Reflections: Breaking Old Patterns to Find Yourself

Stephanie: Hi. Welcome back to the Big Four Oh. It's Steph here, and I wanted to explore some of the themes that emerged from my conversation with Elizabeth Makepeace, which launched earlier this week. If you haven't listened to it yet, don't worry. It's not a prerequisite and there is no quiz. This isn't so much a recap as an examination of how Elizabeth's story fits into the framework and illustrates some of the motifs that come up during this midlife transition.

I normally add these thoughts to the end of the interview episode, but have found more and more that I get great feedback when I carve them out into a standalone episode. So I'm gonna try to do that more often.

For those of you who haven't yet had a chance to listen to Elizabeth's story, I'll give you just a quick outline. She was a single mom in her thirties when she met a younger man who romanced her and wooed her right up until they got married, at which point he had some very rigid and regressive views on how husbands, wives, and children were supposed to act.

After several years of trying to make this marriage work and after losing a baby, Elizabeth decided to leave the marriage just a couple of weeks before her 40th birthday. As a healer, she was trying to heal her ex-husband, but she finally realized that that wasn't her job. He had a choice of whether or not to heal. And it was during the time after the marriage when she was processing what had happened, that she realized that there were lifelong patterns being played out and that it was time to break some of those habits.

So when I sat back and thought about Elizabeth's story, it reminded me of one of the conclusions I came to after speaking with Marcy Langlois in episode 119, how the thoughts and beliefs running in the background of our minds shape our lives often without us realizing it.

So many of us reach midlife, feeling stuck or frustrated. Or even physically unwell without really having any understanding of why. I know that was true for me, and I could easily identify dozens of previous guests who were in the same boat. And these aren't just abstract ideas, these are deeply embedded programs. Stories that we absorbed during our childhood. Roles we were trained to play. And dynamics that we reenact again and again and again, until one day we finally realize what's happening and ask, wait, wait, what? Why does this keep happening? And Elizabeth's story is really a textbook example of this kind of awakening. She did such a great job of illustrating the path to her realizations. Because unbeknownst to her, she was conditioned to care for others from a very, very young age, which later manifested in emotionally imbalanced partnerships where she sacrificed her wellbeing to heal or fix someone else.

She spent decades in that familiar role of the caretaker, of the healer, of the person who fixes things, who holds it all together, and who carries the emotional weight for everyone else. It wasn't just that she was a mom of young children. Her first marriage was to an alcoholic who required caretaking. And her second marriage was to somebody who had his own issues, who also required caretaking.

But looking back, it made sense because she was raised in a home where her dad was ill. Her mom was stretched super thin. Her brothers were much older, so from a very young age, she learned to be useful by being capable. And like so many of us in midlife, she eventually hit the wall, not because she did anything wrong, but because it was finally time to become aware, accept, and evolve.

And to do that, she had to face those unconscious patterns head on. So there are two interesting tidbits I wanna pull out of Elizabeth's story in case maybe they seem familiar to you. And the first is breaking the caretaker cycle.

You might not think of yourself as a caretaker per se, but ask yourself the following question. Am I always the one keeping the peace? Am I always the one doing the emotional labor? Am I always the one fixing others or taking care of others and putting myself last? Because sometimes what looks like love is actually an old survival strategy. And part of this transition into second adulthood is learning to love other people without losing yourself.

The second tidbit is related to the caretaker cycle, and that is recognizing that some of this might be generational patterns playing out in your life. Midlife is when so many of us suddenly see our lives through a different lens. We begin to recognize how the dynamics we grew up with, especially the ones we never questioned, are still playing out in our relationships, in our careers, in the choices we make about our lives.

But there's good news because becoming aware of those patterns is the first step to changing them. In her story, Elizabeth didn't just survive her unraveling. She used it as fuel for her transformation, and that's something that anyone can do, once we start paying attention to the quiet stories our lives have been trying to tell us all along.

And that brings me to the bigger picture because what Elizabeth went through highlights something I see in so many of these conversations about midlife transition. We often grow up believing that love looks like doing, helping, fixing, taking care of other people's needs sometimes before they even ask. Anticipating other people's needs. And we're praised for it.

We hear You're so strong, you're so reliable, you're so good, you're so thoughtful. But at some point, many of us start to realize that what looked like care was actually something else. It was codependency. Or it was over-functioning. Or it was self-worth getting tangled up in being needed.

I shared a realization with a girlfriend a few years ago and it resonated with her deeply. And she's also another oldest girl, so maybe it's the birth order first girl thing, but after some major event, I told her I cope with capability. Meaning when shit goes down, I get shit done. Checklists to-do lists, those are easy to take care of. I had never heard the concept of over functioning before.

