Connie Zweig first encountered her inner age on a clear spring day in Santa Monica about seven years ago.
The author and retired psychotherapist was enjoying lunch at her favorite vegan restaurant, Real Food Daily, when an elderly woman walked in and sat at the table next to her. The woman's clothes were worn and tattered, her nails were dirty and her hair was disheveled. When she began asking for free food samples, presumably because she couldn't pay, Zweig noticed a feeling of disgust growing inside her.
This is uncomfortable. I will never be like that. I feel bad for her.
Then he caught himself, took a deep breath, and stopped. For decades, Zweig had helped people interrogate the part of their minds outside their consciousness: what 20th-century psychologist Carl Jung called “the shadow.” Now, here was his own shadow raising its head.
“My voice in me attributed traits that I couldn't see in myself,” said Zweig, who was in his 60s at the time. “I was getting older, I was getting needier, slower. You could be at risk of falling into poverty if something terrible happened.
“And that was shocking to me,” he said. “That after all this work on my own personal shadow, I still had an ageist role.”
If you've ever plucked a gray hair, made a joke about our aging political leadership, or taken a few years off your age in conversation, then you probably have an internal ageist too. Most of us do it. This is the deep part of ourselves that has us convinced that aging makes us useless, useless, ugly and irrelevant. It's also the part that leads some of us to spend thousands of dollars each year to combat any signs of aging with personal trainers, fillers, Botox, and a steadfast refusal to slow down.
But the battle against age is ultimately unwinnable. No matter how old you are, aging also comes for you. (Consider the alternative.) As Zweig says: “Aging is the one thing we all have in common.”
After his encounter with the woman at the cafe, Zweig embarked on an inner-year exploration of how to overcome his internalized prejudices and discover the hidden treasures of growing older, especially in old age. The result is his book “The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul.”
“We thought the legislation would eliminate racism, but we have seen that it was not successful,” Zweig said. “Implicit bias requires both social justice action and what I call 'shadow work' to uproot unconscious internal images and attitudes like inner ageism.”
Zweig, now 74, spoke to The Times about where inner age comes from and how we can begin to recognize it in ourselves and ultimately release it.
“Our unconscious beliefs and biases about age shape how we experience it,” he said. “But that can change.”
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
For those of us who want to reorient how we feel about aging, where do you suggest we start?
Throughout life, the inner ageist grows along with us, so you can start doing this work at any age.
What are you telling yourself about getting older? Can you catch it like I caught my internal dialogue at the restaurant when I was being judgmental and ageist? Can you capture that inner voice (or the feeling that accompanies it) in the context of aging?
Maybe you see an older stranger: what do you say to yourself? Or you see a family member who has aged, what do you say to yourself? Or you notice a change in yourself: what do you say to yourself and how do you feel about it? That kind of shadow awareness can help you start to become more in tune with yourself and then notice the effect it's having on you.
Emotionally, socially, in terms of your health, your relationships, what are the consequences of not attending to that inner voice and uprooting it so you can attend to it more deeply?
Knowing that aging brings with it a decline in health, time and energy, how can we be less afraid of it?
Those are legitimate concerns because they are legitimate challenges. It is true that pain and loss are part of and integrated into the aging process. And part of my shadow work is facing what I call mortality awareness. Many people deny death and that denial is creating a burden in us around illness and death.
But when we are aware that we have limited time, this time becomes very valuable and we want to spend it differently, we want to prioritize and we really want to care about what is important to us. That changes everything.
Fighting the physical signs of aging is expensive. Why do many of us spend our money this way?
If our identity is rooted in our appearance and that's all we know, then we will do everything we can to shore up our self-image for as long as possible. It is our only value. If our identity is rooted in what I call “the doer” (what we do, what we produce, how we succeed), then we will continue to “do” as long as we can. So if we can start to learn how to cultivate an inner life, then we will focus more on that and less on how we look and what we do.
I've heard friends say, “Women aren't allowed to grow old.” What do they mean when they say that?
If you start looking at how the media portrays older adults, you'll start to see a response to that. I grew up in the '50s and '60s watching “All in the Family,” where the husband, Archie Bunker, despised his wife as she got older and was petty and judgmental and often used humor to put her down. We internalize those feelings, beliefs and attitudes.
An older person who is a truly positive influence, such as a grandparent, aunt, teacher, or mentor, can be an antidote to negative media portrayals or negative comments people make. If you don't have an antidote, you will simply internalize the negativity.
I have a friend whose brother sent her a cane when she turned 25. What is the cause of that?
We encounter the shadow or the unconscious in many ways. One way is with black humor. If you listen to comedians you will feel uncomfortable. You will start to feel a little soft because they carry a part of the shadow that is not normally said out loud. There are many Hallmark cards and birthday cards that have this advantage because they make people laugh. But they do it at a price. They do so at the cost of expressing, in this case, age discrimination, but it could be any implicit bias. So that humor can be uncomfortable.
You are 70 years old. What is it like for you to accept your age?
We can't prescribe what this looks like for anyone else. For people who find themselves in really difficult financial situations, it's something completely different. Some of them have to continue working even when they are sick, even when they would prefer to stop working. There are also cultural differences around the role of the family with the elderly.
For me, I have been working since I was 19 and now I am ready for a different pace. I'm ready to spend more time in meditation, in the inner world, spend more time with my husband and our grandchildren, which we haven't been able to do because we are so busy. I'm looking at different types of activism, as well as different types of spiritual practice.
But the deeper problem for me is allowing myself to step into the unknown so I can see what calls me. Because as long as I'm this busy, I won't hear the next call.
