Understanding the in-between years

I remember the moment it was named, though it had been circling for a while. Life looked fine from the outside. Work was going well. Relationships ticking along. Nothing dramatic had happened. And yet ordinary days had started to feel strangely heavy. Small decisions took effort. Noise grated. Even things I used to manage without thinking now left me tired and short-tempered. It wasn’t sadness. It was overload. A sense that life, as it was arranged, suddenly demanded more than I had to give.

This phase is often described as confusion rather than distress. A feeling of being internally scrambled. The question arrives quietly at first, then with more urgency. Is this menopause, or is it me? Why does everything feel so much harder than it used to? It’s not the pain of loss so much as the unease of no longer recognising your own responses. The world hasn’t shifted dramatically, yet your capacity to meet it has.

Midlife Without a Script

This is usually the moment people start reaching for the word midlife, often with discomfort. Midlife still carries judgement. A suggestion of failure, indulgence, or decline. Something faintly embarrassing. For men, midlife has long been framed as a story. A crisis. A reckoning. A narrative arc that includes buying the car, upgrading the watch, chasing desire, blowing up a life and calling it authenticity. These behaviours are culturally legible, even expected. There is a script, however crude it may be.

For women, the same period is more often folded into a diagnosis. The menopause. A biological transition that explains something, but rarely explains enough. The difference matters. Men’s midlife is narrativised; women’s is medicalised, and both approaches miss something essential. One overplays agency and drama. The other compresses a complex psychological and relational shift into hormones alone. Despite the flood of information, panels, podcasts, and prescriptions, this remains a strangely unmapped terrain. Women are given a label, but little help translating it into the texture of daily life. How it feels in the body. How it alters tolerance, desire, attention. How it quietly rearranges identity.

A Change In Rhythm

What can feel like personal failure, or even collapse, is something else entirely. It is a recalibration. For decades, many women organise their internal world around holding, managing, anticipating. Around being reliable, capable, emotionally available. This isn’t accidental. It’s learned early and reinforced relentlessly. It keeps families running, workplaces functioning, relationships stable. It’s praised, rewarded, expected. It also asks the nervous system to live in a state of near-constant readiness.

When the rhythm changes, when children need less, when work shifts, when hormones fluctuate, when life no longer demands the same vigilance, the body doesn’t simply exhale. Systems adapt to what is required of them, reminds us Dan Siegel, psychiatrist and researcher in interpersonal neurobiology. When the requirement changes, the system has to reorganise. And reorganisation is rarely calm.

“As a client said to me recently, it feels like the old way has gone, but the new way hasn’t arrived yet. I’m standing in the middle with no instructions, and everything feels louder than it should.”

This in-between state is deeply uncomfortable. There is no cultural script for it. No sanctioned behaviour. Just a sense of being unmoored inside a life that still looks intact.

When Coping Stops Working

Midlife often hits hardest those who appear to be coping best. Competence can disguise exhaustion. Emotional intelligence can keep you functioning long past the point of internal strain. Strength delays reckoning. It doesn’t remove the need for it. When life stops requiring quite so much vigilance, what surfaces isn’t peace but noise. Irritation. Restlessness. A brittle edge. The feeling that your days no longer fit you properly.

Identity takes a quiet hit here too. Not dramatically, but persistently. Much of adult female identity is built around usefulness. Being needed. Being dependable. Being the one who remembers, anticipates, smooths things over. As Susie Orbach, psychotherapist and writer, has long argued, women are encouraged to locate their worth in care and accommodation. When those roles loosen, something collapses inwardly. Not because they were wrong, but because they were never the whole story.

The Grief No One Names

There is often grief in this, though it rarely announces itself as such. Grief for versions of the self that were admired and indispensable. Grief for the clarity that came with being busy. What replaces it isn’t immediately liberating. It’s ambiguous. Unsettled. Hard to articulate without sounding ungrateful.

Relationships feel this shift too. Not always through open conflict, but through recognition. Many women begin to see how intimacy was organised around function rather than shared inner life. How emotional labour was absorbed rather than negotiated. Resentment doesn’t always arrive as anger. More often, it shows up as fatigue. As withdrawal. As the quiet question psychotherapist and author Esther Perel returns to again and again: who am I allowed to be here, and at what cost?

For some, this phase intersects with neurodiversity in revealing ways. Years of masking and compensating begin to fail. Coping strategies that once worked lose their elasticity. Burnout appears not as collapse, but as narrowing. Less tolerance. Less flexibility. Another reminder that adaptation, however impressive, is not the same as ease.

The Conversation That Waits

Midlife is not a problem to be solved. It’s a passage that exposes the limits of how we’ve been living. A phase where structures that once made sense start to feel ill-fitting, and new ones haven’t yet taken shape. The discomfort lies not in failure, but in uncertainty. In being asked to listen rather than push through. To discern rather than react.

This stage doesn’t demand reinvention or escape. It isn’t necessarily a call to leave, upend, or start again. It asks for something quieter and far less marketable. Honesty. Discernment. A willingness to stay with questions that don’t yet have answers.

Midlife is often treated as an inconvenience to manage or a symptom to medicate. It may be something else entirely. A long-delayed conversation about who you’ve become, and what that self can no longer carry. The unease isn’t the enemy. It may be the first signal that something essential is finally being allowed into the room.

This article was written by Veronika Kloucek, Senior Psychotherapist, Trainer, Supervisor.

If this article resonates and you would like to find out how I can help you, contact me to schedule a confidential enquiry call today. I work in private practice and head up The Village Clinic.

Orbach, S. (2009). Bodies. Profile Books.
Orbach, S. (2016). In therapy. Profile Books.
Perel, E. (2017). The state of affairs: Rethinking infidelity. Harper.
Perel, E. (2007). Mating in captivity: Unlocking erotic intelligence. Harper.
Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.