Do you know who you are? Do you remember times in your adolescence or young adulthood when you felt that you didn’t have a true identity? Struggling to find yourself is a normal and, in most cases, healthy stage of adolescence. I remember deep conversations with my closest friends in college about who we were and what our place was in the world. It was a time of great anxiety, worry, and depression for some of us, but fortunately most of us gradually emerged from this period with what psychological theories call “a sense of self.”
For many of us, aging stirs up another identity crisis. We may not be the same person we were just a few years ago. Sometimes these changes have nothing to do with our age, and everything to do with circumstances. I was thinking about this the other day when I was back in New York City, after some weeks away. During the pandemic my husband and I left our apartment in the city and lived full-time in our cozy weekend home in the hills of Massachusetts. We didn’t realize it at the time, but we were shifting one of our longtime identities. We had considered ourselves New Yorkers for more than forty years. Now, suddenly, that self-definition didn’t suit us anymore.
The pandemic impacted my sense of self, as it did for many people. For example, I had to quickly become knowledgeable about the world of technology in order to keep doing my work. I also started the pandemic with a gentle awareness that I was getting older, but that I didn’t need to deal with aging yet. Like many of my peers, I was taken aback to find my age group labeled “seniors” and sitting solidly in the high-risk category of dangers connected to getting COVID-19.
My husband and I were used to seeing ourselves as healthy and strong. We seldom got sick. We managed to keep that self-image even after we learned that he needed a heart valve transplant, and even after the surgery that turned out to be far less simple than we had been led to believe. But the reality was that we, like all of our peers, were moving into a new stage of life. And although the pandemic didn’t cause that stage, it did force us to look more closely at the sense of who we were now that we had entered it.
I’m not talking about a complete change of identity that occurs just because we’re older. In fact, one of the themes emerging repeatedly in my writing these days is the question of how we can, at every stage of life, grow and develop while not changing the parts of ourselves that we like. How do we weave old threads of ourselves into new experiences, and how do we weave newly developing selves into old experiences?
So, what is this new stage of life? Given that life expectancy has increased greatly in the years since Erik Erikson introduced the idea that our lives have “stages” and also coined the phrase “identity crisis,” we need a new set of stages for the later years. I particularly like the term that the French use, “Le Troisième Age.” The translation, “The Third Age,” doesn’t have quite the same ring, but it captures the important idea that it is part of an ongoing developmental process. This stage of life generally includes those of us who are between 65 and 80 years old, although like every other arbitrary time frame of human development, the edges are blurry. You can enter the stage earlier and leave later than those specific birthdays.
What’s useful about thinking about this time of life as a developmental stage is that it helps put the “identity crisis” that accompanies it in a context. “Who am I?” becomes “who am I now?” And it allows us to think about other questions, such as “who do I want to be now?” and “how do I want to be now?”
A client who was hospitalized and nearly died in the early months of the pandemic, for example, told me that she kept saying to herself, “You’re going to fight this.” When we talked about that mantra, she said, “I guess I’ve always been a fighter, and I’m going to keep being a fighter till the day I die.” In therapy, we explored ways that being a fighter has been both a strength and a problem throughout her life. We also talked about the possibility of reweaving her definition of what a fighter is and does. For instance, we’ve uncovered some ways that fighting both protects her from feeling vulnerable and, at times, leaves her feeling even more unprotected. She has decided to work on managing her tendency to fight in her relationship with her wife. “I don’t know how that’s going to go,” she said with a grin. “But it will be an interesting shift in how she sees me, as well as how I see myself.”
Changing our self-definition, our sense of self, isn’t something we can do by dint of willpower. We’ve already seen that some aspects of identity are not in our control. That is, we can’t change that we’re getting older, that our bodies might not be as strong as they have been, that our minds might not always be as clear as we’d like. Much as we would like to, we can’t always stop ourselves from getting ill or from experiencing accidents. We can’t control external forces, like changes in the job market or the medical system, either.
And change doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Our sense of self is, like it or not, often linked to how other people react to us. That reality, which has been explored by researchers in neuroscience and developmental science as well as by numerous psychological theories, can be quickly illustrated by an exercise from Dialectical and Behavioral Therapy (DBT). Walk around in your normal way and notice how people respond to you over the course of the day. The next day, try to have a “half smile,” that is a mildly upturned look to your mouth, on your face as you walk around. It needs to be a natural smile, not artificial, and it should have a serene look and feel to it. If it’s forced, it won’t work. Notice if there’s any difference in how people respond to you.
In many instances, you will find that people respond differently when you’re wearing a gentle half-smile. But even more interestingly, you’ll also probably find that you feel different on the day that you wear the half-smile. The change may be in part from changing the physiological message you send to your brain about how you feel. But it is also probably in part from some of the reactions you are getting from other people.
As we go through this life stage, it’s important to recognize that how we feel about ourselves can be influenced by both how we present ourselves to others and how they respond to us. So maybe the question to ask ourselves isn’t “Who am I now?” but “Who do I want to be at this time in my life?” We aren’t in charge of everything about this stage. But we’ve learned a lot about who we are and who we want to be throughout the stages leading up to this one. That knowledge is one of the threads that will lead you to a richer sense of who you are in “Le Troisième Age.”
123RF stock image # 186866827 photographer: skawee
Great article! Thank you.
I think it's also interesting to note ageism and how it may effect how we think we look, how others see us and react to us, what we dare show to the world without letting fear of rejection or shaming stop us.
I smile a lot, and wonder who is it that others see smiling. Some may see an older woman. See her with kindness or with a bit of a feeling of being separate and different than? Some see lines and wrinkles. Some may not see at all. Invisibility.
And what I see in my own mind and my own self reflection inside myself.....that is the precious treasure. And the foundation that remains steady. Sometimes slightly shaken, but coming back to its core in time. The sense of self that has taken me a lifetime to come home to. And to share with those who are able (and interested) to see me and hear me.
And most of all, to kkeep remembering to not be invisible to myself.
Such helpful therapy and coaching! Thanks so much.