How Stress experienced as a child can impact our midlife journey

Stress is not our friend in our midlife journey.

Did you know that the stress you experienced in utero can impact on your perimenopause transition?

When we experience stress hormones from our mothers, our little body gets the message that when we arrive earthside, we need to have a pretty quick off the mark stress response because the world is not safe. Fast forward to the baby becoming a woman and what this means is that her body will go into a stress response more easily.

Amazing thought. The science of epigenetics is showing us that our cells actually store memory in their DNA and that it is possible for non genetic information to be passed down mother to baby. So it's possible for your mother's trauma as well as your own affecting your body.

When our adrenal glands (which make stress hormones) are tired, our body will literally steal the sex hormones we have and turn them into stress hormones. Guess what we will become deficient in? You guessed it sex hormones. This can translate into PMS in our menstruating years, and more physical symptoms of perimenopause, like hot flashes, anxiety, depression, in our menopause transition.

We are made to survive. Our body will prioritise our safety first every time. Let's think of all the ways this impacts on our relationships in our life.

A woman who is sensitised to high stress (which given they way we work now is most women) as a developing baby or young child, will tend to perceive her environment as unsafe or stressful where others may not. This pattern continues throughout life and by the time we arrive at perimenopause we are burned out and might have adrenal fatigue.

In our second half of life, our adrenal glands and fat cells take over our sex hormone production from our ovaries when they wind down at menopause. If the adrenals are tired when we start this journey and our body is giving them another new job, to produce not only stress hormones but also now sex hormones, they are not going to cope too well are they.

Remember it is all connected.

Learning to work with our emotions and feel safe to experience the emotions we have been told are 'bad' all our lives is so critical at this time in our lives. When we have been repressing an emotion for years and then all of a sudden we start experience it at midlife because our body can't keep the lid on the repression anymore, it is going to make us feel unsafe. Most of us will shut it down, this takes up even more energy or it will come in an outburst. This has a negative impact on our relationships also.

What is the best way to deal with this?

It is not a thinking exercise, you can't think your way out of trauma. It is learning to feel sensation and create safety in your body that that feeling is OK and may be even pleasurable. So we call that feeling approach a somatic approach.

Learning to feel the sensations in your body somatically and connect with them will bring you into a deeper level of emotional intimacy with yourself. It will create more capacity in your nervous system to feel. When you start to learn and practice this skill, you get more comfortable with the sensations and feelings and you get better at talking about it to others.

In my experience coaching women to do this, it has an unbelievably positive experience on all their relationships but most often it is their primary intimate relationship that benefits the most. This is because they are able to have a deeper level of communication with their partner about what is going on in their inner world. This deepens intimacy in the relationship; the crux of intimacy is communication. When we can talk about our inner world with honesty, it is appreciated so much by our partners, they learn from it too and can mirror us, and in my observation this is what leads to better sex.

As I say to everyone I coach, intimacy means 'into me you see'.

So when you are looking at your physical symptoms in your midlife journey remember everything is connected. It is not just about physical changes alone or dietary changes. Learning to actually be in your body and feel the sensations, to make your emotions your allies, is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.

I currently have space to coach two new people. So whether you would like to reclaim your emotions, enhance your leadership skills, create more ease in your life with a big transition, you can contact me to book a clarity call to see if we are a good fit to work together.

How do you deal with big changes in your life?

How do you deal with big changes in your life and how do you learn? The way we enter into, navigate and exit transitions really matters because it sets us up for the next stage of our lives.

We all go through a midlife transition, regardless of gender. I think the unfortunate thing for menopause is that a lot the transition volatility of midlife gets blamed on menopause. They are two separate, but often parallel transitions.

One of the reasons I chose to pursue further study around relationship and sexuality coaching was because, at one time, I had so many executive coaching clients blowing up their lives, in particular their relationships in their midlife transition and I thought I need to learn to support these people better. Whilst I had studied adult development intensively and really understood, the shape of the stages of adult development I was unsure as to what the other factors were, that were getting in the way.

Here is what I know about our midlife transition. It is a HUGE opportunity.

Many people come to this time in life and they feel stuck. Maybe in relationships, in jobs they don't really like. They often reach this stage and don't like where they are, they don't know how to express how they feel about it and don't know how to get it out of it. Many people don't know where to go to find answers and they can often make really big changes and life altering decisions to get away from the pain of what they are feeling. They can't actually see that with everything they are feeling what they are actually crying out for is a transformation in their life.

