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CASE STUDY
"Sister Jane" • Midlife Issues

Lief Noll, Ph.D. is a therapist at SLI.

"I just can't take care of everything like I used to," says a tearful Sister Jane Marie, a 56 year-old member of a religious teaching order, "I give and give; I feel no support in return; I am just so tired." After a thirty-two year career as a teacher and school administrator, Sister Jane is angry and humiliated at finding herself seeking help. Accustomed to being the one to whom others went for support and guidance, she now struggles with how to cope with the many changes in her life over the past few years.

When Jane chose to return to the classroom after years in administration, she was disheartened to find her students more unruly and less focused than she remembered. Her colleagues seemed more aloof and even distant. She found herself irritable with students and avoiding faculty meetings. On occasion, she chose to eat lunch in her car and found herself crying without apparent reason. Jane described her relationship with the members of her community as "up and down." She is grieving the loss of two of her closest friends - one died recently of cancer and the other is on exclaustration. And as a result of an intense ministerial focus over the past 5 years, Jane has felt her communal relationships become less conflicted, but also "much less open and safe." She has no one presently that she confides in regularly.

After Jane's father, an alcoholic, died recently, her younger sister told Jane and her other sister that she had been molested by her father throughout her adolescence. Her other sister then admitted that her father had touched her inappropriately as well. This revelation has been a tremendous blow to Jane, who idolized her father as a strong and spiritual man. She is now grieving his death and also coping with a shattered image of her father and of her family. Jane feels guilty because she was "untouched" and was not able to protect her two younger sisters. She is struggling to reconcile his support and pride for her religious vocation with how he treated her sisters.

What is happening with Sister Jane?
Sr. Jane's story provides some clear examples of common issues faced by many hard working, deeply committed successful people in religious life: depression, unresolved family of origin issues, and midlife questions. Sister Jane is a strong, competent woman who has had strong validation for her vocation and work, and good support. Jane also has a sense of herself as being tough and able to handle whatever the Lord might throw her way. But some inordinate stresses at work, combined with the opening of some long-ignored wounds from her early life, plus a growing distance from members of her community, have all conspired to bring life as Jane knew it to a screeching halt.

Jane suffers from a heroic sense of self. Her tremendous energy, intellect, and people skills, have caused doors of opportunity to open in her life. Able to take on more and more, Jane learned not to say "no." Her successes taught her that she could do more. Her colleagues became accustomed to Jane being able to "handle it" if there was more work to do or more problems to be solved. Ironically, her strengths are now the very prison in which she finds herself. Her lack of close friends and social support have become a handicap. Her self-reliance and inflated sense of her own importance made her delay in seeking help. Sr. Jane's depression is directly related to her isolation and the unexpressed losses of these past few years.

A critical early support for Jane had been the loving presence of family. For Jane, early survival in her dysfunctional family meant turning a blind eye to problems, putting on a cheerful front, and acting as if she had a model family. That myth has been shattered. Jane is not only grieving her father but also the myth of a perfect family. And her heroic savior role in her family very much parallels her hyper-functioning role at work as an adult.

A Time of Crisis or Invitation
Midlife is, indeed, a time for reassessment and modification of what Daniel Levinson calls "life structure." Current films such as American Beauty illustrate the dark side of this time for both men and women. Developmental theorists and writers suggest that midlife brings with it psychological and emotional tasks that are as poignant and as critical as those developmental challenges posed by adolescence. Issues of identity, questions about the meaning of one's life and work, adapting to a changing sense of one's body, coming to terms with limits and mortality become salient issues during this time. For women, issues related to menopause and the transition from motherhood to crone/wisdom figure come into play. For women religious, generativity, consciously or not, frequently comes to the forefront. For persons who overwork, as does Jane, the ability to work harder and do more may become a primary expression of generativity. Depression can be related to a sense of "drying up" and of decline. Evaluating what generativity means and being able to find ways of working and relating that are gratifying and fruitful are issues for all women, including women religious.

Spirituality, Integration and Healing
Carl Jung describes being human in terms of polarities. Young-Old, Creative-Destructive, Masculine-Feminine, Attachment-Separateness, are all dimensions along which we move in different ways at different times in our lives. For Jane, and for others who face times of crises and midlife challenges, now is the time to integrate these polarities and to find a new sense of balance. Spirituality must be the crucible in which this deep, integrative work takes place, for the journey through midlife is an essentially spiritual one. Coming to terms with one's own limits, admitting one's own weaknesses, opening up to new ways of relating to others and being in the world, must be anchored in one's relationship to God, the "Ground of One's Being." And it is often when a person is able to open themselves up and admit all that they are not, that God can speak and show them who they are to become.

LUKENOTES is a bimonthly publication of Saint Luke Institute.
Permission to use these materials must be requested in writing by contacting
lukenotes@sli.org

SLI EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
Saint Luke Institute
8901 New Hampshire Ave.
Silver Spring, MD 20903
(301) 422-5499 • (301) 422-5519 (fax)

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