Dr. Jeffrey Gladden addresses women in their late 30s and beyond who feel something is wrong but can't name it. He reframes struggles like not speaking up to spouses or fearing friendship loss as unlearned skills, not personal flaws. Women-only spaces help them see they're not broken, just untaught.
One of the things that I hear over and over from women is, you know, we get into late 30s, early 40s, sometimes even 60s, and we have this sense that something is not right. Can't speak up. You know, my husband, we have these limitations on our relationship. I can't tell him how I feel about this or this. My friendships, I really wonder if my friendships would survive if I stopped being the one who planned everything and called everybody. But the way that the human psyche works towards self-blame, like, what's wrong with me? What's my problem? Why can't I do this? What is it going to take to finally make me speak up? Rather than seeing it as these are skills you weren't taught, and of course this is who you are today. That's who you were taught to be. And so having that community of women that they can come into where they're really— they can see, oh, it's not me. I'm not the one who is broken or somehow you know, not fixable, because that's, I think, one of our core fears as a human, that there's something like extra special, super broken, just about me.
