Episode 15: Therapy Changed My Life and I'm Not Whispering About It

Welcome to Episode 15:  Therapy Changed My Life and I'm Not Whispering About It

In this episode, Melissa and Anne take an unfiltered look at therapy and the role it can play in helping midlife women move beyond survival mode and into deeper self-awareness, clarity, and support. Together, they unpack the lingering stigma around asking for help, challenge the idea that women must wait for a crisis to deserve care, and speak candidly about how therapy can help break long-held patterns, strengthen boundaries, and create space for a more grounded and authentic life. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Midlife Interrupted and Unfiltered.

SPEAKER_00 0:02

I'm Melissa, coach, counselor, and professional truthbringer.

SPEAKER_01 0:06

And I'm Anne, trial lawyer, accountability partner, and certified Pilates instructor. Yes, that's true. We're two East Coast women who met at kindergarten drop-off. And 15 years later decided Midlife needed a megaphone and not a mute button. So we're here to interrupt the negative narratives. And share the unfiltered truth about reinvention, pairing menopause, and everything in between. Which, by the way, we are all promised would save us.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Right? What if that thing that changed your life was therapy?

SPEAKER_01 0:47

And what if, instead of whispering like it's a private embarrassment, you said it out loud, like it was the truth.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Because for me, therapy is part of self-care, and today we're not going to whisper about it. Welcome back to episode 15, the place where we talk about midlife identity, reinvention, relationships, burnout, boundaries, grief, hormones, healings, and all the things women are often expected to carry quietly.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

Quietly, beautifully, gracefully, and without needing anything from anyone.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Yes, that full fantasy package.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

And we reject it.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Yep. And today we're talking about something that's deeply personal, deeply important, and honestly, still weirdly stigmatized in a lot of spaces. And that topic is therapy.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

More specifically, what happens when women in medlife finally stop treating therapy like a shameful little secret and start seeing it is real support.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

Let me just be clear. This isn't an episode about pretending therapy fixes everything overnight.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

And it's not an episode about diagnosing your ex from your kitchen table.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Although many have tried. This is about what therapy can open up when you spent years holding everything together, being the reliable one or the capable one, the one people count on while quietly losing touch with yourself.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

And if that sentence hit a nerve, stay with us for this episode.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

So let's talk about why this topic hits different in midlife. Because I really think therapy lands differently than maybe it would have in your 20s or 30s. Because by this point, a lot of us have become extremely skilled at coping or maybe hiding what we feel.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

Exactly. Functioning's not the problem. Midlife women know how to function. We know how to show up, get it done, keep moving, make the list, solve things. Remember that birthday, manage the tone of the email and regulate everybody else's feelings. We're all good at that.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Yep. And then we just say, I'm good, I'm fine, and someone asks.

SPEAKER_01 2:45

Right. And midlife is often not where the dysfunction begins. It's where the old survival strategies stop working.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

That's it, and people pleasing starts to hurt more. And overfunctioning, it gets heavier and more exhausting. Self-abandonment gets harder to glamorize. And suddenly, what used to feel like being responsible, unquotes, starts to feel like resentment, irritability, numbness, and quite honestly, flat out exhaustion.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

And women in this season are often dealing with so many layer transitions at once. Maybe you're parenting teens or adult children. Maybe you're a newly empty nester. Maybe you're caring for aging parents. Maybe your marriage is changing. Maybe your body feels unfamiliar. And maybe your career looks successful from the outside, but feels really empty on the inside.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

Yep. Or maybe your friendships are shifting. And maybe grief is showing up. Maybe you're asking a question you've never had time to ask before, which is, do I even like this life I built?

SPEAKER_01 3:47

And that is such a midlife question. Not because everything's bad, but because the noise starts to die down just enough for that honesty to start working its way in.

SPEAKER_00 3:57

And honestly, that honesty can be really disruptive.

SPEAKER_01 4:01

It really can. And especially if you've built your identity around being low maintenance, easygoing, grateful, a strong person, dependable, selfless, and are always quote, fine, close quote.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

A lot of us were rewarded, right, for being strong when what we actually were was unsupported.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

Definitely. And I think therapy helped me realize the difference between those two things.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Same. It helped me realize that just because I could carry everything didn't mean I was supposed to. So let's get personal, Ann. What and we'll start with you. What brought you to therapy?

