Midlife Crisis: How Somatic Therapy Can Help
When you picture a “midlife crisis,” do you imagine a fifty-year-old man buying a red convertible, leaving his marriage, and chasing someone younger?
I did too, until I became a therapist who works with people in midlife and started moving through it myself.
For many people, midlife doesn’t feel dramatic so much as disorienting. It can be exhausting and confusing, filled with questions that don’t have easy answers. You’ve worked hard, cared for others, and built a life, yet something feels off. You might find yourself wondering:
Is this really the life I want?
What parts of me got lost along the way?
Is this how this is supposed to feel?
Why do I feel anxious, unmotivated, or disconnected when I thought I’d feel more settled?
For some, this stage of life feels especially unstable. Relationships shift, work no longer fits the same way, or caregiving responsibilities increase. You may also notice changes in your body—sleep feels different, stress lingers longer, and it takes more effort to recover from things that once rolled off more easily. When several of these changes happen at once, it can start to feel harder to keep everything moving forward.
Midlife is also a time when earlier experiences can resurface. Emotions, reactions, or patterns you thought were behind you may begin to show up again. Long-term stress and past trauma don’t only live in our thoughts. They’re carried in the body and in the nervous system’s threat responses. When life slows down or shifts, those patterns sometimes come into view because there’s finally room to notice them.
Your body may be signaling that something hasn’t been fully processed yet, and that tending to it now could help you feel more steady, connected, and present in your life.
Hi, I’m Amy Hagerstrom
I’m a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, and Certified Integrative Mental Health Practitioner.
As a Gen Xer, I’m familiar with the cultural pressure many of us grew up with to keep going, stay functional, and not slow down too much. I didn’t necessarily understand the impact of that at the time. What became clearer later was how certain experiences, both in childhood and adulthood, were overwhelming in ways that shaped how I learned to cope, relate, and move through the world. I didn’t have language for it then, but I can see now how those experiences lived in my body as much as in my thoughts.
That perspective is central to how I work. Somatic therapy focuses on slowing down enough to notice what’s here, staying with yourself as sensations, emotions, and reactions arise, and allowing your nervous system the space it needs to settle or complete what never had a chance to resolve. Through that process, understanding often emerges naturally, along with more capacity to tolerate stress, feel your emotions, and respond with greater choice.
Even if you don’t identify with a particular generation, midlife often brings a similar realization. The ways you learned to get through life may no longer feel supportive. Somatic therapy can offer a different way of meeting yourself during this stage, with more steadiness, connection, and room to respond differently than before.
Why Midlife Can Feel So Overwhelming
Even if you’ve spent years learning about yourself and working through old patterns, midlife can bring up things you didn’t expect. You may recognize triggers more quickly, yet still find yourself reacting in familiar ways. You have insight, but something deeper can still feel unsettled.
Midlife doesn’t just change what’s happening around you. It also changes what’s happening within you. Shifts in hormones, ongoing work and caregiving stress, and a growing awareness of time all affect how your system responds. Your body and mind are adapting, and that process can amplify both physical and emotional intensity.
Protective strategies that once helped you cope may start to feel tight or insufficient. You might notice more tension, a shorter fuse, or a kind of depletion that rest doesn’t resolve. Emotions that once felt manageable can show up with more force or linger longer than they used to.
This isn’t a sign that you’ve failed or that previous therapy was wrong. It often means that what’s being asked of you now requires a broader kind of support, one that includes how stress and emotion are held in the body as well as understood in the mind.
Somatic therapy offers a way to slow down and listen to what’s happening beneath the surface. We pay attention to how stress shows up physically, how your system responds to pressure, and what happens when there’s space to stay with those responses long enough for them to shift. When the body is included, change can happen not just through insight, but through a deeper sense of steadiness and integration.
Somatic Experiencing: How We Work With the Body
Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-based approach to therapy that helps your nervous system recover from the effects of stress and overwhelm. It’s based on the understanding that when something difficult happens, whether it’s a single traumatic event or chronic emotional, physical, or relational stress, your body automatically responds to protect you.
Sometimes that stress response gets interrupted, not because your body failed, but because life often requires us to keep going. Even well-intentioned advice can reinforce this, like pushing feelings down, overriding impulses, or jumping straight into calming techniques before the body has had a chance to complete the stress cycle or tune into what it actually needs.
