Expand Your Identity from Doing to Being
In midlife and beyond, we need to slow down to be able to self-reflect. Because if we continue our midlife hurriedness, we're not going to be able to do the inner work that leads us to the treasures of this time
Dr. Connie Zweig, retired Jungian-oriented psychotherapist, Shadow expert, and author of The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul
It’s a hot summer afternoon and the jaguar growls a silent roar next to a gray kennel too small for its size. Despite being exposed to scorching summers and freezing cold winters, the statue’s ceramic coating hasn’t lost its shine and now its fixed black eyes look at me carrying a box overflowing with objects. A step away from reality, the local landfill of the town where my father-in-law used to live is a mesmerizing micro-cosmos. It mixes the exoticism of a funfair with the extemporaneous genius of a surrealist artist. The manager fits in the place seamlessly. With his long curly gray hair, tattoo-covered arms, orange reflective jacket, faded jeans, and safety shoes, he reminds me of a modern Charon who ferries the souls of things from everyday life to recycling.
In a way, there is a sort of peaceful order in this huge courtyard where the objects adapt to their second life. The branches of a discarded plum tree bend under the weight of its purple fruits, while a plastered Cinderella statue, a bit chipped in her blue dress, sits under a grove of banana trees that, miraculously, managed to cope with the cold winters of Milan. From the manager’s trailer, the loudspeaker fills the courtyard with Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind.” For a moment, I am overwhelmed by a wave of emotions: disposing of the little and big things that make a comfortable den is an unscripted, silent, and solitary ritual after the curtains fall on the funeral. In this suspended time, I contemplate the ineluctable journey of the objects - from the designer’s table to the factory, from the shop to the house, from daily life to the landfill.
When my box is empty, I stand in front of the open doors to an oversize dark green container full of scattered washing machines. Some are upside down, some stand with their windows open, some expose their rusty backs. The ensemble looks like a consumerist version of Picasso’s “Guernica.” The second life of the objects is like the White Rabbit’s den. I can’t resist the temptation to peek inside the blue container of neon lights. There are hundreds of milky lamps in every shape and size. I would like to dip my arms inside their whiteness to extract a sound, a stir of life. Instead, I’m taken aback by the circle I’m witnessing and in my mind I hear the whisper of a poem: “And occurs to me the eternal, and the dead seasons, and the present and alive one, and its sound.”
My conversation with Connie Zweig couldn’t have happened in a more timely fashion. Although I didn’t expect it, I realize that her quiet voice is the counterpoint to my experience in the landfill. As the author of The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, Connie brings a fundamental piece to the puzzle. If the cycle of objects is a metaphor of our appearance and disappearance, aging stands out as an ally in this inexorable journey. Aging gives us a chance to take every “piece” of our life out of the box and to place it where it belongs. It takes some work to do so, and Connie’s much needed book shows us the way.
What brought you to write The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul?
Like so many millions of people, I began to feel disoriented as I entered my late 60s. It was a surprising feeling for me because I've been doing so much psychological work and spiritual practice for so long that I didn't anticipate it at all. I began to read in the field of aging, and see if I could find some guidance, but I couldn't find anything that had a depth psychology perspective. What I mean by that is a perspective that includes the unconscious process, or the Shadow. I just couldn't find anything about it. I did fortunately find a community called Sageing International. They have a one-year training to become an elder or sage. I did that and it was really beautiful. But it also led me to realize that I had to write another book, because it just didn't include anything about the Shadows of age, the unconscious fears and beliefs that we all carry as we inch our way toward this late life stage.
So, the book was born out of a personal need. I had been listening to this in my clients. I was still in clinical practice and as people entered their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, I started to hear that they felt invisible and useless. They were becoming irrelevant, and there was a lot of suffering that went with this transition. I came to think about it as a late-life identity crisis.
I realized that there’s a lot of understanding about the midlife crisis, but nobody was really talking about the loss of identity from our roles in midlife and beyond. As I began to teach workshops, all of the participants were asking again: Who am I?
What can we discover if, instead of denying age, we self-reflect and embrace it?
As we age, which is the one thing we all have in common, there’s a natural process that happens of losing our roles, our family roles, work roles, friendship roles. And we lose relationships or spouses. As we lose our roles, the doer in us, which is often the source of identity, begins to get disoriented. So who am I, if I'm not a CEO, or a mom, or a teacher, or a caregiver, or a writer? Who am I, if I'm not Dr. Connie, the Shadow expert? I wanted to provide people with the inner work to get through this period of time and to emerge as an elder with renewed purpose. And that means dropping our identification with the doer, with our roles, dropping the identification with the image, how we look, because that changes too. It changes every day, and every year and every decade, it’s not permanent. If we believe that that's who we are, then we're really going to suffer. The practices that I provide will turn the attention away from the roles, successes and achievements, away from the image and appearance, away from old beliefs about who we are, and turn it toward something spiritual, toward our essential nature. That can give us a deeper sense of identity for this stage of life.
