What to Do When Life Falls Apart

“I kept discovering new things about myself, and it felt like a defeat.” ~ Carl Jung (as cited by James Hollis)

You just turned 40 and you feel like your life is falling apart.

You’re quite confused because you thought you’d have your act together by now.

I mean, you’re a bonafide adult with adult responsibilities. You have a few accomplishments under your belt that you’re proud of. You have kids, a house, cars, money. But inside you’re a wreck.

Because even though things look good on the surface, there’s rumblings beneath it all. Maybe you’re experiencing your first real “failure” such as a job loss or relationship difficulties. Maybe your health is beginning to decline or you’ve lost interest in things you once enjoyed and don’t quite know why.

Maybe you feel alone and isolated. You have no real friends as all your friendships from high school and college have faded slowly over time. You find yourself in the midst of all your joys and challenges having no one who you can share the deepest parts of yourself with.

You’ve read dozens of personal development book teaching you how to get richer, smarter, healthier, more zen. You’ve searched high and low to discover the secrets to better relationships or realizing your biggest goals and dreams. But none of it is working.

Your soul knows that what you’re facing in this moment cannot be helped by promises of having more at a time when you’re experiencing so much loss: loss of hair, brain cells, strength, vitality, control over your kids. 

You still have much to offer the world, but with each passing year, you feel the weight of those years in your body, mind, and spirit.

In an age of endless personal development, you’ve discovered, quite by accident, the personal undevelopment taking place just below the surface.

Life is a series of partings

I heard a priest preach a homily once where he said:

“Life is a series of partings.”

I was practically a baby, only in my early 20s when I heard it, but the phrase never left me. Even at that young age, it struck me as true. We think of our youth as the time of our lives when we’re gaining. We’re growing physically, learning all kinds of things, and developing emotionally and spiritually. While this is all true, we’re also losing or undeveloping.

Think about the big loss of the comfort of a mother’s womb a newborn baby experiences. Or your lost sense of safety the first time you were bullied. Or your lost innocence the first time you experimented with drugs or told your first white lie.

Though these periods of our youth are painful, we hardly register them as losses. But as we grow older, we feel the losses more acutely. In her powerful article called “The Midlife Unraveling”, Brené Brown writes:

“Midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear:”

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I’m not screwing around. All of this pretending and performing – these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt – has to go. Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armor could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy and lovable, but you’re still searching and you’re more lost than ever. Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can’t live the rest of your life worried about what other people think. You were born worthy of love and belonging. Courage and daring are coursing through your veins. You were made to live and love with your whole heart. It’s time to show up and be seen.

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Brown says that up until this point, we ignore the rumblings, deny them, or actively fight them. But there comes a day of reckoning when we are forced to growth through our losses by finding new meaning in and through them.

The summons

Here’s the crucial difference between personal development and personal undevelopment: You may choose to undergo some personal development program, most likely to feed your ego, but you have no choice when it comes to undergoing your personal undevelopment program.

Furthermore, though it often happens at the inflection point between the first and second halves of life, it can happen at anytime. It’s like receiving a summons to the traffic court of life. You have no choice but to respond when the precipitating event happens. Jungian analyst James Hollis in an interview about the experience, said:

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…for me, it happened almost literally at midlife chronologically, but it’s not always that case. For some people, it’s the loss of a relationship, for others it’s being downsized at work, for others it’s obligatory retirement or changes in the body that one has to deal with. Or sometimes, people just wake at 3:00 in the morning, the hour of the wolf, and realize, “I don’t have a clue as to who I am, and what I’m doing here.”

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Unfortunately, there’s no hack to circumvent the experience or make it go faster or easier. It unfolds like a conveyer belt leading you toward the abyss. A conveyer belt without a stop button. The experience is utterly terrifying but if you surrender to it, you will, discover the real you: In the words of Brown, “The messy, imperfect, brave, scared, creative, loving, compassionate, wholehearted me.”

What to do when life falls apart

If you’ve received your summons, don’t be afraid. Try not to resist. Surrender to the experience and you’ll experience growth unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before. You’ll have the opportunity to meet and fall in love with the real you.