Dealing With Betrayal in Midlife: 4 Steps To Healing

By Karen Caffrey

Recently I wrote about how the separation of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver might be touching fears about marital stability in midlife. I had mentioned affairs as one possible pitfall in a midlife marriage, particularly one where one or both partners hadn’t kept up with their emotional homework over the years.

Nevertheless, it was truly nowhere within the realm of my mind that the next week we would be reading that Gov. Schwarzenegger had fathered a child with a member of the family’s household staff. 

I cannot and do not suppose that I can know what is going on in the minds of either of these well known individuals, Continue reading →

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Is Divorce Inevitable in Midlife?

By Karen Caffrey

High profile separations and divorces of long-married couples, like the separation of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver announced yesterday, can tap into a core of unease in many of us about loss of stability and change. 

If it can happen to the “beautiful people,” will it happen to us?  And if it did, would that be a good thing?  A bad thing?  In any event, it would be a different thing, and research shows that even good change is experienced as stressful.

I sit with a lot of people who are questioning the future of their marriages and their lives in middle age.  For many of them, it seems as if life has been cruising along on automatic pilot for quite awhile. Decisions made one or two decades earlier – who to marry, whether to have children, what choice of a career – have just been assumed as part of the warp and weave of life.

Then something happens. Continue reading →

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Don’t Be So Quick To Say You’re Not The Buddha

By Karen Caffrey

Several years ago I was fortunate enough to attend a three day workshop presented by Dan Siegel, MD at Kripalu Center in Massachusetts.  In case you haven’t heard of him, Dan Siegel is a psychiatrist, author and preeminent researcher in the field of interpersonal neurobiology. The workshop was on meditation and consciousness.

For three straight days he spoke extemporaneously to the group of 150 or so participants.  He led us in a series of meditations to ever deepening layers of consciousness and awareness, and took questions from the group.

I found him to be amazingly articulate, intelligent, grounded and very available and inviting.  At one point I had a question I wanted to ask.  In all honesty I can no longer remember exactly what the question was.  I do recall rehearsing it in my mind in preparation for standing up in the group and asking it. 

But as I arose from my seat it in front of the large group, I was struck by a bit of stage fright and dissembled. I tacked a preamble onto my question, saying, “Well, I’m not the Buddha, but…..”  Continue reading →

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Lost Your Midlife Mojo? Three Steps To Getting It Back

By Karen Caffrey

Two Happy Women Who Got Their Mojo BackRemember having a sense of personal vibrancy and exuberance, when all things seemed possible?  When you had the “magic”?  When you felt full of joie de vivre, attractive and alive? 

Are you feeling it now?

Yes, no, maybe?

If the answer is anything but an unequivocal yes, you may be suffering a Case Of Lost Mojo. 

Maybe it’s been stolen by your own personal Dr. Evil.  (Fellow fans of the impossibly juvenile Austin Powers movies, you know of whom I speak.)  Maybe it’s been transported into outer space by aliens. Maybe you dropped it when you were ordering your latte at Starbucks.

Or maybe, like for so many of us, you haven’t even noticed that it’s gone.

Ouch.

But once you do notice your mojo is gone, what’s to be done?  You can try to pretend it’s no big deal.  “Excitement is for the young”.  “It’s natural to get more serious as we mature.”  “It’s not like I’m a kid anymore”. Continue reading →

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Ready, Aim, STOP!! Three Steps To Slowing Down Your Life

By Karen Caffrey

It saddens me to witness what a difficult time some people have stopping.  Stopping their thoughts, stopping their words, stopping the constant race of some kind, any kind, of forward motion.  It’s hard to have a good life when you simply can’t slow down.

So why is it so difficult to stop?  Sometimes it has become a habit, one we are often not even aware we have.  Sometimes, when we stop we become aware of a difficult feeling, thought or awareness we are trying to avoid.  (Hence, the desire to continue moving!)  Often it is a combination of the two.

Yet wonderful things can happen when we stop:  intimacy, relaxation, clear thought, pleasure, peace.  And also some of the richer, more complex and yes, even painful things happen when we stop.  Our tears, our anger, our remorse.  Difficult things, to be sure, but things that have the ability to teach us and change us in positive ways, if we let them.   

Usually if we can develop the capacity to experience the difficult things that happen when we stop, we will also be rewarded with the pleasurable things in life that happen only when we’re still.

So how can we begin to cultivate the capacity to stop, to be still?

  1. Define your “Stop”.  Your Stop may mean you stop speaking.  It may mean taking one or two deep breaths.  Or perhaps your Stop will be one minute of silent, seated breathing.  (Five minutes for the ambitious!)  
  2. Stop frequently.  Four, five or six short “Stops” a day will have a bigger impact that one long Stop.  Plus, you’re more likely to try something new if it is small and easy.
  3. Bootstrap your Stop.  Tie your Stop to something you already do.  E.g. – Put a Post It note on your bathroom mirror to remind you to Stop before you brush your teeth.  Diary “Stop” in your Blackberry several times a day.  Use your Google calendar to remind you to Stop.
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Approach With An Easy Heart

By Karen Caffrey

Last week Charlie Rose interviewed actor Bradley Cooper, star of the recent box office hit movie Limitless.  When Rose asked him how he’s changed in the process of preparing for a role Cooper replied,

“The main thing I’ve learned is to approach everything with an easy touch and an easy heart, and just approach everything with a much more relaxed energy, ‘cause that’s when you open up.”

