Helping Husbands and Wives Through Crisis and Change

We get asked every day: Can you help my husband or wife in a midlife crisis? You have come to the right place.

This article is for all partners and spouses of midlifers: married or unmarried, separated or together. We’ve helped thousands of individuals successfully navigate a complicated midlife crisis more gracefully.

Because you’re here, you’ve most likely already experienced confusing moments and contradictions from your partner. You may also feel powerless. Working together we will help you reclaim power as well as find peace and answers.

First, helping partners and spouses in a midlife crisis is a process that requires patience, acceptance, and time. There isn’t a single answer but we will help you find answers specific to your situation and the unique relationship you have with your spouse.

Second, the more you restrain the midlife process with expectations and limitations, the less likely it is to become a positive growth experience for you, your partner, and your relationship. Instead, we will help you define and maintain clear and healthy boundaries.

If questions arise or you think you could use additional support, please contact us to schedule a private session via phone/Zoom.

Helping Partners Change

Your partner is changing. We all change and everyone needs to be able to shift with life. What makes this process difficult for many partners is that midlife crises may force you to change too, often before you’re naturally ready.

When both you and your partner are changing, life gets more complicated. Every aspect of the relationship: workloads, expectations, and family support structures are tested and shifted.

The act of helping partners shifts the questions we ask.

• Are you ready to change?
• How much are you willing to change to balance out the situation?
• In changing to help your partner, are you hurting yourself?

Just because your partner is transforming doesn’t mean you have to. Chances are, no matter how you handle this situation, you will discover yourself in a new light. However, helping a husband or wife through a midlife crisis also means helping yourself make healthy life choices during the relationship work.

An Insight:

Don’t take your spouse’s change personally.

This is a moment where the balance of your relationship is changing. Don’t resist the changes rather learn how to use the changes to improve your situation.

Because the process forces you to change also, as partners, we often take midlife crisis personally. We often impose our judgment, fears, and desires upon our partner. In doing this, you can accelerate the process, often to accelerate your husband away from you. After all, in trying to define their change in your terms, you can easily force them further away from their change.

You can work on your change within this process, but be sensitive to how you share your fears with your husband. They’re in a delicate state of mind. It takes a slight misstep to hit a mine in a minefield. Likewise, it’s too easy to step on explosive issues within your partners’ hidden internal process. Issues that are coming to the surface as the midlife crisis stirs up the spirit.

The process of helping partners takes patience, awareness, and kindness.

We change side by side, not in lockstep with those we love. Discover how to grow in the love of becoming more!

What is Midlife Crisis?

If your partner is truly in the middle of a midlife crisis, then it has the potential to become a time when you are living in a falling house of cards.

Think about an earthquake for a second, when the earth changes and rocks. You don’t stand in the middle of the house in an earthquake, hoping the house will protect you. You run for the door to either stand outside of the house or in a doorway to protect yourself from falling debris. After the earthquake is over, you can go back in and fix the house.

A person experiencing a midlife crisis is being shaken apart by an earthquake of the soul. Little stable ground exists inside them to act as support at such a time of inner shift.

Some counseling tips in helping partners.

1. Help shift the crisis into transformation. A crisis is about breaking, the more you re-enforce crisis, the more likely your relationship will break from the crisis. Instead, approach this as a process of transformation. Transformation isn’t about breaking; it’s about change. If you help your partner transform, it helps smooth out the breaking aspects of change, and you will have a higher likely hood of being able to repair any relationship problems as a result.
2. Don’t hold on too tightly to your husband. The harder you hold on to them, the more likely their change will break you in reflection, or cause inner turmoil for yourself to be set off. Also, the harder you hold to them, the more you reinforce the crisis and inner earthquake aspects of the process. Hold on enough to keep yourself and other family members together. Hold on enough to help balance your relationship as required, but not too much to take the brunt of their lashing out.
3. Since a partner is in part a reflection of ourselves, you will have to find peace in shifting also. Otherwise, you will internalize the stress and take on pain of the midlife crisis yourself. It will be equally important for you to be extra pro-active in your health practices and look towards movement practices such as yoga, exercise, or Qi Gong to help re-establish your equilibrium.

Who is Your Partner Now?

All preconceived expectations quickly disappear in this state, and a person can shift moods, emotional state, and personality very quickly and unexpectedly at this time.

The husband you thought you knew, is not who they are now.

In effect, you are with a younger person rediscovering and re-establishing themselves.

Helping partners at this stage requires you to recognize and give space to this newer person waking up.

In effect, you have three relationships at once! One with the person you knew, one with a person experiencing crisis and one with the new personality growing out from the crisis! This is why marriages often fail in Midlife Crisis. Most marriages are based on expectations and memories of the past. Midlife Crisis re-shifts and changes all the rules, as the person is in transition. Their desires and definitions are shifting as they change in the crisis! As a result, marriages can and do break. The simplest way to help to prevent this is not to base your marriage on expectation or the past. Helping partners require us to be forward thinking, to make new rules for the marriage and help discover a new partnership in exchange.