Have you ever wondered when does care become codependency?

I think care bleeds into codependency when your wellbeing becomes secondary to someone else's behaviors or emotions or their wellbeing. When their moods dictate your peace. When you feel responsible for their healing, like Elizabeth did, or their happiness like so many of us do. And often it doesn't look toxic on the surface, it looks generous, it looks compassionate, it looks loving.

That's why it's so hard to spot. So it might be helpful to ask yourself, am I helping because I genuinely want to or because I feel like I have to? If the answer includes anything, like you're afraid that not helping means you'll be abandoned or unloved, or even seen as selfish, that's not care. That's compulsion. That's caretaking rooted in fear, not in freedom.

So how do we untangle self-worth from usefulness? Many of us learned to measure our worth by how much we do for others. We became the helpful kid, the strong one, the responsible one. But here's a potentially tough truth. Being needed isn't the same as being loved. You are not here just to serve my friend. You have value simply because you exist, not because you hold everything together for everyone else.

And this is where midlife can be a powerful reckoning. Ask yourself, if I stopped doing all these things for everyone else, who would I be? That's not a crisis. That's an invitation.

So what does it look like to stop over-functioning? Well, it doesn't mean you have to abandon people. Instead, think of it as letting them carry their own weight, their own growth. You have to trust or even build the trust that other people can handle discomfort, disappointment and responsibility, without you smoothing the way or making it easier for them.

This also plays into a conversation that we've had at the end of other episodes about setting boundaries, because trusting that other people can handle discomfort, disappointment or responsibility might look like you saying, I trust you to figure that out, instead of jumping in to fix it. Or letting someone sit in or take care of their own mess, even if you know how to clean it up.

And it might look like choosing rest over rushing into rescue someone else. It's uncomfortable at first. I know you're gonna feel selfish. You might feel guilty. But over time the people around you either grow up and take care of themselves or they fall away. And if they fall away, that means they were only there because of what you did for them. And if they fall away, you make room for people who see you, not just what you do for them.

So that speaks to really the broader transition from doing for other people to being for yourself, which is one of the hallmarks of second adulthood. So let's zoom out for a minute and talk about what this means more broadly, because Elizabeth's story isn't just personal, it's also got some incredibly universal elements to it.

So let's look at first adulthood, which is essentially from when we leave home until sometime between 35 and 45, when we enter this transitionary phase. We are trained to prioritize doing. We do what's expected. The shoulds. We perform, we achieve. We play roles, parent, partner, provider, peacemaker. And much of what we choose to pursue is shaped by external validation.

Am I being a good daughter, a good employee, a good spouse. We learn to measure our worth through our usefulness to others and through pleasing others with our achievements. But around midlife, something different starts to stir. And for many of us, it's really subtle at first. It's maybe quiet restlessness, a nagging feeling. The question bubbling up inside of you of is this all there is? And for some other people, it's a full on crisis. It's burnout, it's a health scare. It's the collapse of a relationship, like in Elizabeth's case. Or the overwhelming realization that in giving so much to other people, we've completely lost ourselves.

That's why I call this period the Ick, because a lot of times we struggle to name or identify what's wrong, and it's not until we can do that, that we can start to make our way to the other side. So this is really the doorway to second adulthood. And this is the time of life when the volume on all those external voices turns way down, and we start to tune into the voice inside of us that is telling us what we want, what we need, and what will make us happy, healthy, and fulfilled.

And thus one of those hallmarks is the transition from doing for others to being for yourself, not in a selfish way, but in a self-honoring way.

So that could be the difference between defining yourself by productivity to defining yourself by your presence. From prioritizing everyone else's needs to finally listening to your own needs. And from proving your value or your worth through action to knowing that you have value even in stillness.

For someone like Elizabeth, this shift looked like saying, I am no longer responsible for healing everyone else. It looked like recognizing that her compulsion to care wasn't just kindness. It was born out of a childhood survival pattern. And she finally decided to choose peace over performance.

Don't get me wrong, this transition can be deeply uncomfortable. There's a lot of ground shifting under your feet here. When you've been the one holding it all together, it can feel radical, maybe even wrong to choose to rest. To say no, to not answer the call to fix something. But second adulthood is an invitation to release those old contracts we made in our youth and instead ask What do I want? What do I need, and who am I if I'm not doing all the time?

