Waking Up Midlife

Jody Brooks 0:00

You're not falling apart, you're waking up. If you're somewhere between 35 and 65, life feels like it's cracking open, the identity you built no longer fits, and the future feels terrifying. Nobody around you seems to get it. Welcome, I'm Jodie Brooks, and this is Messy Midlife. Because this isn't a crisis, it's a calling to connect. Welcome back to Messy Midlife and welcome to the end of another week together. It's Friday, and if you've been with me all week, you've done something quietly brave. Let me just acknowledge that before we go anywhere else.

Week Two Recap

Jody Brooks 0:36

On Monday, we opened up week two, the week of blocks, and we started asking the deeper question. Not just why did I do that? The question we lived with all through week one, but underneath it, where does this come from? We looked at how the fast predicting part of our brain fires the old responses before the thinking part of you has even arrived. We talked about the satnav calling out turns from an old map, and we started very gently to see that a block is not a flaw in you, it's an old protection that stayed too long at the party. Then on Wednesday I sat down with a woman whose whole story is week two in Living Colour, and today, on this Friday, I want you to gather it all up. Catherine's story, The Science from Monday, and one more careful step down into my own story. Because Friday is where we let the week settle, where we don't add anything heavy, we just let what we've learned sink a little deeper the way water finds its level. So put the kettle on, get comfortable, and let's close out this week together.

Catherine Hits Bottom

Jody Brooks 1:49

If you haven't yet listened to Wednesday's episode with Catherine Cristalli, please go back and hear it in full, because I could not do it justice in a hundred Fridays, but I want to pull a few threads out of it today because they land right in the middle of everything we're exploring this week. Catherine is an author, a former speech therapist, and what she now calls an inner authority guide. She helps people, particularly women, reconnect with themselves after burnout, after heartbreak, and after the kind of identity loss that midlife so often brings. And she came to that work the way most of the best guides do, not from a textbook, but from having lived it, right down to the floor. Because Catherine has been to the floor. She said it so plainly on Wednesday that it took my breath away. She described a moment where her business was collapsing, where staff were resigning three at a time, wave after wave. She ended up in her own words, on the floor, curled up in a ball, rocking back and forth. That's not a metaphor I invented for the show. That's exactly how she described it. The bottom, the actual bottom. And here is what I want you to notice, because it's the whole point of this week. Catherine did not arrive at the floor because of one bad week at work. The collapse of the business wasn't the block, it was the symptom. It was the leak finally showing up as water all over the floor. The real leak, the actual source had been installed a very long time before, and it had been quietly dripping underneath her whole life. I think this is where so many of us get it wrong, and I certainly did for years, so I say this with all compassion in the world. When we finally hit our version of the floor, we tend to blame the most recent thing, the job, the relationship that ended, the redundancy, the health scare. We point at the thing that was happening when the wheels came off, and we say, Well that's what did it, that's what broke me, and it makes complete sense to think that way, because that's the thing we can see. That's the water all over the kitchen floor. It may well be the straw that broke the camel's back, but it wasn't the weight that made the camel's back weak in the first place. But if you only ever mop up the water or remove the straw, if you only ever fix the most recent thing, you'll be back on that floor again in a few years, in a slightly different room, mopping up slightly different water. Because the leak is still up there in the ceiling, quietly dripping, and nobody's looked at it. Catherine could have found a new business partner, hired new staff, patched the whole thing up. I promise you, the same collapse would have found her again in a new disguise a few years down the line because the leak was never the business. The leak was the belief about who she had to be, and you cannot fix a belief by rearranging the furniture around

