This episode explores the impact of perfectionism, societal conditioning, and hormonal changes during midlife on women’s mental health. Dr. Natalie shares data, personal insights, and practical advice to help women love themselves and navigate this transformative phase with resilience.
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 Learn To Love Your Story coaching (https://LearnToLoveYourStory.com) and her private practice (https://NatalieMarrCounseling.com), and all affiliate social media entities are educational ONLY. She IS NOT offering therapeutic or coaching 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):
In this heartfelt episode, Dr. Natalie addresses midlife women feeling overwhelmed by the pressure to fix and manage everything alone. She offers insight into how hyper-independence and the fear of abandonment can contribute to burnout and midlife struggles—and most importantly, how self-love can help rewrite these patterns.
Key Topics:
The emotional toll of hyper-independence in midlife women
The neurochemistry of pursuit and addiction to dopamine hits
Childhood experiences shaping adult patterns of fixing and pleasing
Recognizing and interrupting the spiral of justification and validation
The importance of self-love as an antidote to burnout and scarcity mindset
How fear of abandonment fuels hyper-independence
Practical steps to love yourself through mistakes and vulnerabilities
Moving away from rescuing everyone and focusing on personal peace
Time Stamps
00:00 – Addressing hyper-independent women in midlife
02:09 – The neurochemical roots of pursuit and addiction to dopamine
03:34 – How the chase reinforces the cycle of burnout
04:33 – Personal stories of controlling or fixing others
05:58 – Childhood patterns influencing adult need for approval
06:53 – Recognizing the spiral of justifying and validating
08:22 – The pain of not being liked or validated
09:04 – The risks of over-investment in work and relationships
10:30 – How derailments in pursuit reveal deeper patterns
11:56 – The spiral of self-justification in times of stress
13:20 – The link between childhood chaos and adult control issues
14:19 – Self-love as the key to breaking free from cycles
16:41 – The importance of loving yourself despite mistakes
19:34 – Understanding the fear of rejection and scarcity mindset
20:03 – Letting go of blame and the need for approval
21:01 – Managing relationships without spiraling into chaos
22:24 – Embracing age and experience for self-compassion
23:21 – The power of loving your story, including dysfunction
24:19 – Sharing this message with other midlife women
25:17 – Letting go of the cycle of justification and abandonment fears
26:15 – Finding peace and building inner self-worth
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), (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):
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
One of the more inconvenient realities of perfectionism is how it destroys women over time. We don’t want to acknowledge this, yet I feel compelled to use my platform to make known this shadow side of perfectionism. The high rates of depression in women during midlife, the steep spike in heart related disease and deaths, and the dispensable nature of women in business, families, and communities when they hit midlife all speak to this phenomenon. Women strive for perfection as a means to try and cling to their worth according to society, culture, family, and religion. And yet, this method is slowly killing us.
If a woman uses perfectionism throughout her lifetime as a means to create social currency, the true cost to herself is her body, her mind, and her soul. The true cost to society, on the other hand, is that she is unable to share the full capacity of all of her gifts and over time as we cripple more and more women with this perfectionistic ideal we all lose out on the gifts that this collective group could have given us. It’s hard to know what the losses really are, since it is hard to know what life would have been like had these women lived to their full potential. In essence, we cannot know what we have not experienced.
I happen to disagree with that last statement. I think that we can know what we have not experienced, or at least that we can see glimpses of it when women shed their corsets of perfectionism and live into their authenticity. When we see this we are always in awe and often inspired. I think of the recent book, Untamed, by Glennon Doyle, or the short story written by Keah Brown called Never Too Much in the Anthology You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience edited by Tarana Burke and Dr. Brené Brown.
These two women, Glennon and Keah, share with us their own journeys of wrestling through being the version of themselves the world wanted them to be, in order to live into being the women they authentically are. The reason that testimonies like these inspire us is because we can see ourselves in them. We long to be the people that break the old patterns of being the versions of ourselves that we believe others want for us and becoming the versions of ourselves that we desire to be.
So how do we break these patterns? How do we show up differently in the world? Where do we even begin to fight back the magnitude of how perfectionism, in particular, holds us back? These are great questions. And the answers to them are individual to each of us. Our journey to authenticity is one that will be unique to our individual lived experience, yet one that will be uniquely beneficial to all of us. This paradigm of taking our own heroines journey in order to become the version of ourselves the world needs, lays out just how complicated this venture will be.
As a Clinical Psychologist and an expert in helping women transition in midlife, I would say that the first step in your journey is always becoming more self-aware. Aware of how perfectionism has held you back. Learning how staying small in body, mind, and action as the “perfect woman“ has limited us to a small cage in our lives. And the worst part, acknowledging the cage was never locked from the outside so much as it was locked by our own adherence to perfectionistic ideals from within. This is a hard self realization and one that will require significant amounts of self compassion.
