When I started LearnToLoveYourStory.com I had an idea of what I was trying to accomplish, yet it wasn’t fully formulated in my mind yet. I knew that there were ways I have helped people through counseling and helped myself in my own life transitions that over and over again worked well to help people pivot out of any painful experience. What an amazing super power!!! An amazing resiliency skill!!! And what better time to share such knowledge than after a worldwide pandemic that has caused a sister pandemic…a mental health crisis.
I knew there was a thread that goes right to the heart of why any of us struggle. Why any of us feel human suffering. Why any of us ever doubt ourselves or our capability to handle a situation. In the beginning I struggled to put my finger on what it was exactly.
So I just kept following my intuition on this journey of creating content to help people pivot out of any life transition, any need for a change in their life, and any human suffering of which they are a part. As I sit back and reflect and look at all of what I have created as a whole, it becomes clear that this resiliency skill of growth mindset really is a super power. If one is always ready for change, then no major harm will come from any life transitions. In a way, you are always ready.
That said, it kept bugging me that right under the surface there had to be a reason why all of us experience some suffering during change, or at least are very uncomfortable. What is it? Why do we continue to repeat old behavior patterns even when they don’t work? And why do we cling to them so much, even when we know they no longer serve us? I know how to work with people individually in therapy when these patterns show up in their lives. I do this by helping them unearth their own participation in their suffering and make the changes they want, in order to change this pattern. But why is it that we all suffer in the same patterns over and over, generation after generation, transmitting intergenerational traumas to one another? There had to be an answer to this…right?
Well here is something you should know about me, if you haven’t taken the time to read the About the Author page. At a very young age, living in an alcoholic family home, walking on the eggshells of when the next shoe would drop from which parent for what issue, I created my own super power. I see patterns. Seems simple I know, yet it has come in handy in more ways than I can count. I can see patterns in individuals. I can see patterns in systems. I can see patterns in all of us. So this puzzle, was just another challenge for me.
What is the common thread in the pattern of continuing to participate in our own suffering?
And then it hit me. Constructs. Definitions. Roles. Scripts. Rules. What is hurting us the most is our own making. This is not surprising to me, because when I help people to pivot out of their own pain during life transitions, it generally is because we discover how they’ve participated in their own suffering by clinging to old ways of thinking what they “should be” like instead of loving who they are now.
Why is it that we cling so heavily to pre-fabricated ideas of who, what, how, when, and why we “should be” who we are? Our suffering is born out of our own discomfort that we aren’t exactly like we think we “should be”. It is nourished by the shame we inflict on ourselves and towards others, judging how much we miss the mark and aren’t afforded the privileges of being who we think we “should be”. And it damns us to an eternal repetition of these destructive patterns, when we weave into the fabric of our families, societies, and cultures these definitions of who, what, how, when, and why we “should be” a certain way.
So in case I’ve lost you, let me slow down a bit. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. A common midlife issue is the impact of aging on the body. Men and women both have their own versions of discomfort with this. There are wrinkles, weight gain, and aches and pains. Not to mention things like menopause, heart disease, metabolic disease, and respiratory disease. Need I say more? These illnesses start to plague this midlife group at a higher rate than they did when this group of people was younger. Now, why is it that we complain about these changes to our bodies in midlife? Seems like a weird question I know, but go with me. We complain about these changes because we have a definition of what our bodies “should be“. We have an ideal of what a beautiful body looks like…young, healthy, athletic, attractive.
Yet all of these descriptors are subjective. It’s in the eye of the beholder or or in this case, in the hands of those who make and uphold the definitions. So when I’m talking to a client who is struggling with how she looks because she is aging, and this causes her feelings of depression, it is not the depression that is the problem. It is the definition of what she “should” look like. The depression is the symptom of the real problem…that she is holding herself to an unattainable, unfair, and harmful standard of what her body “should be”. Who made up this definition? And why in the hell are we following it so rigidly that we would create depression over it?
And there it is my friends. Hidden in plain sight. Right in front of our noses. The reason we suffer is that we cannot attain all of these definitions of who we “should be”. It is humanly impossible to be young and aged at the same time. It is possible however, to have different definitions of beauty for different ages. And yet, we stay stuck. We do what we’ve always done. We still believe the unsaid rules that tell us that aged bodies aren’t as beautiful and vibrant as young bodies, and this reinforces the belief that aged bodies are somehow lesser. And this is just one example. And it’s just one layer. You can layer suffering on suffering. What if your in midlife, divorced twice, and a single mom (for the second time). I am. And our world has lots of ideas and definitions about what that means about me. None of them are flattering.
What if we changed the game? What if instead of engaging in the hustle for our worthiness or the rat race towards trying to meet as many of these standards of how we “should be” as we can at the same time, what if we break all the rules and rewrite the rulebook? And even more than that, what if we give license to all of us to have our own rulebook that applies to us individually? What if we stop judging one another, shaming one another, against ideals that we never created for ourselves in the first place? It’s an interesting proposal isn’t it?
The long and the short of it…LearnToLoveYourStory.com is here to help you do this. That’s what I’ve been successfully teaching people to do for two decades. I would love to help more than the very few that I can sit across the couch from offering therapy. I would love to open more eyes in a compassionate lens to see the fact that it is the definitions of how you “should be” that are killing you. It’s not the anxiety. It’s not the depression. It’s not the midlife crisis. Those are symptomatic of what the real problem is underneath. And my friends the problem underneath, hidden in plain sight, is that we are all holding ourselves accountable to definitions of how we “should be”, when we never had a chance to decide what those definitions are. When you work with me I will give you the tools to change that. Wouldn’t it feel better to Learn to Love Your Story? Click the links below to learn more about how to work with me.
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The content in this blog is not a replacement for therapy and is not clinical, medical, or mental health treatment. Dr. Natalie Marr is a Licensed Psychologist in the state of Minnesota. Her work with LearnToLoveYourStory.com and all affiliate social media entities is educational and coaching based ONLY. She IS NOT offering therapeutic services of any kind on these mediums.
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