One of the things that I have noticed with my own increasing aging (soon to be sixty years), and have heard from some of my older patients, is that surprising memories come up from the past, of this or that person long forgotten, that are wonderful and cherished. Often these are fond remembrances that were not recognized as such during the moment or their happening; yet thirty or forty years latter they emerge, in some fashion, as important and valued. Why is this? My own thought about this is that as we move into latter life some of the outer-self attitudes (eg. status, recognition, attractiveness, accomplishment, winning/losing, etc) that we have long protected ourselves with, and aligned with, begin to fall away, and the inner thoughts and feelings that we have long not recognized begin to emerge. One of the really big defenses that many of us have used throughout our lives is the attitude of devaluing. It is this attitude, in particular, that begins to dissolve as we move through the latter third of our lives. The bonus is the bitter-sweet recognition that people along the way that we self-protectively devalued, were and are, in truth, precious to us. While these past relationships are often not fixable in our outer world, their reparation within our inner world is an unexpected bounty to our aging selves.
About Orin Borders, Ph.D.
Orin Borders, Ph.D, a psychologist in private practice with a long standing interest in the Marriage-Of-Opposites, is the originator on this site.
