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Mid-Life Transitions for Women

by
Martha Orrick, Ph.D.
Clinical Psychologist

About Martha
Some time around 1985, Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs sent out an invitation to present at their annual Women’s Life Festival.  I was just starting to build a practice as a psychologist at the time and could use the exposure, so I figured I’d better come up with a topic.  I was then on my third or fourth career, having gone back to school at the age of forty to finish my undergraduate degree before taking on the doctorate.  I didn’t feel like much of an expert on anything but I knew I had some personal credibility when it came to life changes, late vocations, and taking a flyer without being sure where you’re going to land.  This talk is the result.

The word “transition” means “going across.”  Crossing over from one place to another.  Being neither here nor there, but traveling.  Some transitions are predictable, scheduled.  These are the so-called “normal crises” of adult life:  leaving home, getting married, having babies, having the babies grow up.  Other transitions are forced on us, out of season, when a spouse dies, or we suffer an accident or a divorce, or our financial structures crumble.  The tempo may not be the same, but both kinds of transitions present us with tasks.  They bring us grief and they bring us growth.  They bring us losses and they bring us opportunity.

Daniel Levinson, whose work on adult development gave us “The Seasons of a Man’s Life” and, later, “The Seasons of a Woman’s Life,” talks about the “life structure.”  By that he means the pattern of a person’s life at any given time, the network of her relationships with people, places, groups, or institutions – even with symbols, as in religious commitments.  Where she has invested herself and her time.  He sees this life structure as evolving through a sequence of alternating periods of structure building and then of structure changing.  We put a life together and then we take it – or watch it fall – apart.  A structure building period ordinarily lasts about five to seven years; a structure changing, or transitional, period about five years.  Think about that.  If his observations are correct, then we are in transition almost half of the time.  Stability is not the norm.

I’d like to underline that, because the implication is important.  If times of change are as normal as times of feeling settled, then taking a new direction is no sign of having failed at the old.  Periods of change can, and do, involve losses, but this does not necessarily mean that what is being left behind as we cross over was either irreplaceable or a mistake.

It is characteristic of the transitional mood that it calls the existing life structure into question.  Is this really the work I want to do?  Is my marriage all that it could be?  The roles I fill, are they authentic and rewarding?  If we remind ourselves that these times of questioning reoccur, like the seasons, in our lives and in the lives of those around us, then perhaps we can avoid the waste of guilt or blame.  Reappraising a marriage at the age of forty may not mean that you should never have married him; it may just mean that you’re turning forty.

A structure building phase has an inner and an outer aspect.  It involves more than the choices of relationships, activities, and time commitments; it is also characterized by the construction of a coherent, dependable sense of self, which provides us with a certain amount of psychological safety and continuity.  We are pretty sure we know who we are.  One of the unsettling things about transitions is that we lose this sense of inner stability.  This is especially plain in many mid-life divorces.  I can’t tell you how many women have sat in my office saying that they don’t recognize their husbands – or themselves – any more.  The man they thought they knew could not possibly have had an affair; the woman they thought they were could never have contemplated suicide or been swept by vindictive rage.