This was wrote by a counsellor who specialises in midlife crisis.............thought i would share this with my friends xxxxxxxxxxxx
People in Mid life crisis are looking for answers. Often times a person in mid life crisis is not ready to be alone and looks for help outside their current situation.
As a result the consequence of many Midlife Crisis situations is that a person will think about or even have an affair.
I have helped many people work through the consequences of Midlife affairs. Lets not try to make the situation pretty: the fact is, once you are reading this, it means you have entered in a very hard world, with very real consequences that will effect the rest of your life.
The only way to handle a midlife affair is to remove judgement. Judgement traps a person into having an affair and judgements force affairs to go deeper and become messier situations than they need to be. Judgements prevent people from learning from their mistakes. Judgement after the affair will prevent a healthy relationship from growing from the aftermath.
So the one truth that must get released is:
Release the judgement!
There are three cases to consider: Pre Affair, During the Affair and Post Affair.
Pre Affair
If you are considering a midlife affair, it means your current relation has problems. It also means you are afraid to directly work with your partner or that your partner has stopped communicating with you.
In the end many midlife affairs happen because it is the only route where a person feels brave enough or alive enough to begin trying to find answers to their personal problems. The longing towards the affair is also the longing that another person can help solve the problems that are tugging at your heart.
If you are longing towards an affair the first step is to realize that your current relationship is already having serious enough problems to end it.
Finding a counselor to help you begin work out issues is often a better path to explore rather than just suppressing your feelings. The problem is individuals are often blind to their own problems and cannot fix them on their own (hence the pull to an affair). The only trouble is the affair rarely fixes personal problems, rather affairs usually only add additional complications into the mix.
Most people try to solve the pre affair by suppressing their own feelings. Suppression of personal feelings will always fail as an answer. Suppression of feelings leads to (a) you breaking down to having the affair, (b) the pent up feelings coming out volcanically to break your current relationship later in a much more painful manner or (c) pent up feelings slowly rend your heart apart to the point you spiritually die, or even worse (d) the pent up feelings slowly tear a person up inside to the point they stop caring about life, many heart attacks and cancers come out of not taking care of your body properly.
During the Midlife Affair
The truth is sometimes the midlife affair has to happen. Too much tension exists or the need for freedom is so strong that a person finds themselves in a relationship with another person. Part of this attraction comes out from that fact all new relationships are relatively judgement free still. New relationships are fresh, this opens up new experiences and kick starts the exploration of life again. The pull to live again is very irresistible. The pull to be with a person that doesn’t limit one down with judgements or measurement is intoxicating.
The only problem is this: having started a new relationship by breaking trust, this also sows the seeds of hidden judgements, judgements that will grow and circle back around to slowly eat away at your choices. A person can run only so far before having to start dealing with the very issues that created the previous set of relationship problems eating away at the earlier relationship.
The first few months of any affair is magical, but at some point judgement and past patterns will creep back into the situation to cause most people to repeat the seeds of crisis they were running away from.
Post Midlife Affair
At some point, events catch up to a person and their relationship. Most people fall back to the common tools taught to them by society to handle the after effects of an affair: anger, judgement, hate, despair, feeling wronged and feeling morally right…
Conflict accomplishes nothing, and in the end judgement results in conflict.
The truth is this:
The whole midlife affair ends up actually being inconsequential. Most people living fresh from the results of the affair won’t believe this statement. But it is true. What truly matters is this: What did you learn and how did you use the situation to grow from?
If you focus on the affair, you then get stuck in the past and judgements which limit how you can grow from the situation. Learn from the affair but don’t focus upon it either. The affair is a stepping stone towards a better life for everyone, if used as a stepping stone. For most people affairs become swamps of despair. Such a place is not a place worth living within.
Many people waste the experience to hate or regrets. Hate is a very sad limited way to hold an experience. Hate allows no room for growth. In fact, hate dissolves the heart away, it eats a person away until they are left with nothing. Those resorting to hate often will fall prey to depression and slowly pull away from others.
No this whole process means being brave enough to stand up and learn from the experience. To be willing to live life honestly and not hiding away from others.
The Real Truth about Midlife Affairs
This is a very delicate case by case situation that most of the time will not be resolved smoothly without outside assistance. The truth is once the affair happens, the marriage is officially broken. The fundamental value of trust that a marriage is based upon is broken and will never again be the same.
But here is the secret:
Mid life transformation is all about starting a new life. You and your partner are in mid life transformation. This means it’s possible to start and build a fresh new trust between partners, to create a whole new relationship, since you both are in transformation!
The process runs like this
Remove judgement. No one is guilty.
Release the Relationship. (All relationships)
A new friendship is beginning.
Work with kindness.
Help each other grow
In time, if love reignites then remarry, if not then help each other move on
Is this easy? No it isn’t. The over whelming response of our society is to push guilt, to force relationships and want answers right away. Yet the mid life transformation process takes roughly two years to grow within. It takes time to grow and find one’s nature.
But to those who take the time:
This is literally becomes a magical process,
truly the stuff of stories everyone else reads about and wishes would happen to them.
The only trouble is this, reading a story with a happy ending is fast and quick and takes no effort.
To live the happy ending is a slow process requiring patience, it means making mistakes and growing from those mistakes. It’s lots of hard effort which very few people are willing to do in a society where everything is consumed and expected to happen by miracles and pills…
Finally and most importantly:
Be Brave.
Hiding from an midlife affair or truth only diminishes you in this process.
Be Brave: so you can live your life and grow.
Right now, it won’t seem possible that the whole affair issue can ever resolve out gracefully, but having work with many people, all my clients say the same thing, they would go thru the process again: because it allowed them to truly live again, honestly and completely as themselves! In other words, many relationships have become a prison from judgements and that is where the affair comes into the picture. In this process, we free those involved to live to heart, without judgement. The whole affair literally just becomes a past story to be shed as each person transforms into a newer wiser person.
Literally
Shed it or have it shred you.
Many people reading this are probably feeling shredded by the thoughts of an affair…The shredding feeling is your soul eroding away. Stand up and live your life.. or watch it erode away in pain.
It really is a personal choice. Sadly most people in this culture choose the painful path, only because they haven’t been shown another way. This article is to help show, there is a better path that does work.
Source:
http://personaltao.com/taoism-library/midlife-crisis/survive-thrive-affair/
Questions about the Affair/OM/OW III
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