Hello and welcome to the Well Woman Podcast. A place for women over 40 who are ready to transform midlife, reimagine what's possible, and make each new decade better than the last. I'm your host, Karen bta, certified health and life coach, and after going through my own midlife reinvention, I can honestly say that I now experience more energy, vitality, confidence, and joy than I ever have before. Each week, I'll be sharing information, inspiration, and strategies to help you do the same.
Let's get started. Today I have a treat. I have, Deb Blum of the Whole Soul Way joining me. Deb is the founder of the Whole Soul Way, which is a program dedicated to empowering women on their journey towards self discovery and authentic expression. she works with what she calls do it all women. I love that term.
And she helps them break free from fear, conditioning, and external expectations so that they can create more success, happiness, and peace without losing their edge or disrupting the lives that they've worked so hard to create. Deb has been married for almost 22 years. She is an empty nester and the proud mom of a 19 year old and a 21 year old boy, and she understands the complexities of balancing our personal growth with our family responsibilities. So lots of great stuff to talk about.
Welcome Deb. Thanks for having me here. I'm so happy to be on your show. I am happy too. And I'll share with the listeners that Deb and I spoke once before, and I don't even know how long we spoke for, probably close to an hour. And I was so disappointed that I hadn't been recording it because it ended up being such a great conversation. We went in so many fun directions. So, uh, so who knows where we'll end up today, but I know it will be someplace good.
so I'll start by mentioning that, you know, my listeners are used to me talking about midlife, as being the bridge to the second half of life. And for that reason, I think it's a really formative time in a woman's life. I really think that how we operate 40 on really shapes. What we experience in our 60s 70s, you know, and beyond. So, I think it's important at this time to really sort of examine where we've been and what we want our future to look like.
And I know you have a really interesting perspective on the two halves of life. In fact, you use the term second half living. Second half of life living? Second half of life. Yeah. Which I love. So can you just, share with our listeners, you know, kind of how you look at the first half versus the second half and, what exactly second half of life living is.
Yeah, well, um, I first learned about this from something I stumbled upon that I think was rooted in Carl Jung's philosophy of, of the way we live. In fact, he has a quote that he says, um, everything before 40 is just research. So we don't stop, we don't really start living until after 40.
And so the way that I look at it is that in the first half of our life, and let's just say it's something like the first 40 years, but you know, I mean really for most of us, it's probably like 37 and a half, you know, we're really honest with ourselves. But in that first half, the idea is that we're responding to the question, what does life want from us? And when we're in the second half of life living, we begin to hear this call of what does my soul want from me?
And the way that I look at it is this. The first half, it's a lot of, it's almost like it's survival based, right? It's in its biological in many ways. It's this time of, you know, building safe structures in our life and procreation. You know, marriage and procreation and all the things that we're biologically driven to do.
And there are a lot of really important reasons why we even abandon ourselves in those times, because we're oftentimes just focused on making money, getting a house, getting some stability. It's like even, maybe you could even go to like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Like, are we gonna, we get those basic needs met of, Of, you know, our, our safety and security, the, our basic needs are provided for, and then maybe I think it goes up to like relationships and self esteem.
And we, we move up that up that pyramid And so a lot of women will come to me, and they're in their 40s, 50s and 60s, and they're saying to me, you know. I can't believe it took me this long to figure this out. And I'm like, but it's actually by design. Really it is by design. And, and in many ways we have to get that stable, that stable, secure foundation in order to feel safe enough to be able to start to explore what our soul wants for us. And so it happens to coincide with this time, right?
Where we get to the middle of our life and You know, I, I don't think it's by mistake that women go through a period called menopause where they were, I mean, it's interesting because I think men go through something like this too, but isn't it interesting that we have such a very pivotal moment in our life where things shift from a, from a hormonal perspective and we can no longer. bear children anymore. We can't, our bodies start to change. We start to change.