For many people, this can be a chance to re-vitalize their partnership/marriage!

But by definition to re-vitalize, it will mean to drop old expectations, truly shift and jump into something new!

Also, be very aware, you may not like the new person evolving from the crisis. While we can help mold a person slightly at this time, the more you do so, the more you actually can hurt yourself and them in the long term. Trying to mold a person at this stage just introduces new problems to be dealt with later in life.

The stories of a midlife crisis, are often that the person in crisis will leave the marriage or relationship. It should be noted; it’s as equally valid that at times it might for you to consider leaving the relationship because you are not compatible with the new person your partner is becoming.

Embracing Kindness

In this whole process: Kindness is one key step which I teach. Kindness is important for everyone involved. In helping partners transform, don’t forget to be kind to yourself.

Take care of yourself!

Don’t jump in to save your partner until you are truly ready to understand and accept your problems.

It’s like when a plane is crashing, and the oxygen masks come out. You don’t place the mask on the other person first; instead, first take care of your mask, which then lets you take care of others, this is a similar situation.

One common problem is after helping a spouse change, is to take on too much pain. To take too many emotional bruises during the act of crisis can be very terrible. Don’t take on pain to a point it becomes destructive to yourself.

Be kind to yourself, take care of yourself in this process of crisis, because if you can’t take care of yourself, how can you expect to help heal another person?

When helping a spouse in crisis, unless you are ready to handle the crisis yourself, the crisis can derail your own life more than you expect due to the force of revelatory repercussions that will also come with the process.

It’s important while helping partners in kindness not to push them too hard and cause additional damage.  If this happens, you get blamed for all the problems.

Understanding Our Past

Helping someone through a midlife crisis often means helping them come to peace with their past. Midlife can bring old stories, unresolved emotions, and experiences from earlier in life back into awareness. What appears to be a problem in the present may be connected to something much deeper that has been carried for years.

This can make healing more complicated. The issues being explored may extend beyond the individual’s own experiences into family patterns and problems passed from one generation to another.

When we care about someone, it is natural to want to help them avoid pain. As healers, coaches, partners, or loved ones, we may see someone moving toward a choice that we believe will cause more suffering, and our instinct is to intervene. Empathy is important, but so is allowing someone to work through their own process without imposing our perspective upon them.

Sometimes the emotional pain itself is part of what needs understanding. Rather than simply trying to remove the pain, the deeper work may be discovering what it is asking the person to recognize, accept, or finally let go of.

Past Problems

Sometimes the past reaches much farther back than one person’s lifetime. Patterns, wounds, beliefs, and unresolved family problems can be carried from one generation to the next.

A midlife crisis can become a time when a person confronts these inherited patterns and decides which ones still belong in their life. They may discover that some of the fears, obligations, beliefs, or behaviors they have carried for years were learned from their family rather than consciously chosen.

This is one reason midlife transformation is not always straightforward. A person may think they are trying to solve a problem in their present life when they are actually confronting a much older story.

Healing does not necessarily mean fixing the past or making everything right. Sometimes it means understanding what happened, accepting what cannot be changed, and deciding what we are willing to carry forward.

Coming to peace with the past does not mean approving of everything that happened. It means reaching a point where the past no longer dictates the story of the life being lived today.

When helping partners through a midlife crisis, be aware that family and multigenerational problems may be part of what is unfolding.

Timing is especially important when helping someone heal. If we try to resolve a person’s pain before they are ready, they may resist the healing, re-create the very problems they are trying to escape, or even turn their frustration toward the person trying to help them.

This can happen because the pain itself has become part of the story driving their midlife transformation. Before a person can let go of an old story, they often need to understand why they have been holding onto it.

When those problems have been carried through generations, the wounds can be especially deep. Trying to make things better only at the surface can sometimes bring deeper issues to the surface before the person is ready to face them.

Healing is therefore not simply about making the pain disappear. It is about helping someone become ready to understand their past, make peace with it, and eventually choose a different story for their future.

Our process and experience help us work through these more complicated midlife situations toward growth and healed relationships.

Sincerely
Casey

Video: Husbands in Mid Life Crisis

If you need help right away, you can start here with this 30-minute video.

Learn how to help everyone make it through a difficult transition time.

This 30-minute video covers:

• An overview of Mid Life Crisis: What your partner is going through.
• Helping partners communicate more smoothly.
• The mirror of mid-life change
• Will my partner leave me? Steps to avoid a breakup.
• How to work with change in your life. The rules are changing.
• What relationship means in a mid-life crisis.
• Helping partners by releasing judgment. The three key steps.
• What is co-dependency and how to remove co-dependencies.
• Don’t let other people force your choices. Breaking out of bad patterns. Considerations for children.
• You and your partner will see issues differently. Learn how to approach this properly.
• Release feeling guilty.
• Helping partners in redefining friendship.
• How to get over bad feelings.
• The steps to move past the midlife crisis.