Reflecting on your former self

Fascinating question and I'm not sure I can answer it straight off so I'll more or less dive in and see where it goes. The stages I recognise, mainly from myself, my parents and my children (and now my grandchildren <3), are sort of like this table. Each stage is distinct, but the heavy black lines represent major transitions, the others more minor ones. Note that there is a lot of overlap in the age ranges, because we are all different and different people move between these at different rates.



For me, the actual rows are not the key to understanding this once we have understood the significance of each stage - it's the boundaries between them that matter, and for each of us, our lives are profoundly affected by how well we transit these boundaries. At stake is our mental, spiritual and physical well-being.

In particular, the heavy black lines represent significant physical and psychological changes that seem to be hard-programmed into us. Our health, or at least our peace of mind, can be severely affected if we don't make the passage successfully. The old idea of Rites of Passage at key stages of our lives captures this idea very well at least in terms of significance. I've seen people suffering a lot because they fail to make an effective transition. The big ones that are maybe peculiar to our age are

• People who try and stay at the irresponsible Young Adult stage until they are in their 40s, but biology will always inexorably win that battle and leave a lot of psychological wreckage. Jung's work is filled with the consequences for folks who don't make that transition successfully.
• People of my sort of age (early 70s) who try and stay at the Late Mid-Life stage instead of coming to terms fully with our mortality and likely declining fitness and health.

But before I go further, is this conceptually the sort of scaffolding of our life stages that you had in mind Slant?

 

Yes, I got that OK

This was to try and set a context of stages and transitions that we all go through, though of course our individual circumstances, choices and experiences will all be greatly different. For example, I became a fairly senior middle manager within the computer department I worked for in a large Pharma. At one time, the HOD job (next level above me) became vacant and I interviewed for it - up till that time I'd risen slowly up the management ladder. I didn't get that job, and was amazed at how relieved I was - it would not have been a good experience for me, and I relaxed into accepting my then level, which I enjoyed, and which I could do well, till I retired. I was 50, and in terms of the diagram starting to explore the boundaries between early and late mid-life - carrying on trying to live the Hero myth would have been pretty bad for me. That experience would have had very different significance if I'd been, say, 29 at the time.

 

Just taking things on a little more, I think that the stages of my life that have had the most profound impact on me were when I had responsibility for caring for someone who was unable to do it for themselves. This is a very powerful experience which certainly changed me irrevocably (I've described some of this before in the forum). There were our two children of course - now 37 and 42 . You are never the same after experiencing the dependency of your own children as they grow up - you have all the hopes you hold for yourself, but they are projected onto these free independent spirits that have to make their own way in the world. Harder has been dealing with my wife's severe episodic psychological problems and sharing her distress and suffering without going under myself, which I nearly did. She first became ill when we had children below school age, and it was a nightmare. It's why I recognise people in the forum so readily who have boundary problems because that's when I had to learn the hard way how to find and manage my own boundaries. More recently - in my 60s - I cared for my father who developed dementia over several years. We didn't take care of him physically most of the time because he went into a care home, but I dealt with all the aspects of his medical care, his finances, made sure he was safe, arranged care for him, sold his house when he went into care, visited him regularly and watched him slowly fading away. There's something terrible about judging when to intervene and take a bit more freedom away from someone with a degenerative illness like that. A year or so before he went into care, I had to stop him driving for example because he was no longer safe but would never have stopped of his own accord - but that lost him the freedom to leave home by himself, shop for himself, go to church on Sunday. It was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. I'd Just got him into care and sold his house when the medics mucked about with my wife's psychological meds and 3 months later she was in the most desperate condition and ended up in hospital for 3 months. That took nearly a year to sort out all told, so I got an extra year of hands on carer responsibility after I got dad sorted and a trashed digestive system with all the stress and anxiety of it.

These are very testing experiences, and of course the focus is on the people who need care, not on you as the person responsible for providing a lot of it or making sure it's there. This is a terrible but valuable experience - good for the soul - but you do need to learn how to take care of yourself. It's valuable in so many ways not least of which is that for me, the problems we had in our 30s and 40s acted as counterpoint to my job, which could be quite demanding. Lots of people face the risk of becoming their career and losing their identity in it - this could never happen to me because the challenges I had at home were so different and even more powerful. I might have gone under with anxiety and stress of course, but this sort of experience is definitely an antidote to the risk of becoming possessed by your occupation, which was never an issue for me like it was for some of the folks I worked with.

