Aging Joyfully by Dr. Carla Marie Manly

Author:Dr. Carla Marie Manly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Aging Joyfully
ISBN: 9781641702102
Publisher: Familius
Published: 2019-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Tuning In to Your Relationships and Roles

F rom your twenties through your mid-life years, you may have found yourself buffeted about by constant change.

Indeed, during these full decades of life, change may have been the only constant in your life. Women can be pros at adapting to change—often at great hidden expense to themselves. Although some women can make the shifts from one role and life stage to another seem ever so easy, these busy years of life often take a heavy, unconscious toll on the body and psyche.

To make everything run as smoothly as possible, you may have raced full speed ahead through each day without awareness of yourself, your relationships, and your many roles in life. Like many women, you may have simply done what needed to be done to get through each day. With a focus on pleasing others—making everyone as happy as could be—you may have lost touch with yourself. It’s quite possible that you simply didn’t have time to ponder the meaning and nature of your own life.

That makes perfect sense, for early adulthood schedules are filled with an ever-changing variety of tasks. In the course of her days, a woman often finds herself immersed in an exhausting array of roles and responsibilities. Your standard go-to list might have included juggling some mixture of the following: friends, dating, work duties, bills, cooking, the needs of a significant other, family issues, pregnancy, new babies, growing children, financial issues, carpools, dance lessons, daycare, school field trips, career changes, health issues, soccer games, laundry, work schedules, car repairs, shopping, volunteering, in-law concerns, doctor visits, birthday parties, homework, school schedules, busy vacations, relationship hiccups, home repairs, holiday events, and more. Clearly, schedules like this don’t leave a great deal of time for quiet introspection and soul-searching. Yet now, for the first time in decades, you may be pausing to ask yourself questions like: “Who am I?”; “What state are my relationships in?”; and “What have I done with my life?”

The later decades of life provide a most beautiful opportunity to consciously explore the questions and feelings that might be welling up inside of you. By avoiding the tendency to push such thoughts or emotions back down, you set the stage for exploring the wealth of internal information that is begging for your attention. As you look on your prior roles and relationships with compassionate awareness, you can use the wisdom you garner to find incredible selfappreciation and liberation.

The Roles of Youth: And So It Flew By in a Blur

If you’re like many women, you spent the first two decades of your life exploring, wondering, fretting, and doing your best to find your place in the world. You may have struggled with your place in your family of origin. If you were one of the lucky ones, you may have fit in and felt supported, accepted, and right at home. If not, you may have felt like a foreign object—the proverbial ugly duckling, baby bird without a nest, or postman’s daughter.

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