Understanding the Process.

Your partner is changing. Don't take this change personally. We all change, over time everyone needs to be able to shift with life. What makes this process difficult for partners is that mid life crisis will often force you to deal with change outside your own natural timing of change.

The process of joint change is far more complicated. Since in crisis, all checks and balances are tested in a relationship. Every aspect of the relationship: workloads, expectations, family support structures and other aspects will teeter about and shift.

So a basic part of the issue is: in reflection of your partner changing, it will force some change in you. The questions can quickly shift to become: Are you ready to change? How much are you willing to change to balance out the situation? In changing to help you partner, are you actually hurting yourself? Just because your partner is transforming doesn't mean you have to change. Yet, chances are no matter how you handle this situation; you also will discover yourself in a new light.

This is a very delicate dance!

An Insight:

Don't take your partner's change personally.

Because the process forces you to change also, as partners we often take mid life crisis personally. This means often times we impose our own judgment, fears and desires upon our partner. In doing this you can actually accelerate the process, often to accelerate your partner away from you. After all, in trying to define their change in your own terms you can easily force them further away from their own change.

You can work on your own change within this process, but be sensitive to how you impose / share your own fears and judgments upon your partner. They are in a delicate state of mind. It takes very little effort to step on a mine in a minefield, likewise, it doesn't take too much effort to step on deeper issues within your partners hidden internal spirit, issues that are coming to the surface now that the midlife crisis is stirring up the spirit.

This process takes patience, awareness and kindness.

We change side by side, not in lock step with those we love. Freely flowing in the love of becoming more!

What is Crisis?

If you partner is truly in the middle of Mid Life Crisis, then it has the potential to become a time when you are literally living in a falling house of cards.

Think about an earthquake for a second, when the earth changes and rocks. You don't stand in the middle of the house in an earthquake, hoping the house will protect you. You run for the door to either stand outside of the house or in a doorway to protect yourself from falling debris. After the earthquake is over you can go back in and fix the house.

A person experiencing mid life crisis is literally having an earthquake of the soul. Little stable ground exists inside them to act as support at such a time of inner shift.

Some pointers to help you start.

1. Help shift the crisis into transformation. Crisis is about breaking, the more you re-enforce crisis, the more likely your relationship will break from the crisis. Instead approach this as a process of transformation. Transformation isn't about breaking, it's about change. If you help your partner transform, it helps smooth out the breaking aspects of change and you will have a higher likely hood of being able to repair any relationship problems as a result.
   
   
2. Don't hold on too tightly to your partner. The harder you hold on to them the more likely their change will break you in reflection, or cause inner turmoil for yourself to be set off. Also the harder you hold to them, the more you reinforce the crisis and inner earthquake aspects of the process. Hold on enough as require keeping yourself and other family members together. Hold on enough to help balance your partner as required, but not too much to take the brunt of their lashing out.
   
   
3. Since a partner is in part a reflection of ourselves, you will have to find peace in shifting also. Otherwise you will internalize the stress and take on the pain of mid life crisis yourself. It will be equally important for you to be extra pro-active in your own health practices, and look towards movement practices such as yoga or Qi-Gong to help re-establish your own equilibrium.
   
   

Who is your partner now?

All preconceived expectations quickly disappear in this state, and a person can shift moods, emotional state, and personality very quickly and unexpectedly at this time.

The person you thought you knew, is not who they are now.

In effect you are with a younger person rediscovering and re-establishing themselves.

This means not to only treat them like the person you knew, but to also begin a new relationship with the person now growing up in your life.

In effect you are having three relationships at once! One with the person you knew, one with a person experiencing crisis and one with the new personality growing out from the crisis! This is why marriages often fail in Mid Life Crisis. Most marriages are based upon expectations and memories of the past. Mid Life Crisis re-shifts and changes all the rules, as the person is in transition. Their desires and definitions are shifting as they change in the crisis! As a result marriages can and do break. The simplest way to help to prevent this is not to base your marriage on expectation or the past. Be forward thinking and make new rules for your marriage and help discover a new partnership in exchange.

For many people this can be the chance to re-vitalize their partnership / marriage! But by definition to re-vitalize, it will mean to drop old expectations,  truly shift and jump in to something new!

Also be very aware, you may not like the new person evolving from the crisis. While we can help mold a person slightly at this time, the more you do so, the more you actually can hurt yourself and them in the long term. Trying to mold a person at this stage just introduces new problems to be dealt with later in life.

The stories of mid life crisis, are often that the person will leave the marriage or relationship. Yet it should be noted, it's as equally valid that at times the partner not in crisis might leave due to the situation evolving into something that doesn't fit your life.

Kindness

In this whole process: Kindness is one key step which I teach. Kindness is important for everyone involved. In helping another person transform, don't forget to be kind to yourself.

Take care of yourself!

It's like when a plane is crashing and the oxygen masks fall down. You don't place the mask on the other person first, instead, first take care of your mask which then lets you take care of others... This is a similar situation.

One common pattern is after helping a person change, is to take on too much pain. To take too many emotional bruises during the act of crisis can be very terrible. Don't take on pain to a point it becomes destructive to yourself.

Be kind to yourself, take care of yourself in this process of crisis, because if you can't take care of yourself, how can you expect to help heal another person?

Understanding Karma.

In working with crisis at times the process is made more complicated, since, the issues being worked upon can go deep and be a result of multi-generational problems.

At times, it's hard for anyone acting as a healer not to use their own perspective to overlay upon another person. When we see a person going down a path that will hurt more, we want to help. Empathy is part of being a healer or being with someone you love. Ironically, the emotional pain can actually form the baseline for the healing they need.

It's important not to push your partner too hard and cause them more hurt which they wouldn't be able to recover from!

The bigger issue is that at times pain runs deeper than you might realize. This is when Karma is part of the issue. When Karma gets involved then it's never a simply straightforward business to heal. Often times we have multi generational issues happening within a Mid Life Crisis. Mid Life Crisis can be a time when a person will begin to shed off family issues and problems from previous generations. Once you get into this territory, the healing process is more twisted and often passes its way through generations to resolve.

This means when Karma is involved people hurt themselves more for larger reasons that go beyond just them. Healing in these cases can span the spirits of several generations... This means focusing help or healing upon the one person won't directly work since it's missing the larger picture of balance. This is something modern healing practices often miss in their healing methods.

So be aware of Karma and multi-generational issues when helping your partner.

This also means to be careful on the timing of when you heal a person. If you heal a person before they are ready, they will often re-injure themselves or lash out at the person healing them. This is done subconsciously but on purpose to re-instate the pain driving the mid-life crisis process. When the pain is from generations, the wounds are deep. Just making things better at the surface can cause larger issues to surface which are more difficult to resolve if approached in the wrong manner.