What a lovely phrase, and a lovely idea.  “Approach with an easy heart.” 

This got me thinking about how an easy heart might feel resting inside my chest. As I sat with this idea, I could feel the muscles around my heart relaxing and letting go. My shoulders came down, and I felt my torso softening and broadening. My breathing slowed. Ahhh….An easy heart.

I told my heart that it was okay to take it easy.  Everything is already okay.  Right now.  This very moment. All is well.

Cooper was right.  When your heart is easy, you open up.

How do you imagine you would feel if you approached life with an easy heart?

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The Gift of a Mid-Life Crisis (Or Two or Three)

By Karen Caffrey

It’s never to late, or too early, to have a mid-life crisis.

The phrase “mid-life crisis” has become impossibly trite.  But a mid-life crisis still describes an experience that many, if not most, people have at some point in their lives.  I think I had my first mid-life crisis at the age of 27, when my first marriage fell immediately and disastrously apart.  I’ve been fortunate enough to have several since then.

I say fortunate, because if used properly a mid-life crisis forces one’s attention into the present moment.  Particularly when we are young, some of us have a tendency to live life focusing on the future.  Developmentally, that can make a lot of sense. “I’ll finish college in four years.”  “I’ll get married after I’m 30.”  “I’ll make my first million by age such-and-such.”  We look forward with our hopes, our dreams, and our plans. 

A mid-life crisis is what happens when something interferes with, or in fact even destroys, this forward living perspective.  The marriage is unsatisfying.  Or it makes us miserable.  The business venture fails. We spend three, four, five years in graduate school only to discover that we can’t stand working in our chosen field.  “The best laid plans of mice and men…”, and all that. 

The golden ring of the future lands squarely in our lap, and we discover that it is in fact a rusty metal band.  The “unpleasant present” wallops us over the head.

And oddly enough, this is the gift.

All the sages agree that life is lived more fully, and in fact can only truly be lived at all, in the present. Unpleasant realities have the effect of bringing us directly in to the here and now.  Our task is to distill the gift of that reality from the mid-life crisis – the gift of living in the here and now – and use it to guide our life into the future. 

So go ahead – have a mid-life crisis.  Have one, or two, or three. 

Welcome to the present.  

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The Sleep Diet

By Karen Caffrey

I’m on a diet. The Sleep Diet. Unlike most diets, however, this diet involves indulgence rather than deprivation.

Since January 1, I have been sleeping as much as I want. I go to bed early and I don’t get up until I wake up naturally. No more alarm clocks for me.

I haven’t slept less than 8 hours a night for five weeks now. Most nights I sleep 9 hours, and sometimes even 10. I feel rich, spoiled, decadent.  I feel like I’ve won the lottery, or inherited a vast fortune. I go to bed at night greedily, hungrily. I sleep voraciously. I revel in the luxury of a vast, uninterrupted space of time between my fleecy microfiber sheets and comforter.

I’ve also lost 7 ½ pounds since January 1.

There’s science here. Research has shown that not enough sleep affects hormones that control our appetite by increasing gherlin (the hormone that makes us hungry) and decreasing leptin (the hormone that makes our hunger feel satisfied). 

Science aside, I am of course feeling supremely rested. I feel less stressed and have more energy. I have more energy, for example, to plan, shop for and prepare nutritious, home-cooked meals. I feel less need to eat for comfort, or to try to create energy to make up for my fatigue. I’m experiencing a Better Life. 

I love being on my Sleep Diet. I’d tell you more about it, but I gotta go now. It’s time for bed.

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Getting Counsel From Someone Who’s Been There

By Karen Caffrey

Lawyer-turned-therapist offers help to attorneys in crisis

by Douglas S. Malan
The Connecticut Law Tribune
March 30, 2009

Karen Caffrey knows the feeling.

You’re in your early thirties and things are starting to click at your law firm. You’re getting to understand how to practice law and you’re good at it. But the time and effort required in your practice is immense, and the legal work really isn’t fulfilling.

You’re starting to question whether the legal profession is where you should be. You wonder if you can get out, and how. Meanwhile, colleagues and friends are getting laid off by the dozens. Continue reading →

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Adoptees And Silent Realities

By Karen Caffrey

In our society adoption is usually viewed as a problem-solving, not a problem-creating, event. Adoptive parents can parent a child, birth parents are relieved from the responsibility of parenting that same child, and the child ends up with a family.  However, the emotional realities for all members of the adoption “triad” (adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents) are far more complex, and far less idyllic, than is implied by this common stereotype. 

For adoptees, these realities often include emotional consequences that are rarely acknowledge or discussed.  Some of them are as follows: Continue reading →

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