OP, I’ve seen many people turn around after aged 40, including a friend who got married for the first time at aged 58. She’s energetic and attractive and incidentally also turned her life around after 40.
My two pennies would suggest you throw the past expectations out the window, determine where your passions lie, and set short-term intentions / goals. I might also suggest looking to groups where people are successful but take approaches outside the norm. My friend for example is a successful physician and involved in a Yoga community that is global and inexpensive and where he can meet others of like kind. Build community for yourself.
I know "see a therapist" is generally meant well, and therapy can definitely help, but people are way too quick to suggest it, and suggest it as a must. It can communicate that a person is broken when their situation can be due to any number of things besides brokenness. I think most people know that therapy is an option, and I think many also underestimate the difficulty in not only finding an adequate therapist but a therapist at all in any reasonable amount of time.
What should see a therapist is society itself, with top answers like that. Therapy should be reserved for the eccentric pathologies, not for routine middle-age crises and life situations.
In a sick society, everyone is sick by definition anyway... so yeah... therapy
I have been through three course of therapy, they helped me understand what was happening when I had an episode but...I was still in the same place, and that made all my mental-health problems worse (this isn't a post about that...but everything changed when one aspect of my material situation changed...when you go through this, everyone who has never had a problem like this will tell you therapy will help...maybe it will but your material situation is more important...there is no-one selling "material situations" at $200/hour though, so that tends to be emphasized less). No-one wants to acknowledge this because it makes mental health a trickier problem to solve.
I will say generally too: putting yourself in a situation where you are constantly looking for "the answer" is fundamentally unhelpful. You may not be able to overcome it yourself, but that doesn't mean a therapist can help.
Lots of people use "therapy" for performance optimization for example: sports psychology.
> It’s about growth and self actualization.
I don't think the majority of people seeking therapy are doing so merely because they want to self actualize. Self actualization and growth may be a part of therapy, or be a next step as roadblocks are overcome, but implying that therapy isn't about addressing problems seems naive or disingenuous. Performance optimization really has little to do with what people actually mean when they're suggesting "therapy."
Therapists that are well matched to their patients are capable of truly incredible stuff.
Getting professional help shouldn't be stigmatized as a cop out.
Why?
I'd change it to "need a psychiatrist".
Why? Because it is a very American approach that is less the norm elsewhere. Therapy is not an industry to such a degree necessarily in other countries. Cop-out because it is akin to RTFM, ‘go Google it’, ‘delete and re-install’. If one doesn’t have a personal viewpoint, why bother responding.
I understand your frustration with the "go to therapy" response. Even in the US there is a dismissive undertone to comments like this. The reality is that the people who get the most out of therapy already have a positive outlook on its benefits.
Therapy doesn't fix anyone directly -- it gives a people a vehicle to look for ways to fix themselves by talking to a non-judgmental arbiter. People that have already done that tend to take it for granted and obviously there's a ton of variance in results/quality of therapeutic conversation.
A medical doctor can evaluate the OP much better than we can, and determine if medication may be able to help, in addition to changing thinking patterns.