SPEAKER_01 4:41

You always start with me. Good lord. Okay, honestly, I think it was exhaustion, not like cutesy tired, not like, oh, I need a spa day or weekend away tired. I mean, like soul level burned out, exhaustion. I was absolutely functioning at a very high level, but really didn't feel connected to myself or my own life. I was getting things done, but I felt like I was teetering. I was short-tempered often and resentful and really just felt emotionally crowded. Like I was always one minor inconvenience away from becoming really upset. And I joke, like I can go from zero to like eruption of a volcano in no time.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

But that still happens to me often. But it's almost like in that sense, when you're in that place, it's one simple question like, what's for dinner? Or when are we going shopping? You're internally, you're like, I cannot be the keeper of all these ugly answers. Great Lord, leave me alone.

SPEAKER_01 5:41

Exactly. And I realized that I had spent years being available to everybody, especially my career, like emotionally available, being the mentor, being logistically available, being mentally available, but I was almost completely unavailable to myself. I don't think I had anything to give myself because I felt like I was giving it away to everybody else.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

That is so real.

SPEAKER_01 6:03

And I think what finally pushed me was not one giant dramatic crisis. It was more like a thousand little moments or a thousand little stabbings of recognizing that I was not like feeling fulfilled. I wasn't feeling like I was lit up and I felt like I was disappearing in plain sight. I could handle everything that anybody tossed my way, but I just didn't feel like alive or passionate in my own life.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

Yeah. And I think my experience was similar, but mine came over several years of several transitions, I think. Mostly I'd say in my 40s. My career was thriving, but I was exhausted. And I still felt like there's something more I could be doing, but I don't know what it is. So I knew I needed to figure out my work identity. My girls were getting older and moving away, and I wanted to have the flexibility to go see them in a show or visit them at college or go to a game. And my role at home as Uber driver was not as demanding. And my husband and I had to also, in parallel, learn how to parent differently with different kids with different problems. And like you, I was exhausting myself thinking about all of this because it felt so heavy and like so much. And I just kept hearing this internal voice saying, You should be handling this better. You can do this, you get stronger.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

That internal voice, which we've talked about in previous episodes, the one that's not always so nice. And that word should, I think it's done so much damage to women in general.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

It's a bad word. And even other than the shoulds, when I was during that time I just described, I kept thinking, Melissa, be grateful, be more resilient, stop being so emotional. You're so cranky. Knock it off. I should have figured this out by now. And just having a neutral sounding board to help me think out loud and help me understand what was inside and help me accept that gratitude and frustration and grief can go coexist and that love and loneliness can coexist, and that stability and dissatisfaction can coexist was so helpful.

SPEAKER_01 8:18

Those are all big ones. Those all the things that can coexist when they seem like they are polar opposites of each other, and they are, but they still you can feel it all. So that's a big one that you just dropped on us. And midlife is clearly not one clean emotion, it's like a mixed bag of emotions. Like you can love your family and still feel lost or lonely, and you can be accomplished and totally feel disconnected and unpassionate about what you're doing. And let's be real, you can have a good life, seem to have it all, and still need support from somebody.

SPEAKER_00 8:57

Absolutely. And hearing that from a therapist, or maybe I'll add a coach, since I actually call my psychologist a life coach because that's what she really was coaching me through life. But hearing that from someone that's not related to you, that's not your spouse or partner, that you're not failing just because you're overwhelmed is really freeing. And giving me that permission to make changes and validate that what I was feeling was actually a need and things could change was so amazing.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

And I would think that would be empowering too, was it?

SPEAKER_00 9:38

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

Because sometimes what women need most is not advice, it's permission to tell the truth about what's going on.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

Exactly. Let's talk a little bit about what therapy actually changed for us, because I don't want to talk about the abstract version, but what actually shifted? Like what were the actionable things that shifted in our lives?

SPEAKER_01 9:59

You love actionable things, don't you? Yes. Okay, so for me, it changed the way I talked to myself. Before therapy, that inner voice was basically an overstimulated manager with no compassion, very results-oriented. And I was really hard on myself all the time.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

Same here. So many women are walking around with an internal voice that sounds like pressure. I think of Billy Joel's song, but not care.