How Blocks Begin

Jody Brooks 4:57

it. The part of Catherine's story that stopped me cold because it's such a perfect, tender example of what we mean when we say a block gets installed. Catherine used to love music, really love it. She told me she used to make mixtapes and burn CDs and download tracks and put together whole collections of music for all her friends. It was the one of the ways that she expressed who she was. It was hers. It was joyful, it was a piece of her authentic self, right out there in the open. And then, in her first marriage, somewhere along the way, she quietly formed a belief. She thought if I just like what my husband likes, we'll stay closer, we'll have more in common, it'll hold us together, and so bit by bit she gave up her own music. She stopped listening to things she loved. She folded herself gently and with the best intentions into the shape of somebody else. Years later she was in a car with a friend, and the friend was playing music, sharing tracks the way friends do, and it stirred something in her, and her friend looked at her and said quite simply who are you? And Catherine said that question hit her like a small earthquake. Who are you? And she found herself thinking I genuinely don't know any more. Who am I? Now listen to what actually happened there through the lens of this week. That decision to give up her music was not a small thing. It felt small at the time. It probably felt sensible, even loving, but that was the moment a block got installed. In that quiet, well meaning choice to abandon a piece of herself to keep the peace, a belief was laid down. A belief that went something like, My job is to mould myself to other people, my own preferences are dangerous to relationships, I keep the connection by disappearing. And a belief like that does not stay in a marriage, it gets into everything. It's the same belief that later had her building a business entirely around herself where everyone had to come to her for everything, where she couldn't switch off her phone on holiday without the whole thing falling apart. It's the same belief that had her answering a hundred emails at three in the morning, using the delay send button so that nobody would know that she wasn't actually sleeping, the same belief that kept her going to the naturopath every single week just to get a bag of supplements to keep her system from shutting down from all that cortisol. The block was I keep everyone safe by carrying everything myself and disappearing in the process. And it looked for years like being reliable, it looked like being strong, and it looked like being the one you could count on. Right up until it looked like a woman on the floor, rocking, because there was simply nothing left.

Blocks Disguised Virtues

Jody Brooks 7:59

And I want you to really sit with how sneaky that is, because this is true of almost every block. They don't look like problems. That's what makes them so hard to spot. They look like virtues. Catherine's block looked like being selfless, being devoted, being strong, the one who holds everything together. My block, the control one. It looked like being reliable, being capable, being the man that sorts everything out. Nobody ever pulled either of us aside and said, You've got a problem here. Quite the opposite. People in fact praised us for it. They leaned on us for it. They said, I don't know how you do it all. And every bit of that praise drove the block a little deeper, welded it a little more firmly to our sense of who we were. That's the cruel genius of a block. It disguises itself as your best quality. So when it finally starts costing you everything, you can't understand it, because surely the thing that's hurting me can't be the very thing that everyone admires me for. But it can and it very often is. The block and the strength are frequently the exact same thing, carried too far for too long, out of an old fear rather than a present day choice. And notice too, when Catherine's friend asked that question in the car, who are you? It wasn't cruel. It was one of the kindest things anyone ever did for her, even though it landed like an earthquake. Because sometimes the person who loves us can see the disappearing before we can. They can see that the music had gone quiet, they knew the version of us that was still fully here, and they missed them. And their question is really a form of longing. Who are you? Meaning where did you go? Meaning I missed the real you and I want you back. If someone's ever asked you a question like that and it's stung, I gently invite you not to defend against it this week, but to let it in. It might be the most loving thing anyone's said for years.

Archaeology Carbon Dating

Jody Brooks 10:09

So here's the image I want to give you for this Friday, and it builds directly on everything we've done this week. I want you to think of this work as a kind of archaeology. When an archaeologist finds something buried, they don't just yank it out the ground, they brush away the soil layer by layer carefully, because the layers tell the story and crucially they date what they find. They work out how old it is, when it was laid down, what era it belongs to, because an object only makes sense when you know where it came from. That's exactly what we're doing when we ask where does this come from? We're becoming archaeologists of our own responses. We're taking the reaction we noticed in week one, the runaway bus moment, the snapping, the withdrawing, the overgiving, and instead of just being cross with ourselves about it, we're gently brushing away the soil to see what's underneath. And then we're doing the most important part, we're carbon dating it. We're asking how old is this feeling really? When was it actually laid down? Because here's the thing that changes everything. When you carbon date one of these reactions, honestly, you rarely find that it's from now. You reach for the feeling and it's older than the situation in front of you. Much older. That flare of rejection when a friend cancels a coffee turns out to be forty years old. That collapse of worth when your boss offers one small criticism turns out to belong to a child in a classroom a lifetime ago. The situation today is just the site where the old artifact is being dug up again. And for Catherine, when she carbonated her burnout, it didn't date to the staff resigning, it dated all the way back to that quiet decision to give up her music, and probably if she kept digging to something even older than that. Some early lesson that taught her that love had to be earned by shrinking. The business collapse was just the top layer of soil. The artifact underneath was in fact ancient. I want to be really clear about why dating matters so much because it's not just an interesting party trick. When you discover that a feeling is old, something shifts in how you can hold it. Think about it. If your reaction to a partner leaving the dishes in the sink is a wave of rage that would be more appropriate for a genuine betrayal, you carbon date it and you find it belongs to a childhood where you were never allowed to have needs of your own, where your feelings were always dismissed as making a fuss. Then suddenly the rage over the dishes makes sense. It's not about the dishes, it never was. It's a lifetime of dismissed needs. Finally finding somewhere to point. And once you can see that, you can do two things at once that you couldn't do before. You can be tender towards the old wound, the child whose needs never mattered, and you can deal with the dishes as a small, ordinary, present day thing, rather than treating them like the final straw in a war you've been fighting since you were seven. The carbon dating separates the ancient from the now, and once they're separated, both become much easier to handle. That's the gift of this. Most of our biggest, most disproportionate reactions are ancient artifacts getting dug up by ordinary modern moments. The modern moment is small, the artifact is huge, and when you stop confusing the two, life gets a great deal lighter.