In SE, we slow down and pay attention to what’s happening in real time. We might notice tension, breath changes, impulses to move, or the moment you start to tighten, speed up, or pull away. These are signals that show us how your system has been trying to take care of you, and they give us a place to work. Sometimes the work looks quiet, nourishing, and even cozy. Sometimes it’s more active, like gently following an instinct to push, pull, turn, reach, shake, or even find your voice. It looks different for everyone because everyone’s life experiences and nervous systems are different. This means needs are different.
This is also a process of discovering what’s resourceful for you and your nervous system. We discover that together and incorporate that in the work. I often invite clients to practice resourcing between sessions.
As your system releases some of what’s been held, things start to organize differently. You may notice more space inside, more ease in your body, and a clearer sense of what you feel and need. The body and mind begin to work together again instead of against each other.
Why the Body Is Central to Healing in Midlife
By midlife, many of us have spent years relying on thinking, managing, and pushing ourselves through what needs to be done. We learn to override signals from the body in order to keep functioning. Over time, those signals don’t disappear. They tend to show up as ongoing tension, exhaustion that doesn’t resolve with rest, feeling easily overwhelmed, or a sense of being disconnected from yourself.
Including the body in therapy changes how healing can happen. When we slow down and pay attention to physical sensations, nervous system responses, and patterns of activation or shutdown, we’re no longer working only at the level of insight. We’re working with how stress and experience are actually held.
This creates more room for choice. As your system becomes steadier, it’s easier to pause, feel what’s happening, and respond rather than react. You’re not forcing yourself to change. The capacity to tolerate stronger emotions, more stress, and more complexity grows naturally when the body is part of the process.
Somatic work can help you build a stronger internal foundation so you can:
Feel more grounded and steady day to day
Stay present with difficult emotions without becoming overwhelmed
Have more energy and less depletion
Reconnect with what feels meaningful and alive to you
Somatic therapy doesn’t remove the challenges of midlife. It supports you in meeting them with more capacity, flexibility, and connection to yourself.
Integrative Mental Health: Supporting the Whole System
Because I’m also a Certified Integrative Mental Health Practitioner, our work can include more than thoughts, emotions, and nervous system patterns. We also look at the physical and lifestyle factors that shape how you feel and cope with stress.
Mental health doesn’t exist in isolation. Sleep, nourishment, movement, hormones, daily rhythms, and overall stress load all influence mood, energy, focus, and emotional resilience. When the body is depleted or out of sync, it becomes harder to feel steady, present, or regulated, even with good insight and strong coping skills.
In our work together, we take a wider view. We pay attention to how these pieces may be contributing to anxiety, low mood, reactivity, or burnout alongside relational, emotional, and nervous system factors. Sometimes small shifts in daily rhythms can support the deeper therapeutic work. Other times, it becomes clear that additional support from integrative providers, such as nutritionists or medical professionals, would be helpful.
This approach brings the whole of you into the process. You are not just a set of symptoms to manage, but a complex human being whose body, emotions, experiences, and patterns all interact. When we account for that full picture, therapy can become more supportive, more sustainable, and better matched to what you actually need during this stage of life.
From Crisis to Invitation
What if this season isn’t a crisis, but a turning point?
Midlife often brings moments where the ways you’ve been coping no longer work the way they used to. What once helped you stay functional or get through hard things can start to feel constricting, exhausting, or misaligned. That can feel unsettling, but it can also be information.
Rather than something to push past or fix, what’s coming up may be asking for your attention in a different way. The anxiety, restlessness, fatigue, or emotional intensity can be signals that your system is ready for more space, more honesty, and more support than it had before.
Somatic therapy offers a way to meet this moment without fighting it. Instead of choosing between logic and emotion, or strength and vulnerability, the work makes room for all of you. We stay with what’s present, listen to what your body and nervous system are communicating, and allow things to shift at a pace your system can actually tolerate.
With consistent support, your system can begin to settle, patterns that once felt automatic loosen, and there’s often a growing sense of clarity about what you need and how you want to move forward. Life may not become simpler, but it can start to feel more grounded, more connected, and more like it belongs to you.
If You’re Ready to Explore Somatic Therapy for Midlife
Whether you’re feeling burned out, questioning your direction, or noticing old emotions resurfacing, this work can support a greater sense of steadiness and self-connection.
I offer online somatic therapy and integrative mental health sessions for adults across Florida and Illinois. You can schedule a free 10-minute consultation to see if this approach feels like the right fit.
This is an invitation to come back into relationship with yourself, with support that includes your mind, your body, and your emotional life. It can help you move through this chapter with more clarity, more capacity, and a deeper sense of what matters to you.