SPEAKER_01 10:25

Yeah. And that I think that therapy helped me notice that voice and then question it and then slowly start to replace it. And I think I started becoming that voice in my head that I could actually live with and who actually was like advocating for myself in my own mind.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

That's huge.

SPEAKER_01 10:44

I think it was too. And it also changed my relationship as it relates to boundaries. Before I thought boundaries were either harsh or selfish or dramatic. And being a people pleaser, you feel like, oh, am I going to be letting somebody down or what will they think? I thought I should be endlessly flexible with everybody and their schedules. But therapy taught me that boundaries are not punishments. It's not a bad thing, but boundaries give you clarity.

SPEAKER_00 11:12

Yes. And clarity can feel rude when you've been trained to over-explain everything.

SPEAKER_01 11:20

Yeah, of giving an excuse or a reason of why you can't do something as opposed to saying, no, that doesn't work for me.

SPEAKER_00 11:26

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

So let's say that again for people who need to hear it, Al.

SPEAKER_00 11:32

Okay. Clarity can feel rude when you've been trained to overexplain everything. And I'm going to add to what you shared, but therapy helped me stop overexplaining and feeling like I had to please everyone, or that I had to have a reason or share my rationale with people as to why I was or wasn't doing something. And that might sound small, but it wasn't small in my life. And I used to think every no needed a work plan to get to a yes, or that I needed this grandiose PowerPoint to share my whys.

SPEAKER_01 12:03

With footnotes.

SPEAKER_00 12:05

But therapy helped me understand I can't do that. Or no, this doesn't work for me. Or I need to pause. I need time to think. Or maybe even to just disagree with people in my life who have historically had the upper hand, or maybe I'd go to when I was making big decisions. I just needed to listen to my gut and trust myself and have the courage to do that.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

And that kind of healing really changes your entire central nervous system.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

It does. And also it helps you to identify patterns, right? Patterns that I had that I couldn't clearly see on my own. And where I was confused, maybe about need with what I valued, and where I equated maybe self-sacrifice with love. I just kept trying to earn rest, right? Earn it instead of allowing it and listening to my body when I needed it.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

And I almost said, well, you deserve the rest, but you didn't even have to deserve it. Let's be true. Like if you need rest, nobody's got to give you validity to say I'm checking out for a little while. And I think that's huge.

SPEAKER_00 13:05

I think it's huge too. And I'm not gonna say it's easy still to allow some of that rest and just say, oh no, listen, but I think I am way more better at it now than I ever was. And therapy helped me through that.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

And I think for me, it changed conflict. I used to experience conflict like total danger, which is so weird. Like in my personal life, I would when what I do is conflict every day in and out is a litigator. But like sometimes even like a small tension in a relationship with somebody I cared about would create a lot of tension that I could feel, like physically feel, and send me into overdrive with overthinking, or to your point, overexplaining, yes, rehearsing those conversations or like writing the email in my head or the conversation in my head of what I was gonna say. Really argument at 2 a.m. in your bed. Totally. And I think that therapy helped me separate discomfort from danger. And not every hard conversation means that you're at the end of a relationship or friendship, or that conversation's gonna end that relationship or friendship. And not every disappointed person in me means that I did something wrong.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

Right.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

You know, maybe it's something in them and they can't handle that. I said, no, I'm not available that day.

SPEAKER_00 14:25

Let them, as Mel Robins says.

SPEAKER_01 14:27

Yeah, and not every parenting decision means success or failure.

SPEAKER_00 14:33

That lesson right there that you just said, all of those things, life-changing.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

It is, and I think it's empowering. I think that for a lot of midlife women, therapy can give them language to things that they felt for years but never named, like burnout, resentment, anticipatory grief, emotional labor, hypervigilance, or what I mentioned before, people pleasing, like of being able to go and talk to somebody who's a professional. And here I am talking about talking to a professional when I'm sitting here with one.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

But it's okay, you're safe.

SPEAKER_01 15:05

Labeling it is okay, that's your people-pleasing tendency, that's your fear tendency. And what we've said throughout this podcast, and you specifically, Mel, has been when you name it and you identify it, you can actually do something with it.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

You put it in the universe and you can work with it, right? Because before that, maybe you just thought, why am I like this? Or what's wrong with me? And having someone listen and repeat that back to you and help you reframe how you're thinking about it, priceless.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Yeah. And of course, it didn't make me perfect, but let's be clear on that for sure. But I think it did make me more honest with myself and more regulated. I think it gave me an awareness of what was going on, of why I was feeling what I was feeling. And I became less likely to disappear in service of being accepted or pleasing others.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

So why do you think women still whisper about it? Why is this such a taboo subject?