A lot of pain from our childhood resurfaces to be healed. Many people at this inflexion point in their lives do a bit of an audit. There are hidden gifts within your wounds. Some of us are forced to address childhood trauma, wounding from early relationships in our teens and twenties. When you can face your wounding with compassion, from a different perspective, face the consequences of decisions in the past, when you can give your wounding space, you can come to terms with who you have become.

Old pain that resurfaces, needs time for you to release any grief that is accompanying it. This might mean letting go of long held hopes and dreams. This transition gives you an opportunity to really review you life, the road behind you and the road in front of you and align with your purpose. That is what this transition is really all about, moving from an ego driven early adulthood to a second adulthood driven by purpose and meaning.

It can get derailed really easily can't it?

Especially when you look for answers outside of yourself. Because you see, this transition asks you to dive deep inside of you.

The more you heal and release now, the more you make way for spaciousness, new beginnings and new opportunities in your life. Change does get hard as we get older because we do get a bit stuck in our ways. So midlife is the time to deal with it so we can live well in the second half of life.

If you don't deal with pain, unresolved trauma and wounding now, you step further into victimhood and continue to project this wounding outward and that is when a lot of relationship issues, conflict and unhappiness can occur in the long term. In this time in our lives we have more power to accept ourselves fully and take accountability for our healing. We did not have this power when we were younger but we do have it now.

We can rewrite our transition story at midlife. We can rewrite how we deal with this stage and approach it with acceptance and grace but it takes some inner work. When we can accept all the different parts of ourselves fully, we come home to the truth of who we really are. Don’t cling to the past, that is when you get stuck, heal the wounds from the past, accept where you are now. That creates space for the future.

As Carl Jung said, ‘when we look outside we are dreaming, when we look inside we awaken’.

Dancing with Grief

I’ve been thinking about grief a lot this week, well actually I’ve been thinking and feeling it. My husband’s grandfather passed away earlier in the week. He had turned 98 on Sunday and then died on Tuesday. We knew it was coming. He lives quite far from us and we all said goodbye to him in July which was the last time we saw him. He was sharp, funny and a true gentle man. He play online Bridge with my husband and kids and anyone else who turned up online up until about ten days ago.

Grief is a funny emotion. Most of the others pass through if we let them in a matter of minutes but grief seems to come through in bursts and can stick around for quite a while. What I notice, is when I am quiet and still that is when it comes. In surrender.

Even then it comes in bursts, and can keep coming for quite some time. When our Grief last longer than six months, it is now pathologised as depression. To me this seems like a total misunderstanding of grief.

A colleague said to me a few years ago, grief is love not able to be expressed.

I loved this insight and to me this seems true because we always grieve love we have lost, over time it fades but does it ever really go away?

For grief doesn’t just occur when a beloved passes. When relationships end we grieve. When we have acute illness we grieve. When our youngest or only child passes milestones we grieve because we know that we will never see or experience that stage again as a parent.

As our bodies age and we move into a new rite of passage, stage of life, we grieve for what we leave behind and for all the dreams and aspirations that we had that we were not able to experience. We grieve for the choices we made that allowed us to walk through a door way and miss another. We think of what may have been.

When we grieve in the present we often tap into a reservoir of unresolved grief from the past. Grief that wasn’t finished, that still lives in our bodies. It is never too late to heal unresolved grief. Healing is always an option and your body will tell you someway and somehow. Our darker emotions are rooted in alchemy, they always take us some place else. When we open to the wisdom of the darker emotions, particularly grief, there is always another emotions waiting for us. Grief often gives us gratitude.

“The gift that grief offers us is the capacity to see deeply into the way things are. Life is limited. We are here for only a short time. Grief asks us to know this, not only in a disembodied, cerebral way, but in the marrow or our bones - to look into the reality of death and loss with our usual egoic blinders on”

— Miriam Greenspan - 'Healing through the dark emotions'

Unexpressed grief holds a lot of hurt. Culturally we don’t express death well. We don’t acknowledge that the journey of life is a series of death and rebirths all the time as we grow and journey into different stages of our lives. Unexpressed grief gets passed down through generations in individuals and societies and comes out culturally in often unrecognisable forms; forms that are sometimes violent and highly destructive. The lack of acknowledgement of our grief is bringing about the destruction of the planet. The symptoms; increasing busyness and consumption, increasing depression, loneliness, anxiety, boredom and apathy.

