Somewhere in the decade before retirement, a question tends to surface. It does not always arrive loudly. For many people it comes in quieter moments: driving home from a meeting that felt pointless, watching a friend navigate an illness, realising that the promotion you worked toward for years no longer feels like the thing you actually wanted. The question underneath all of it is the same. Is this it?
That question is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is often the first honest reckoning many capable, outwardly composed adults have had with themselves in years. A working life structured around deadlines, deliverables and other people’s needs leaves very little space for the kind of reflection that asks what you actually want, value, or feel. When that structure begins to loosen, as retirement
approaches and the horizon becomes visible, the gap between the life you planned and the one you are living can become impossible to ignore.
Why This Decade Is Different
The years between fifty and sixty-seven (the current retirement age in the UK) carry a particular psychological weight. There is still enough time ahead to make choices that matter, but the sense of infinite possibility that characterised earlier decades has quietly closed. Paths not taken have become paths not taken. Compromises made in your thirties for practical reasons are now simply the shape of your life.
This can arrive as restlessness, a low hum of dissatisfaction that is hard to name or justify. You may be objectively successful, comfortable, even grateful. And yet something feels unresolved. Many people at this stage describe a vague sense of disappointment they feel they have no right to, alongside guilt for feeling it at all given everything they have.
What is actually happening is a form of grief. Not the acute grief that follows loss, but a slower, quieter mourning for versions of yourself that did not develop, ambitions that were quietly shelved, and a self that got subordinated to the demands of building a career and a life. This kind of grief rarely gets named as such, which means it rarely gets processed.
What Therapy Offers at This Stage
Psychotherapy creates the conditions to do exactly that. Not to manufacture regret, or to pull apart a life that has real value in it, but to look honestly at what has been lived and what has been left unlived. That distinction matters. Many people arrive at this stage carrying a story about themselves that was written a long time ago, often in response to family expectations, early experiences, or circumstances that no
longer apply. Therapy offers the space to examine that story, understand where it came from, and decide what, if anything, you want to do differently with the time ahead. This is not crisis work, it suits people who are outwardly settled but privately unsettled, who have spent decades being competent and capable and have rarely had a space that is entirely for them, with no agenda other than understanding. If
the question has started surfacing for you, that is worth paying attention to. It does not require a crisis to justify looking at it carefully.
If you are considering long-term exploratory therapy and want to find out whether it might suit you, you are welcome to get in touch with me.
Author Bio: Samantha Merry is a BACP Senior Accredited Psychotherapist and Clinical Supervisor based in Bromley, South East London. She works from a relational psychodynamic framework with adults navigating significant life transitions and unresolved personal patterns. Find out more at samanthamerry.co.uk.
Resources
Books… The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz. A psychoanalyst’s account of what therapy reveals about the patterns people carry, written accessibly for a general reader.
Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life by Adam Phillips. A psychoanalytic exploration of the lives we did not live and how they shape the ones we do.
The Middle Passage by James Hollis. A depth psychology account of the reckoning that arrives in midlife, written for people who sense that the first half of life has not told the whole story.
Podcast Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel. Real therapy sessions exploring how people navigate the gap between the lives they imagined and the ones they are in.
YouTube Speaking of Psychology (APA). Relevant episodes on life transitions, identity and meaning in midlife and beyond.