Summary In this episode, Dr. Natalie explores the concept of ‘The Great Unlearning,’ a transformative journey that challenges the societal belief that doing everything right leads to a fulfilling life. She reflects on her personal experiences, particularly during midlife, where she realized that striving for perfection and external validation often leads to burnout and disillusionment. Dr. Natalie emphasizes the importance of self-worth and the need to reclaim it from within, rather than through external achievements or approval. Through poignant anecdotes, she illustrates how the pressure to conform to societal expectations can lead to a double life and emotional turmoil, ultimately advocating for a shift towards self-love and acceptance.
Dr. Natalie introduces the metaphor of the tugboat versus the lighthouse to illustrate the difference between exhausting oneself in the pursuit of perfection and standing firm in one’s self-worth. She encourages listeners to reflect on their own lives, identifying where they may be sacrificing their well-being in the name of doing everything right. The episode serves as a powerful reminder that true fulfillment comes from within, and that midlife can be an opportunity for profound personal growth and self-discovery.
Keywords: midlife, self-worth, personal growth, self-love, great unlearning, emotional well-being, tugboat lighthouse metaphor, reclaiming self-worth, Dr. Natalie
Takeaways: The version of you that you’re most proud of may be blocking your actual life. Midlife can be an invitation to examine the mess of our lives and love it as it is. Reclaiming self-worth from the inside out is essential for true fulfillment.
Sound bites: “What if I told you that the version of you that you’re most proud of… is in the way of your actual life?” “Today we’re gonna talk about the great unlearning.” “You do not need to fix yourself. You just need to find yourself.”
Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to The Great Unlearning 03:49 A Holiday Dinner Reflection 10:20 The Tugboat vs. The Lighthouse 18:10 The Power of Self-Love 23:39 Reflecting on Your Journey JOIN the https://LearnToLoveYourStory.com Mailing List! Join my newsletter and receive my FREE video and workbook, “Freeing Yourself: A Guide for Letting Go of Other People’s Opinions”
SIGN UP on the website at https://dashboard.mailerlite.com/forms/762561/109840834025752017/share DISCLAIMER: The content in this podcast and video 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 (https://LearnToLoveYourStory.com), (https://NatalieMarrCounseling.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. If you or someone you know is having a mental health crisis or having thoughts of suicide, please use the following crisis resources (this is not an exhaustive list of available resources): National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/ CALL 988Crisis Text Line: https://www.crisistextline.org/ Text HOME to 741741
I know exactly how you feel right now. You see it. You know that there are ways that you’ve participated in your own suffering for so long now. You didn’t always get it but you do now. And that’s painful. Honestly it’s excruciating. And there is a helplessness to it. It’s almost as if you don’t think that you would ever be able to overcome these patterns that you’ve got yourself into that are just habits of being you now. How would you ever stop being yourself? Is that even possible?
I’m writing this blog right now because I saw you today. I saw you in your exhaustion. I saw you contemplating returning to work after a holiday season and rinsing and repeating this whole mess again. I saw you wondering, is there ever a New Year’s resolution that really would change your life. I wanted to reach out and tell you, while there is no resolution there is acceptance. And while there is no quick fix, there is a road I’ve taken and many like me have taken that will lead you to more peace. More joy. More content. More of a life that you want instead of a life you feel you have to lead, because it’s what you’ve always done.
I know you think you’ve lost the plot. I know you think it’s impossible to live a life without feeling exhausted and possibly even hating getting up in the morning and doing it all over again. I know you think that pining for an idea of a life that you were sold you “should” have by now is the only way to get your shit together enough to have goals in place to course correct all this. What if I told you you’ve always been on the correct path? What if I told you that designing a life that you want to be in means looking at your life from the perspective that you are exactly where you need to be? What if I told you that exhaustion with recognition that you’ve participated in patterns of behavior that keep you trapped in a life you don’t like is exactly where you should be right now?
I imagine hearing some of those last questions makes you want to smack me across the face and honestly, I understand that. I wanted to smack my own self as I started to recognize these things. I wanted to rage against the machine that had put me in the place where I had meticulously created a life that I was told I “should” have when in fact, it was a life destined to give me grief. What kind of bullshit is that? That you do everything right and you end up in a space where you hate it? It just isn’t fair! But then again who said life was ever going to be fair. No one did.
And I still think that the reward here is recognizing that where you are is not where you want to be. And the helpless feeling makes sense to me and I hope to help you see it makes sense for you. The helplessness is that all the things you’ve learned to do to get yourself out of a pickle in your life won’t work here. Why? Well think about it. If they had worked, wouldn’t you be in a better place already? Of course you would. I know this has never been a problem with effort. I know you’ve started every January 1 with a whole list of things you’re gonna do to fix your life. And yet you end up back in the same exhausted place. Here where you hate it. Here where the life you’re in is not the life you want to be in. Here in your resentment that you’ve done everything right and yet can’t seem to get it right.
My invitation to you is that maybe this is exactly where you need to be. And maybe you needed to be here as many times as necessary to really get the motivation to look at this differently. To see that everything you’ll do from this point forward is going to be brand new and therefore awkward, uncomfortable, and even painful at times. However, the excitement, the hope is that it will bring you to a new place. That on this next stretch, you will be ready to choose differently for yourself. That maybe you’ll even find that you like living in your life or dare I suggest love it. But only if you choose the road less traveled. Only if you go through the doors, you’ve never gone through before. Only if you engage in patterns of behavior that you haven’t even dreamed of having yet.
