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Midlife Challenges
Many books written in the last 15 years explore what our lives are like now as we head into new territory. Many of us are crossing the life-marker of age 50 with an expectation of living in good health for another 25 or 30 years, with a high likelihood of spending some percentage of them without a partner even if we are currently married. Many of these books interview women about their lives or record discussions between women, with more or less insight into the larger psychological, social, and political issues.
The offerings I found most useful are those which use the voices and experiences of women to organize the information and clarify the whole picture. It's crucial to know that whatever you are now experiencing, you are not alone - many woman are feeling the same, struggling to make new sense of our old lives and find different possibilities for the coming years. In all these books, women are doing what we can do so well - revealing frankly the fears and inadequacies and suffering of humans living real lives on the planet, and the insights and triumphs that emerge from facing what comes and looking for creative solutions.
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 How To Create Your Second Life At Any Age
Barbara Sher
1998
BarbaraSher.com
This is the best single book of the many I have reviewed dealing with the issues that are commonly lumped together as the "midlife crisis." Barbara Sher sweeps away the received wisdom about women and aging with a no-nonsense broom. She proposes that our first life, until 40, is not really our own -- we are at the mercy of our biology and governed by our hormones. But in our second life, we finally have the freedom to make real choices based on what we've learned from our past experience. The mistake most of us make is that we don't slip out of the chains of nature when we can - we try to keep applying the rules we learned from our first life to our second life, rather than recognizing that this is a whole new game.
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 How Women Can Develop Their Inner Strengths, Genius, and Intuition
Mona Lisa Schultz, M.D,. Ph.D.
2005
http://www.drmonalisa.com/
Buy this book new or used at Amazon
This is a follow-up on her first book on intuition. It's based on Shultz's medical, psychological, and neurological studies of the brain, personal experience with intuition, intuition readings with clients, work with patients as a psychiatist, disastrous personal health experiences, and work with Dr. Christiane Northrup on women's issues. In contrast to the “you are what you eat” approach, Schultz says “you are what you feel,” and names her process of recognizing emotions and their effects and taking action to promote what is positive and neutralize what is negative “Emotional Feng Shui.”
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 A Guide to Reviving Your Spirit, Recreating Your Life,
and Returning to Your Truest Self
Kathleen Brehony
1996
website
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This is definitely a self-help book with big aspirations. Brehony covers a lot of excellent material exploring the issues of midlife from the Jungian perspective. Jung sees midlife as the time when the urge toward individuation, or beginning to move beyond the public persona which has served us well in the first half of life, becomes of primary importance. Dissatisfaction with forms and relationships which were once all-important begins to bubble up as the need to move toward a more inward relationship with the self intensifies.
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 Coming Into Our Own at Fifty
Colette Dowling
1996
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A positive, energizing look at the possibilities of women’s lives over 50 and the dilemmas that need to be solved. This is a good overview of the territory, straightforward and written with humor and pizzazz. She sees through conventional cultural expectations and punctures them at every opportunity. Dowling is also the author of The Cinderalla Complex and The Frailty Myth.
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 Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman
Joan Anderson
2000
The autobiographical report of a woman who has married an extremely rational and un-nurturing man and has raised a family with him, but now feels the relationship is empty and the next step is obscured by her lack of knowledge of herself. She has the extreme good fortune to have a cottage on Cape Cod, and the guts to decide to retreat there for a year to work things out for herself, by herself. She finds herself unexpectedly in the position of needing to work, and the experience of working in a fish market and digging clams, new relationships with local people, and her time alone tracking herself lead to a fruitful understanding. This could be good if you are at a decision point about what do about a relationship you are in.
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 Concentrated Wisdom for Juicy Women
Jean Shinoda Bolen
2003
This is a small book, sharply focused and perhaps useful for those of us who have trouble with the crone archetype— my first image of a “crone” is always a hunched-over, wizened woman in a ratty medieval cape with a hood, pathetic and vaguely menacing. Bolen says, pitting herself firmly against that image:
I am proposing that it is time to reclaim and redefine “crone” from the word pile of disparaging names to call older women, and to make becoming a "crone" a crowning inner achievement of the third phase of life. . .
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A Visionary Journey of Healing
Jeanne Achterberg
Don’t be put off by the subtitle. Dr. Jeanne Achterberg is one of the original founders of the alternative health movement - psychology professor, author, lecturer, teacher of healing visualization, and senior editor of the cutting-edge journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. Her other books are: Imagery in Healing: Shamanism and Modern Medicine, Woman as Healer, Rituals of Healing: Using Imagery for Health and Wellness (with Barbara Dossey).
Her last 25 years of work have been about the psychological and spiritual dimensions of cancer. I thought when I opened this book that I would be reading the straightforward story of a woman who faced a serious health challenge and simply applied everything she knew about alternative healing. Well, no and yes - this honest and completely absorbing memoir could just as well be subtitled “muddling toward the truth while trying to keep your sense of humor.”
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