We start to, our, our, even our, our physical beauty starts to shift into a new form of beauty, not based on the youth standards, but now based on something different. It's a really amazing time. And oftentimes we see it, I think, as this. negative thing. This, like, it's depressing. My, you know, my skin is sagging. My sex drive has changed. All these things, when actually I really see it as an invitation.
for us to step more fully into all of who we are, not just what society says we should be doing and not what society says women should look like, but really to embrace the fullness of our expression and who we are. And that's where we start to enter this next stage of what does my soul want from me? But if we don't take that bridge, as you say, let's just say that we don't. And we stand on one side and we're like, Hmm. And it's because it's a little scary to take a leap into these new spaces.
Oh yeah. What I think happens, and I think a lot of us see this in our parents, is that if we don't bravely take this initiation, like if we don't see it as a rite of passage for us, what I think happens is we will actually just start to shrink our lives more.
It's, it's almost like it's, if you don't intentionally notice the way fear conditioning external standards and pressures and all the limitations in our mind, if we don't start to notice them and say, I'm not going down those paths, I'm going to do something different. What will happen is they start to just box us in more and more and more and our life gets smaller and smaller and smaller.
Yeah. And it's so interesting what you said too, because,, this is a time during those perimenopause menopause years where we actually physically can no longer operate the way we once did, right? Like our, our bodies are. Sending us all of these symptoms and signals saying we can no longer do this this way, you know, and almost like requiring us to change. So to, your point, when we refuse that call when we don't change and we don't cross that bridge, as you said.
It actually has not only health consequences, you know, in terms of our physical health, but there are emotional consequences as well. I mean, how many times do we encounter women who, are just feeling really stuck? Right. They're in, relationships that feel stale, particularly romantic relationships often, become really stale. The kids are independent, so sometimes they feel like their life lacks the purpose that it once had. they don't have the same energy level.
As you said, their bodies are changing. I think, you know, life can become like a groundhog's day. Yeah. Where every day just kind of runs into the next and they, they really don't have a lot of excitement or enthusiasm about that second half of life. So, what would you say to those women to allow them to, you know, stick a toe onto the bridge? Yeah, right, right, right. Because it is so true because I think it's like a well.
A well trodden path in the sense that many women have walked it, but very few women are actually just explicitly saying this is what the path looks like. And of course, everyone has their own path, but I'm glad that there are women like you and me and other women out there that are starting to say like, no, but we want to. Help you too. We're going to hold your hand and we're going to invite you over here.
Like we've been doing this and we want to show you that there's another way and it's not as scary as you think, or it's not as big of a leap. One of the reasons why I say explicitly that I want to work with women who want all of this.
This expansion in their life, but without blowing up their lives without destroying the lives they worked so hard to create is because I think that's actually one of the biggest fears is that women are afraid that if they do this work, then they're going to have to get divorced or they're going to have to, you know, uh, Sell all their stuff and move to India and live in an ashram or something like there's this perception. And of course that's like a future catastrophizing.
But we've also watched women who decide that they're going to go on this awakening journey and all of a sudden they don't want to be with their husband anymore. And maybe we do want to stay married. And so we're kind of holding on to the only way we can stay married is to keep it the way that it's been. I agree with you. I think it feels, um, you know, a little scary because. It is unpredictable what's on the other side of that bridge, I actually have come to believe that the more.
We are connected to ourselves. And the more we are awakened, the more conscious we are, and the more we make, choices you know what I'm saying? Like, I think that what happens is when we're not conscious of what we want, and we're just kind of going on the daily grind. That's when things happen. That's when we're surprised by our husband no longer being happy and, and leaving us. Or that's when we're surprised by our own misery just taking over and we make drastic changes.
I think the more that we take this as a slow incremental process and we, Recognize that it's not, it doesn't have to be a massive disruption, but that we can still experience much more aliveness and fulfillment and satisfaction in our life. We don't have to meet it with that much fear.
And so that's my first thing I would say to people is take some of the thoughts that you have and say, maybe I'm just going down fear paths and I'm future catastrophizing and it's actually not going to be that bad. Maybe I can try to take it one day at a time. And so I would say this. you could Google it and find a lot of things out there about like all the external things you can be doing, find a hobby or go back to work or exercise. And they're a great advice.
