3 Steps to Navigate your own Midlife Unraveling
Midlife can be a challenging time for so many of us Mamas It can be one of the first opportunities that we truly stop, pause and take a hard look at ourselves and our life. Often it is in that pausing , where we first start to make some profound discoveries that stem from hard questions.
We begin to wake up from our busy and often numb lives to realize how short life actually is and how hungry we are to live our next phase (i call it phase 2) as our most courageous authentic selves.
Thank you Brene Brown for her beautiful work on research and shame, but also for helping some of us women navigate through this clunky time in life that she refers to as the Midlife Unraveling.
In this article Brene explains:
“The truth is that the midlife unraveling is a series of painful nudges strung together by low-grade anxiety and depression, quiet desperation, and an insidious loss of control. By low-grade, quiet, and insidious, I mean it’s enough to make you crazy, but seldom enough for people on the outside to validate the struggle or offer you help and respite. It’s the dangerous kind of suffering – the kind that allows you to pretend that everything is OK.”
Having experienced my own midlife unraveling which left me feeling lost, confused, alone, full of shame, and empty, I came to understand that this massive transition can be a beautiful opportunity to heal old patterns, begin speaking our truth and integrate those parts of us that feel like they have been buried for decades.
So what exactly are some of the shifts that happen for us midlife mamas during our time of unraveling?
A shift from living out who we THINK we are, to claiming who we TRULY are. Owning our true identity and shedding off the layers and masks that we never truly were to begin with.
A shift from autopilot mode and operating out of reaction to being intentional with our responses and using our words and behavior to care for the people we love.
A shift from putting everyone before ourselves to learning how much our needs matter, honoring what we desire and filling our own cups.
A shift from having to be everywhere, please everyone and do all the things to becoming intentionally present. Living in true appreciation for your children, your partner your life.
A shift from beating ourselves up for not doing it all right to leaning into compassion and forgiving ourselves for doing the best we could with what we knew at that time.
A shift from thinking we are super warriors who can do it all, to knowing our limits, honoring our limits and being okay with saying NO.
A shift from thinking we can handle everyone and everything to understanding how beautiful it is to allow someone to support you and care for you in your journey.
A shift from unhealthy habits and struggling to find the time to nourish ourselves, to creating schedules where moving our body, eating healthy food and getting proper sleep are just the norm.
A shift from operating out of our own lack of healing to choosing that it’s time to look at old wounds and begin to heal and repair.
A shift from believing that we have to do it all perfectly to lovingly accepting that sometimes a B- is exactly a-ok.
A shift from being terrified to use our voice for fear of judgment and shame to knowing that no matter what we do, we will always be judged by someone but we speak our truth in love anyway.
A shift from living life by an opinion poll to developing trust in ourselves and living from a place where intuition always guides and always wins.
I have to say, there are moments where I still feel a little lost and confused. There are still times where I grieve for ways in which I could have shown up differently in my life.
However, being committed to healing through my own midlife unraveling, what I find that the most challenging is that we now have this new burning desire to forge a new path, to take a new journey and yet there is no map.
I want to offer you 3 very simple but powerful practices that you can implement right now to help you through your own uncertainty and unraveling.
1). Create space in your life. As we slowly create space between us and learned behavior, that space becomes a pathway for healing. In it we can slowly start to meet ourselves with love, with kindness, with honesty. The core of who we are is not the coping mechanisms we learned along the way. The core of who we are is the part of us that recognizes when these patterns aren’t serving us. It’s the part of us that feels shame or pain in a repeated pattern. It’s the part of us that notices repeated dysfunction and wants change. It’s the part of us that knows what we are capable of, knows the kind of love we want and deserve, knows our intentions and our heart. This only comes through creating space. Many of us have lived for decades filling our time, our schedules, our calendars so much because this space can be the very thing we are terrified of. Most of us have a hard time defining who we are underneath our dysfunction. But learning to create space and pause, can truly become a beautiful pathway for healing
2). Practice Self-Compassion. Self compassion is giving ourselves permission to mess up. It’s leading with the belief that we are all imperfect. It’s understanding that the mess up isn’t the issue, it’s the hiding away from our lives that is. That if we are living our most authentic lives, we are absolutely going to fall hard on our faces. The parts of our lives that trigger shame, are often the part of our lives that we are bravely showing up in. And when we accept that as our truth, the next time we mess up, we can say to ourselves “ahhh this is proof that I’m showing up”.
3). Get curious about your inner conflict. When we are willing to sit with our emotions, we begin a new relationship with ourselves. We discover when our boundaries have been crossed, when our needs aren’t getting met. We discover wounds we didn’t know impacted us so deeply, dynamics we never even realized were unhealthy. When we are willing to use our own inner conflict to learn ourselves more, we set the tone for a healthy relationship.
Midlife can be a huge transition. The unraveling can feel like massive exposure, as if we are naked standing on the busiest street corner in town. It often feels raw as we choose to shed patterns that we think have protected us from pain, emotions, shame, and suffering while we let our true selves be seen. Sometimes we aren’t even sure who the true self is anymore by the time we hit this point.
But our midlife unraveling holds such much potential to realize who we are at a deep and beautiful level. As we learn ourselves more deeply we build on self trust. As we build on self trust, we cultivate a deeper sense of self worth. And that allows us to walk though life in a completely real, authentic, beautiful and true way.