Discover why midlife reckonings and relationship explosions aren't sudden, they're the collapse of somatic holding patterns when "I'm Fine" runs out of road.
I think most of us know when someone says ‘I’m fine’, they usually aren’t. Certainly I can think of a few scenarios where I have said it and I have been majorly pissed off or so sick of a situation I am actually out the door completely disengaged and never coming back. I wonder if in myself it is a fawning response sometimes or an extreme case of apathy. Sometimes it's also when I am super tired and have no energy reserves to take an issue somewhere.
The ‘mechanics’ of the ‘I’m fine’ scaffolding are often built on fawning, over functioning and emotional suppression and it leaves a huge debt. Every time someone swallows a boundary, silences a desire to keep the peace or ignores a trauma response, they are taking out a high interest loan against their own nervous system.
This debt can hold for years and in some cases decades until a capacity threshold is reached and the body falls apart. This shows up in many different ways. There are event based triggers and hormonally driven triggers.
Digital image, Kellie Stirling, Woman externalising her psychic scaffolding as it breaks apart.
When you look outside the midlife and matrescence events, the scaffolding breaks down whenever the nervous system’s capacity is reduced or or the loan is suddenly multiplied. Some events I have observed over the years with clients include:
Illness or injury. Physical vulnerability strips away the energy required to ‘over function’. When you cannot take care of everyone else, the suppressed rage of having taken care of everyone else's needs but your own, for years, can explode.
Grief and loss. The death of a parent or loved one can destroy our illusion of control. Grief demands so much nervous system bandwidth, there is literally zero energy left to over perform accommodation or fake harmony.
Burnout and professional rupture. Sometimes people reach the top of their career ladder only to realise the ladder has been leaning against the wrong wall. The body collapses, ‘the workaholic’ management strategy scaffolding is revealed because achievement stops numbing the internal emptiness that exists.
The Parental Mirror. This can happen at any age. Watching a child hit a particular developmental milestone or experience something you never received from your caregivers can trigger a big collapse because our inner child’s unhealed grief is exposed. I have seen this happen with 28 year olds and 50 years olds. There is no specific point of trigger here, it seems to be the experience.
What happens when it is a hormonal trigger?
When we go through big hormonal changes, such as those experienced in child birth and menopause, the nervous system can receive a big shake and all the stuff we pushed down into the basement of our psyche comes popping up. It definitely happens to many women during menopause and I always think that in many ways we are lucky to go through this transition because it forces us to face reality and do some deep inner exploration. I know some of you reading this won’t agree but what I have come to learn through my professional training and my work is that the body is very wise and at some point it will bring it all up. The developmental challenge of midlife is ‘come back to the truth of who you really are’. There is wisdom in this, don't you think?
It is true that in the midlife season of life in particular, old stuff usually comes up to be resolved, more than other life seasons. Simply because the body has been squashing it down for years. Smoothed over with the ‘I’m fine’ response and it hits a limit and up it comes. It is a capacity issue and it can happen to all of us because the cost of pretending outweighs the body’s capacity to hold everything in. The armor cracks, whether through illness, grief, childbirth, or simply the unbearable weight of one too many swallowed boundaries.
For those of us around someone going through this it can be overwhelming and scary when we don’t understand what is happening. I think what is helpful to know is that often it is not ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’, but often, the 40 tonnes of hay that were loaded onto the truck that we didn’t have the capacity to hold in the first place.
If you need some support, come talk to me. I specialise in working with people navigating life transitions, and I am deeply invested in helping you understand the body’s somatic truth, emotional capacity and the physics of human suppression.