I don’t think there has been a more important time to learn the gifts of listening to our body, to be with our darker emotions and learn the transformational power that they bring.

If this post resonates with you feel free to pass it onto a friend.

Your purpose - following the path home to you

When we go through our midlife transition, many people start to question everything about their life. This is perfectly normal and common. Our midlife transition is very much about moving from our first adulthood which has been driven very much by our ego; establishing our career wanting to achieve, meeting a partner and starting a family for some, maybe buying a house. The common theme of doing. Our second adulthood about discovering purpose, passion and meaning in our life. We ask ourselves the questions, Why am I here? How can I be more of the real me? What brings me love, joy, calm, happiness in my life.

Our midlife can be a time of great rupture. Some times this is good, sometimes it is not. What it asks of us is to go inward. A journey into our innerworld. Here is where many people, in my opinion, get stuck, using a first adulthood model when it comes to the bigger questions in this transition. Our purpose is not what we do in the world - it is who you are (be). Other people experience your purpose through your sense of ‘beingness’ or being human. It’s not about making things happen, although to be fair, just being yourself and doing work that lights you up, can allow you to really show the world unapologetically who you are.

We expect our purpose to come to us in an aha! moment. Your purpose blossoms moment to moment as you go into your inner world and explore your cultural conditioning, your ego survival strategies, your childhood wounding. It is more a gentle unfolding. It is how you show up moment to moment in life. Who you are, with friends, with your kids, with your partner, talking to your neighbours, doing the dishes, when you are on the train or the bus. It is you in life, in the day to day moments.

We tend to overthink purpose and turn the finding of it into an achievement of great magnitude. When we do that, we become like Dorothy from ‘The Wizard of Oz’ following the yellow brick road, looking for something outside our ourselves. It is not outside of you, it is in you. Nobody is going to give you a gold medal at the end of your life for finding your purpose. It is the essence of you, the authentic you behind the ego wounding, the persona’s you have created to belong. Who you are to strangers, to animals, in the garden with the earth. It is your strengths, your wounding, who you are in partnership and who you are in friendship. It is who you are with yourself.

We expect our purpose to come to us in an aha! moment. Your purpose blossoms within you. Is is a gentle unfolding, moment to moment.

Midlife is the right time to start this journey for a lot of people because we have the life skills, experience, knowledge and understanding to discern what is really going on for us and in some way our psyche knows this. For women, I often wonder whether the shifts of our hormones starts this quest, this journey of coming home to you, the essence of who you are. You can’t use logic and reason to find your purpose, all you have to do is start to make friends with your emotions, look through the lens’ of conditioning that have imposed views of how you should ‘be’.

When we push on our edges, beyond what is comfortable, when we make mistakes, when we let ourselves slow down, in our moments of stillness; we learn to be with ourselves. Your purpose is your journey of life, in some ways I think our learning journey is a constant state of learning who we are. Who we are in a bigger picture of collective humanity. Of a collective state of being.

For some people it can take their whole lifetime to get to this state, for others they find it sooner. There is no rush, go slowly and gently. My motto in life, SLOW is MORE.

The Good Girl

You know there is something that happens to women in midlife. They develop a burning passion and desire to step into their power. It is the journey toward becoming a crone, the wise woman, for sure. But it is something more. It is a strong desire to pull off that ‘coat’ of good girl conditioning. That part of us that we pull over like a coat to stay safe. On the opposite side of that is absolute fear of what will we happen if we do throw it all away. The polarity within is so strong for most women I’ve coached. On one side the desperate longing to be your true self and on the other side the absolute fear of judgement, hatred and rejection by the tribe.

We get demeaned when the urges come through. When our emotions are bursting at the seams to come through in our perimenopausal journey, when your bodymind is telling you ‘something has to change, enough, you cannot do this anymore’. You get called the angry menopausal woman. That is one of the great things about our hormones changing at this time. Estrogen which is the hormone of accommodation and progesterone, which is a calming hormone start to decline from out late 30s. All of a sudden a vale is lifted and we start to see the world with the lens we had when we were very young, about 10 to 12 years. When we started to see the injustice. Well yes, it is back but we are wiser, more experienced in the ways of the world, and frankly, pissed off and needing some space and change in our lives.

