What a midlife crisis actually is
The phrase is used dismissively, which is a shame, because the event it describes is real and it is not vanity.
A midlife crisis is what it feels like when the arrangement you built your life around stops supplying meaning. The career still works. The marriage may still work. Nothing has necessarily gone wrong. And yet the thing that made it all worth doing has quietly gone, leaving performance without content.
Jung’s observation, and it has held up, was that the second half of life has a different task from the first. The first half is about building: the career, the family, the position, the competence. The second half is about something else entirely, and nobody is told what. The crisis is what it feels like when the first half’s answers stop working and no second set has arrived.
Why Thailand answers it so well
Because it answers it genuinely, at least for a while.
What Thailand offers is not primarily a lower cost of living. It is the removal of the audience. Nobody here knew you at forty. Nobody is measuring the present against the person you used to be. The identity that took thirty years to construct can be put down without anybody objecting.
That makes a second adolescence practically available for the first time since the first one. Late nights. Attention from much younger women. Alcohol that is cheap, constant and socially compulsory. Drugs, if you want them, at prices that remove the friction. And no obligation to explain any of it to anyone.
The relief is real. Most of the men I work with here were, for the first year or two, genuinely happier than they had been at home. That is the part people outside never understand, and it is why advice from home is so useless.
Why it stops working
Because a second adolescence is an answer to the wrong question.
The question underneath is about meaning: what this life is for, now that the thing it was organised around has stopped supplying an answer. A second adolescence does not answer that. It anaesthetises it, and the anaesthetic is excellent, and it works for about three years.
Then the arithmetic starts. The drinking that was social has become structural. The relationships have become shorter and more transactional. The money moves in one direction. Old friendships have thinned, because there is less and less that can be said honestly to people who knew the previous version. And the original emptiness is still there, now with a decade of consequences attached to it.
What is usually underneath
Two things, in my experience, and they are usually both there.
An unanswered question about meaning. Not a philosophical one. A practical one: what am I for, now.
And something much older. A very large proportion of the expatriates I work with are carrying something from long before Thailand: a childhood, a marriage that ended badly, a bereavement that was never grieved, an event nobody ever knew about. Leaving the country removes the reminders. It does not process anything, and it works well enough for long enough that nobody connects the two.
That is why treating the drinking, or the relationships, or the spending, without treating those, does not hold.
What the work is
It is not talking anybody out of anything. If you have made a life here and it suits you, that is not a symptom.
The work is finding out what the change was actually reaching for, so that the answer is not simply repeated somewhere else with a new set of costs. In practice that means going back to what stopped supplying meaning and why, dealing with whatever older material is sitting underneath it, and building something for the second half of the life that is not simply a reproduction of the first half with fewer restrictions.
Jungian analysis is particularly suited to this, which is why the practice is built on it. It is the one approach explicitly organised around the second half of life rather than the repair of the first.
Practicalities
Sessions are fifty minutes, weekly, by secure video, from Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Phuket or anywhere else in Thailand. In English or French.
Dr Philippe Jacquet is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. His Doctorate of Professional Practice at the University of Essex examined male eating disorders from the perspective of analytical psychology. Registration can be checked on either public register.
Related: alcohol · addiction · trauma · Jungian analysis
In crisis in Thailand: Samaritans of Thailand English line 02 113 6789, press 2. Department of Mental Health hotline 1323. In an emergency, go to the emergency department of an international hospital.
Common questions
What is a midlife crisis?
It is the point at which the arrangement a person built their life around stops supplying meaning. The career, the marriage, the role, the identity: all still functioning, and all suddenly hollow. It is not a failure of character and it is not vanity. Jung described the second half of life as having a different task from the first, and the crisis is what it feels like when the first half's answers stop working and no second set has been found.
Why do so many midlife crises end up in Thailand?
Because Thailand answers the question extremely well in the short term. It removes the audience that knew who you were, it makes a second adolescence practically available, and it is inexpensive enough that the decision feels reversible. The relief is genuine, which is precisely why it takes several years for most people to notice that the original question has not been answered, only postponed.
Is a midlife crisis the same as depression?
They overlap and frequently occur together, but they are not the same. Depression flattens everything, including the capacity to want. A midlife crisis is characterised by wanting intensely, usually something specific and usually something that belongs to an earlier version of the life. Where both are present, both are treated.
What age does a midlife crisis happen?
Most commonly between the late thirties and the mid fifties, but the age matters less than the trigger. It is usually set off by an event that makes the remaining time visible: a parent dying, children leaving, a career reaching its ceiling, an illness, or a birthday that lands differently from the ones before it.
Can therapy help with a midlife crisis?
Yes, and it is one of the areas where depth work has the clearest advantage over short-term approaches. The task is not to talk somebody out of the changes they are making. It is to find out what those changes are actually reaching for, so that the answer is not simply repeated in a new country with a new set of consequences.
Do you work with expatriates in Thailand?
Yes, online across Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Phuket and elsewhere, in English or French. A substantial part of this practice is expatriates, and the midlife crisis is one of the most common reasons they get in touch, though rarely the reason they give in the first email.