Somewhere in the middle of life, we begin to sense that our truest self is not wrapped in social roles or others’ approval, but in a deeper authenticity waiting to be reclaimed.
Many of us reach midlife haunted by an unnamed ache we label as regrets or unfulfillment, forgetting that who we are today was once woven by a thousand unseen threads—small joys, deep griefs, unnoticed growth.
Perhaps, what’s rooted in this regret, nostalgia, or even quiet despair is that we’ve never been shown how to reconcile our earlier choices and experiences.
In, Falling Upward, Rohr argues that the reason we don’t pursue an authentic or wholehearted life is because we get trapped in conditioned living.
For many who have experienced historic and generational trauma, insecure attachment bonds, or other adversities, our life choices are often shaped through pain and fear. We learn to adapt, to shrink, to comply. To survive.
The Knots of Enmeshment
Enmeshment happens when relationships are forged by the wounds, ungrieved losses, and unfulfilled needs of others. Your boundaries collapse and fragments your inner wholeness. You lose clarity about where you end and others begin. Their needs become yours, while yours fall silent. It tangles you in someone else’s story instead of living your own.
These can be blurred boundaries that got us tangled in toxic relationships. It can be unhealed wounding that taught us unhelpful ways of coping to self-protect.
The Impact of Enmeshment
The impact of enmeshment is stark and can span decades, slowly eroding your innate sense of self. It can cause us to hide out, afraid to fail, be seen, or heard. We blindly followed inherited patterns that keep us compliant while our innate self slowly eroded, often across decades.
This quiet despair is also echoed in the stories gathered by palliative nurse and author, Bronnie Ware, in The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. At the top of her list is the wish to have had the courage to live a life true to one’s self, instead of one shaped around others expectations.
Midlife is typically the season we step into these unmoored spaces, sitting with questions like.
Who was I really, under all that pleasing, performing, or enduring?
Healing Language of the Soul & Psychology
If we lean into this question with self-compassion and courage, the answers will surface, and the soul can begin the quiet work of reorienting us. Clearing out the emotional debris, repairing the fractures, and weaving you back into your original shape.
In the language of the soul, it’s the kind of wholeness Psalm 139 describes as fearfully and wonderfully made; precious and cherished. Secure and safe. Loved, unconditionally.
The language of psychology calls this inner healing and growth individuation and differentiation — twin pathways that shifts you out of enmeshment.
Individuation:
Carl Jung coined the term individuation to describe the lifelong process of becoming a whole and authentic self. It is the journey of reclaiming parts of us hidden beneath roles, masks, and external expectations, so we can live in alignment with our true nature. Individuation is not about becoming someone new, but about becoming undivided—gathering together what was fragmented, bringing light and shadow, conscious and unconscious, into one integrated self.
In practice, it involves:
- Reflecting on past choices and noticing patterns without judgment.
- Allowing yourself to feel emotions fully, even those you’ve long ignored.
- Exploring personal interests, values, and goals that may have been sidelined.
- Trusting your intuition or inner guide over inherited scripts when making decisions.
- Integrating past lessons, griefs, and regrets into a fuller sense of you are today.
Differentiation:
Where Jung emphasizes the inner work of integration, family systems psychologist Murray Bowen shows how this inner wholeness takes shape in our relationships. He called it differentiation: the capacity to remain true to your own identity, values, and voice even when you are under pressure to conform.
Differentiation is what allows us to stay connected without collapsing into others’ expectations, or cutting ourselves off entirely.
In action, this might look like:
- Calmly expressing a differing opinion without arguing, shrinking, or apologizing.
- Saying no without over-explaining.
- Practicing self-care without guilt.
- Choosing how much time and energy to devote to relationships, over blind compliance.
- Responding to disapproval and push-back responsively rather than reactively.
Together, these twin pathways form the heart of midlife’s invitation.
Individuation calls us inward—toward authenticity and self-integration. Differentiation calls us outward—toward connection that doesn’t cost us our soul.
Both are essential if we are to untangle the knots of enmeshment and reweave a life that belongs to us.
A differentiated, individuated self is one that no longer lives reactively—pleasing, performing, or hiding—but one that chooses freely and lives with grounded authenticity.
Perhaps that’s why midlife can feel like a type of death and re-birth.
Conclusion
Midlife is not an endpoint but a passage—a time when old psychological contracts are rewritten and new truths embraced.
It’s the threshold where we finally stop editing our story to keep others comfortable. We realize we cannot keep outsourcing our sense of self to roles, titles, or approval. We must come back to ourselves and recover the agency to decide who we want to be now—not in defiance of the past, but in gentle conversation with it.
Each act of self-definition, each moment of re-alignment, is a thread that reweaves the self into wholeness. This is the heart of a differentiated identity— claiming a self that can belong and flourish without shame or self-betrayal, and to love without self-erasure.
💬 Do you find yourself wading through a messy middle years yearning for a deeper rootedness? An unconditional sense of belonging in an uncertain world, second-guessing every choice or path or wondering if there’s even a place for you anymore? If so, you’re not alone.
The Midlife Homecoming series explores how to untangle these knots so we can find our way back to our original blueprint and pursue wholehearted living.