I have some personal experience with this concept as I've had to really reign in what I'm able to accomplish and commit to since I've been managing a chronic illness for the last eight years. I remember, I don't know, maybe I was in my teens or twenties. One of my uncles said that my grandfather was a guy who could make you hate Saturdays, and I think that was true of the families that both my parents came from. Weekends were for doing. For chores, for projects, for cleaning. And the house that I grew up in was very much the same way, and my brothers both subscribed to these same practices.

So you can imagine the things that my brain started telling me once Saturdays became the day I needed to recover from making it all the way through the work week. And Sundays became the day I needed to rest up in preparation for the exertions that were coming the very next week. It was an adjustment, let me tell you. But I am not a bad person because my garage isn't as organized as I would like it to be or because I haven't picked up my stained glass tools in more than a year now. And I'm not a bad person because I need to pay someone to help with projects because I'm not capable of pulling my own weight physically.

And that's part of the redefinition that's at the heart of this midlife transition. It's not the end of usefulness or love or service, but the beginning of choosing them consciously, not compulsively.

So much like the pattern of working away on the weekends that my family passed down through the generations, Elizabeth realized that she was repeating emotional dynamics she witnessed in her family as well. Caring for an ill father, picking up the slack for an absent mother, being the responsible one. That was a light bulb moment for her, and maybe for you too.

Midlife is often when these invisible patterns start to come into focus, probably for the first time. We finally get curious about why these things are happening and we start asking questions like, why do I always end up in this role? Where did this belief even come from?

I remember asking some of these questions when I finally realized that my romantic relationships kept conforming to similar patterns time and time again. So one of the most powerful things we can do in midlife is start tracing those patterns that show up in our lives. Not to assign blame to anyone but to understand them. We all have emotional habits, unconscious beliefs, and relational behaviors that seem to repeat themselves over and over.

Maybe you always end up in relationships where you feel responsible for your partner. Or maybe you find yourself constantly overworking, people pleasing, or avoiding conflict at all costs. These aren't random personality traits. They are patterns learned somewhere, absorbed young, and reinforced over time, all without your knowledge or your consent.

So when you start to ask, where did this start, or who taught me this, you're not pointing fingers. You're turning on a light. Until we understand the source of a pattern, we stay stuck in it. It's the operating system running silently in the background of our lives, influencing everything from who we choose to love, to how we define success, to whether we feel safe resting, or worthy of rest.

Elizabeth gave us a beautiful example. She grew up in a household where her father was ill and her mother was constantly working. From the time she was a child, she was put in a caregiving role, cooking, cleaning, literally helping with dialysis. So it made perfect sense that she became a caretaker in her adult relationships as well.

But she didn't fully see that connection until midlife, when yet another emotionally draining relationship pushed her to her limit. That's when the penny dropped. That's when she could finally realize, oh, this isn't about now. This isn't about this relationship. This is about then, way back then, before I even knew I had absorbed this lesson.

And here's the important part, once you see the pattern and its origin, you can stop acting it out because you can choose differently. You get to update your story from survival to sovereignty.

I remember clearly when I first met my husband, I knew he was something special. And when we first started dating, I had already realized that I was in, uh, a doom loop. I was in a pattern I couldn't quite get out of. So I said to myself, and again, I remember this explicitly, I said to myself, I'm gonna do the opposite of what I would normally do. If I wanna call him, I'm not gonna call him. If I wanna text him, I'm not gonna text him. And let's see how that works. Well, four years later, we were walking down the aisle, so something must have clicked.

So if you're noticing that you are stuck somewhere in your life, take a step back and look and see if there's a pattern there. Ask yourself if you've felt the same way before. Ask yourself, who taught me that this was how love or success or safety or whatever works? Where did I pick this up? Where have I seen this before? Because maybe it wasn't somebody teaching you something. Maybe it was just something you saw.

And then finally, what do you wanna believe instead?

Now I know, I know this intro, this kind of introspection isn't easy. It's a lot of work and it's uncomfortable, but it's ultimately freeing. Because it allows you, no, it empowers you to stop reenacting the past and start creating a future that's aligned with who you are now.

After my conversation with Marcy Langlois in episode 119, I talked about how we can dig up the unconscious thoughts, patterns, and beliefs that are running in the background of our minds, that are shaping our lives often without us realizing it. I shared five tips on how to do that, and if you're interested in a copy of that, drop me a line and I will send it to you.

Go to my website, the big four oh.com, and you can contact me right from that top bar.

Aside from that, I would love to know your take on what I've shared here today. Does any of this resonate with you? Did you have any aha moments with any of those examples or thoughts? And are there any behaviors in your life you've gotten curious about exploring?

Drop me a line. I'd love to hear about it. I'll see you next time.