We often take our life for granted, as if we have all the time in the world. We procrastinate unapologetically; we hush our desires and burn our passions waiting for the perfect day to start all over again. This goes on until one day the bubble bursts and we recognize the old wrinkled picture in the mirror laughing at the missed opportunities and unlived moments. That’s when a mid-life crisis hits you hard.
This is the case study of Madhavi, a successful Civil engineer entangled in her family responsibilities and lost the pace of her career. The emptiness of her own happiness and lost identity haunted her in the silence that followed the chaos as her children left her nest to build their life.
Madhavi resigned from her well-paying job in the engineering consulting firm after she embraced the news of her pregnancy. What was supposed to be a short break in her career extended for over a decade dedicated to nurturing and raising her two little munchkins?
After her children were enrolled in school, she had ample time to start over. But all her attempts to get a job went in vain as she stood alien to the new developments of technology in the past decade. After many failed attempts, she dropped the guns and joined the band of housewives. Being a housewife takes a lot of sacrifices which casts a shadow of regret and dissatisfaction on the ambitious woman.
Madhavi continued to raise her kids and got engrossed in the management of her bustling house. As she was engulfed in making the bread and butter, her husband slogged to foot the bills. He worked in a construction company and was buried in work all the time. He had no time, energy, or interest in the mediocre affairs of his family. Life was totally mechanical there was enough money but no happiness in the marriage.
The time came when her children flew out of her nest and the chores of her house were passed on to the house help, and she was left with nothing to do. The feeling of emptiness overwhelmed her and she found solace in the attractive world of the web.
The empty boxes of her emotions were refilled with colors when she met a young man in her colony. They talked, laughed, and started to spend time together. After years, she had an ear to listen to all the stories that she held close to her heart for eons now. The new attention and spark of this romance wooed her barren life and soon she was ready to leave her husband and the family she built to start a life all over again.
With the love lost for her husband, Madhavi declined to sleep with her husband. The day her husband forced her for sex she bled out. She was completely ignorant about the family and indulged in her own happiness.
However, every now and then the cloud of guilt would cover her soul leaving her fearful and making her sick. Finally, she decided to opt for consulting a doctor and reached me for help. She started talking about headaches and insomnia and after ten minutes of beating around the bush, she finally confessed her problems.
I listened to her from start to end and explained that it’s a mid-life crisis that is the root of all the turbulence in her life. It is common for men and women in their 40s to go through this phase. I counseled her not to jump her guns and take out time to think about all the time she poured into building her family.
I prescribed her two Ayurvedic medicines to make her mind calm.
Along with medicines I strictly advocated for her to attend counseling. The sessions cleared the hazy picture of her personal life by portraying the impact of her impulsive outbreak. It focussed on diverting her vision and focus towards fulfillment and consoled her short-sighted worries and thoughts. After the first set of counseling, we focused on reassurance, stress management, and strengthening her ties with her husband.
I also taught her to see her children’s success as the result of her sacrifice and inspired her to move forward starting with setting goals for the next five years. We worked on finding her hobbies, insisted on journal writing, and motivated her to practice Yoga and Pranayama regularly. Also, a few sessions were dedicated to freeing her from the web of social media. Social media addiction is a real problem and it takes proper counseling to come out of this.
After she was prepared to return to her normal life, we had a few additional sessions to teach her how to use auto-suggestion to forgive herself. This was crucial because if she didn’t learn how to forgive herself, the guilt would have become too much for her to bear. Without this technique, she would have found herself in the same situation again, perhaps even more hopeless than before, after only a few days.
After the counseling was done, she started working more than 10 hours. After two years she started her own consultancy firm, where her husband joined her hands as the CEO. It’s been 8 years now and she is leading a happy life.
(Note: The name of the individual in this article has been changed to Madhavi to ensure their privacy.)
