Creative Edge
Counselling for Mid-Life: An Overview
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Life as a Story
At Creative Edge, we look at life as a story, with a throughline - a beginning, a middle and an end. What happens at the beginning of the story lays the foundation for what happens later. There is an authorial reason for telling the story, and, in the end, it all is of a piece and makes sense.
In your life story, you are both character and author. As
author you create circumstances that give your character opportunities to advance the
plot. As character you have a role you are meant to play, but that you have the free to
refuse to play.
As long as you as character exercise your free will to ignore or decline what you as author are asking of yourself, the story of your life stalls.
You get on with your life when you as character realize that the
reason you are given your free will is to surrender to your soul’s desire, when you
learn that doing what you are meant to be doing is the key to having energy,
enthusiasm, satisfaction and the sense of living a meaningful life, that your pain and your suffering arise out of your resistance to
doing what you are meant to be doing.
The Nature of Mid-Life Crisis
Within our culture it is understood, often without saying, that the overriding task of the journey of the first half of life is to gain mastery over your environment. This requires the development of an ego with an intellectual grasp of how the world works, so that outcomes can be predicted and choices made in order to serve the pursuit of personal goals.
But what do you do after you've gained' mastery of your environment? What is the task of the second half of life? Unfortunately our culture doesn't provide good answers to this question. In our culture the first half of life is celebrated as a hero's journey, while the second half of life is more often than not depicted as consisting of little more than a series of diversions designed to distract people from the harsh reality that they are deteriorating both physically and mentally, and that, eventually, they will succcumb to the grim reaper. With deterioration and death as the only prospect to look forward to, it's little wonder people get depressed at mid-life.
During the second half of life, the primary task of life is to give up control and instead give over to what life wants from you. This willingness to give over flows from a visceral understanding that the most satisfying and meaningful exercise of free will is to surrender it. In the second half of life the question becomes "How am I meant to serve?" rather than "How can I benefit?"
One way to think about the turn around between the first half of life and the second half of life is to think about life as if it was a football game. If life is a game of football, then mid-life is half time, the point in the game when the ends switch and it's time to carry the ball in the opposite direction.
Mid-life crisis is the crisis that arises as the ego comes to the end of the first half of life and seeks a vision of the second half.
Navigating Mid-Life Crisis
In the Creative Edge version of the second half of life, there is a primary task we are meant to accomplish and that task is as important and meaningful as the task of the first half of life. The challenge: to relinquish control and surrender to doing what you are meant to do, whatever that may be.
Mid-life issues do not emerge full blown until the goals of the first half of life have either been achieved or abandoned. Generally some work on reaching personal goals is needed before tackling the mid-life issues head on. This involves rejigging your model of how the world works where that model is inadequate or skewed, and developing and consolidating the life skills you need to achieve personal goals.This aspect of our work is very similar to the services provided by many other counsellors and coaches.
There are at least two ways to know what life is calling us to do: passion and circumstances. Passion is an inner experience. Circumstances involve what is happening around us. For more on passion and circumstances, click on NEXT>>>
Cirmcumstances - While the author cannot force the character to accept a particular path, the
author can ensure that the alternative routes are dead ends while similar opportunities to
advance the plot keep opening up. If your plans never work out, if similar issues and
circumstances keep resurfacing in your life, it is fair to assume that you have been
rejecting opportunities to get on to the next chapter in your life.
• to use our skills
as psychotherapists to help you recover your ability
to feel your passion so that you know what you
want from the inside,
without having to rely on a test.
• to use our skills as coaches
(1) to help you read the circumstances
of your life for what life is
asking of
you; and
(2) to work out the practical steps
required to answer life's calling
• to bring coaching and psychotherapy together within a perspective that
values
the care of the soul and a relationship to
something larger than yourself.
The Change You Need May or May not be Career Related
Connecting with your passion and aligning that passion with your calling comes out of a process of personal growth and development that goes beyond issues of work and career.
Often
what the process reveals is that the dissatisfaction that brings you into
counselling
is not rooted in your work and that a career change is not going to solve the
problem.
Even when work is the problem, we regard career change as a remedy to be resorted to only after other options have been explored. We start by looking for ways for you to derive greater satisfaction from your existing work.
And sometimes a career change is exactly what is needed.
For
more on Identifying Your Passion, Click NEXT>>