How "Faulty Foundations" May Be Tested in the 30s and 40s

This post is part three of a series. You can read part two here.

In today’s post, we’ll explore two examples that make concrete this abstract idea of how faulty cracks begin to show in the 30s and 40s and, importantly, we’ll also explore how it’s possible to fix cracks in faulty foundations and why it’s so important to do so.

In the prior posts in this series, we have been talking metaphorically and abstractly about proverbial foundations, proverbial houses, cracks, and stress tests, so let me share some examples of what this can look like.

Example one

First, imagine, if you will, a little girl who had a father with antisocial personality disorder and a depressed mother prone to suicide attempts.

Raised by personality and mood-disordered parents, this little girl would have had a childhood colored by relational trauma.

Her lived experience in childhood would, of course, have taught her that relationships are not safe and, in fact, could be downright dangerous.

For this young girl, it would be self-preserving of her, then, to withdraw from relationships (especially her parents but likely others, too) to protect herself and get through childhood and adolescence as unscathed as possible.

She would have learned (unconsciously) introjects and beliefs such as, "Relationships equal danger." Or, “Relationships are not safe.” And perhaps, “I am safe if I am by myself. Other people can’t be trusted.”

She develops avoidant attachment beliefs and behaviors as a protective function.

Again, this makes perfect sense given the conditions she experienced.

So let’s say she ages up through childhood and into middle school and high school.

In high school, she may be lonely watching her friends and classmates date, go to parties on the weekends and make plans together, but still, she doesn’t want it (relationships, romantic or platonic) enough to risk getting hurt by doing what they do.

But flash forward several decades, and now this young woman is 34. While she’s professionally and financially successful, she now feels an acute longing to be in a long-term romantic partnership and have a meaningful life outside of work.

She wants a life partner.

She’s not sure if she wants children—she wants the relationship first—but she’s also acutely aware of the biological dwindling of time to make that choice, too.

But there’s a problem: She doesn’t know how to find and date and be with a functional, healthy partner. She doesn’t even know what this means.

She’s never lived with anyone and can’t imagine letting someone see her when she’s sad or in those times when depression visits her.

This woman’s arrival into her 30s and the attendant pressure of the developmental milestones of this decade have forced her to confront the cracks in her proverbial faulty foundation in a way that she didn’t necessarily have to in prior decades.

She’s starting to feel the structure of her proverbial house of life sway more on the faulty foundation now that she’s older.

Life feels like a mystery. She feels acutely that everyone else seems to have been handed the proverbial “Handbook to Life” instead of her.

Her life feels hard.

Example two

Here's another example where the cracks in the proverbial foundation are felt more acutely in the 30s and 40s:

Imagine a young girl who was raised by one mother with generalized anxiety disorder that manifested into critical outbursts towards her and engulfing behaviors, and another mom who was a functional alcoholic but who sometimes drove the family in the car under the influence, terrifying the little girl.

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This little girl, as with the other example, would have experienced relational trauma.

In the wake of a lack of relational safety in her home, this young girl developed hypoarousal and “freeze” responses within her autonomic nervous system when she’s outside her window of tolerance.

When confronted with perceived or actual danger or risk, instead of having his limbic system “stay online” to cope with the stress, she shuts down. She freezes. She withdraws.

This manifests as dissociation and behaviors that help keep her “numb” and “checked out”, such as:

Heavy cannabis use.

Gaming through the night at the expense of her homework and sleep.

“Shrinking and not taking up space” at home and at school to avoid “making herself a target” with either of her moms or her disappointed teachers.

So she struggles through high school. She barely graduates.

Despite her low grades, she tries out community college but has a hard time self-organizing because each time she’s confronted with stressors (picking courses, essay deadlines, etc) she freezes and reverts to her dissociative coping mechanism.

At this point in her life as a young adult, the proverbial single-story house on her faulty foundation isn’t exactly sound, but it’s not (proverbially speaking) detrimentally collapsing (yet) either.

So this young woman grows up and she arrives into her 30s having patchworked together a series of jobs to get by, pay her bills, and make her way through life.

She hasn’t been given or asked for a raise in seven years across her jobs and is starting to feel the building financial pressures of inflation and not being able to competitively provide well for herself in her chosen urban environment in a way that she simply didn’t feel in her 20s.

She dearly wants to buy a home and maybe even have a family someday but she has not a clue how she’ll financially afford either dream.

Now, later in her life in her 30s and 40s, she’s starting to feel the cost of the cracks in her faulty foundation.

And these are two examples of an endless variety of ways cracks in faulty foundations might begin to reveal themselves as we age into the 30s and 40s and are confronted with the passage and pressures of time and developmental milestones we need and want to meet.