When Approval Stops Working
How Midlife Rewrites the Inner Rules of Belonging & Approval
They call it a “mid life crisis” but for many of us, it doesn’t show up that way. Instead, it shows up as a quiet refusal.
A refusal to keep managing the room.
A refusal to stay agreeable when something feels off.
A refusal to “perform” in ways that once felt normal.
A refusal to tolerate any more Bullshit!
What’s often described as “burnout,” “hormones,” or “midlife awakening” is, at a deeper level, a core relational shift. The old rules of belonging and approval just stop working for us.
The Inner Child Meets a New Season
Our inner girl carries early relational intelligence: how to stay close, how to stay safe, how not to be left. For decades, those strategies run in the background. They help us build careers, families, communities, and identities. But something changes when we hit midlife... It introduces capacity ceilings!
Our body becomes less willing to override discomfort. Our nervous system becomes more honest. The cost of approval becomes harder to ignore. And at some point during this process, it becomes non-negotiable.
I’m sure you have heard the statistics on divorce rates in menopausal women. Women are starting to advocate for equality in areas that we have historically been ignored (think Medical and menopause). Our generation (Gen X) is the first to have a full generation of women experience TRUE financial freedom and abundance.
My mom (a Boomer) was a fiercely independent woman. She worked from the time I was 3 years old but…that was only because my father died unexpectedly, in 1974, leaving her to fend for herself and raise a child on her own. She found a job and made her own career but there were limited opportunities. She started as a secretary and worked her way up to an HR executive over the course of her 40 year career. On paper she looked to be independent but the blanket of societal rules and expectations weighed her down. She hit glass ceilings in every job she had and remarried multiple times because she still had the old thought process that she needed a man to be complete.
But it was different for us, growing up in the 80’s. Most of us spent our early childhood, in the 70’s, watching the feminist movement roar. Then we watched women push up against the glass ceiling in the 80’s and make headway in the corporate world. It became an accepted fact that we didn’t need a man to be successful or happy. And yet, many of us still fell into the “traditional role” of mom and wife while building our careers, causing the “emotional load” to rise up and start to crush us! But the collective push back has been pretty mighty. So now, even though menopause has been around forever, we are no longer willing to tow the line. Many of our inner girls are getting loud.
The Separation of Safety and Approval
Earlier in life, approval often felt like safety for us. It meant fewer conflicts, consistency and predicability, emotional steadiness in those around us. It may have been at a cost, but it was worth it for many of us to sustain that feeling of safety.
But in midlife, many women notice something new: Approval no longer brings relief. Instead, it brings feelings like resentment, exhaustion, and an overall sense of losing or sacrificing ourselves. And often, our inner girl recognizes it before we do. She feels the dissonance before we can name it. And as we enter menopause, and our brain and body start to shift, our nervous system begins to renegotiate these old contracts that we made with ourselves. We no longer tolerate :
“I’m responsible for everyone’s emotional experience.”
“If something feels off, it’s my job to fix it.”
“I’ll manage myself so others don’t have to.”
“I should be able to handle this without needing help.”
“My needs can wait.”
Should I go on????
These are old adaptive responses and our body no longer consents, so our nervous system responds with anxiety, anger, grief, or shutdown, screaming at us to pay attention.
Something inside is asking for a different kind of belonging.
Here is the beautiful thing about this process. When we start to loosen and let go of approval we are able to feel the grief for what we have carried, the anger for what we have lost, and a view of how we can belong in a softer, different way. This may cost us some relationships, but for many of us the benefits are greater than that loss.
Most of us don’t think about our inner girl very often, but she is always influencing us. Many times she is responding from this core need for belonging and approval that we have never addressed. However, in midlife, we start to notice her more, even if we haven’t named her. She starts to have a voice and when she does, we heal.
So if you are moving through this transition and hear her getting loud...
Take a seat….listen closely.
She is your way forward!
Been there, done that…