The fear of not belonging is so strong. We adapt and twist ourselves so much that many of us forget who we really are. I’ve seen it in work cultures, social cultures; I see it on social media every day. I know this deeply, I’ve found myself in roles when I worked in large organisations where I was the person who would speak up and ask the hard questions. One of my lovely male colleagues said to me one day, ‘you are the voice of reason in this group’. Let me tell you sometimes it’s hard being that person. Fortunately for me I learned early on to march to the beat of my own drum if I wanted to stretch toward my desires, but honestly it is hard being that person sometimes. I also know this feeling because many clients tell me that trapped in fear to speak out, to create, to desire. The good girl conditioning is so strong that we learn to live inside an invisible box and a limited range of acceptable behaviours and actions. The good girl learns to distrust her inner knowing that the answer must be outside of her. She disconnects from the deep knowing of her body because the masculine view which favours logic, rational and data, tells her that her inner knowing is wrong.

The desire to live, to be accepted and to belong, keeps most of us in our places. And so we spend our lives running from the darkness, trying to our hardest to be good and work hard and keep others happy.

Lucy Pearce

I’ve noticed in the last three years a trend of women getting sick of misogynistic social media posts, bitchy competitive behaviour amongst women, women exhausting themselves trying to be the perfect mother, wife, sister and friend. The assumption that we are on call for our employers 24/7. This is one of the reasons I do this work because I know that women have been subjugated for so long, pushed down to a narrow version of themselves, that they need a lot of support to help their nervous system feel safe enough to be the real version of themselves. The process of unlearning and rediscovering those lost parts of ourselves is slow and gentle. To be able to speak your desires and to listen to yourself deeply takes time and patience and tenderness.

We live in a culture where the masculine view is the norm and all genders of people have suppressed their feminine (the toxic masculine version of it) to survive and belong, to feel safe and loved. She squishes herself into a version of the good girl to feel safe, to please. She has shut down her feelings because an angry or sad or frustrated girl is not easy to handle. She has disconnected from her body and sexuality and when her body calls to her to listen, she soothes and numbs herself through overeating, drinking, overexercising or workaholism. Women are treated like little men in every facet of their life.

So how to we find the fierceness inside of us? Well it starts with connecting with our body and learning to listen to her. We connect with our pussy, the centre of our creativity and listen to her whispers. We start to connect with our pleasure and train our nervous system to accept and receive pleasure. We connect with nature and the cycles of the moon. We are cyclical beings and our menstrual cycles and rhythms of our life line up with the moon. We learn to connect with our dark feminine, our fear, anger, sadness, grief, frustration, we welcome them in for that is the journey for the heroine. We do this because we know that living in a female body, but living like little men is unbelievable unhealthy for us. We are not little men we are women. Ours is the journey of the heroine, spiralling in and out, up and down, into the underworld and back up again. We move inwards through our own dark terrain to find the essence of who we are, before we had to put the good girl coat on. When we find our inner flame, our muse, we realise that the guide we have been looking for is here.

It is all here inside of us. That is why I do this work to take you deep to that place inside of you so you can find your muse, your guide. It is all inside of you, you don’t need to look outside anymore.

My course Magnificient Midlife start on September 7th, pleasure click here if you would like to join the journey of taking the good girl coat off.

The verbs that support our relationships

When it comes to the relationships in our lives, there are some very important verbs that are actually skills we need to learn to thrive in our relationships. It can be challenging to learn how to do these skills because we don’t have many good role models of healthy relationships in our lives. Well some of us do, but many of us haven’t had good role modelling. This is because many of our parents, grandparents and great grandparents are of the generations of people who have been in survival mode for a long time. In the past two centuries we have had the industrial revolution, a couple of world wars, mass migration of displaced people all over the world. Just to name a few traumatising incidents. So learning how to thrive in their relationships was not top of their priorities; they were just trying to stay alive.

I feel like we are at a very good point in time where we can start to thrive in society. There is a lot of damage to marginalised groups that has caused a lot of harm, that is going to take a long time to repair. I feel like we are at the stage where we can really start to focus on learning to have better relationships with ourselves and with others.