I can map all this into two different stages of my life journey. My wife originally became ill when we were in our early 30s and we had several severe episodes until our late 40s. In a way, keeping our family on the road saw me through that major transition to mid-life. That's because it pulled me out of myself in many ways, and made us clarify what we could realistically achieve and how - and it taught me to live and appreciate a day at a time in the middle of a crisis, and it taught me that future possibilities did not have unlimited horizons, but that we needed to accept that it was finite and even contracting.

Dealing with my father settled me firmly into late middle life and has prepared me for my own later days - there's a long slow dying and grieving with dementia as someone you love is gradually taken away from you. You become familiar with the process of dying - for me not in a morbid way, but it's the yin to the yang of birth. I doubt that I would be expressing this as one of the outcomes of the experience if it had happened 20 years earlier.

 

I don't think I've grown really. More shed certain things that weren't useful to me. That said @Hostarius is right that one should be careful what they shed due to the effect it might have on the larger structure of who you are, and I feel that too. There are many things about teenage-me that I wish I could carry more into adult-me's life. That said there are things I regret not doing as a teenager so...

It's also interesting to me how I haven't really changed, but may seem to have changed to others. I probably seem more hard-working now than when I was in school to people, but it's not that I've become any more hard-working, just that I work for my own benefit and not to fulfill other people's expectations of me now. Though my work ethic has taken a dip since COVID...

 

@John K
You are such a beautiful strong compassionate Angel and I really really really hope you win the lottery and get to galivante around the world as you so deserve. It's like you've always been a grown up and this might sound ridiculous but I wish you could go to Neverland.

 

I have a lot to say on this subject but I am mentally drained. I'll do my best to come back to it.

 

I don't agree with the notion of a former self. There's shades on a spectrum, even when it seems like a particular sea change redefined one's identity. I guess I just worry about denying what came before, forgetting those experiences. They happened and they matter even if they are sometimes best left to the foggy part of the past. But I understand if sometimes, we need to cut ties with what came before and who we were then.

That said, yeah chapters feels right. For me it was chapters defined by living in different places. Each move carried with it some distinct changes in my life. The most notable was leaving the town ("town" being a mega-sprawl city) where I grew up and the huge leap in growth from that. Just being forced to reckon with life and its requirements on my own, away from a support network. I've had some difficult experiences along the way (oddly punctuated by literal stormy weather, thunder and lightning stuff), but I also had a lot of great ones, and met a lot of good people who've helped me become who I am now.

 

I agree with most of this, I just don't think the things I've gained really count as gains.

Maybe I've gotten better at noticing logical contradictions? My modus operandi debating when I was younger would be citing stats or proposing a more complicated alternative. But I did definitely use logic in debates, at least some of the time. I think it might be better to say that I've developed a greater ability to see the framework my opponent is operating off of and argue against that rather than semi-consciously accepting the framework.

You can tell that I grew up on debate forums from my answer, I think. In any case, I haven't gained anything in a broader social interactions sense*, just lost things that were causing problems. It doesn't feel like improvement.

*I'm already starting to change my mind on this, so we'll see what I have to say the next time this topic comes up.

 

It's fascinating to see this in the output of certain people who have been in the public eye for many decades. These are two Louis Armstrong numbers, the first from 1927, the second from 1969 for the Bond Film, Her Majesty's secret service. It's only a narrow window of course but we can see the same guy, altered profoundly by 42 years of life.

It isn't as simple as pointing out that these were different eras with different fashions in music - if you listen, you can hear how Louis was always a master of musical timing, but he's so comfortable in his own skin in his later years, and he's so generous with his artistry, so much more in effortless control of it. Someone who seems to have come to terms with himself in ways that he hadn't when he started out and everything was still to win or lose.





But it depends on perspective. There's something that persists in me that is sufficiently unchanged that I can say I'm the same I who remembers my first day at school in 1954. I'm not much like that child any more in the way I interact with the world, or in the ways I experience myself .... and yet, I am. I think all of us must feel that their experience of adolescence has profoundly changed the way we orient to the world - we all go into it as children and come out of it as young adults. We were completely dependent on others at the start of it, and can live independently at the end of it, which is a profound change. The mid-life transition is just as profound for many people. Although these are stereotypical changes, we all experience them completely differently according to the cards we are dealt in life, so the changes are unique to us, though they have parallels in most other folks.

