• Are you dissatisfied, questioning, feeling stuck or anxious about your relationship or career choice?

• Are you struggling with the meaning of your life as an empty-nester?

• Are you worried there’s little time left to materialize your dreams?

• Are you being confronted by your own mortality?

• Are physical, sexual, and health changes diminishing your confidence?

• Are you depressed, irritable, and indecisive, as life seems to pass you by?

If you are between your late Thirties and late Fifties, you are probably undergoing a natural life cycle change or transition often labeled as the “midlife crisis”. This developmental transition is marked both by physical changes, as the body ages, and by psychological responses to the changing landscape of your life. Some of you will accept and adapt to these changes, processing and grieving them as necessary losses and natural parts of aging. Others, especially those who have not dealt with their personal issues, such a fears, doubts, social and familial expectations and roles, experience distress, anxiety, depression, and anger about the changing meaning of their lives. Reactions to this life transition can come in a variety of forms:

• Denial and avoidance: burying the anxiety and distress leads to depression and feelings of stuckness, including the risk of addictive behaviors such as substance abuse and sex addiction.

• Attempts at reclaiming declining image: Impulsivity like shopping sprees, including the proverbial new sports car, or trying to recapture lost youth through various immature behaviors.

• Relationship problems: blaming your partner or avoiding of intimacy for fear of being exposed, feeling vulnerable, or seen as an impostor.

• Anger, irritability, and defensiveness: resistance to obligations and feeling trapped in role expectations.

• Anxiety and stress: indecisiveness, fear, or worry about the future.

• Feeling lost and directionless: trying to figure out goals, priorities, values in a changing world.

• Unhappiness: restlessness, lack of motivation, weight gain, and lose of interest, including sex.

• Soul Searching: who am I? What’s the meaning of my life?

Don't wait for your challenges to become overwhelming or self-destructive. Seek and get help NOW! Call GLOW counseling.

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