Ep. 237 When Love Feels Hard in Midlife Try This Coping Skill to Calm Anxiety and Stress

Why does love sometimes feel harder in midlife—even when you care deeply and want connection?
If relationships feel more complicated than you expected, you’re not failing—you’re encountering the real work of love.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

1. Why anxiety and stress often rise when relationships move into disharmony—and why that’s normal in midlife
2. How learning to stay present through discomfort becomes a powerful coping skill for connection
3. Why love grows through repair, not perfection, and how that understanding can calm stress and deepen intimacy

🎧 Take 12 minutes to learn the coping skill that helps you move through disharmony and build real connection—right where you are—you’re worth it.

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About the Host:
MJ Murray Vachon LCSW is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than 48,000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching her Mental Wellness curriculum, Inner Challenge. Four years ago she overcame her fear of technology to create a podcast that integrated her vast clinical experience and  practical wisdom of cultivating mental wellness using the latest information from neuroscience. MJ was Social Worker of the Year in 2011 for Region 2/IN.

Creating Midlife Calm is a podcast designed to guide you through the challenges of midlife, tackling issues like anxiety, low self-esteem, feeling unworthy, procrastination, and isolation, while offering strategies for improving relationships, family support, emotional wellbeing, mental wellness, and parenting, with a focus on mindfulness, stress management, coping skills, and personal growth to stop rumination, overthinking, and increase confidence through self-care, emotional healing, and mental health support. 

