Sometimes life breaks you open in midlife and beyond

A marriage ends. Someone you love dies. Your body changes. You get sick. Your work disappears—or stops meaning what it once did. Your children leave. You become a caregiver. You retire. You fall in love when you weren’t expecting to. You reach an age you somehow never imagined yourself being.

Or nothing dramatic happens at all…You simply wake up one day and realize: I can’t keep living the rest of my life this way.

These transitions are different in midlife and beyond.

By now, you’ve lived long enough to have become somebody. You’ve built relationships and careers and families and ways of being in the world. You’ve survived things. You’ve adapted. You’ve lost people and places and possibilities.

And you’ve probably gotten very good at being the person your life required you to be.

Then something changes. And the question isn’t simply, How do I get through this?

It’s also: Who am I now? What still belongs to me? What am I no longer willing to carry? What have I never gotten to be?And what do I want to do with the life that is still mine?

This is the territory I love

For more than forty years, I’ve worked with women in the midst of profound change—as a psychotherapist, professionally trained coach, and spiritual mentor.

I’ve accompanied women through serious illness, grief and death, divorce, betrayal, trauma, caregiving, spiritual crisis, creative awakening, aging, and the enormous transitions that don’t fit neatly into any diagnostic category.

Sometimes something has been shattered. Sometimes something has simply run its course. And sometimes the life you’ve built is still perfectly recognizable from the outside—but somewhere inside it, you have changed.

That can be enormously disorienting.

It can also be one of the most fertile times in a woman’s life. Because by midlife and beyond, you have something you didn’t have at twenty-five: a life to look back on.

You know something now about what nourishes you and what costs you. About love. About work. About your compromises. About what you’ve done because you truly wanted it and what you’ve done because you thought you should.

There are fewer illusions. And there can be considerably less bullshit.

You may become less interested in being good, pleasing, impressive, or understandable. And much more interested in being fully here.

I don’t believe that pain is always “a gift.” Sometimes pain is just painful.

Sometimes the work is to grieve what has been lost. To be angry about what happened. To reckon with what it cost. To have someone beside you who isn’t trying to rush you toward the silver lining.

But big transitions do have a way of loosening things: identities, relationships, old accommodations, assumptions about who we are and what our lives are supposed to look like. And eventually another question may appear:

Now what?

Not the chirpy self-help version. The real one. Given everything that has happened, and everything I now know—How do I want to live now?

I bring more than one way of seeing you

I’m a psychotherapist, a professionally trained coach, and a spiritual mentor. I need all three.

Psychotherapy helps us understand history, wounds, relationships, patterns, trauma, and the ingenious ways we learn to survive.

Coaching reminds us that understanding how we got here isn’t always enough. Eventually there is also the question of what we do with what we know.

And spiritual work makes room for meaning, mystery, mortality, the sacred, and the questions neither psychology nor coaching can answer, particularly in midlife and beyond.

I don’t separate these neatly because human beings aren’t neat. And after more than forty years doing this work, I’m not particularly interested in formulas.

I’m interested in you.

There’s plenty of life on the other side of “supposed to”

This may be less about reinventing yourself than reclaiming yourself.

The artist you stopped being. The sexuality that changed. The anger you learned to swallow.

The spiritual life that no longer fits the language you were given for it. The pleasure you kept postponing. The friendships you hunger for. The work (“real” and also emotional) you no longer want to do.

The body that isn’t twenty-five anymore and is nevertheless still your body. The woman who has spent decades being useful and has begun to wonder what would happen if usefulness stopped being the price of admission.

And perhaps something harder to name: the unlived life.

Not as an accusation, but as possibility.

At this age, you don’t have infinite time. Neither do I.

I don’t find that depressing. I find it clarifying.

There is still time to grieve. To change. To make things. To love. To get angry. To become more visible. To astonish yourself. To stop doing things you never wanted to do in the first place.

And to discover parts of yourself that never had enough room before.

Sometimes life breaks you open. And sometimes, in the opening, more of you gets to come through.

Interested in working together?

You can read more about how I work on the Working Together page.

Or contact me directly to talk about what’s bringing you here and whether we might be a good fit.