This would not be a journey I would tell you to enter into lightly. Instead, I would encourage you to find the resources that you need in order to practice that self compassion while coming to the self awareness that you have participated in your own suffering by aspiring to the perfectionistic ideals of culture, society, family, and religion. I would also strongly encourage doing so in community with other women who are also taking on this challenge. One of the ways that women excel is in our ability to combine resources and support with one another, and in so doing transcend our own limitations by networking with the strengths of others. What better scenario to do this in than while we journey out of perfectionism?
I strongly urge you to join us at Learn to Love Your Story, exploring the ways that we can lean into our authenticity and away from the social conditioning to which we’ve grown accustomed. You can start by joining our mailing list, listening to the podcasts, reading the blogs, and joining us for events when they come up that seem to most resonate for you. Share this journey with other like minded women. Give yourself the huge gift of showing up differently and letting go of these old patterns of suffering.
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.
Dr. Natalie’s Online Courses and Coaching CAN HELP. Click below and get started.
You don’t want to miss a thing we are doing here at LearnToLoveYourStory.com. From our weekly podcasts to our library of blogs and videos that can help you step into a more centered life. Allow Dr. Natalie to guide you on this empowering adventure to break free, rediscover your passion, and create the life you’ve always envisioned for yourself. Your journey to empowerment starts here. Join our Mailing List today!
Need more clarity on your midlife journey? Sign up for a complimentary call with Dr. Natalie to explore if her transformative coaching program aligns with your aspirations. Get personalized answers to your questions and discover if Dr. Natalie can help you untangle where you life is now and design the life you want to be living. Don’t miss the opportunity to embark on a life-changing experience – schedule your complimentary call today and take the first step toward designing the life you deserve! Please press the “START” button below to answer a few questions and schedule your consultation:
Keywords: perfectionism, midlife crisis, women in midlife, changing the narrative, empowerment, self care, self awareness
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):
Do you remember the DARE programs that started with First Lady Nancy Reagan in the 1980s (or as my kids tell me…in the ancient times:)? There motto, “Say No to drugs”. Those DARE programs are still around in some format in schools, still trying to tell our kids to “Say No to drugs” and I am not sure that its working out as well as we would like.
Saying “No” to perfectionism is also not working. I know we all want to “Say No”, yet then we all fall back into our same old ruts with it. We want to be the ideal. We think that if we are not working towards this ideal than we will not be making progress. We think that we are “lazy” or “don’t have a passion” for what we are doing if we aren’t striving towards perfection.
Listen…perfection is not just armor against shame as Dr. Brené Brown has so aptly demonstrated for us in her shame research over the last two decades. Perfectionism is a coreset. It is a self-inflicted restraint that we place on ourselves to look and be the way we think others want us to be, while it slowly takes our breath away and our own inner strength to be authentic in the face of what culture, society, or our family tell us to be.
So what are we to do to stop this beast? First of all, you must change your mindset about what you are doing. We will not be able to “stop” perfectionism’s pervasiveness in our society, nor remove it from the habitual way in which we approach our lives. What we can do is start to be more aware of it and make adjustments for how we will show up in the different areas of our life that perfectionism has taken up residence.
“That sounds hard Dr. Natalie!” Indeed, it is hard and the effort we exert to do this work will help us strengthen our resources in many other ways. Think of it like this, perfectionism becomes the rumble strip we work with in order to strength train our healthy emotional wellness skills. This is the mindset shift I am referring to. Instead of thinking of perfectionism as an enemy to get rid of, think of it as a set of weights that you are using to strengthen your muscles around new skills you are building. When perfectionism shows up, you can choose to use or not use the new skills you’re building to let go of the old perfectionism pattern.
If this sounds interesting to you…please join us for our next FREE Summer Workshop with Dr. Natalie LIVE, coming up on Tuesday July 20 at 7pm CST. Click Here to register.
I know it seems impossible that you could get a gold star without trying to be perfect, yet the true paradox is that you can only achieve excellence when you avoid being a perfectionist. I know right?!? It just doesn’t seem like this works that way. Take a listen to Dr. Natalie as she explains why it is that those of us who like gold stars and have since we were children, struggle as much as we do with perfectionism. She also offers us a tip for continuing to get our gold stars without the corset of trying to be a perfectionist.
You don’t want to miss a thing we are doing here at LearnToLoveYourStory.com. From our weekly podcasts to our library of blogs and videos that can help you step into a more centered life. Allow Dr. Natalie to guide you on this empowering adventure to break free, rediscover your passion, and create the life you’ve always envisioned for yourself. Your journey to empowerment starts here. Join our Mailing List today!
