Midlife Crisis Lies
Rethinking the Midlife Crisis through Therapy and Psychedelics
What if questioning everything isn't a sign that something's wrong?
When we think about a midlife crisis, there are a few images that tend to come to mind: the balding guy who buys a sports car, the woman getting plastic surgery or lipo, someone dating a much younger person, or someone rage-quitting their job and seemingly throwing their life away. And listen, none of those things are inherently wrong. I'm not judging the sports car or the lipo. But I do think it's interesting to consider the stories we've been fed about entering our 40s and 50s.
In my work as a therapist with women in California—and as a client who has been engaged in my own therapy for more than a decade—I'm starting to realize that the midlife crisis for women is not the bullshit we've been told it is. I don't see it as losing our minds or desperately trying to reclaim our youth. I think something much more interesting is happening.
We spend the first 20 years of adulthood becoming. We build careers, relationships, families, routines, and identities. We become capable. We figure out how to function in the world, and consciously or not, we build patterns along the way. Patterns in the way we love, the way we handle conflict, the way we measure our worth, and the way we respond when someone is disappointed in us. We learn to people-please, overfunction, withdraw, achieve, control, take care of everyone else, or make ourselves smaller to keep the peace.
Many of those patterns served us. Some of them helped us build the very lives we're living today. But then we reach our 40s or 50s and something starts to shift. The version of ourselves we spent decades becoming doesn't quite fit anymore. Outside of my work, my relationships, my family, and my responsibilities, who am I? I spent so much of my own life trying to get to some point called “success,” and now I'm not even sure I know what success means anymore.
For some women, this questioning arrives almost silently. For others, something forces it. A marriage changes. Trust is broken. A partner reveals something unexpected about sex, intimacy, infidelity, pornography, or wanting a different kind of relationship. A career stops fitting. The life that felt certain suddenly doesn't feel so certain anymore.
I think these moments have a way of exposing not only what's happening around us, but the patterns we've been living inside of. How long have I been ignoring what I need? Why am I always the one holding everything together? Why is it so hard for me to disappoint someone? Why do I keep doing something that no longer feels like me?
We've been taught to see this kind of questioning as a crisis. I see midlife differently. I see it as an opportunity to notice the patterns we've been repeating for decades and decide which ones actually get to come with us into the next half of our lives. In my work with women navigating midlife, marriage, and major relationship changes, this questioning is often not something to get rid of. It's something worth getting curious about.
This is also part of what fascinates me about psychedelics and psychedelic-assisted therapy. I don't think psychedelics give us the answers. I think they can offer enough distance from our usual perspective to help us see what was already there.
Patterns are hard to recognize when we're living inside of them. We move through familiar roles, relationships, reactions, and thought loops for so long that they can start to feel less like patterns and more like who we are. Sometimes we need enough distance from our own perception to ask: Is this actually me, or is this something I learned to do? And underneath that question is an even bigger one: Who the fuck am I?
At this stage of my own life, I'm realizing I'm less interested in becoming and more interested in uncovering. I spent a lot of my earlier adulthood thinking about where I wanted to get, what I wanted to accomplish, and what my life was supposed to look like. Now I'm more curious about what's underneath all of that. What do I actually want? What feels like me? What do I want to stop carrying simply because I've carried it for so long?
Breaking a pattern doesn't mean blowing up your life. Sometimes it brings you back to the same life, marriage, or relationships with more intention. Sometimes it shows you that something really does need to change. Either way, I think midlife gives us something incredibly valuable: enough life behind us to recognize our patterns, and still so much life ahead of us to choose differently.
What if questioning everything isn't evidence that something is wrong, but evidence that there can be more? More of you, more freedom, more expansion, more life. I don't think that's a crisis. I think that's growth.
Navigating your own season of questioning?
I work with women throughout California, including San Francisco and the Bay Area, who are navigating midlife, relationship changes, broken trust, intimacy, identity, and the patterns that no longer fit the life they want to live.
Therapy can be a place to slow down, understand what's happening beneath the surface, and get curious about what you actually want—without rushing yourself toward an answer.
Kristina Shimokawa, LMFT provides online individual therapy throughout California using depth-oriented approaches including IFS, Brainspotting, and psychedelic-assisted therapy.
Interested in working together? Schedule a consultation →
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