Who I work with · Midlife women
Counselling for women in midlife
Not a crisis. A reckoning. And a rather good moment to work out what you actually want.
Everything shifts at once
Midlife has a way of changing several things simultaneously, and then being described — usually by other people — as a phase.
Your body is doing something new and largely uninvited. Children may be leaving, or arriving back, or needing you differently. Parents may be needing more, and the balance of who looks after whom may have quietly reversed. A marriage might be being re-examined. Work might have become something you’re simply enduring.
And running under all of it, a question that can feel almost embarrassing to say out loud: is this it?
That question isn’t a symptom of anything. It’s a reasonable response to reaching a point where you can see both ends of your life at once.
Menopause is not only a physical event
There’s more conversation about menopause now than there was, which is a genuine improvement. Most of it is still about symptoms and treatment, though — and less about what it does to your sense of who you are.
Women often describe a feeling of becoming less visible. Of being taken less seriously at work, or looked past in public. There are changes in confidence, in memory and concentration that can be frightening, in desire, in temper, in sleep — and often a hard grief about fertility, whether or not you ever wanted more children.
Alongside that, some women find an unexpected sharpening. Less patience for things that don’t matter. Less willingness to keep smoothing everything over. That can be liberating and can also cause real disruption in relationships built around a version of you who never said no.
All of that is worth taking seriously, and worth having somewhere to think about. I’m not a medical practitioner — for HRT and physical symptoms your GP or a menopause specialist is the right person. What I can offer is space for what it means.
When midlife and neurodivergence arrive together
This deserves its own section, because it’s extremely common and rarely joined up.
A great many women are identified as autistic or ADHD in their forties and fifties — often when their own child is assessed, and the questionnaire reads like a description of their life. Others find that hormonal change strips out the coping strategies that had been holding everything together, and difficulties they’d managed for decades suddenly can’t be managed any more.
So you can find yourself, in the same year, renegotiating your body, your role, your relationships and the entire story of who you’ve been. That’s an enormous amount to hold, and doing it alone is unnecessarily hard.
If this is your situation, you may find my page on late diagnosis useful too. Counselling for late-diagnosed adults →
What we might work on
An hour a week that's entirely yours
For a lot of women, that in itself is the unfamiliar part.
Book a free 20-minute call