I meditate and do all these things. I'm not every one of those pieces, like there's no harm in doing any of them. But most of them, what they're doing is still keeping us from what's really the call, which is to turn inward and listen to our own truth. To listen to what's really in there. And so that's the part where you, you touched on it being unpredictable. I mean, that's the part where it starts to get scary for people.
Cause people are really afraid that their truth is they don't want to be married anymore. Or their truth is that maybe even some people are afraid their truth is like, they don't want to be a mom anymore. I don't mean like they literally want to like abandon their children, but that they're kind of like, God, I just want to be free or something. You know, they, they want to shed all their responsibility. Abilities.
Most of the women that I've watched, there's an internal fear and urge for that, but actually it's only because we've been pent up for so long that it feels like it's like, ah, if I let this, if I unleash myself, I don't know what to expect. But most women were much more balanced than that. we really want a whole life. You know, our whole picture, not just selfish, kind of like moving in some direction where we abandon everybody.
But I think that one of the pieces is to move in this place of, um, I often call it sacred selfishness. It's healthy selfishness. It's this idea that most of us have been giving more of ourselves. to others than is even balanced. We're oftentimes abandoning ourselves in a bid to make other people's lives better, or in a bid to be approved of, or in a bid to not upset people. We don't want to rock the boat. So we give up. We don't bring ourselves fully into our, into our lives.
We do things like watch the movie that our husband wants to watch because Okay, fine. You know what? I'll just sit on my phone and watch that with you or we go to dinner to the place where our kids want to go. And we never even say, I really would love to try that, you know, seafood restaurant down the street because we're like, nah, it's okay. I'll just do what they want to do. And, and we kind of like have this little secret compartment that we have where we are being authentic.
Maybe with one or two friends or maybe just inside of ourselves, but we don't bring our authentic selves into our lives. And that to me is the, the most precious thing we can be doing. And I will say this. Our husbands, our partners, they may give us pushback because they have fear and they don't want us to change and they're like, I don't rock the boat, you know, whatever. But the staleness that we experience in relationships is because we put each other in a box.
We think we know each other and The liveness is lacking because we're not really bringing who, if you really think about a person, we don't wake up every day, exactly the same. We're always, it could be, I'm in a different mood today. I have a different energy level. I have different desires. My, desires changed by the season, by the week, by, you know, what else is happening around me. And we don't allow each other to be those fluid beings. It is comfortable to say.
I know my husband and I know what he's going to do and he's predictable and he knows me and I'm predictable in these ways. And then we just act our predictable ways and then we wake up one day and we're like, what did I just create? This is awful. It's so boring. And it's better when you're raising children. everything's so unpredictable that having the predictability of your roles and the rules of the household and, and all of that can be good.
For stability, but stability is oftentimes like after a while it's like, Oh my God, it just, it just like closed me in and I'm now confined. So. There is this way of like birthing that feminine, the feminine in us, like a little more unpredictability, a little more flow, a little bit more of that like, I don't even know who I'm going to be today. And then even inviting our partners like I kind of want to be known. Right. But I want to also be New.
Yeah, I want to be known and I want to be new, right? I think it's Tony Robbins talks about, um, I want to say it's like six needs of life and I couldn't tell you what they are, but ironically, one of them is certainty and one of them is uncertainty. You know, so we need a degree of both.
And what's interesting about what you're saying, it's so funny because I'm, I'm preparing to do a podcast on nurturing your femininity and really what motivated me to dive into that is to your point, what I see, what I observe is that a lot of women spend a lot of time in this very masculine energy of doing and organizing and, you know, taking action and being decisive.
And while all of that is good, there is no balance of receptivity and softness and flow, you know, so it creates, this strange dynamic within relationships where, it's exhausting for a woman to be in that kind of masculine energy all the time, you know, and, and when she's got, you know, a million balls that she's juggling. It, it really does kind of mess with, I think the dynamic between men and women.
