Crisis Irina Vasilyeva Gender differences are manifested not only in the structure of the body. The psyche of women and men also functions differently. They react differently to the realities of life. And even age-related turning points, despite general trends, do not occur and are perceived by them in the same way. The crisis of 30 years for women and men are two completely different crises. Today we'll talk about one of them.
Good afternoon, dear reader! And today our topic is: the weaker sex. Although, well, as weak as he is, in some places he is very, very strong, depending on what we are talking about. Remember, for example, the old joke: “Only by giving birth to a child can a woman fully experience the agony experienced by a man with a temperature of 37.2.”
What are the basis for gender differences in experiencing age-related crises?
Analyzing the incredibly huge empirical material on the psychological differences between women and men, you come to the conclusion that we can distinguish two main realities that influence experiences during critical periods of life: these are physiological characteristics and social ones.
Physiological features of a woman’s experience of a crisis period
Unlike men, women's brains never rest. Nature made sure that a woman “thinks for two,” three or more people. How else? The offspring simply will not survive without a “multifunctional mother.”
Neuroscientist Anne Moire writes about this: “Throughout history, women have always been responsible for children, dangerous situations were everywhere, so women could never completely relax.”
The same ancient factor determined the gift of evolution: the female brain is more active, it is constantly not just at work, but in multitasking mode.
If we compare it with a computer, the male brain is a powerful stationary machine that has only one, maximum two browser tabs open when turned on. He is capable of solving many complex problems, but only one by one, in order.
The female brain is a slightly less powerful laptop, but the number of tabs open on it is large. And the user not only has time to work on all of them at the same time, alternately opening one or the other, but also drinks coffee, gets a pedicure and chats on the phone with a girlfriend.
Social features of a woman’s life at 28-30 years old
It’s not for nothing that I first introduced you to physiology. Now it is much easier for you to understand what is happening to a woman socially. In this article we will not touch upon the crisis of adolescence in girls or the midlife crisis - there will be separate publications for a deeper discussion of these topics.
Let us dwell on the most turbulent creative period: thirty years.
A woman at this age has an incredible number of opportunities for self-realization: from raising children to rapidly climbing the career ladder.
The revaluation of values that occurs during this age period leads to the fact that the weaker sex compensates for what it did not achieve earlier. Tough career women are thinking about family, those on maternity leave are eager to get to work, mothers of many children are actively engaged in self-realization through handicrafts and acquiring a new profession, those who are disillusioned with marriage are joining the ranks of feminists, etc.
How to survive the women's crisis for 30 years?
At different stages of life, a woman faces psychological crises. One of these difficult periods overtakes her around the age of 30. It is important to perceive the crisis of 30 years as a step for growth, and not something negative. This is the best time when you can take a critical look at your life and do some “spring cleaning”. In this article you will find tips that will help you not only survive this stage, but also emerge from it as a winner!
Analyze your life.
Most often, the crisis of 30 years is faced by those women in whose lives there are many things that do not suit them. This is a time of severe disappointment and the fall of illusions. At the age of 18 you dreamed of one thing, and hoped to achieve it by the age of 30, but in the end you have something completely different. It is important to find time to sit alone and analyze your life. Find and write down those moments that do not suit you. Write down absolutely everything on paper, even if it seems to you that it is impossible to change.
Analyze your desires.
Try to determine what you really want from your life. What are your desires? Think carefully about this question, but don't let your emotions dictate what you want. Our emotions are temporary, but real desires are permanent. Therefore, write down your desires and give yourself some time to check them - some of them will go away when the emotions pass.
Take care of your appearance.
Very often, the thirty-year crisis is associated with the appearance of the first signs of aging. Alas, time is inexorable. But the first gray hairs and small wrinkles do not mean that you have become ugly. This is just an impetus to take even more care of your health and beauty. Set a time for exercise and don't skip workouts. Treat yourself to salon treatments at least 1-2 times a month. Don't skimp and buy yourself some new super fashionable outfits. This will boost your self-esteem. By showing yourself love and care, you will see that you are worthy and realize that there is nothing wrong with your appearance. Beauty is not in youth, but in the ability to maintain attractiveness at any age.
Engage in your inner world.
Start developing your talents, working on your strengths. There is no point in focusing on failures and mistakes when you have plenty of opportunities to change them. Start reading books that can deepen your consciousness and expand the boundaries of life.
Talk to your partner.