Body Sends Invoice

Jody Brooks 14:02

Now there was another thread in Catherine's story that I have to bring to you today, because it's one of the most important things anyone can understand about midlife, and she lived it in the most vivid way. When Catherine kept ignoring the call, when she kept pushing through, kept overriding what she knew, her body started to send the invoice, and it was frightening. She began to go numb. She lost the feeling in her little finger, then it travelled up through her arm, then she couldn't feel half her face, and underneath it all a voice in her intuition kept saying You're heading for an autoimmune condition. Her nervous system was fried from years of cortisol, from years of running on empty and pretending she wasn't. Here's the part that gives me chills every time. The day she finally quit the job, the very first day she stayed home, every single symptom disappeared. The numbness went, the whole lot gone, because her body had been saying in the only language it had left, the thing that her mind had refused to hear for years. This is what we mean when we say the block runs deeper than thought. It's not just in your behaviour, it's not just in your reactions, it gets into your body. The body keeps the score of everything the mind is too busy or too frightened to face. And in midlife so often that's exactly why the wheels come off. It's not that we suddenly get weak, it's that the body has finally had enough of holding a truth we've been refusing to look at. It stops being willing to hide it for us. So if your body's been trying to get your attention lately, the tension it won't let go of, the exhaustion that sleep won't touch, the ache that has no medical name, I want you to hear Catherine's story as an invitation, not a warning. Your body is not portraying you, it's on your side. It's carrying a message up from deep, from below the waterline, it's asking you gently, it's asking you as gently as it can and then as loudly as it must to finally understand where the pain is really coming from. I want to say something carefully here, because I never want to be misheard on this. I'm not for one second suggesting that every physical symptom is emotional or that you should ignore something that needs a doctor. If your body is unwell, please always get it properly checked. That is its own kind of listening and it matters. What I'm pointing at is something that sits alongside the medical, not instead of it. It's the simple ancient truth that the body and the mind are not two separate machines. They're one system. We carry a stress, a fear, a grief, or a truth we won't face for long enough. The body very often ends up carrying it for us, because it has nowhere else to put it. Catherine's numbness was real. She could genuinely not feel half her face, and it was also at the very same time a message. Both things were true at once. The body is not lying to you when it does this, it's translating. It's taking a feeling you couldn't allow yourself to feel and turning it into a sensation you can no longer ignore. Emotions are often easily brushed aside and ignored. Still, physical discomfort is much harder to do this with. When your body has no choice left, it will communicate in the only way that it can, and that it has left to get your attention. I find that oddly hopeful because it means your body is an ally in this archaeology, not an obstacle. When you can't find the memory with your mind, sometimes you can find it through your body. Where do you hold your attention? What happens in your chest, your stomach, your throat, when a certain kind of situation comes up? The body often remembers the address of a wound long after the mind has lost the map. So this week we listen to it kindly as a friend who's been trying to tell you something important for a very long time.

