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Writing Midlife Emergence: Free Your Inner Fire

April 11, 2023 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

Midlife Emergence: Free Your Inner Fire

By: Jen Berlingo, MA, LPC, ATR

After two decades of guiding my psychotherapy and coaching clients through life’s major transitions, I experienced my own profoundly transformative passage in my early forties. At the time, I heard an inner call I could not deny, asking me to live more fully into my queerness. This sent me on a quest of deep self-discovery, experimentation with ethical non-monogamy, and eventually divorce as a more expansive form of love.

Throughout my journey, I posted my midlife musings and experiences on Instagram. After receiving hundreds of comments and direct messages from other women saying, “Me too!” and “This should be a book!”, I became inspired to write a book to midwife the modern woman through her unique midlife transition.

Each person’s inner voice cries for different longings at this life stage, and it takes tremendous courage to listen and act upon whatever is calling us forth. There’s an unexpressed and beautiful part of each woman that is longing to be set free. It can feel difficult to acknowledge and even more daunting to act upon. Most of my clients, like me, are “recovering good girls” who have done all the “right” things and met the expectations to create the life we “should” want, but we still feel unsatisfied.

Midlife Emergence is both a revelatory memoir and an inviting guidebook. It is a compassionate companion that belongs on the bedside table of every woman who is burning to reclaim powerful parts of herself that social conditioning locked away. In psychology, midlife is defined as the period between ages forty to sixty-five.

I noticed a marked difference when I entered my forties, a decade I believe to be the liminal space between the first and second acts of life. It’s like a waiting room where we each have an opportunity to architect the second half of life mindfully and authentically. Midlife doesn’t need to be a crisis or emergency – it can be an emergence. Emergence is defined as “the process of coming into view or becoming exposed after being previously concealed.” The concept of emergence feels absolutely resonant to my personal experience of unveiling in midlife what in me had previously been unseen.

Erik Erikson, a psychologist in the 1950s, said that the midlife period brings us the challenge of stagnation versus generativity. This is a period in which we reevaluate our life’s purpose to be sure we are leaving our mark on the world in a way that feels satisfying, and that we are ringing this lifetime dry of all the juiciness it has to offer. While it soothes our nervous systems to feel stable and secure, we are also wildly seduced by the mystery – that yearning for something “more” that I hear from midlife women. In doing qualitative research for my book, I heard from more than 100 women who all said they are more enticed by risk-taking now than at any other time in their lives.

Making changes at this stage of life could be disruptive because the stakes feel high. Most of us have no roadmaps, models, or cheerleaders helping us to unfurl into our most expansive, aligned way of being in the world. Therefore, we are lulled into staying in our safe, sleepy, stagnant habits because it is too threatening to face the voice inside us that perpetually wonders, “Is this all there is?” I’ve been there. As I worked to realign to my own integrity, I became a cartographer, charting the course, marking the waypoints, pinpointing the universal signposts along the journey. I did this so other women in midlife wouldn’t need to walk the path alone.

Truth-telling in midlife is vital to deeper connections and to our collective healing. I want to be part of the change where we’re telling our radical, messy truths to one another. I want to model talking about the things for which we feel shame to be set free from the prison shame imposes. I hope that standing in my truth, however painful it is at times, inspires others to begin to claim their own.

My hope is that my story ignites a flame of recognition inside those who yearn to illuminate parts they may have buried in darkness. Throughout the book, I use my expertise as a counselor, art therapist, and ceremonialist to weave in psychological teachings as well as thought-provoking journaling prompts, creative art invitations, and potent rituals designed to support the woman in midlife in freeing her own inner fire.

Midlife Emergence validates the adult in untangling her personal values from those imposed by family or cultural lineages. It embraces the parent ready to break out of habituated martyrdom to show her children how not to abandon themselves. It emboldens the woman who has come of age under the patriarchy to finally claim her sovereignty. It speaks to the person who has been conditioned into compulsory heterosexuality in exploring her intrinsic desires later in life. It empowers the recovering good girl and the drained people-pleaser in taking courageous steps toward unfurling into her full integrity for the second half of life.

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Jen Berlingo, MA, LPC, ATR is a thought-leader, coach, guide, and author on the midlife transition. She’s also a Licensed Professional Counselor in Colorado, a nationally registered art therapist, and a Reiki master. Jen is also visual artist who offers original paintings, prints, and oracle decks to collectors worldwide. She shows her fluid, abstract art in her beloved town of Boulder, Colorado. There among the sunny foothills, Jen can be found making bottomless bowls of popcorn and snuggling on the couch with her unconventional family, her coven of close friends, and her rescue cats, Jinx and Juju. Learn more at jenberlingo.com.