One of the main reasons women in midlife come to my programs is to find a sense of self again. I know that sounds strange, yet the truth is these women have no idea who they really are or what they really want in life. They know what they do, they know who they care for, and they may even know what they are good at. What they don’t know is who they really are. The real version of them. The one that has been locked away inside. Why is this? Because early in our childhood the social conditioning begins. “Be a nice girl” we are told. “Shouldn’t you share that with your friend?” we are asked. We are even likely to hear, “you’re a natural at being a little mom for everyone” or “You are so good at knowing what others need.”
And then we are off to the races. Once we are conditioned to find our worth in how we codependently take care of others, we are hooked. Like a drug, we seek more and more and more. We want to be that friend, that sibling, that spouse, that parent, who against all understanding can hold it all together. Can take care of all the things and still look good doing it. Because don’t forget our looks are our other form of social currency as women. It has to look easy and we must look beautiful doing it, in order to fully gain our worth. And we hustle for our worth in this madness for a long while. Many of us keep hustling, until we can’t anymore. And when the last of our roles has ended and our beauty’s shiny luster wears off with age, where does that leave us? It leaves us to our own devices. It leaves us with ourselves. Only the woman who we now inhabit has been a human doer for so long, she is a stranger to us. Who is she at all? What are her wants and desires? We sometimes have no idea where to even start.
That is usually where I come in. A woman will come into my office for therapy or join one of my programs for coaching and we will start to unravel the layers of social conditioning that has told her who she is. We are seeking to help her find who she actually is. Underneath all the tasks she had and roles she played is an actual person. However, it is a person that often times has been so horribly neglected for years there is no recognizable aspect to this person. This self (inside the socially conditioned woman/human doer) is a stranger to the women who work with me. This is where the work begins.
Learning to Love Our Stories is a journey of self love, self exploration, and self empowerment. Yet not one of those things is attainable without true self awareness. If we do not know the person we truly are we cannot love them, we cannot help them explore, and we certainly cannot help them make empowered choices to create the life they want to live. And that is where all stories begin really…they start with meeting the main character. So what happens when you are the main character and you don’t know yourself? Answer…you start to know yourself by listening. You are listening for what it is you truly want. That is usually a wonderful indication of who you really are.
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So here is the catch. If a woman has been conditioned most of her life to look out in her world and identify what is wanted of her by others and meet those needs, she has atrophied the cognitive muscles to look inside and see what she wants and needs for herself. And when these women are finally sitting with me trying to learn these new skills it is an effortful process. It is like an adult trying to pick up a new language. Let me explain. Speaking fluently in a new language is never going to happen overnight. There will need to be repetition. Tons and tons of repetition. And even then we initially learn a new language by translating it through our native tongue. So you hear a phrase in the foreign language and you think through the lens of your current language to know what that means. Then you decide in your current language what you want to say back and you translate that back into the foreign language. It takes a LONG time to really get the hang of this. A LONG TIME and A LOT OF PRACTICE.
So how does this match up with what women are trying to do when they are learning to know the real version of themselves? Let me give you an example. Once I helped a mother at the start of her empty nesting, who was really struggling to know what she wanted in her life. She had spent the better part of nearly three decades taking care of her kids and her spouse, making sure that their every need was met. So now as she was looking at retirement from those roles she was really shook up. She didn’t have a purpose. She didn’t see a meaning to her existence any longer. Her depression was entrenched in this understanding that she had worth as a mother and a wife, yet the circumstances of her life were no longer providing her opportunity to express this worth. This was her native tongue. To be a human giver in a family setting.
Here is where the new language starts. We talked at length about self care…a totally foreign concept and one that was saturated with this idea that she was selfish if she did anything for herself. She wanted to start being better about self care, but she wasn’t quite sure how to do that when it always felt so uncomfortable. I would suggest starting with easy things that she already wants. She then asked me, “Do I get to want things?” She was seeing the idea of self care (the new language) through the translation of her old life, which told her doing something for yourself is selfish and childish. What happens is the ideas are lost in the translation. “Doing for yourself” or “self care” has different cultural meanings when translated literally. In the language of a therapist it is a form of general hygiene, like brushing your teeth every day, eating nutritious meals, and getting enough sleep. In my client’s language, “doing for yourself” meant she was choosing herself above others and in so doing disrespecting those she loved.
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Any good teacher knows that when there is a meaning breakdown, it is helpful to bring in a metaphor that makes sense to someone given their cultural conditioning. So one of the ways I helped this woman to see what self care meant, was by translating it through the idea of caring for others. She needed to see herself as one of the “others” she was caring for in her life. For years, her spouse and children had wanted for nothing as she had dutifully served them. Now she needed to turn her attention to the one that was neglected all that time…herself. This was still uncomfortable for her, so we took the metaphor a bit further. I asked her what she would think if her youngest child came home and told her that they had felt ignored their whole lives in the family home. That all the other siblings had more needs than this child did, so this child learned to be quiet and not make a fuss. And if this child told my client that they had watched as she poured herself into the other siblings and now this child was feeling neglected and somehow jilted as a result of this inequity, I asked my client, “What would you do for this child?” My client had a TON of answers for that and a reinvigorated purpose as she spoke about what she could do for this child in a scenario like this. When she was done telling me what she would do for that child, I told her to think of herself as this neglected child and to apply those same ideas to herself. That is the true meaning of the translating the meaning of self care into her native language.
Women often have no idea that they don’t know themselves and almost never have a language for this experience. What they know is they are sad, irritable, aimless in their purpose and function in life, complacent, and not sure where to start to try and fix any of this. I tell them that they are right where they need to start. In their discomfort. As I teach them a new language for how to know themselves and articulate their needs and wants, I ask that they sit in their discomfort and listen. Listen to what the discomfort tells you. If you are worried whether you did enough for your children, maybe what you are hearing is that not enough was done for you. You can’t literally translate what you hear into your native tongue. Your body mind doesn’t speak that way. If you hear yourself filled with resentment that your partner has an entire life with their work, hobbies and friends, maybe what your body mind is telling you is that you want a life too and its urging you to go out and find that. If you notice yourself feeling lonely, maybe what you’re hearing is that you need to expand your tribe and find new connections. Piece by piece, thought by thought, worry by worry, I help these women translate what their body minds are telling them and help them to create new self empowered choices to design a life the meets these new insights.
What can be really neat about my work is that it is a lot like a treasure hunt. There are treasures hidden under the sea of emotions that we are having as we transition in midlife. Our job is to learn the movements of the sea and the storms, in order to understand where those treasures may have drifted off to on the seafloor. It is always an adventure. And it is not for the faint of heart. We must prepare ourselves for storms as we set sail to find ourselves. Treasure is there to be sure, but so are dangers. A trusty navigator and a crew are always helpful additions to this journey. If you think you are in this boat on your own, take a listen to what a recent group cohort said about their journeys in the Learn to Love Your Story program. You may find that having someone like myself on your side, who has the navigational tools to manage the sea and storms, as well as a group of women that are in this with you to discover their own treasures, is just the right fit for what you need to weather your midlife storm.
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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.
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