And I do think it impacts relationships and, you know, I, I have been there, you know,, I'm divorced and, you know, raised two kids and, I, I felt that dynamic shift and change and I was exhausted by it. And you know, you're, you're sometimes in a place of like, well, you know, I'm exhausted. And now all the resentment is building to, and, and you were talking about, um, you know, women who are always conceding to what their husbands or their partners want.
I think the other piece of that is that sometimes women don't even know what they want. They're so used to doing what everybody else would like that they, maybe haven't even really stopped to consider. What do I like? What do I want? You know, what, what do I want to create and how do I want to live? Because it seems like, that's just not a priority for, as you say, that whole first half of life, yeah, right.
Well, the first thing is to just honor, I think, all of us just to take a moment and take a breath and say, it's okay that it's been that way. It's okay because you know what? We had to carry the load. We, we did need to do all those things. Maybe, maybe we'll be able to change this in future generations, but you know, like, it's all right that we ended up in gender roles that we didn't expect being both.
But on the one hand, being the, the mom who does it all, on the other hand, the, the one, the woman who became more masculine, because that's what we are generally, like right now, this stage of where we are in our evolution is like women are trying to reclaim. Some of their power. And so we've maybe stepped a little bit more into the doing spaces than our biology really is able to handle, but there's nothing wrong with what we've done.
And whenever we're figuring it out, I mean, I have women in my program who are 68 years old. It's never too late. when we're ready to embark on our second half of life living, it doesn't matter. It could be at 28 years old. And it could be at. 92 It doesn't matter, whatever it is or any time in between.
But when we do, I think you bring up a really, really good point, which is one of the things once you've, once you've Forgiving yourself for everything that you've done, not even forgiven, but just like accepted and just appreciated that you are like really amazing. You are an amazing woman who has carried in, in so much burden and you have run your household and raised children and done amazing things.
That's the first thing, just like, could you give yourself some credit, celebrate all of and then say, and I'm ready for more. I'm ready for more. So how do we start to tap into more? I think your point is excellent. Start to open up to what your opinions are about things. Just start to get curious. Like, I'm actually, instead of deferring. I'm going to think about what I really want for dinner tonight. I'm going to check in with myself.
I'm going to pause for a second and be like, what am I actually hungry for? And then, and then possibly suggest a place for dinner. Decide, you know, we're going to do something different, maybe just make a plan or maybe give some choices to your partner and, and, offer some other possibilities. The number one thing we have to do is not stop.
When we get pushed back from other people, because we have to remember that any pattern we're breaking, any pattern that we break in a relationship, we are initially, we're going to get pushed back. And what I hear from people, I've already tried that. I already tried to, I already tried to say I wanted to watch a different movie and they didn't want that because they hear it once and they, my husband hated that that it was changing. So I'm just naturally an evolving being.
We all are, but some of us are more, some of us like change more than other people. And I am. Definitely an ever changing being and for a long time, I tried to fit myself into a box. Well, I actually just did until my kids were about eight years old. And then I had this massive midlife awakening. I was 39 years old. And at the time, it felt like just a plain old midlife life crisis. But I realized I had. I had gotten into a box and I was confined and I didn't, I didn't know how to get out of it.
Well, I was starting to do these changes, things that I would bring, like I would maybe start to have an opinion of something I wanted in our lives or I didn't want to do everything all the time anymore. I wanted my husband to help out more around the house or do other things. Well, every single time he pushed back. Every time. And he was afraid of me changing so much that I wouldn't want to be with him anymore. So he wanted to keep me, you know, keep me where I was.
It was safe and secure for him. We persisted. And he got more comfortable with it. And then I grew a little more and he grew a little more. And then we kept expanding and now we're now married 22 years. And he admits that he is so happy to be married to somebody more exciting. Like he says, he's like, he's not afraid anymore of me changing because he sees that it's only in the allowing me to be all of who I am, that I'm still here.