As a rule, the crisis of 30 years accompanies problems in relationships with a beloved man. It is very important to remember in these moments that men are built completely differently, so you should find the strength within yourself and explain to your partner what you are going through now. A loving man will understand you and provide support, and this can be the decisive factor in overcoming the crisis.
Don't forget to live!
Thirty-year-old women, for the most part, are either completely immersed in work, or devote themselves completely to their family and children. These are extremes that only make the crisis worse. A woman is sacrificial by nature, but we need to find a “golden mean” in this matter. Try not only to give others your time, energy, love, but also to accept from life everything that it gives in return. Live and enjoy every moment!
Symptoms of what is “about to hit”
In one form or another, no one can escape 30 years of crisis, even the happiest woman on planet Earth. But the experience in its acute form, when you want to “give up everything and run away to the ends of the world,” requires the help of a specialist or other outside support (well, at least from your ubiquitous girlfriends).
If you feel like you are about to be overwhelmed, I suggest you get acquainted with the materials of my online training. It is associated with the correction of emotional instability, the prevention of emotional burnout and the achievement of harmony and tranquility. After completing the training, I’m sure you won’t want to “run” anymore, because you will have a new resource for self-improvement.
What are the features of intense experience of the crisis of 30 years in women?
A sharp change in life goals and objectives
Everything that was important and unshakable yesterday is being questioned today. The blessings of life cease to satisfy, “new horizons” appear that one certainly wants to achieve. Middle-aged women with two children often remark: “It’s strange, when I was on maternity leave with the first, I was so eager to go to work, now I’m sitting with the second and enjoying every day I live.”
And the whole point is that maternity leave with the first baby, as a rule, is captured by the crisis of 30 years, when new horizons still beckon.
And maternity leave with a second child falls closer to the midlife crisis, when you come to the value of every minute you live (but we’ll talk about this in more detail in other articles).
Desire for a wealth of events and emotions
There is an acute feeling of discrepancy between real and desired life. At this time, by the way, marriages often collapse due to women’s initiative.
After all, it is during this period that most often a woman simply “flies” up the career ladder.
Dissatisfaction with self-realization
Whatever a woman does during this age period, it’s not enough for her. If she stays at home with her children, then she becomes not just a housewife, but a mom-blogger: a cook, a multi-mom, a beauty consultant, or a fitness consultant.
If she is interested in creative activity, she immerses herself in it: the incredible talents of an artist, singer, dancer, and writer are revealed.
I know cases where women at the age of thirty began to engage in sports activities and even achieved small professional results (of course, only in trade union or city competitions, but still!).
Causes
In fact, the fact that a 30-year-old woman or man at this age has not yet had a serious long-term relationship with the opposite sex has some psychological implications. To some extent, the framework discussed earlier makes sense in terms of the discrepancy between such cases and the average statistical data.
Perhaps you shouldn’t exaggerate things like that and immediately label people as “abnormal.” Indeed, in most cases, by the time they reach this age, many are already married and record the fact of becoming parents. While the minority are perplexed and acquire new complexes about why everything is different for them, why they are still alone. And there can be a lot of reasons for this, and many of them are deeply psychological in nature.
- Associative thinking in projecting parents' experiences onto one's own life. We have already said earlier that in an ideal family, children observe the relationship between their parents, forming in their minds a set of certain values that should guide a person’s life. But such drawing up of projections and making associative analogies with moral principles dictated by parents arises not only in prosperous families, but also in unhappy ones. Brought up in parental abuse, amid constant scandalous scenes, the child adopts from his father and mother the line of behavior chosen for his own coexistence. As a result, not wanting to repeat their fate, he closes himself off and, already an adult, rejects all opportunities to meet a representative of the opposite sex in order to create a family with him.
- Features of education. A parent who was once offended by his spouse, being in a state of divorce, can unintentionally or, conversely, deliberately lay in the child’s not yet formed consciousness an irrational trajectory of behavioral line in his future marriage, or rather, he can motivate him to prevent marriage as such in general, convincing his son or daughter that “all women” or “all men” are the same, and that in the future a potential partner may treat him (her) in the same way as one parent treated another, leaving him for another family, for example. As a result, it comes to the point that a person brought up in this way, even at the age of 30, does not perceive relationships as such, rejecting the very possibility of meeting someone and being together.
