THE METAMORPHOSIS FROM BOY/MAN TO MAN: TOWARD SELF-RENEWAL
Posted on 2009 under Men's Health-Erectile Dysfunction | No CommentThe mid-life crisis is a time of metamorphosis. It is a time when the American male crosses the boundary line that separates the boy/man from the man. But as we have seen, this critical turning point not only offers new opportunities, it also poses new dangers. To resolve the crisis a man must first appreciate what the crossing really signifies.
“Beyond question I found myself at mid-life in a radical crisis,” writes Sam Keen, author, editor, and teacher, in an autobiographical memoir. “My emotional capital seemed exhausted. My past looked infinitely richer than any future I might create. Depression lurked and easily invaded any empty moment. I had either to surrender to despair or mourn the death of my old life and find some way to begin again
“For many months I was a victim of bitter confusion. And then gradually my struggle to create or discover a new life began to take form. I came to the realization that I was living out a myth that gave my pain, conflict and dislocation a meaning. With a sense of relief I now understood the central message of the Christian myth: You must die in order to be reborn.
“I had been living the story of the hero who must descend through the dim winter light into the underworld of chaos and pain before he can spring up into the miraculous light of the ordinary. Through discovering that the myth which informs my life with meaning involves the belief that all life is a process of beginnings without end, I found the terrors of the mid-life identity crisis becoming transformed into an adventure.” So too for other men in their middle years: Surmounting this crisis demands a transformation of beliefs and a change in attitudes. This in itself is a monumental undertaking that requires a man to revise his definitions of what it means to be a male, an adult, and a human being. There is a profound connection between what we expect and what we get in life; and our expectations include what we believe about human nature and about ourselves.
Mid-life is a time for transformation. It is the time for a man to change what he believes about himself from negative and self-denying to positive and self-affirming. It is the time for him to redefine the facts of life and enlarge his sense of possibilities.
One of the major challenges facing this generation of midlife men is to break out of the masculine mystique. Macho values that require a man to be tough, competitive, and always in control turn out to be boyish virtues. After forty they fail to sustain.
It is hard work to be manly in the traditional way, and it is too confining. Men are as capable as women of a broad range of feelings, but the mystique will not allow a man to reveal the depth of his inner experience to himself or to others. Thus he is obliged to hide much of his real self, to repress his real feelings. Fearful of exposing weakness or vulnerability, he must be continually tense, guarded, and armored. Such emotional repression is dangerous and self-destructive. It causes a man to lose contact with his inner self and with reality.
Worse still, because the conventional male role carries with it a chronic burden of stress, it may be a factor related to the American male’s shorter life span. Today it is becoming obvious that many apparently physical illnesses have a psychological and, ultimately, social root. Heart disease is an illness that belongs in this category, and it is time we recognize that fact. There is strong evidence, as we have seen, that Type A behavior—a composite of our society’s most admired male traits—too often leads to premature death.
To surmount the mid-life crisis, then, a man not only needs a new definition of masculinity but a new definition of health and sickness as well. Masculinity in the old sense is predicated on too narrow a base: the work role. Defining a man primarily as a producer and an achiever leads to a sickening way of life. Ironically, though, being manly also makes it difficult for a man to recognize when he is sick. Trained to ignore his feelings in order to pursue his goals, he is less sensitive than women to inner signals that tell him that all is not well. Tuning out these inner distress signals until they can no longer be ignored, he is unlikely to heed the signs of his own sickness until the lethal aspects of his manly way of life have brought him to the point of total collapse.
At mid-life when a man is forced to confront his mortality and recognize that his years are limited, it is vital that he learn to take care of himself in wiser ways than the masculine mystique allows. It is time for him to recognize that he is neither a machine nor superhuman. It is time for him to let go of heroic imperatives in favor of more humane values. The life he saves may be his own.
The American male has been conditioned to experience himself in negative ways. He has been conditioned to accept a static view of what it means to be an adult—rigid, inflexible, and in decline. And in accord with most Western religious doctrines, he has been taught that human nature is essentially evil, that man is doomed from the start.
We are partly creatures of our own images, and these images have practical consequences in terms of how we live and the choices we make at mid-life a man’s beliefs about himself—and about what is still possible for him—tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Thus if he believes that he is devoid of free will and that nothing he does can alter or improve his life, the odds are that his actions will be futile. Similarly, if he believes that aging is a curse that congeals the self, that life is all downhill after forty, the odds are that for him it will be.
This matter of self-fulfilling prophecies relates not only to how a man views himself in particular, but also to how he views the human potential in the larger sense. To make significant changes at this stage of life he must first believe that change is possible. More fundamentally, he must believe that human beings are sufficiently creative to make meaningful choices throughout their entire life span.