SPEAKER_01 16:04

I think it's because a lot of us were raised inside some version of don't air your business, don't be dramatic, family matters have to be kept private. Pray about it or push through. Oh, be grateful and the best. Don't make anybody uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

And to be clear, and prayer can be powerful. Faith can be powerful, and community can be extremely powerful.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

Absolutely. And therapy doesn't have to replace any of that. For many women, it complements it.

SPEAKER_00 16:32

But there's still this idea out there in some circles that needing help means weakness or that therapy is for people who are falling apart, and we should just hand it over to God.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

Well, when actually I think therapy prevents people from falling apart, and therapy can be for the woman who is holding it all together so well that no one even realizes that they're struggling.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

Yeah. And I really do think there's also fear around what therapy might uncover and people having to address things they've buried, buried, right? And if I say this out loud, what does it mean for me, for my marriage, for my childhood, for my mother, my father, my identity, my choices, my kids.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

And there can be a real fear that honesty is being disloyal to somebody or some relationship.

SPEAKER_00 17:19

That is such an important point. And just because you're in therapy does not always mean that someone else is to blame or that it was because of X, Y, Z and childhood.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

Naming the pain or the issue is definitely not betrayal. Telling the truth about your experience is not cruel, and silence does not automatically equal strength.

SPEAKER_00 17:41

And midlife can be the exact reason when women decide they can no longer afford this cost of silence. Because if you keep it buried, eventually it will make its way up and it can physically make you sick.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

That's so true. It'll percolate its way up. Okay, now let's talk about for the woman whose therapy curious but hesitant. Let's talk to the woman listening right now whose therapy and maybe she's thinking, I don't know if my problems are serious enough. What would you say to her, Mel?

SPEAKER_00 18:15

I'd say you don't need to prove your pain to deserve support. You don't need a dramatic backstory. You don't need a breakdown. Just feeling overwhelmed is enough. Feeling stuck is enough. And feeling like you're carrying everybody else's weight, that's enough.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

Absolutely. You don't have to be in crisis to benefit from care and support.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

And I'd also say if you try therapy and the first therapist doesn't feel right, that doesn't mean therapy is not for you. It takes time to find your person, and that might take a few trial and errors.

SPEAKER_01 18:53

That's a really important point. Don't throw away therapy just because you don't click with the person. Find the person you're going to click with.

SPEAKER_00 19:00

Exactly. And I always tell my clients, if I'm not your person, no hard feelings. I want to help you find your person as long as you keep committed to self-development and improvement. As you can see with that, it's a relationship because you are absolutely allowed to want someone that makes you feel psychologically safe, validated, seen, challenged, respected. You're allowed to ask questions and you're allowed to have preferences and you're allowed to say, you're not for me.

SPEAKER_01 19:35

That's really empowering, and people should really take that to heart. Because we all want someone who understands the complexity of where we're at, or being a woman in midlife, the caregiving, or the identity shifting, or the resentment we might feel, or hormone chaos, or cultural expectations. And sometimes all that stuff and even loneliness that can all exist inside a full life. And you deserve, we all deserve, someone who understands that complexity.

SPEAKER_00 20:12

Helps you feel like you're not alone. I think it helps to release this fantasy that you don't need to know exactly what you're gonna say when you go into the room before you begin. Sometimes the first sentence might just be a tear. It's not even a sentence and you don't know why you're crying. Or maybe you go in and say, I don't know where to start. I just know I'm not okay.

SPEAKER_01 20:34

Yeah. And that's a beginning.

SPEAKER_00 20:37

It is. And another thing, it doesn't always look dramatic. It's not always one cinema breakthrough to another or a gorgeously timed tear rolling down the cheek and perfect lightning. It's just not rude honesty. It's absolutely very rude. Sometimes healing looks like noticing your body tense up sooner. Maybe your shortness of breath. Maybe it's saying no sooner. Maybe it's resting without having to justify it. Maybe it's not panicking because someone is disappointed. It's just realizing you're allowed to have these needs and you don't have to apologize for them.