Jody Pub Story Deeper

Jody Brooks 18:25

Now you knew I couldn't get through a Friday without coming back to the pub and I promised you right at the start of the season that this story would deepen one careful layer at a time. So let me take it one step further today. Just one. We're still not taking it fully apart, that's a proper excavation with an actual tool in your hands, and that's in week three. But we can feel it a little bit further today. If you're new this week, here's the shape of it quickly. Years ago in a pub in front of a room full of people, my stepfather said something cruel about me, loud enough for everyone to hear, and in that moment something in a young boy decided quietly and permanently that he would never be caught like that again, that he would stay in control, that he would manage every room he ever walked into, so he could never ever be humiliated like that again. In week one I let myself feel that story. I stopped narrating it from a safe distance and let myself feel what the boy felt. On Monday this week, I started to ask where it came from, and I noticed the important thing that the pub wasn't where the belief was born, it was where an older, quieter belief got its official stamp. The pub was the site of the dig, not the origin of the artifact. So today let me carbon date it a little. When I sit with it honestly and I feel back past the pub, I can find the chill that was already there, the sense long before that afternoon that I was somehow on trial in my own home, that love was conditional, that I had to be good and useful and no trouble, or I might not be wanted. The pub didn't create that, the pub confirmed it in front of a jury in a way that felt like the whole world making a unanimous verdict on the evidence already half believed as true, guilty as charged. What I noticed in my body, now that I've learned to listen to it, when I go back to the pub, in my mind, even now, all these years later, my shoulders climb, my jaw tightens, there's a bracing, a getting ready right across my chest and up into my neck. My body still to this day prepares for the impact when I go anywhere near that memory. And that tells me something the story alone couldn't. It tells me this isn't finished business up in my head. It's stored down in my tissue. It's an old artifact that my body is still faithfully standing guard over. And when I notice that, when I feel my shoulders climb, I say to myself gently, ah, there it is. That's the old alarm. That's the boy getting ready to be humiliated. Something in me softens by just a fraction, not fixed, not gone, but softened, acknowledged, felt, seen, heard, listened to. What I can feel now that I couldn't for most of my life, the control that came out of that, the need to run every room. It isn't a character flaw. It's the oversensitive smoker line we talked about on Monday. It's a protection that was fitted for a very good reason, by a frightened boy who genuinely needed it, and it did its job. It kept him safe. It just never got the message that the danger had passed. It's been going off at toast, and sometimes just bread. Going in the toaster for forty years. I'm not going to dig out the root of it today. That's week three. But I want you to notice that I can hold that whole story now with something that isn't shame. I can hold it with a kind of tenderness, even something close to gratitude for the boy who built the protection and for the protection itself. That shift from shame to tenderness is the entire work of understanding, and it's available to you too, with your story, whatever that may be.

Same Story Different Clothes

Jody Brooks 22:34

So let me draw Catherine and mine's story together, because they really are the same story, wearing different clothes. Catherine gave up her music, I took control of every room. On the surface, those look nothing alike. One is a woman quietly disappearing to keep her marriage close. One is a man loudly taking charge so he can't be humiliated. Total opposites you'd think. But underneath they're identical. They're both young people in a moment not feeling safe, making a decision about who they have to be to be loved, accepted or protected, and then spending decades faithfully following that decision long after it stopped serving. Catherine's block made her disappear. Mine made me take over. Both were old protections, installed early, running an autopilot, way past their usefulness. Both were the sat nav following a map of a road that no longer exists. And that's the quiet extraordinary truth of this work. However different our stories look on the outside, underneath we're all doing the same thing. We're all carrying old protections we mistook for our personalities. We all said at some point, well that's just how I am, and it was never how we were. It was just how we learn to survive. There is such a deep comfort in that. It means you're not uniquely broken, you are beautifully, ordinarily human, doing exactly what humans do. And it means that if Catherine could find her way off the floor and all the way back to herself, then so in your own time and your own way can you. And notice one more thing about Catherine's story, because it's the part I find most hopeful of all. When she finally shut the doors, when she finally quit the job, when she finally stopped disappearing, she did not fall apart. Everyone around her was terrified she would. Where will the money come from? What will we do? The house hasn't sold. And yet the moment she stopped abandoning herself, her body healed overnight, the numbness vanished. That's the thing nobody tells you when you're standing at the edge of a big, frightening change. The old protection screams that letting go will be the end of you. But so often, letting it go is the beginning of you. The block always insists it's the only thing holding you together, and it's almost always the very thing holding you back.