 

I probably have gained a few things in thinking about it--mostly just the ability to block out "noise" and recognize when I need to take a step back from certain things. I also think I try to understand how a person's psychology contributes to what they think more now than I did when I was a teenager.

I might also have gotten better at finding words for what bothers me sometimes. I was never bad at it, but the improvement is still helpful to me, even if it is just identifying problems.

I guess the "improvements" haven't often generated a rush for me in the same ways the problem behaviour did. And haven't ushered in any dramatic life improvements. My life's going fine, but y'know.

 

Oh I love this question @slant

Some chapters in life that I feel shaped me most:

1. Being Incarcerated

I served a jail sentence in my mid-20s due to something my mum and sister were mostly at fault for. Both were under investigation and my sister was pregnant at the time; I took one for the family. What made it worse is that they had included my father in what they did (who although is to blame a lot in my life for, was less to blame for this crime than me). I ended up being locked up with him for a few months, but thankfully he only served a couple of months and I was glad to see the back of him; he made jail a real hell for me. It got easier after he went and that made me begin to realise how bad he was for me.

One of the most difficult times of my life but now looking back after almost a decade, I'm glad it happened; enabled me to see the sheepish lives we're made to live in from the outside as well as more importantly beginning to realise what my family was really like. It was like I was sucked out of the Matrix and could see everything for what it was in my life as well as realising that I take life too seriously.

This has allowed me to shed many toxic relationships that were weighing me down in life, although I love the people that were within them.

2. Getting my heart broken for the first time

I didn't think it was ever even possible to fall in love with another man, but it happened; it was the greatest and deepest love of my life. Then it ended and my heart broke despite my best efforts in trying to keep it held together.

This has been by far the most painful thing I've ever gone through in life; jail was a breeze compared to this because that affected me physically and I knew when it would be over, whereas this broke me to my soul's core.

I wouldn't wish this on my enemies; from crying to sleep and waking up in the middle of the night crying, to days where I couldn't get out of bed and left my business to rot. This one almost killed me, literally.

But now a few years later, I'm glad it happened. By breaking me completely, it later allowed me to choose which parts of my self to keep and which to shed. It also took my head out of the clouds; feel like I can see the world for what it is now rather than idealising everything. It still seems beautiful to me, but in a more real way.

I want to add that his love helped me to learn to love myself, as well as to accept those parts of myself that I despised and feared.

...

Just sitting here thinking about what I've written; I guess I grow most from pain an suffering and although at the time I just want it to end and am riddled with confusion and anger amongst other things, those times have made me who I am and as cheesy as it sounds, I like who I am today - I feel like I'm heading in the right direction in life overall.

My closest relationships are so dear to me and I'd honestly die for a couple for people in my life, but nothing is more important to me than my self growth.

I wish you continued growth and wisdom in life @slant; thank you for reminding me and giving me clarity on my life this night; goodnight and God Bless.

 

I think there's a mindfulness I lack in terms of recognizing and changing behavior. I react to situations and developments. It's notable that what I wrote above is marked by events and time periods, not emotional states or my perception of my own behavior. It takes me years to get any sense of who I was then and how I may have changed. Density, denial? I don't dwell on it.

I came across this earlier tonight. It's from a book called Straw Dogs by John Gray (quoted in a book about EarthBound ). It made me think of this thread.

It is the casual drift of things that shapes our most fateful relationships. The life of each of us is a chapter of accidents.​

 

Something that's been on my mind daily over the last 5 years, but I still don't have an answer to. All I know is that trauma caused me to lose my trust, family, identity, and home. And life has pounded hardship after hardship and has shot down every solution I've tried to come up with to grow and escape this revolving hell. I've grown bitter, impatient, and untrusting of others, while I desperately try to return to the state of calmness, patience, understanding, and trusting of others I've had before all of this occurred. I feel like everything I've done for myself, for my family, for my future -- all of it has reverted to nothing and I'm desperately trying to grow back to what I've achieved, to the state of being I've worked my whole life to create. But like doesn't want that anymore. Today I snapped when my toilet wasn't unclogging for the trillionth freakin time (I live poor and in cheap apartment with a lot of financial assistance, another situation I wouldn't be in if tragedy decided not to strike), and broke my toilet paper holder, ripped my toilet paper, spit on the floor multiple times out of hatred and as I stomped on the stupid toilet paper roll, I quietly yelled to myself, "I fucking hate my life." It's 100% uncharacteristic of me and scares me that I got like that. Should I just accept the pain and anguish, or should I kill myself trying to find a way out? The passion for life is gone and I have no reason to live other than not to be another number and not to break my mother's heart by killing myself. Her heart's about to be shattered to pieces again soon anyway and I can't bear the fact that I'm powerless to stop it. I'm torn between wanting my dad to be happy and hating him for making this stupid decisions while he knows how much mom is hurting and how much this decision will hurt her.