Have you grown exhausted enough that you’re ready to lay down everything that you know how to do? Are you that tired yet? Are you resentful enough that you’ve done everything right that you’re ready to consider that doing things that way isn’t right for you? Can you feel that very small hope living inside your soul that whispers, “Believe!”
If that’s where you think you are, then let’s begin. Let’s begin designing a new life. A life that you can’t wait to get up for every single day. A life you never knew you could even dream of for yourself. Let’s begin living that life. Let’s let go of the idea that we need to be fixed or improved or find the right goal or engage in the right behavior to finally reach happiness. That has never been how this was going to work. Let’s give all that up and listen to that small voice on the inside. Let’s Believe.
Let me tell you what I know about how hard it is to be a woman in midlife right about now. IMPOSSIBLE!!! And yet you don’t see any of us falling down like flies. NOPE…we are all in survival mode. A BEAST MODE if I’ve ever seen one and a mode that we have been in for more years of our lives than we would like to admit. Right now this survival mode is even more apparent as we try to make the impossible decisions of how to care for everyone else in our lives in this post-pandemic world. Whether we are caretakers or not, we are nurturing and this whole mess has us in a bad position.
For starters, we are no where near out of this COVID thing and that means we are no where near normal (whatever that means). The backlash of having had our lives turned upside down is the sister pandemic of a subsequent mental health crisis we are no in. I Vlogged (see the video below) on this very issue at the start of this pandemic…it is hard and we are not going to come out the other side the same. We can’t. We will be forever changed by this experience.
I worry about women in midlife. We have no idea how this is going to affect us in the long run. And guess what, after all the waves of the physical illness are finally over…really over…no variants left and the whole thing under control…that is when people will start coming out of the emotional survival mode that they have been in since the start of this. So we have no idea what that fallout will look like, and I promise you we have not done the preparations for this. You thought not having enough PPE at the start of the pandemic for the front line workers was bad? Just wait until people are in mental health crisis and we learn how under staffed the mental health field is. Not to mention the fact that SO MANY people do not have the access to mental health resources or will not use these resources because of the stigma attached to “mental health” problems.
Sure we have had moments when we peeked out of the survival mode that we are in. Losing our $&#% on someone in traffic, at our family, or at that neighbor that is just driving us nuts. Yet, for the most part, we have been emotionally numb…what psychologists call dissociation. I wrote a blog and made a video (see below) on this subject not too long ago as well. Dissociation is the form of survival mode when we play dead. In the wild we see this when the gazelle gets caught by the lioness. It plays dead in the hopes that the lioness will let the gazelle go and move on for another kill. Meanwhile, the gazelle may have ONE LAST CHANCE of survival by waking up just enough to run away again. This is where we are at. We are the gazelle. We are playing dead, being real still and hoping as hard as we can that COVID will go away and things will be normal again (whatever that means).
So what does all this have to do with why I am afraid for women in midlife right now? Because so many women in midlife live a great deal of their adult existence in survival mode…and this is when there IS NOT a worldwide pandemic. We step up to the socially appropriate roles that we have been given, as pretty to look at, as caregivers and nurturers, as team players and not necessarily leaders (always the bridesmaid but never the bride). Yet we shy away from our own inner voices on how we should be in the world. Midlife is usually the natural time of transitions that land women in midlife square in the position to be coming into their own and moving out of the corsets of socially accepted roles. These transitions are difficult in their own right…not always crises, yet challenging enough. And you guessed it…going through COVID overshadowed this whole kitten caboodle and then added a crap ton more stress right on top of it.
When we come to the point when the physical illness portion of the pandemic comes under some form of control, midlife women are going to be under a level of duress that is likely to LEVEL them! This is what I am worried about it. It is why I created LearnToLoveYourStory.com. I knew there would not be enough therapists in the world or access to those therapists to save us all. We need more venues to gain access to the help we are going to need on the other side of this. Not to mention we are going to need each other…a community of women suffering in the same way, who know what its like and are equipped to lift one another up.
That’s where my Online Course and Coaching Programs will come in real handy. I designed my programs with just this purpose in mind. Ready made groups of women learning the skills of how to pivot through any life transition, courses that guide you on how you can do this at your own pace, and even individual coaching for those that want that personal touch through their growth process. Let’s help you to escape falling into a midlife crisis or some other demise.
So if you do nothing for yourself but this…take a look at my courses and programs, and join our free online community. Make this coming year the year you design the life YOU WANT and that YOU LOVE. And send this blog to any women in midlife you know. They need to see it!!! They may look perfectly fine on the outside, yet the ugly truth is…that is the survival mode talking. When we come out of that mode, the emotional toll will seem to tall to manage for so very many of us.
Do any of these sound like you?
Feel a sense of lack, despite success in life or having done everything “right”
Struggle to articulate how you feel to others
Experience guilt about how you’re feeling
Have lost your way
Are struggling to overcome turmoil in your life
Have become resigned to accepting a life you don’t love
Many of us are suffering like this — daily life has become an ordeal, and we don’t know where or how to find help.
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Keywords: Midlife transitions, Women in midlife, Self-discovery, Empowerment for women, Women’s empowerment, Personal growth, Relationships in midlife, Self-care for women, Authentic living, Thriving in midlife, Midlife journey, Women’s wellness, Expert insights, Redefining success, podcast for women, gray divorce, survival mode, stress, starting over in midlife
Disclaimer
The content in this podcast and video 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.
If you or someone you know is having a mental health crisis or having thoughts of suicide, please use the following crisis resources (this is not an exhaustive list of available resources):
You don’t want to miss a thing we are doing here at 