It happened to me the other day when I was on holiday on my own. I was sitting on a beach, sun hat on, book in hand, and I found myself watching the young families around me and realising I no longer fitted in. More than that, I didn’t really know where I actually did fit in. I imagined them looking at me and thinking – if they thought anything at all – that I was some sort of remaindered woman, husband-less, child-less, sitting reading like a washed-up former heroine of a novel.
It was a “moment”. But, then again, over the last six years since I turned 50, I’ve been experiencing so many “moments” that it now feels pretty much like a constant buzz of dis-ease within me. I have, over the years, turned from someone who is generally prone to happiness and a sort of sustaining optimism, to someone who feels somewhat irrelevant.
Now that my identity as a working-mother-of-four-young-children has gone, I feel, in a nutshell, “lesser”. I feel as though I am in the shadows, fading into invisibility, which leaves me asking: who am I? How do I, and so many women in their late 50s, deal with this feeling of being not only irrelevant, but disconnected from who I always thought I was? What adjustments need to be made? Is it possible to make peace with our emergent selves, without seeing ourselves as lesser or irrelevant?
As a therapist, I speak to women in their 50s who put it another way: they talk of being “othered”, of not knowing who they are now that they no longer fit the traditional archetype of carer, mother, worker, friend, daughter. They are the same person, they are still present, and yet their psyche seems to be elsewhere. The discomfort, even shock, this creates stems from a feeling of not being able to locate that psyche.
“The ‘self’ I had feels as if she no longer exists,” one client told me, “and that she will never come back. I find it very frightening.” She spoke of feeling irrelevant to herself and also to others. “It’s as if I have lost my foothold.” She described how ostensibly nothing on the outside had changed – she runs a sector of a well-known bank and is an effective manager. She is married. Her children have just left home. “But it’s not an empty-nest thing. It’s more than that. I just don’t care about myself or about anyone and I am exhausted and nervous nearly all the time.”
Another female client, 55, spoke of how she found herself feeling scratchy and irritable with pretty much everyone. “It’s as if this other person is emerging and I don’t know who she is, but she’s short-tempered and unpleasant and cantankerous.” She told me her friends would usually describe her as a happy, kind soul. “Where has that person gone?” she asked, obviously in deep distress.
It is pretty terrifying to find that you are no longer the person you thought you were. Another client described it as being shot by a bullet that has shattered into so many pieces she had no idea which parts of her were still intact and which were broken and damaged.
As a therapist I have heard this many times. This loss of self – of feeling irrelevant not just to others but also to yourself – is a deep wound in women. But I have always thought this was to do with being sexually attractive – and the perceived loss of this as we age. However, I have come to realise that this isn’t strictly true. My own sense of invisibility, even to myself, has stopped me in my tracks at times and it’s not about my physical body. It’s about wrestling with a side of me that I had previously denied – a side that could be described as “shrewish”. This gnawing, stinging, nervous scratching in my soul has finally made me realise that not only have I actually managed to feel unrecognisable to myself, but that I have done this to myself. Somehow all the parts of myself I have hived off for so long, the shadowy bits, have finally invaded all parts of me, leaving me reeling as to who I actually am now.
As my friend Rosa, 59, put it: “Who I am now is a very difficult question to be asking myself at an age where I thought I’d be settled, serene, looking forward to my older years – and then wham!” Her feeling is that she has, over the years, started to see herself as being “eroded”. “I find myself not liking myself very much,” Rosa continues. “It’s as if the part of me that was joyous has disappeared and in its wake is something a bit faded and not very recognisable as being me.”
Psychologist Susie Orbach suggests our tendency to “other” ourselves can be about our lack of experience when it comes to taking care of ourselves – especially after decades of looking after others. “I think it’s important to ask yourself: ‘Is this an inability to take in the caring that comes towards you?” she says. “The ‘needy’ self is disdained and turns into the critic that then turns against the self.
“The channels of giving,” she says, “which come out of the person’s own neediness and identification with the needs of others, are overworked, and the channels for receiving are underdeveloped and unused to taking in.”
Some psychologists and philosophers – Carl Rogers, the founder of person-centred psychotherapy for one – would say that we are relational and that our sense of self intersects with that of others. If, then, we start retreating from society or find ourselves incapable of taking in care and support, we have nowhere left to go but into the denied parts of ourselves. Jung called this our “shadow” self for obvious reasons – they are the bits of us we don’t like. In fact, we might dislike them so much we have made them unconscious – we don’t even know they are there until, shockingly, they come out and rock our world. This effectively means we are actually turning inwards on ourselves, as Orbach suggests. We cannot bear the idea of being “needy” so we turn against who we are. Worse still, we only have ourselves to blame.
Many of my clients express feelings of despair and even revulsion when they look at their circle of friends; they feel they no longer belong, whereas they used to feel secure in these attachments. The recurrent refrain is: “I don’t fit in with them any more.” Many find themselves in a strange limbo: the self exists in a void, hovering somewhere between post-children and pre-ageing and death, leaving us feeling untethered, even afraid.
Relationship coach and author Greg Wheeler refers to Maslow’s five-tier hierarchy of needs, which are physiological (food and clothing), safety (job security), love and belonging (friendship), esteem and, finally, self-actualisation.
He says that once our lowest needs are met, the self-esteem part is often defined by our behaviour patterns with others ie getting our needs met by giving to others.
“It is typical that how we feel about ourselves, and our sense of self-worth, is dependent on how we feel others feel about us. This includes the usual stuff, such as family and friends, but this self can become untethered in later life as the tectonic plates around us shift.”
In essence, as we age the loss of, or change in, key relationships sets us adrift from those who could meet those needs. Thus the slowing down of our lives gives the darker elements of our self a chance to come to the fore. This can create feelings of loss of safety, purpose, value and identity, and feeling lovable.
So what can we do about this? What seems vitally important is to find some deep acceptance of self and, more importantly, to love our new, emergent self. Psychotherapist, author and trauma specialist Gabor Maté maintains that the people who truly thrive (in whatever shape or form) are those who are able to adapt. For those of us who find ourselves othered, or feeling irrelevant, or othered – all such harsh words – we would do well to embrace our mutability; we are not set in stone as people, so perhaps now is the time to go with the flow of where we seem to be going. That may mean learning to love ourselves and who we are becoming, even if that feels alien to who we feel ourselves to be.
“I see this as potentially a call to action to love ourselves in ways we never have before,” says Wheeler, “replacing the love we tried so hard to get, miss so much, and were dependent on receiving from others, with our own self-love. This form of self-love is where we work to know our true feelings, needs, desires, and passions and then honour them by embracing them, sharing them, and enforcing boundaries. We can then acknowledge that we are lovable, amazingly perfectly imperfect – just as we are.”