Weekend Practice

Jody Brooks 25:14

So here's what I'd love you to carry into the weekend, and it's gentle because it's Friday and you've done enough this week. I'd like you to pick just one of your patterns, just one, the one that's been most obvious to you this week, and I'd like you to play archaeologists with it. Not the big dig not yet. Just the first careful brushing of soil. And one honest question How old is this feeling? How old is this feeling really? When I feel it in my body, does it feel like a grown adult responding today? Or does it feel younger than that? Does it feel like a much smaller version of me reacting to something that happened a very long time ago? You don't have to solve it, you don't have to know the full story. You're just carbon dating. You're just noticing oh, this is old. This isn't really about now. And that noticing on its own starts to loosen something. Because the moment you realise a feeling is forty years old, it stops having quite the same grip on your life today. And notice your body while you're at it. Where does that pattern live in you physically? Does your chest tighten? Does your jaw set? Does your shoulders climb upwards? Your body is a part of the archaeology. It often remembers what the mind has filed away. Just notice, kindly without needing to fix a single thing. Be gentle with yourself over the weekend because carbon dating our own history can stir things up, and that's normal. Rest is part of the work, not a break from it. Go for a walk, see the friend, let the dog drag you down the beach, the understanding will keep working away quietly underneath, whether you're thinking about it or not. And it's often in those activities of rest, a gap, a space created for awareness that understanding arrives in a memory or a sudden connection of thoughts. And if you find something tender when you're digging, some younger version of you who was clearly doing their best in a hard situation, I'd love you to try what we practiced on Monday. Sit down beside them in your mind and ask them the soft question what did you need back then that you didn't get? Then just listen. Don't rush to fix it. Sometimes the whole of the healing at this stage is simply a grown adult finally turning towards a younger self and saying, I see you. I see how hard it was, and you were never the problem. That's it, that's enough for a weekend. You don't need to solve your whole life by Sunday night. You just need to be a little kinder to whoever you find down there in the

Week Two Wrap Next Week

Jody Brooks 28:00

soil. Let me gather up week two for you before I let you go. On Monday you learned that your old responses are predictions, firing before you're even aware, drawn from a map made long ago. On Wednesday Catherine showed us what blocks look like when it's been running your whole life, and what it costs the body when we refuse to listen. And today you've learned to become an archaeologist of your own reactions, to start carbon dating the feeling and discover again and again that it's older than the moment that triggered it. And through all of it one quiet message you're not broken, you're protected, you're carrying old strategies that kept you safe, and this month is about understanding them kindly and so clearly that you can finally let them relax their grip. Next week, week three of season two, we stop just noticing and we pick up the actual tool. I'm going to hand you the thing that lets you follow one of these responses all the way down to its roots, the proper dig into the carbon dating and the truth, and I've made you something to hold in your hand while we do it. But that's for Monday. For now, you've done enough, so let it settle. So let me leave you where we always begin. You're not falling apart, you're waking up. This week you've learned where your responses come from, not from your weakness, not from some flaw in your character, but from a younger you who was only ever trying to keep you safe. And you've learned that understanding, gentle, patient, tender understanding is how you finally set that younger self free. So this weekend, be kind to whoever you find when you're digging. The boy who took control, the woman who gave up her music, to whoever your younger self turns out to be. They did their very best with what they had. They kept you here, and now slowly you're learning to let them

Community Outro Disclaimer

Jody Brooks 30:05

rest. And if this week stirred something in you, if you're ready to stop doing this alone, I'd love for you to come and join us in the messy midlife community. It's warm, it's honest, it's completely free from judgment, and it's where all the free tools and worksheets live. It's the place where the mess becomes the beginning, in good company, with people walking exactly the same road as you. Come and find us, it's completely free and we've saved you a C. The link is in the show notes below. And if you have any questions or you just want to share your journey, you can message me directly by clicking Connect with Jody at the top of the show notes and sending me a message or a voicemail directly. I truly love hearing from all of you and always respond personally to every message. So, until next time, stay curious, stay kind, and keep coming home to who you really are. Thank you for spending this time with me on Messy Midlife. If this episode resonated, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who might need to hear it today. You can find the show notes below and more resources at authenticcoaching.me. And just a little gentle reminder, Messy Midlife is here for information, reflection and personal growth. It isn't a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, therapy, or any other professional healthcare support. If you have concerns about your physical or mental health, please reach out to a qualified professional. Until next time, take good care of yourself. And remember, midlife might be messy, but it's not a crisis, it's a calling to connect.