Transcript

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW 0:00

In this episode, you'll discover how to grow love in the life you already have. Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, the podcast where you and I tackle stress and anxiety in midlife so you can stop feeling like crap, feel more present at home, and thrive at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over 50,000 hours of therapy sessions and 32 years of teaching practical science-backed mental wellness. Welcome to the podcast. Earlier this week in episode 236, we talked about attachment styles, how early relationship patterns shape the way you experience closeness, conflict, and connection. We talked about how understanding your attachment style. Isn't about blame, it's about awareness. And awareness gives you agency. We also talked about love as one of the most powerful coping skills because when love feels safer and more grounded, anxiety and stress naturally settle. In this episode, you'll discover how love has grown through real relationships, not by avoiding disharmony, but by learning how to repair and how relational mindfulness helps you respond. From your adult self rather than your old coping patterns. And lastly, that love grows through repair, not perfection. Before we go further, I wanna briefly return to Monday's Inner Challenge. You were invited to notice one relationship where you felt a little activated, and to gently ask, what might my attachment system be trying to protect right now? Even that moment of noticing without fixing anything is already a step toward calm and connection. It might seem little, but by the end of today's episode, you are gonna realize how big that little bit of noticing actually is. Today we're gonna build on that insight and move into practice because understanding attachment is important, but love doesn't grow in theory, love grows in relationship, and especially during Valentine's Week, many people quietly feel disappointed, not because they don't love, but because relationships rarely look like the way we imagine they would one of the most helpful skills is something called relational mindfulness. I've talked about mindfulness often on this podcast, bringing your attention to the present moment, usually by noticing what's going on inside of you. Relational mindfulness builds on that, it focuses on what's happening between you and another person. Hedy Schiffler, the renowned couples therapist I interviewed in earlier episodes, talks about the importance of not polluting the space between the people we love the most. And when we do, having done enough. Inner work to clean up that space. The foundational skill for this is relational mindfulness. It simply means slowing down enough in relationships to notice what's happening inside of you. Name the pattern that's showing up, and choose a response that comes from your adult self, not an old coping habit. In other words, learning how to keep your Inner child from running the show and polluting your relationship. Relational mindfulness helps you stay grounded when relationships feel messy, which they often do. And messiness doesn't mean failure. This is where the work of Terry Real, another renowned couple's therapist, is so helpful. One of his core insights is that intimate relationships are always moving through three phases, harmony, disharmony, and repair. That can feel surprising because many of us were raised with the idea that love should move from harmony to happily ever after, with maybe a little disharmony in there, but not disharmony that keeps coming back and back and back. But that's not how real relationships work. Disharmony isn't a sign that something is wrong. It's a sign that two people are trying to stay connected while being different. Did you hear that? Two people are trying to stay connected while being different? What matters isn't avoiding disharmony, it's learning how to repair because again, love grows through repair, not perfection. In midlife, disharmony often shows up around feeling unseen or unappreciated, differences in needs, energy, or priorities, how closeness and independence are balanced, and this is where old attachment coping strategies tend to resurface. Not because you're immature, because those strategies once worked, they actually helped you feel safe, and underneath that is often a quiet fear. Many people don't say out loud, if I stop accommodating, if I speak up or slow down, I might lose love. Let's face it, many of the ways you learned to cope in childhood were adaptive. You may have grown up in a home with lots of tension, and you became the peacemaker, ignoring your own needs to keep others calm, or maybe you had a critical parent and learn to stay under the radar. Those coping skills were practiced over and over. They were your younger self doing your best, but just like you've outgrown your childhood shoes, it's helpful to ask whether the coping skills you use when your relationship is in disharmony still help you and your loved ones move forward in a healthy way. Adult relationships need adult coping skills and for most of us. That means an update. This is the difference between reacting from a younger protective part of you and responding from your adult self who can tolerate and hold discomfort and stay connected at the same time. Relational mindfulness can help you pause and cue you to slow down and move from that reactive childhood coping pattern into a stable, sturdy, healthy adult coping skill. Probably the most common midlife relational pattern I work with is a woman who comes to therapy, seething and resentful for years, sometimes decades. Sometimes. Her whole life, she has quietly accommodated others, having learned early on to put her needs second, third, or last. Those lessons often came not just from home, but from school, church, and the larger community. Asking for what she wants and staying with it when it inconveniences others is not a skill she ever developed a midlife with. All the demands placed on her. She often comes to therapy, sometimes alone, sometimes with her husband, and asks, what is wrong with me? I'm angry all the time. I'm so unhappy. Is this menopause? No, I usually say this is your opportunity to update, to grow, to learn, to be more loving, more authentic, not only towards yourself, but towards your family and friends. Often the turning point comes when she begins to put words to what she wants and needs and notices how uncomfortable and unfamiliar. That feels her spouse is often hoping it is menopause and is surprised to learn that. No, it's time to pause, listen, and update. The relationship to this kind of update requires courage and fortitude. It requires honesty, authenticity, and it requires one of the hardest coping skills for any human. Slowing down and listening. Really listening first to yourself and then to the person and the people you love. Listening as an adult, someone who can hold your own wants, needs and dreams and the wants, needs, and dreams of another. This woman's attachment style was disorganized. When she felt unseen and unappreciated. Sometimes she would explode in anger. Other times she would get in her car and leave in therapy. She learned to notice and name. I feel 12 years old right now. She learned to ground herself sometimes with 90 seconds of breath work and remind herself not to let her angry teenager run the show when she felt hurt or frustrated with her spouse, when she was first learning this skill, she said to me, this kind of feels awful. I felt so much more powerful when I was angry. It all just scared her. But over time she discovered something important, choosing repair. Overreaction brought relief. She no longer had to live with the remorse of saying hurtful things that never actually got her what she wanted. Instead, she stepped into genuine power, authentically and honestly stating her needs in a connecting clear and direct way. What that example shows is this love grows when you stop trying to avoid discomfort and instead learn how to move through it. Repair is where intimacy deepens. Repair is where trust and understanding grow and repair is one of the most powerful ways to calm anxiety in relationships. So many people look at what they don't have and feel discouraged. But love doesn't grow by waiting for a different partner, a different past, or a different version of yourself. Love grows when you slow down instead of react. Stay present instead of withdrawing and choose connection. Overprotection, one small moment at a time. That's how love is cultivated from where you are. And one gentle reminder for all of us. We get very little education, if any, in our culture about how to create and sustain healthy loving relationships. If something in this episode sparks curiosity or hope, there are many thoughtful teachers and resources available. I'll link several in the show notes for those who want to explore further. In this episode, you discovered how love has grown through real relationships, not by avoiding disharmony, but by learning how to repair. You learned how relational mindfulness helps you notice old coping patterns and respond from your adult self, and you were reminded that love doesn't require perfection. Love grows through repair. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Monday with more creating midlife calm and happy Valentine's Day.