Because if he had kept me small, I probably wouldn't have been able to stay. But it required me to be brave and to not just believe him when he was afraid. We, as women, oftentimes we'll just like, well, he doesn't like it. So then I can't, that's, but that's such a pattern for us. Like if they don't like it, then we stop doing it. Yeah. I think that's another big one is that, um, you know, and I, I say this to my daughter a lot. I have a 21 year old daughter and, and you know, I just.
Always I'm trying to impress upon her the fact that it's okay for people to not be happy with us. It's okay for people to be disappointed in us because if, if we can't become comfortable with that, we're doomed to a life of people pleasing, you know, and I give you so much credit because you know, I, I went through this awakening that you talk about, but it was, I think it was easier for me quite frankly, because once I got divorced. There was a period of about a year I, I didn't date.
Like I really took that time to figure all that stuff out. Exactly what you said. You know, who am I? What do I like? What do I want? What are my non negotiables? You know, I felt like I quantum leaped in that year in terms of my own growth and development, but I had the space to do that. I wasn't, you know, in a relationship and trying to.
Deal with my own growth and support my own growth and, have this awareness that somebody else was disappointed in me or upset with me or not happy with the changes. So, so, yeah, I mean, I give you so much credit. I almost think that it's easier when you do have, you know, whether it's a move across the country or, you know, when you have the big change, I think it makes that awakening happening. Easier because you, you, you can't revert back. There's nothing to revert back to.
You know, what came before is done and you have nowhere to go, but forward. I mean, I think it's just different, right? I think it's different. And I think that you're right. Like, you could see that as easier, but I also think getting a divorce has its own set of challenges. Right. So, but I wouldn't want to minimize your experience at all.
And at the same time, I hear what you're saying is that there is something about doing it within the container of married with kids where it does kind of level up the challenge, you know, like, cause I had a lot of resistance that I was met with and I was a people pleaser and had to practice. I have this people pleaser side of me.
I also have this other tougher kind of like, um, there was an inner part of me that was rebellious too, that I was like, no, you know, and I knew that our marriage wouldn't work if I didn't do what I was doing. Cause I knew I couldn't be confined, but I also was patient. You know, and I was willing to take the time knowing that it's going to take us time to get through this. Change is actually hard. It legitimately is hard.
And, I know you and I talked about this at one of the big things that I had to do is like a mental thing for me. And I can't exactly remember when I did it, but it was earlier in my journey on this, this path was I committed to marrying myself first. Yeah. I love, I love that you, that you call it that. It's so interesting. So yeah. Tell us more about that. Well, and I even told my husband, I said it to him and I'm like, listen, I just want you to know something.
Like, uh, you're no longer first, like I am first and you know, it sounds like it is selfish, but actually it is really just bringing balance back into the relationship. And that goes back to sell the sacred selfishness. It's like you're, you're, if I'm doing, if you're really think about a healthy relationship. I take 100 percent responsibility and the other person takes 100 percent of responsibility. And when we're in codependent relationships, we're usually taking too much responsibility.
We're like, we're thinking we need to take care of this other person. And the only time we need to take care of people are is if they're disabled or they're young children or they're like aged parents or something like that. In some way, they are, they are lacking the capacity to take care of themselves. Otherwise we have to take 100 percent of responsibility. And I oftentimes encroached into his space and he encroached into mine. In these, in these codependent ways.
And so I was trying to reclaim myself. So sacred selfishness is really just reclaiming back to a hundred percent. You know, I don't abandon myself, but I also don't abandon you. I honor me and I honor you instead of either over like a lot of times what happens is we swing the pendulum. We are, we give so much and we are so depleted and then we're like, screw this, you know, and then we're like taking back our lives.
And then we, you know, we go back and forth in the, in this pendulum instead of realizing that actually some, at some point, like you wouldn't have to get in balance. At some point, like, I mean, I definitely see like you're wobbly, right? You might go to one extreme, but ultimately isn't the vision. We want to be in relationship with people where we can be connected to them, where we can care about them. Sometimes they take care of us.