SPEAKER_01 21:19

And sometimes healing is a lot quieter than we expect, but it's more powerful than we could have ever imagined. Exactly. So let's talk about Mel, what healing looks like in real life. And I used to think healing would look big, loud, obvious, like one insight would rearrange like my entire life overnight.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

But so often it looks like steadiness.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

That's so true. It looked like pausing before saying yes, right? You think about whether or not you want to make that commitment or agree to do something. And it looked like not spiraling after a difficult interaction or actually noticing. When I was triggered, instead of deciding that there was something wrong with me. And it looked like letting myself grieve and give myself grace on things I used to minimize.

SPEAKER_00 22:13

Yeah. And for me, it looked like less is more productivity and performance, less managing and micromanaging with spreadsheets because I love spreadsheets and actions. Nerd. I know. And less shape-shifting to make everyone else comfortable. It looked like accepting that some people knew the version of me that overperformed, over-accommodated, maybe overfunctioned, overdid a lot of things. And they might not love the more honest version of me. It's like we talked about in an earlier episode is that when you're reinventing yourself, or even when you're in therapy and maybe transforming things in your lives, not everyone is going to like the new you, and that's okay.

SPEAKER_01 22:53

Yeah. And not everybody's meant to be on the journey with you. Some people might fall by the wayside, but the importance is that you watch out for yourself.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:01

And take that empowerment and feel good about yourself. And that's all real. Therapy can change your relationships. And it's not because it ruins them, but to your point, it might be because it changes the roles that you've been playing and in your relationships with others.

SPEAKER_00 23:21

Exactly. And the woman who stops over-explaining, rescuing, softening, fixing, absorbing, anticipating, she may actually surprise people. Maybe she even surprises herself. But there's so much freedom in that surprise. Therapy didn't make me a different person. And it still doesn't make me a different person. It brings me back to myself or maybe to a self that I never really in different parts of my life allowed to fully exist.

SPEAKER_01 23:49

And I think that's the invitation for so many people in midlife, not to become someone brand new because the old you was wrong, but to become more fully yourself because you're finally telling the truth. And truth has a way of making room for peace.

SPEAKER_00 24:05

It really does. So let's say it clearly for anyone who needs to hear it. Therapy did not make me weak. It did not make me self-absorbed. It did not make me ungrateful. And it did not make me dramatic. Now, I am dramatic, but it wasn't the therapy.

SPEAKER_01 24:23

We can't blame the champions for that. And I think it made me more honest and more grounded and more aware and more compassionate and more able to love people without disappearing into that relationship or that love.

SPEAKER_00 24:40

Therapy actually changed my life because it helped me stop surviving a life and be in a life that I actually wanted to inhibit.

SPEAKER_01 24:49

And we're not whispering about it because too many women have spent too many years suffering in silence under the belief that they should just be able to handle everything better.

SPEAKER_00 24:59

And maybe you don't need to handle it better.

SPEAKER_01 25:01

Maybe you just need support.

SPEAKER_00 25:02

Or language.

SPEAKER_01 25:04

And maybe you just need rest.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

Or a place where your whole self gets to show up unapologetically, you. And if this episode met you in a tender place today, here's your next step. Don't just nod along and move along. Let this be your sign to take one small brave step.

SPEAKER_01 25:25

And here come the action items.

SPEAKER_00 25:29

Look up a therapist. Go to psychology today. Find one in your area. Ask a trusted friend for a recommendation. Write down the truth that you've been avoiding and that you want to work on or work through with somebody. Admit that you want more. And admit that you deserve support before a crisis forces the issue.

SPEAKER_01 25:53

And healing, I think, gets easier when the shame around it gets quieter. And when we stop whispering. Thanks for joining us on Midlife Interrupted and Unfiltered.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

If this episode hit home, share it with a friend who needs to hear it.

SPEAKER_01 26:10

And subscribe so we can keep interrupting your week with real talk.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

Find us on Instagram at the dot interruption.

SPEAKER_01 26:17

Where we're continuing the conversation and building this community together.

SPEAKER_00 26:21

Until next time, keep interrupting those narratives.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

And stay unfiltered. See you next week.