Many people are shocked by their bloodwork at their yearly physical, or by a flare-up of back pain, migraines, or stomach issues. They always had these issues, but flares were brief and easily managed.
At midlife, you are struck by how much your physical health changes, and any issues that you were denying, ignoring, or minimizing threaten to disrupt your daily life functioning. This is a wake-up call for many people who are faced with the limits of their own mortality and resolve to focus more on staying healthy for themselves and their children.
5. She is looking at a financial reality that doesn't match what she's been telling herself
For some people, midlife is a respite from the financial anxiety of youth. You have increased net worth and stability, and can take a breath and look around, as discussed earlier. However, for other people on the other end of the spectrum, midlife is a moment of financial reckoning. They think they are doing “fine,” but when they sit down to think about paying for kids’ extra activities, camps, and eventually college, they realize they have underestimated how solvent they are, and were denying/minimizing how much debt they accrued.
Sometimes, one partner getting laid off, a parent not leaving you the inheritance you had expected, or, of course, the partners divorcing, can lead to an epiphany about how irresponsible the couple had been with money over the years. A lack of financial literacy coupled with a head-in-the-sand approach to money can lead to sharp regret about money in midlife, and panic about how to move forward. Other people have a different epiphany: they have been overworking and now no longer believe that money is the solution to everything.
If these resonate with you, you are not alone. These are all common issues that clients discuss at midlife in therapy. There are no easy solutions to any of these, but clarifying them and discussing them more objectively with a therapist or coach can allow you to create a cohesive life narrative, understand what can be changed in your life to allow for more fulfillment, and give you an understanding of what got you to this place so that you can move more intentionally in the second half of your life.
Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten, aka Dr. Psych Mom, is a clinical psychologist in private practice and the founder of DrPsychMom. She works with adults and couples in her group practice, Best Life Behavioral Health.