- Closedness. If in deep childhood and later adolescence a child grows up without love and manifestations of warmth from the people around him (often these are orphanages, children from boarding schools, etc.), at a subconscious level he develops a kind of blocks that subsequently do not allow him let people get close to you. They don't know what it's like to love and be loved. They have never felt any care towards themselves, so any object approaching them is perceived by them as a threat, and not as a person who wants to make their partner happy and give him their affection.
- Violence. Cases where there was a violent relationship are included in a special, separate category. This can range from parental beatings and bullying in childhood to sexual harassment in adulthood. The psyche of a victim who was once subject to violence breaks down, changes, and the normal perception of representatives of the opposite sex radically changes to irrational. In such cases, people do not have relationships, not only in 30 years, after such terrible life incidents they can generally remain alone forever, without any desire to open up to anyone and allow them to touch themselves.
- Fear of contact with the opposite sex. There is also such a thing as stupor and fixation - they can become the root cause of the fact that a person under 30 has not had a relationship. Due to character traits, internal isolation and self-obsession, a person is considered a hermit in life, who finds it difficult to find a common language with people. Lack of sociability, the desire to communicate, get to know others and talk about oneself - all this characterizes a person as a loner, unable and unwilling to share himself, his presence with someone else and share the rest of his life with him. It is more comfortable for such people to live independently and separately. But this, again, is until they experience a real feeling of falling in love and being infatuated with someone.
- Self-prejudice. Many people today are afraid to enter into a relationship due to the fact that they underestimate themselves, believing that they are not good enough for their partner to qualify to stay with him. This bias is also psychological in nature, since all these fears arise exclusively in the head of an indecisive person and are easily eliminated with the help of psychotherapy in consultation with a specialist.
- Prejudice towards potential partners. There is also a reverse dynamic in the development of events, when a person rejects attention from the opposite sex not due to his own embarrassment, but based on a feeling of hostility towards potential applicants, explaining this by his own superiority over them. This kind of “picking” in choosing a life partner can last quite a long time, up to the possible start of a relationship at 30 years old, or even later. But such prejudices are less common among people.
How to overcome a crisis period?
It is possible to survive the thirty-year life barrier without losing your honor and dignity. To do this, you need neither more nor less, but to begin to realize, bring to life your most incredible goals and desires.
Even if not everything and not on a large scale, it is simply necessary to try. This will be an effective adaptive behavior strategy.
Another adaptive strategy, although not as effective as the first, is a predominantly female tradition: communication. Women are much more likely than men to turn to other people for help when they experience discomfort: relatives, friends.
If there are favorable intimate and personal relationships in the family, the spouse can also be such a “safety cushion”.
What if you “grit your teeth” and leave everything as it is?
Our psyche is so beautifully structured that, when experiencing negative emotions, it will definitely find ways to get rid of them, even if we “don’t allow it.”
It is known how often psychosomatic disorders occur precisely in those who are accustomed to “gritting their teeth.”
This is a voluminous and complex topic. You can learn more about this topic by reading my book “How to allow yourself strong experiences, emotions and feelings without destroying yourself and others.”
If “something went wrong” during a crisis, it will be reflected in many areas.
Psychosomatic manifestations
- physical activity will decrease;
- constant fatigue and asthenia will appear;
- eating behavior will change (from refusing to eat to consuming large amounts of food);
- possible sleep disturbances (from insomnia to constant drowsiness);
- difficulties in sexual relationships (decreased libido or unrealistic sexual fantasies);
- formation of painful symptoms (pain of unknown etiology).
Performance
- a sharp increase or decrease in performance;
- decreased adaptability to the situation (rigidity of thinking);
- lack of analysis of the situation (action according to habitual behavioral patterns).
Forbidden thoughts and actions
A relationship crisis at 30 often occurs in couples with a long history of relationships. But depressive states that arise against the background of many years of loneliness are also common. What can we say, relationships after 30 years of marriage are also subject to life’s troubles and acts of infidelity. But in order to worry about this, you first need to enter into such a marriage. How to protect yourself from loneliness?
- Firstly, you need to eliminate your own reclusiveness - sitting at home or constantly at work, it is difficult to meet someone who can become your life partner.
- Secondly, you cannot think of yourself as a person “with a defect” - this is still the same theme that you need to learn to love yourself first.
- And finally, thirdly, you cannot alienate those who are actively trying to break through the wall of indifference that you have erected as a defensive reaction. Learn to trust people. Even if you make a mistake, the feelings you experience in moments of happiness will repay you with interest. Moreover, those who do not make mistakes do not learn from mistakes.
