Women in Midlife Crisis
While common knowledge usually accounts for all the signs of midlife crisis in men, we rarely see any mention of midlife crisis in women. Does this mean women do not have it? Or do they have it in a different way?
Psychology Today identifies midlife crisis as a phenomenon indifferent to gender, or even age. It is often called midlife crisis precisely because it usually occurs in the ages between 40 and 50, but as you will see midlife crisis is actually a complex psychological problem that actually originates from childhood.
Midlife Crisis
In today’s psychology we come across a term called ‘chaos kid’. This signifies a person who never dealt with her own childhood problems. The problems of abandonment, abuse, neglect, insecurity, and any other traumatic or bad memory they have from their childhood, connected with their parents or their environment.
When these ‘chaos kids’ grows up and have kids of their own, they transfer all their negative emotions, impressions, and childhood traumas to them. So, these now new ‘chaos kids’ are infused with not just the negative emotions and behavior, but with the representation of everything negative their parents lived through in their own childhood.
This proves to be too much for a young mind, and creates an even more severe traumatic effect than in the previous generation. These traumas affect certain parts of the brain, like the amygdala. This part of the brain plays multiple important roles in our thinking, emotion, and reasoning, as we will explore ahead.
Let us look at an example of a second generation ‘chaos kid’, like the one described previously. Imagine everyday events that come in to her life. Now, events that happen to us do not have any meaning for us, until they are registered by the amygdala because this part of the brain is the one that attaches meaning to everything we experience, every event. It is also responsible for memory, decision-making, and emotional reactions.
This is normal and nothing out of the ordinary, but since the amygdala has been traumatized in this person’s childhood by events and problems that have not been dealt with, it contains painful memories of negative emotions and events.
That traumatic sense of negativity inside this person’s head attaches those memories and negative feelings from his past with current events. And, since the memory and emotion is negative, the amygdala sends out negative signals to that person, telling her that current event is something bad. During this process, the brain is shut down and unaware of what is actually happening, due to eminent danger of something negative, and defense mechanisms are coming in to play.
Now, instead of rationalizing and examining the reality of the situation, the brain of this ‘chaos kid’ imagines a scenario where current events will lead to the old negative outcomes, she knows all too well from childhood. She plays this ‘movie’ inside her head all the time and affects this kid’s nervous system.
Now, the nervous system only recognizes the signals the brain sends it, it cannot differentiate if they are justified or not, and so it reacts as it should when confronted with negativity or an eminent negative event.
That kid’s nervous system then produces a series of bad feelings, such as fear, physical pain, anxiety, and similar stressful emotions. And, those emotions are fed back to the brain.
Upon receiving those negative emotions, the brain gains a negative belief. It has a negative expectation of the outcome of the current situation, and causes that ‘chaos kid’ to have a bad attitude towards it, such as to be rude, defensive, and even aggressive.
It is then when that ‘chaos kid’ will be aggressive towards her environment, towards her friends, family members, spouse, and even her kids, repeating the same mistake her parents made.
Women in Midlife Crisis
So, from all this we can extract that if you do not feel comfortable in your life, feel irrational fear or doubt in everything that is happening to you, and always expect the worst out of every situation, these all might be signs of midlife crisis, i.e. problems and traumas from your childhood.
If you then try to rationalize your thoughts and feelings, and you still feel the same way, you should try and learn more about your problem by perhaps consulting a professional or educating yourself.