Implicit in the new concept of adulthood proposed by developmental psychologists like the Yale group is a vision of human nature that differs radically from the one we have become accustomed to. This vision comes from many different sources: From Eastern religions, existential philosophers, humanist psychologists, and psychoanalytic thinkers. What is emerging from these combined sources is a more positive view of man’s inner depths than that proposed by Freud. One basic difference is that whereas Freud conceived of the unconscious primarily as a storehouse for repressed memories from the past, theorists like Jung maintain that possibilities for the future—seeds of growth—are also contained in the unconscious. This change in emphasis has resulted in a more optimistic vision of human nature, whereby man is seen as possessing an inherent capacity for growth and change.
This view of man as an evolutionary creature with an instinctual need for purpose and meaning, a creature capable of assuming responsibility for his own life, became the basis for the human potential movement in the 1960s. Today that movement has expanded considerably, in scope and impact, to include a wide variety of disciplines and therapies, both Eastern and Western. Now known as the consciousness revolution, it is unified by the central belief that man can achieve self-transcendence through increased awareness of the physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of his existence.
Convinced that we have underestimated our capacity to lead open, evolving, and meaningful lives, a growing number of Americans are joining this revolution to explore new avenues for personal change and renewal. Like some of the men we have heard from in this book, they are proving that an affirmative view of the human potential is valid. They are proving that people can reshape their own future continually, regardless of age. They are proving that growth is a lifelong process, that a person’s capacity for self-development does not diminish through the years. Accepting this vision of what it means to be human is a prerequisite for surmounting the mid-life crisis.
Adult growth is more complex than that of children, obviously, and more painful too. It is a normal process but not an automatic one. When Jung said that human beings strive for wholeness, he emphasized that this striving had two aspects: It is a natural process,, on the one hand, but it is also work— a task to be accomplished. Similarly, Erikson stressed that each developmental crisis could be resolved for better or for worse. Growth is a risky business. More disturbing still, it is disturbing. The process of growth includes stages where a person feels despondent and in despair.
Here again we need to revise our definitions of sickness and health. In the adult, anxiety and depression often accompany inner growth. Those tormenting emotions are in fact in- I herent parts of the process. On the surface such symptoms may look deceptively like illness, but if they are treated like pathology the possibilities for growth will be undercut.
Psychic pain, like physical pain, is a sign that a person’s way of life has lost its meaning or become sickening. At mid-life such pain usually means that it is time to move on, time to discard old beliefs, old habits, and old values that have been outgrown, in order to find new ways to restructure one’s self and one’s life. The challenge is stimulating but scary. It beckons a man into unknown territory, both within himself and without. Moving from the old to the new is not likely to be quickly or easily accomplished. There will be a time of not knowing, a time of conflict and confusion.
This will be agonizing to endure unless a man comprehends what is happening within him. More important than the particulars of this crisis period, the specific issues we have already examined, he must understand the growth process itself—especially its~deafh-and-rebirth aspect. This is a difficult concept to grasp because it is alien to our industrial culture and our scientific way of thinking. By contrast, in many other societies where the metaphors for life and time are taken from the natural world, crossing from one life stage to another is ritualized by rites of passage that symbolize a death-and-rebirth process.
Traditionally the rites of passage had three phases: (1) social disengagement and psychological dying; (2) a time and a place of isolation outside familiar boundaries, which anthropologist Arnold van Gennep called “the neutral zone”; and (3) psychological rebirth and social reintegration.
What seems like sickness or personality disturbance during the mid-life crisis is comparable to the experience in archaic cultures of being in the neutral zone. This meant a vigil in the wilderness, usually a forest or desert, where the person was exposed—utterly alone—to the terrifying powers of the psyche and the universe. This was supposed to be a time of access to visions and voices, a time when life-turning discoveries could be made. But it was also a time of terror and chaos.
Recognizing the perils of this passage from the old to the new, archaic cultures understood that the pull of the unknown future can be frightening. They therefore prepared people for this experience of lostness and dread that is so often felt in the midst of profound change, and helped to ease them through it. In such societies, too, the initiate not only realized that his ciders had survived but also that new opportunities awaited him on the other side of the passage.
In our culture no such preparation and no such promise are offered to those who experience a similar kind of psychological death and rebirth. Lacking such supports, the American male must maneuver the painful mid-life passage on his own. He must recognize that the terror and turmoil that he feels are not signs that he is going crazy. Rather the feeling that everything is falling apart, that the old ways are futile or meaningless, is a prelude to self-renewal—or rebirth. It means that the metamorphosis is under way. New beginnings and new adventures lie ahead.
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