Sometimes we take care of them, but it's, it's still comes from, I am whole, AKA a hundred percent and you are whole, AKA a hundred percent. And we come together in wholeness. Right. And you know, when you are coming together in wholeness, then when that pendulum does swing, there's not that sense of resentment over it. Right. I think that the resentment comes from the fact that we know on some level that we are abandoning ourself in this relationship.
And so, all of these times when the pendulum swings, it's almost like, There's part of us that's keeping score and part of us that's upset about it because we know, down deep that we are allowing it to happen. We're almost like betraying ourselves in the relationship. Yeah, we are betraying ourselves. And that is the key. Exactly. And we are mad at them because in some way we're kind of like, you know, it's, it's you, you should never let that happen to me.
Like I should have had to have done that. And we're waiting for them to change in order to see, don't let me abandon myself anymore. Save me from myself. But that's why marrying ourselves self becomes so important because for one, I want. us to realize we can do this with care and love. And so easy. We oftentimes feel like we have to sort of have that like effort kind of attitude of like, I'm taking back my life. But I think we can do it with care and love.
And when we marry ourselves, what we do is we say, we say, I am actually going to notice the ways that I Have abandoned myself and I'm going to treat myself with the love and the care that I'm wishing for from someone else. I'm, if I'm wishing he would remember something, I'm going to make sure I remember it and I take care of myself where I'm going to ask for what I need.
Like if, if I really want something special on my birthday, I'm going to say to my partner, Hey, you know, I would really love to do this. Thing on my birthday. I know we've never done it that way before because we just kind of got complacent, but would you be willing to do this thing? And they might say no. And when we say, I love the phrase, would you be willing? Because it's not about demands. It's not about like. You know, I'm setting a boundary in my life.
No, it's like invitations and requests and allowing them to be autonomous beings as well and say no. And then maybe it's, Oh, well, what would you be willing to do and working together? But it's saying, I'm going to hold onto me. Like, let's just say it's like your birthday and you really want to go for a spa day. And your first request is that your partner and you go together, but then your partner says, I don't really want to do that. You know, I don't really like that. Well then maybe it's.
It's not giving it up. It's them saying, well, then I, I think we're probably not going to spend my birthday together this year then, because I'm actually going to go to the spa. And that might be something you never would do before, because you know, you guys always did the same thing breakfast in bed. And then we go for a hike and you're like, I don't want that to this year. I want to do this other thing. Marrying yourself would say, if that's what I really want, I'm going to make it happen.
Even if he's not willing, and I'm not going to put my, my happiness in the hands of him. I'm going to take charge of my happiness. I'm going to make sure that I don't, I don't not do the things that are important to me because for some reason he's not interested or isn't able. This is another one other piece too, is, um, realizing that we're in relationship with another human being and that person may not have the capacity or the emotional maturity or the.
Even like the healedness to be able to sometimes meet us where we need to be met. And so we might have to do it for ourselves. Like if we feel like we're not feeling fully heard, I invite people to journal. Start listening to yourself be your own partner. Yeah, it's interesting years ago I had heard something I wish I could remember where I even heard it that talked about Biologically the difference between men and women like men were the hunter gatherers.
They didn't need Somebody else in order to survive where the women were home with the kids and I'm talking, you know, really primitive times women relied on the men for food for protection. So, it's really a different, just a different hard wiring. We are so hardwired to please, because there is always this element of fear.
Like so many times in relationships, I think women are driven by fear rather than by their own, Soul as you often say, or, or their own desires, I think, you know, a lot of times it's like fear that drives women to act in a certain way. So, so it is really interesting. And what you say makes perfect sense. I, I can see how that.
Would be hard, you know, I mean, I I'm imagining myself in that situation and it's like yeah That would be pretty hard to be like, okay this year I'm doing this on my birthday and I'll catch up with you the next day.
You know, it's it's it is funny and it's such a departure From the way that we've been and and and I would imagine it's hard to do that without that resentment You know, because again, if we're going to do these things, I think a big piece of it is that there has to be a clear energy between two people with these kinds of choices and decisions.
