Happy age

“When I’m as old as you, I won’t need anything either,” my son told me when he was 15 and I was 35. The same phrase could be said by a 70-year-old child to a 95-year-old parent. Nevertheless, at 95 and at 75, people need the same thing as at 35. Once, a 96-year-old patient said, blushing slightly: “You know, doctor, the soul doesn’t age.”

The main question, of course, is how we see older people. 30-40 years ago, when a person retired, he was deleted from life. He became a burden with which no one knew what to do, and he himself did not know what to do with himself. And it seemed that at that age no one needed anything. But in fact, old age is a very interesting time. Happy. There are a lot of studies that confirm that people in their 60s and 90s feel happier than younger people. Psychotherapist Carl Whitaker, in his 70s, remarked: “Middle age is a tiring hard marathon, old age is the enjoyment of a good dance: the knees may bend worse, but the pace and beauty are natural and unforced.” It is obvious that older people have less and more sober expectations, and there is also a feeling of freedom: we do not owe anything to anyone and are not afraid of anything. I appreciated it myself. I retired (and I continue to work, as I worked – a lot), but I receive a consolation prize for my age. You can’t live on this money, you can survive on it, but when I got it for the first time, I caught myself in an amazing feeling – now I can score on everything. Life has become different – freer, easier. Old age generally allows you to pay more attention to yourself, to do what you want and what your hands did not reach before, and to appreciate every such minute – there is not much time left.

Read more:

• “Old age can be the happiest time of our lives”

Pitfalls

Another thing is that old age has its own problems. I remember my childhood – it was the time of birthdays, and now I live in the time of the funeral – loss, loss, loss. It is very difficult even with my professional security. In old age, the problem of loneliness, being needed by oneself sounds like never before … No matter how parents and children love each other, old people have their own questions: how to buy a place in a cemetery, how to organize a funeral, how to die … It hurts children to listen to this, they defend themselves: “Give it up Mom, you will live to be a hundred years old!” Nobody wants to hear about death. I often hear from patients: “Only with you I can talk about this, with no one else.” We calmly discuss death, joke about it, prepare for it.

Another problem of old age is employment, communication. I worked a lot in a day center for the elderly (in the USA. – Editor’s note) and saw people there whom I had met before. Then they had nowhere to put themselves, and they sat at home all day long, sick, half-extinguished, with a bunch of symptoms … A day center appeared, and they became completely different: they are drawn there, they can do something there, someone needs them there , can talk and quarrel with each other – and this is life! They felt that they need themselves, each other, they have plans and worries for tomorrow, and it’s simple – you need to get dressed, you don’t have to go in a dressing gown … The way a person lives his last segment is very important. What kind of old age – helpless or active? I remember my strongest impressions from being abroad, in Hungary in 1988 – children and old people. Children whom no one drags by the hand and does not threaten to give to a policeman. And the old people – well-groomed, clean, sitting in a cafe … This picture was so different from what I saw in Russia …

Age and psychotherapy

A psychotherapist can become a channel for an active life for an elderly person. You can talk about everything with him, in addition, he also helps. One of my patients was 86 years old and had difficulty walking. To help him get to my office, I called for him, on the way we chatted about something, then worked, and I drove him home. And it was a whole event in his life. I remember another patient of mine, with Parkinson’s disease. It would seem, what does psychotherapy have to do with it? When we met with her, she could not get up from a chair herself, could not put on a jacket, with the support of her husband she somehow got out onto a bench. She had never been anywhere, sometimes children carried her in their arms to the car and took her away … We started working with her and six months later we were walking around the huge house arm in arm: when we went full circle for the first time, it was a victory. We walked 2-3 laps and did therapy along the way. And then she and her husband went to their homeland, to Odessa, and, returning, she said that for the first time in her life she tried … vodka there. I was cold, I wanted to warm up: “I never thought it was so good.”

Even seriously ill people have a huge potential, the soul can do a lot. Psychotherapy at any age helps a person to cope with life. Do not defeat it, do not change it, but cope with what is. And there is everything in it – muck, dirt, pain, beautiful things … We can discover in ourselves the possibility not to look at all this from only one side. This is not “a hut, a hut, stand back to the forest, but to me in front.” In psychotherapy, a person chooses and gains the courage to see it from different angles. You can’t drink life anymore, as in your youth, with glasses – and it doesn’t pull. Take a sip, slowly, feeling the taste of each sip.