Why Life Can Feel Harder in Your 30s and 40s

“Why does life feel so much harder in the 30s and 40s?”

I’ve heard some iteration of this question nearly 100 times since becoming a therapist, and I have some ideas about why this statement feels so true for so many of us.

First, I want to go on the record by saying that I believe that life is hard, full stop. Being alive in a mortal body, loving other people in mortal bodies, all the while making our way in a world that requires money to pay bills and so on and so forth isn’t really easy for most.

But I do want to suggest that life might be harder still (especially in one's 30s and 40s) for a particular segment of the population: those of us who come from relational trauma backgrounds.

Why can life feel harder for those of us who come from relational trauma backgrounds?

Imagine this: If life is a proverbial house, built upon a proverbial foundation, those of us who come from relational trauma backgrounds nearly always have cracks in our proverbial foundations that others who come from non-trauma backgrounds do not have at all (or in greatly reduced ways).

And cracks in a proverbial foundation can make the proverbial house less sound, less stable, and more difficult to live in (so to speak).

Let me unpack this idea more.

Relational Trauma Backgrounds Often Yield Cracks in the Proverbial Foundation of Life

What does it mean to come from a relational trauma background? A relational trauma background, as I define it, is trauma that results over the course of time in the context of a power-imbalanced and dysfunctional relationship (usually between a child and caregiver) that results in a host of complex and lingering biopsychosocial impacts for the individual who endured the trauma.

These biopsychosocial impacts stemming from a trauma background can and often include:

• Maladaptive beliefs about yourself, others, and the world around you. For example: “I’m too broken to be loved, no one will ever love me.” Or, “No one can be trusted; everyone always leaves me," or "The world is out to get me. I have to be on guard.”
• Maladaptive behaviors to cope with intolerable feelings (feelings of vulnerability, loneliness, fear, etc.). For example: developing an eating disorder, engaging in risky sexual behaviors, becoming obsessive about work, or using substances to numb out.
• Challenges with emotional regulation and appropriate emotional expression skills. For example: feeling easily triggered often, experiencing explosive rage, feeling a lack of feelings altogether, and being unable/unwilling to share your emotions with others.
• Attachment wounds. For example: developing an avoidant, anxious, or disorganized (as opposed to secure) attachment style in response to the non-secure relational experiences endured.

And so much more.

These biopsychosocial impacts stemming from a relational trauma background are the proverbial cracks in the psychological foundation that, ideally, in a non-traumatic environment would otherwise be sound and stable.

What would a sound and stable psychological foundation look like? In a healthy, non-traumatic childhood, a young child would grow up with largely functional beliefs about self, others, and the world.

They would hit developmental milestones and cope with stressors in (mostly) functional, appropriate ways. They would have access to a wide emotional range and learn developmentally appropriate emotional expression skills. They would earn secure attachment and learn and experience how to be interdependent and connected with others.

All of this would add up to a mostly (if not fully) sound psychological foundation, a proverbially sound foundation for the house of life, which they’ll go on to build upon.

But those of us who come from relational trauma backgrounds? We may go on to build the proverbial house of life on an unsound foundation because of those negative biopsychosocial impacts, leading to challenges down the road but possibly (and often) not knowing that the foundation is unsound for quite some time.

The Faulty Foundation Is Often Good Enough for Some Time As We Grow Up

Most of us only realize how faulty our proverbial foundation is once we arrive in our 30s and 40s. Why is this?

Because when we’re young and growing up—as a teen and young adult—our proverbial house of life, built upon whatever foundation we have, is usually a single-story house, not a multi-level house, and thus we don’t feel the cracks in the foundation quite as much.

What makes it a single-level house (so to speak) and why wouldn’t the foundational cracks be felt as much?

During the early stages of life, most of us are still being financially and logistically supported by caregivers (dysfunctional though they may be) and/or institutions designed to protect and nurture the young and vulnerable (for example, foster care, protective systems, and schools).

Trauma Essential Reads

To Tell or Not to Tell: Disclosing Your Painful Past

Healing in Motion

Combined with still being able to rely on others for financial and logistical support (usually), there is also, in these life stages, a relative lack of significant responsibilities and triggers that would otherwise test the proverbial psychological foundations of our lives.

What do I mean by this?

Certainly, in these early decades of life, we may be in relationships (with family, friends, classmates) but often those relationships don’t demand of us what will be demanded of us later in relationships. For example, the strain of being someone’s best friend in eighth grade is far less than the strain of being the parent of an infant and toddler decades later.

In these early decades, there is still permission to be developmentally young because we are developmentally young. And in being developmentally young, the cost of un- or underdeveloped biopsychosocial skills (that stuff that comprises the proverbial foundation of life) is usually only a cost to us versus other vulnerable people and situations around us.

In other words, the stakes are lower if the biopsychosocial skills are faulty when we’re younger.

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