I see my family struggle and suffer and writhe in hopelessness while I can't do a damned thing about it, and thus I see my world falling apart around me. Nothing I do does anything to help it, and the world keeps hammering on me to make sure I know there is no escaping.

I've never fit in and have always been treated like an outcast my entire life. Even my among outcast friends I was the outcast. People bullied me or set me aside for not being like "the herd," and authority tried my entire childhood to force me to follow "the norm." Things like "No, this is just the way it is. I don't care if it's wrong, it's the way it is and you're just a naïve child and how dare you muster the will to try and change things." "No, this is how I'm telling you how to do this. I don't care if it doesn't work for everybody, this is my way and you are to do it as such." "Don't trust yourself on how you should live, let me tell you how to live and how dare you defy me."
None of my personality traits were nurtured and authority always tried to turn me into a robot while the majority of my peers neglected me because I wasn't into watching sports or talking about Yu Gi Oh or anything normal kids were into. I was always in fights with my teachers because they wanted me to do things their established way and not the way that worked for me. I don't mean following basic directions, I mean situations like how to solve a math problem. I've always butted heads with math teachers because they wanted me to solve problems a certain way, and I couldn't process them that way. I am not directly good with numbers, I have to use critical thinking and logic to break down the problems into the how and why, then solve them accordingly. So I was always stuck between getting in trouble for not solving an issue a certain way, or getting a poor grade because I was pressured into solving the problem the way they decided we all should.

Despite what seemed to be the world working against me, I kept the patience and understanding to realize they meant the best and allowed myself to give some leeway to make it easier on others while staying true to myself and operating how I needed to operate. I researched topics such as etymology, biology, psychology, art, and so on and so forth to fuel my passion for learning and build up skills for my future, so that I can live a comfortable life and spend my time helping others who need help most.

But then my parents divorced. I know that doesn't sound nearly as bad to any of you as it feels for me, even to those who have suffered the same thing. But for me, if tore my world apart.
I was forced from my way of life into moving 3 times in 1 year right after my junior year of high school. All that I had spent building up for myself and my future was reset to nothing. I lost my ability to make connections, and I lost my trust in others. I gained extreme anxiety, and a whole galaxy load of self-doubt. But the most painful thing is how it affected my family. My older sister reacted by immediately running away. She has a rough time, but seemingly was able to put together the life she wanted. Unfortunately, that's not the case and she's suffering from loneliness and a wife with depression because her family disowned her for being lesbian. My sister wants to have a decent life, but she isn't able to find a job that pays her enough, despite her taking extra hours almost every week just to stay afloat. It's tearing her apart and I can't stand seeing her like this. My little brother went from the happiest person you could know to someone who's drowning in their despair. I CAN'T FUCKING BEGIN TO EXPLAIN HOW MUCH THAT BREAKS MY HEART TO SEE. We're almost twins, and we've been each other's best friends for our whole lives. And the worst part is that he processes things similarly to how I do, so I know exactly the agony he's going through. Hopelessness, uselessness, despair, and agony. My mom's heart is broken and is in constant fear my dad will marry his new girlfriend. She developed MS after losing her dad and brother within a couple of years, and while it was maintainable and able to possibly go away if she kept stress out of her life (stress worsens MS and causes it to increase in diagnoses), her dream was to be a mother and dropped everything, even her physical health, to adopt and raise 3 kids who otherwise may not have had a home. The divorce makes her feel like a failure of a mother, and when she says that to us it's like a thousand spears are piercing my heart. No matter how much we reassure her, it doesn't change how she feels. She is quite literally the most kind and selfless person you could ever meet. My own mother stays up at night crying, when she's almost 60 years old and should be enjoying her life. That's far beyond heartbreaking, and makes me feel so useless for not being able to do anything about it. My father may not show it, but we know he's trying to keep us together, He's supporting me financially as I don't make enough, even full time, to live, and I had to drop college due to all of this making it near impossible to focus on classes. I was sinking money into worsening grades.