If only this change happened at the beginning of our life…
It would be different. I think that for some people it happens on the level of belief if they're part of an organized religion. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about belief. I'm talking about experiences. And you know, in psychology, there are stages of human development that are natural and inevitable. In childhood, we're building an ego. We need our egos or conscious personalities to survive in society. Then in adolescence, we're developing our egos, usually as a function of resistance to parental authority and conventional social norms. In young adulthood, our egos begin to engage in “empire building” and the hero's journey. I've got to build a career, I've got to build a family. I am what I do and that's a natural process.
What can we learn by letting go of our resistance to the aging process?
What I found, as I was interviewing hundreds of people, is that there is a series of internal unconscious obstacles. The book is organized around those, so that the tools I offer then become ways to overcome those inner obstacles. And I call them “Shadow characters.” They're a part of our unconscious that disrupts and sabotages us at this stage of life. Just like there's a part of us that disrupts in relationships, let's say the critic, or an addiction issue, self-sabotages us or other kinds of habits and behaviors that might be hurtful to other people. Those are shadow characters, and in the same way they erupt at this stage of life.
What are the main unconscious denials and resistances we face when it comes to aging?
The first one is the denial of age. I have 72 years of life experience, I’m healthy, have a lot of energy, a lot of motivation, and creativity. But if I deny that my body is 72 years old, then I'm also denying the opportunities that come with this stage of life, the possibilities that are appropriate for my age. I have an 89-year-old friend who recently said to me, “I don't want to be with those old people, because I'm not like that.” He's denying the promise, what I call the treasures of this stage of life, which is the capacity to slow down and self-reflect to harvest the lessons learned from our long lives.
This denial blocks us from slowing down the doer. And then the emotional repair that can happen with this stage of life doesn’t take place. Many people want to give and receive forgiveness now, but that’s not going to happen if we deny our age. There's also a lot of denial around retirement, because we're so identified with the doer. So, we don’t open the invitation to a different pace, a different priority, a different kind of service.
What is in our unconscious, or the Shadow, about that? This denial is not merely a conscious process. For instance, if we have enough money, we might think oh, I can be carefree and travel. But, beneath that, we might fear that the end of paid work means we are useless or invisible. So we continue to strive to avoid that. The book helps us to get underneath what's going on there, the fears that we may not be aware of in the transition to retirement, and how to get through those resistances.
What about internalized ageism? And how can we recognize it when we experience it, and what are its consequences?
In Western society, in the US and Europe, we have institutionalized ageism, in our workplace, in our healthcare system - and we really saw this with Covid - in policymaking, in media portrayals of older people, which are often patronizing, condescending. We swim in this sea of ageism, and we internalize it. Even as children, we internalize that it's good to be young and bad to be old, that it's good to look young and bad to look old. As we grow through the lifespan, that part of us I call “the inner ageist,” an unconscious shadow character, begins to have impact on our physical health, emotional health, and mental health.
A psychologist at Yale University, Becca Levy, spent her whole career studying the impact of internalized ageism. It turns out, it influences our memory, physical health, emotional, mental health and, in the end, it influences our longevity. Every aspect of our experience in old age is shaped by our beliefs and fears about old age.
It’s shocking to realize how ingrained these perspectives are. It’s as if we’re operating on auto-pilot.
That's so well said. We’ve seen now that we can't legislate away racism, because it's unconscious in the Shadow. The same is true of ageism. It's an unconscious process that we've internalized through images and beliefs and fears that are all kind of clumped together in the inner ageist in us. My method of Shadow Work - and there's a full chapter about how to use Shadow Work - allows us to uncover our inner ageist and to learn how to consciously observe it, and then make a different relationship with it. Because the more unconscious it is, the more power it has over us.
How does our relationship with the unconscious evolve as we age?
The Shadow was named by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung to refer to the personal unconscious. It is formed very early in childhood, as we seek out love and approval from adults. The feelings and behaviors that bring us love and approval go into our ego, our conscious personality. Let's say, politeness, smartness, flexibility, or athletic gifts, whatever it is, feeling happy or feeling sad, whatever is acceptable in your family goes into your ego and is allowed to be expressed. And whatever is forbidden, criticized or shamed goes into the shadow. It gets repressed and hides there for a long time. In one family, sadness may be permitted and, in another family, it may be shamed. In one family, artistic gifts may be permitted; in another family, they may be shamed.
What happens as we age is that some of those gifts, some of the positive qualities that are hidden in the Shadow begin to erupt. Often, they emerge at midlife. When people have, as I said before, an identity crisis and often leave their careers or leave their marriages and want to live out their unlived life. As we grow older, if we do the inner work of age, with the new longevity we have the time to begin to reclaim some feelings, creativity, relationships, some of the things that we lost in earlier stages of life that were sacrificed into the Shadow.
It feels as if there was a seed under the ground. How do we allow the seed to ripen and come into the light and see where our unconscious, our Shadow takes us?
We need to slow down and that’s the task of aging. Because if we continue our midlife hurriedness, business, preoccupation, and distraction, then we're not going to be able to self-reflect, we're not going to have time to do the inner work. For some people, that's an hour a day. For other people, that's one day a week. However we organize it, we need that time to explore if we want to uncover this self-knowledge. The book is full of practices in every chapter.