So what are these verbs? Well I am just going to go through and explain each one. I want to say to you though that each verb, that is a skill, is really essential to your relationship with yourself and is a key foundation of healthy adult relationships with other humans. With everything around you really.

So here we go…

To want. What do you really want? I think this is one of the most important verbs. When you get clear on your desires, boundaries become easier, purpose and the big questions in life become clearer. Here is the kicker. Culturally we have been brainwashed to believe that to want anything is a terrible thing. If you put your own needs before others you are not a good person. I think that so many women in particular do not know what they want and it is affecting their relationships, their sexuality and their erotic life. Desire is sacred. It is a good place to start when it comes to your relationship skills and getting your needs met. You have to practice this though. Start by writing a list, what do you want? Do it every day for a week and see what comes out.

To Ask. Once you know what you want you can ask for it. Sounds easy enough. So many people struggle to know how to ask for what they need. Your partner is not a mind reader they will not know unless you tell them.

To Receive. This is a hard one. I have had to practice this a lot because I am a very independent person. Being able to receive is a key to abundance. I am talking about material and non-material things. Learning how to receive help from others. In your intimate relationship if you cannot receive, surrender is really difficult. Surrender is important when it comes to orgasm. If you cannot and relax and surrender, if the nervous system does not feel safe to surrender and receive, orgasm can be challenging.

To Take. Don’t be afraid to reach out for what you want. Many of us have been culturally conditioned that to take is selfish, that we are not a good person. Learning to take what you want when it comes before you is definitely a skill. Many of us have developed protective strategies to protect us from doing this. We dim our inner radiance so that we are not offered opportunities, we reject new friendships or intimate relationships so we don’t get hurt. It is OK you can reach out and take what you want.

To Share. Sharing parts of ourselves, being vulnerable can be really scary. I understand why because maybe when we were younger we did this and our confidence wasn’t kept. Maybe we have grown up in environments or worked in places where it has not been safe to share our innermost thoughts, to be really open to how we are feeling. Try with a friend or partner. Then think about the actual experiences you have shared wth others. Whether it has been a friend, a lover, your kids. Something that really lit you up inside, write down how you felt. Sharing life with others and co-creating experiences with others is one of the foundations of being a human. We are not meant to do it alone. Our nervous systems are wired for connection. That ventral vagral part of our nervous system which susses people out when we meet them; that’s the part that is curious and wants to connect to others.

To Refuse. This is challenging when you want to please people all the time, or if your nervous system response is fawning. To refuse is also really dependant on understanding desire. When you know what you really want and what you don’t want, refusal becomes easier. Refusal is also important when it comes to boundaries and enforcing them.

To Play. Why do we stop playing? Play is such a huge part of our learning process, of bonding with other humans. We are so good at it as children, it is how we learn as children. As teenagers we are great at playing but sometimes we stop because we don’t want to lose face. Foreplay is play. It is a really important part of arousal, of your intimate life. Playfulness is a beautiful part of being human. It allows us to try make mistakes, try again, refine, try again. To live is to play. To learn is to play. To have a thriving erotic life with another is to play. To have friendships we like to play. The spirit of play brings us into presence, when we play we are being human.

To Imagine. Maybe this should have been before play? Our imagination drives our creativity. Do you know the sacral area in your body is where you creative energy and your sexual energy come from. Yep same place. Our imagination is fuel for play. Our imagination is fuel for what is possible in life. When you share the imaginations of your inner world with your partner, anything is possible. But that can be a little scary some times can’t it? Try it. Practice sharing one thing a day. Start with something small and easy the each day, just push the boundary a little. Titration - drip by drip, baby steps. We don’t want to freak out your nervous system. Act out your imagination when it comes to your creativity. Draw, make, bake do something with those creative energies coming from your inner world.

I am sure there are far more verbs that are helpful for us in our relationships but I feel like these are a good start. It can be hard to start when you haven’t been doing these and for those of you with trauma it might be harder to partake in some of these skills. Baby steps, start with the one that feels the most comfortable and see how you go.

If you want some support and to explore these skills, you can work through these in coaching. One on One coaching offers deep exploration into many different parts of us that might be getting in the way or protecting us from branching out into these new skill areas. If you would like to explore coaching with me, head on over and book a clarity call with me to explore further.

As always pass this onto a friend if you feel it might be helpful to them.