The amount of times we've been able to muster any amount of hope, and the amount of times those attempts have but shot down make me begin to feel like it's impossible to get out of this. But I have to keep trying. It's caused a great disconnect between my current self and my former self, and I've been working on trying not to hate myself for all that has happened. I desperately want a therapist but can't afford one. I'm in debt from eye surgery and don't even have a means to pay that off. I feel lost in a sea of darkness, and I'm losing sight of the light.

It's tough, but I have to keep going, even if it's simply for the sake of surviving. I don't want to be another number in a statistic inside a morgue, I want to change the world for the better. I don't want to give in since I know I can do great things for the world. But this trial seems so insurmountable...

 

Right so I thought I would like to also respond to this thread. the idea about life stages in life is an interesting one I for one do agree that our physiological development does not run on the same timeline as our emotional development.

I can see this with certain certainty simply because I’ve experienced a large amount of character Shaping or character growth in my last two years of being in therapy. And i do resonate with @Truth Eternity and his childhood. Well I must say I didn’t exactly grew up in a family that was broken or extremely dysfunctional but having said that I grew up in an environment where I would observe my parents fighting and there would be no healthy ways of doing conflict resolution

So what would happen is that my old man Would yell at my mum and she would just shut down and there would be no form of healthy discussion about what went wrong in growing up in this kind of environment as a child Then made me fearful of my dad and having to deal with a phobia of trying to relate to him in the stages of my adult hood and so I struggled with all these family of origin issues until I was in my 30s

So even in my early 30s I was still feeling like I wasn’t good enough like I had to play catching up being an adult while everyone else seems to hold their shit together. I didn’t know how to value myself only on too much more recently putting in the working time in therapy and so I would say that my journey of emotional growth really started in my mid 30s as I learnt my value

And when I started to become comfortable with myself and gain the inner confidence somehow my personality type has shifted from being infp to infj. That was quite a significant milestone in my life because I have been typed the former personality type until three years ago before putting in all the work in 30 but now that I’ve done all the work in therapy it seems like my true innate personality is indeed infj. Ive tried this several times now. Im doomed to be an infj hahahah...

Which makes me really fascinated about the emotional development of people and children especially in the dangers of and undeveloped emotional age. Well given that there are many factors of how one’s emotional ages influenced I believe the family environment in the early stages of childhood plays a critical role in the persons development of his sense of well-being and emotional resonance.

unfortunately for myself I only discovered and learn all that in my mid 30s and while I’m thankful for that I wished I would have learned all these things when I was in my mid 20s the lack of emotional tools and the inability to express myself back in my late 20s and early 30s resulted in With me having one or two episodes of A breakdown in anxiety because I felt helpless and hopeless and powerless but as time went by and I process my childhood and work things out in therapy I soon so changes in my own personality and I put in the work in therapy I also then was able to recover from depression after a full year.

Recovering from depression is a really strange thing because I have become accustomed to feeling depressed and it felt like the familiar things while being healthy and not depressed became the unfamiliar thing and so in the early stages of my recovery I feel terribly uncomfortable simply because I wasn’t depressed any more and that really messed with my mind but I eventually grew to accept that and it was great

So I’ve only recently been back at work but I realise the differences between how I operate in my previous job and this current job that I’m in and out with my strength and emotional resonance I was able to express my need better and be able to communicate effectively.

which is also the reason why I’ve become sceptical about behavioural change because I realise that changes in a persons personality takes a lot of effort and time in self investment in wanting to see change and especially positive change I simply find it difficult to accept if someone comes and tells me I’ve change and I’ll become a new person the next day in a span of 24 hours.

So when I look back and reflect on my journey it’s really in this past 2 1/2 years spending time in therapy and knowing that it is worth it that I value myself enough to want to see change that has now greatly strengthen my emotional resilience.

I don’t know how else to describe it but it is extremely liberating to be comfortable in your own skin and to be able to value yourself and you have agreed an understanding of your own self worth and be also free of the fear of how people see youBecause really that’s their business and not your business

So i I don’t know if I will went off tangent but I think this is how I felt about my phases of growth and these phases of character growth or nonlinear and it is different for each person because we are all at different phases of life in our individual journeys in life are so different and unique

Well this was my shot at your question @slant