Looking at things from this perspective, the necessary work we need to do to uncover what is hidden inside, do you think that we have an embedded program that promotes transformation?
Well, I’m not sure what you mean by that, but here’s what I believe. I believe that the human soul has a longing to evolve, a natural evolutionary impulse, and we experience that impulse in different ways. Sometimes it's a restlessness. Sometimes it's a yearning and that yearning has different objects, such as yearning for love or yearning for spiritual experience or for home. Whatever form it takes (and some of my books explore this yearning), I believe that the human soul has this holy longing in it. And sometimes it's asleep for a while, you know, we don't see it in some people; whereas in other people it runs their lives from a young age. I began to learn meditation at age 19, more than 50 years ago. I've felt and heard the whispers of that longing for my whole adult life, and it has guided me. It has guided me to teachers and practices and books. And it's kind of been the lure that's carried me through my life.
What happens to people who do not feel the same call? Does their aging get jammed?
I think it's very individual. There are some people who are not seekers, and don't feel that longing. But they're kind and compassionate, they’re good grandparents, they feel gratitude. There are other people who, as they age, become rigid and bitter, resentful and regretful. Those people have a harder time, because they kind of live into the suffering, rather than do the inner work to try to find emotional repair and spiritual repair.
So that also explains why people age so differently…
Yes, a lot of it is their psychology. If their childhood wounds are not attended to, then people just tend to get more rigid as they age.
In your book you mentioned the “divine messengers.” What are they and their role?
There's a tale in Buddhism about Siddartha, the Buddha. When he was a young man in the palace of his father, the king, he was very sheltered, never saw any suffering. But then he asked his charioteer to take him out of the palace and into the village in India, he saw old people for the first time. He saw old, ill, and dead people, and his charioteer explained to him that these are inevitable conditions. Illness, old age, and death are called “divine messengers” in Buddhism because they woke up Siddartha to something else. The fourth thing he saw was a monk who was practicing meditation. His spiritual longing was awakened, and he recognized that there might be a way through the suffering with spiritual practice.
For us, there are divine messengers everywhere. Especially now during the pandemic, we see so much illness and death. If we can break through our denial, this can remind us that we too will grow sick and will grow old and will die at some time. It is going to be longer now than it's ever been before. I mean, people are healthy now into their 90s and hundreds, but inevitably the body will die. If we can wake up as Siddartha did and turn our attention away from all the trivial distractions toward what's really important, then we would have heeded those divine messengers.
Do you think that, if we can reduce inner and outer ageism, humanity would greatly benefit?
I think that our problems are so complex right now, for the planet and humanity and, at the same time, age intersects with most of the issues. Age intersects with the climate crisis, as we're seeing now. Just last week, in the US, we had this hurricane and many nursing homes had to be evacuated and people were not cared for. Older people are more vulnerable to extreme weather and climate effects. Age intersects with the social safety net, and therefore the whole economy in all our countries. Age intersects with social care and as more people live longer, there're going to be more pressures on our medical and healthcare communities. So, there's a competition for resources between younger generations and older generations. Even with race and class, older people who are people of color have more issues than younger people of color; they have to deal with more food insecurity, more housing insecurity, more hardship of all kinds. And the same goes with the gay population. Older gay people carry a double stigma, a double projection. There's a lot of hardship in the older gay community in my generation.
I would say that, if we really connect the dots, aging is connected to everything. The important thing for me is, there are millions of elders now who want to make contributions, who want to give their gifts. For instance, Jane Fonda, who's 83, and Bill McKibben, who is the head of 350.org, and a few other people launched a new organization called Third Act, which is about elders fighting climate change. There are many opportunities for elders now to connect with younger generations, to mentor them, to make really significant contributions. And that's what I would like the focus to be on. Because my sense is that we don’t have all the answers, but we have the lived experience about what works and what doesn't work.
When someone praises old age, the focus is generally on wisdom. But I think that older generations have compassion, a more open-hearted and inclusive sense of self. It seems that as we age, we move from I to we.
That's a really good point, because the ego is no longer in charge. I really feel that this book is not about me. I too shall pass. My Connieness will be gone. But this book is a little bit of a legacy. And it's different than I felt as a young writer when it was more about me. It’s a very different perspective on contribution for future generations.
My last question is, you mentioned many treasures of late life. What is your favorite and why?
My favorite treasure of late life is cultivating a spiritual practice that fits who I am now, and practicing the shift in identity from role to soul. I am practicing this: I am not the Shadow expert, I am not the doer, I am not the writer, I am not the grandma, I am a soul on a journey. I am soul, my essential spiritual nature, whatever we call that, whether we call it higher self, or God or divine or essence, I am that. And this period of life, according to every spiritual tradition, is about that discovery. It's about our spiritual development. We have the time for that, we have the opportunity. I suggest a lot of practices in the book and how to put them into your own language. But for me, the treasure is the opportunity for spiritual evolution, especially in preparation for death.