It can't be a situation where you're saying, that you want to spend your birthday at the spa and then you're going to resent the person for not spending your birthday with you. You know, so it does, it gets. Really tricky and, you know, I spend a lot of time with women in their forties and fifties. It's just my circle of friends and family. And I know a lot of women in that age category. And, um, it really is amazing when you hear people talking about their. Partners or their relationships.
There is such a hard edge sometimes and such a cutting kind of humor. And I think it's just become like normalized in our culture. And it, sometimes is striking how little softness. There seems to be just based on what people share about their relationships. I kind of feel like there is this undercurrent of anger and resentment.
Yeah. And, this is the time where we really do have to let that go because let's face it if we're moving into the second half of our life, and especially if we're moving into that half of our life with somebody. You know, to, to carry anger and resentment, how can you create an extraordinary relationship or an extraordinary second half of life?
If you're constantly fighting this war inside your head, getting riled up and angry about what the other person is doing or saying, or what you're not doing or not saying, you know, it's really something That is important as we enter this next stage, you know, if we're in a relationship and that's why I love that idea of marrying yourself first and just really working on that relationship, you know, you and you, and then, hopefully that kind of trickles into all the other relationships.
Yeah, and, and I will say this, that a lot of women, we have good reason to be resentful. There are a lot of things that are happening in relationships, I think that breed resentment. But I also think women oftentimes aren't really seeing the part that we play in the patterns. And that's part of the, when we, when we really own our own lives.
We start to have to look and take an honest inventory of like how we contribute to the things that have happened, you know, oftentimes if we're doing too much and they're doing too little, are we willing to stop doing so much and let the kitchen be a mess and see where it goes? A lot of times we're trying to satisfy and soothe our own anxiety by doing the things we're doing. And that's where it goes into that fear part. Like, can we start to notice the ways that we're.
Overdoing say and then resentful for them underdoing. And instead of being mad at them for underdoing us, try to shift the pattern on our part. So a lot of this is really taking radical responsibility. Some people, I just don't think wanna be happy. I'm just gonna be honest. Like I think some people don't wanna be happy. They'd rather sit around gossiping with their friends complaining and you know, and, and that's fine. That's fine.
But for the people who want the extraordinary marriages and the extraordinary lives, We do have to take ownership over our lives. Now I remember when I first went to therapy with my husband, when I was, we almost got divorced when we were in the middle of our, my midlife crisis. And I, I honestly can't even believe that I did this when I think back, but we went to therapy and it was about a year that every single time we went in, all I did was brought in a resentment.
Like I would say, I am, I'm so angry about this thing. My husband would just sit there, but it turned out, I didn't know it, but it turned out in that time, I'm a bit of a slow learner. I started to understand something. And are you okay with me sharing something about, okay. About, um, this concept of projection. Okay. So this is like the biggest lesson that I learned is that I actually think it might be what saved my marriage.
So there is a concept called projection and I want you to think about it like this, like basically we can't see ourselves in, except for in a mirror, like you can't see your nose, your eyes, your face, whatever, except for in a mirror or on a zoom call. You just can't see it, right? Well, it is the same with our unconscious mind. We cannot see our unconscious within our unconscious mind pretty much except for in the way that it shows up in, other people. So other people are like a mirror for us.
This is called projection. We project the things inside of us that we don't want to be true, that we don't like about ourselves, our shadow parts. Some people would say things that we are ashamed about, like things that we judge about ourselves. We will see them in other people. Because it's easier to actually see it in other people than to own it in ourselves. So what I learned was that anything that I was judging was in someone else. Have you ever heard of like, you spot it, you got it.
Like one fingers pointed out at you, but three are pointed back at me. And Brene Brown says, we judge other people who are doing something just a little bit worse than we do. Right, right. And so, for the most part, for me, what I realize is that I am the queen of projecting onto my husband. It is something that I still, I'm always seeing things about myself and learning more about myself by like the way that I'm projecting onto him.
