Middle Adulthood: Generativity or Stagnation?

This is one of the 8 passages we explore in our upcoming session of Thresholds. In Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, he identifies the portal of Middle Adulthood:

• Generativity: In this time of your life, is your inner world growing larger? You will know it from the quality of inner fullness and aliveness. If you’re paying attention, you may notice you start letting go of old roles and narratives. You feel yourself opening to new possibilities, previous interests or causes calling to you. Something different begins to matter.

  You may notice a desire to leave a spiritual or religious community, civic group or affinity group that mattered to you: it could have been life giving, but now it’s grown stale for who you are now and too small for who you are becoming.

  Your group of friends may grow smaller if you’ve tended to have a wide circle of friends. Or if you’re a type who has tended to isolate from people and life, you may feel an unfamiliar desire to reach out and expand.

  You may feel an urgency to contribute in a way to others or a future and join a group who shares the same desire.

  You may have faced death, loss or an illness in you or a friend and you feel the brevity of life. You stand at your kitchen sink, watch the birds in the feeder, the colors on the leaves change and you think, I’m still here. Now. There’s a poignancy in being alive and you notice small things you hadn’t noticed before.

  Generativity is listening to your life and allowing it to change and grow. There’s an expansive feeling of aliveness and sometimes a depth of meaning.

• Stagnation: Stagnation is when you notice when you’re repeating old habits, playing old roles, still trying to prove yourself with material things, intelligence, perfection and socially acceptable identities.

  One person feeling stagnation said he was tired of being a rebel and revolutionary. His fist didn’t feel the fight and he was tired. He said he realized he wanted to simply enjoy his kid growing up, play his guitar and sit under the pines. What shifted him from irritated stagnation to generativity was an appreciation for some peace of mind.

  Another came to the realization how she only wanted to be with the young, as she had become over-identified with youth and the opinions of younger people. My stagnation was my refusal to accept that I’m in my 50s. It’s a big difference to try to act young and missing out on all the experiences that had shaped me and given me a helluva a lot of depth that my younger friends didn’t understand.

  If you experience the stagnation part of this passage, you may feel a sense of internal emptiness, lack of growth and stagnation. This may be your soul calling. Stagnation can come in a refusal to face what life is handing to you in the present time.

  Stagnation involves feeling unproductive and uninvolved, leading to self-absorption, lack of growth, and feelings of emptiness. You may also feel a normal neuroses that can come with facing aging and mortality. One woman in her 50s who’s always identified with being young, dynamic and athletic said, I wake in the middle night, terrified of aging.

  
  I like to think of stagnation as bound up energy calling me to something different. The midlife call is to continue to grow on the inside. This may elicit external changes in your life…but it’s an inside out call.

“In the end we will only be transformed when we can recognize and accept the fact that there is a will within each of us, quite outside the range of conscious control, a will which knows what is right for us, which is repeatedly reporting to us via our bodies, emotions, and dreams, and is incessantly encouraging our healing and wholeness.”
― James Hollis,
Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life:
How to Finally, Really Grow Up