And some people are very self judgmental, but that's still a form of projection. It's a way, like if you berate yourself, you're still not wanting to see the truth of it. You're, you're kind of like beating yourself up, but never really, never being gentle about it, never trying to understand why you do the things you do.
You're just, well, anyway, if you're projecting onto your partner, It is a beautiful, beautiful chance to see that you are seeing in them things that you don't want to see in yourself. It's the me that I don't want to see. And and so I actually have a, a freebie that I'm happy to share. And it's about shadows and it's, to me, it's some of the most healing work we do. If you want to become more whole.
You want to become more of the extraordinary being you are, we actually have to come into a relationship with all aspects of ourselves, the things that we wish weren't true about ourselves, but they really are. And the things that we love about ourselves, all of them, and it's truly the, an act of self love. We're the only ones that can give ourselves unconditional love.
Really people, real humans can't give unconditional love to people because, I mean, you can do more and more the more you love yourself, but the truth is unconditional love is kind of hard to give to other people. It's really something we can give to ourselves. And that comes by understanding that anything we judge in another person is in us and it's and we're judging it because it's time for us to love it about ourselves. It's time for us to accept that part.
It's time for us to realize that we are everything. I can give an example if you want me to, but otherwise I would just leave it there. Yeah. And it's, and it's interesting too, because I think with that kind of clarity, then we can decide, I mean, there are some very real reasons to end relationships. Absolutely. You know, I, I do believe you need a certain degree of clarity before making decisions like that.
And I bet there are more people than we would imagine who make these major life decisions from a place of being angry, being fearful, being disempowered. So, so yes, I mean, you were, you were in a situation that. fortunately, you were able to save your marriage. I'm sure there are people who would go through that very same process and maybe at the end of it realize that it needed to end, you know, that it was better for them to end it.
But I think in either case, um, the kind of work that you're describing. Is super important and, and that kind of clarity can only serve us as, as we move through the second half of our life. So I will, post the link to that freebie in the show notes. Um, well, this has been such an amazing conversation. I feel like we could go on and on and I, and I think relationships, you know, it's funny. It's a, it's a topic I have not covered on the podcast thus far. Um, but it is just so important.
I think it's really hard. To be really happy, and creating great things in the world and living a life of passion and purpose when our closest, most intimate relationship is in trouble. You know, I just think it undermines everything else we do. So I think this is a really important conversation because if we want to live extraordinary lives in the second half of our life, um, you know, that is a piece that we have to have.
Awareness around and it's something we have to be intentional about, you know, I think in the first half of our lives, as you said, we're, we're swept up with, you know, marriage and babies and child rearing and career. You know, I mean, there are lots of things we're doing in the first half of life and. Maybe that's where some of the trouble starts. Maybe we're not as intentional about our romantic partnership in the first half of life.
But then we get to this place, this, you know, bridge as we've been calling it. And it's like, now's the time to really think about that and to create the relationship that we want. over the second half of our lives.
Yeah. A hundred percent, like not all marriages are meant to last, but when people ask me, um, if they should leave their marriage, I always say, do this work first because then you will be clear versus being, you'd never want to look back and think that maybe I didn't make the right decision, but once you've done this work, then you say, I am so clear. I love this conversation and I know that my listeners will want to find more of you and learn more about your work.
So where can they connect with you? So people can find me at the whole soul way. com. And if people want the shadow work toolkit, it's at the wholesale way. com forward slash shadows. Okay, great. And as I said, I will put all of that in the show notes. I imagine you're on socials as well. You could find my social media on there and, um, yeah. And I. Thank you. Bye. I would say I'm, I probably am more on Facebook than I am on anything. And people are welcome to friend me on Facebook as well.
Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for being here. This was such a rich and full conversation, and I've loved every minute of it. So, uh, so thank you again. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Welligan Woman Podcast. If you're enjoying the show, please don't forget to subscribe, and I'd love it if you would leave a five star review and share it with others. Thanks again for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next episode.