Ep.176 How to Ease Stress & Anxiety When You’ve Stepped Away from A Midlife Relationship

Are you stuck in the heartbreak of midlife estrangement and unsure how to move forward?
Estrangement hurts, but it doesn’t have to define your future.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
1.    How to mind your mind and tend to your emotions so you feel better.
2.    How to grow external self-awareness
3.    How to clarify your core values so you can move forward with integrity and self-respect
🎧 Put in your earphones, take a breath, and let’s begin the journey back to your calm.

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About the Host:
MJ Murray Vachon LCSW is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than 48,000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching her Mental Wellness curriculum, Inner Challenge. Four years ago she overcame her fear of technology to create a podcast that integrated her vast clinical experience and practical wisdom of cultivating mental wellness using the latest information from neuroscience. MJ was Social Worker of the Year in 2011 for Region 2/IN.

Creating Midlife Calm is a podcast designed to guide you through the challenges of midlife, tackling issues like anxiety, low self-esteem, feeling unworthy, procrastination, and isolation, while offering strategies for improving relationships, family support, emotional wellbeing, mental wellness, and parenting, with a focus on mindfulness, stress management, coping skills, and personal growth to stop rumination, overthinking, and increase confidence through self-care, emotional healing, and mental health support.

Transcript

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:00

In this episode, you'll discover how to heal when you're the one who stepped away from someone you love. Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, a podcast dedicated to empowering midlife minds to overcome anxiety, stop feeling like crap and become more present with your family, all while achieving greater success at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon, a licensed clinical social worker with over 48, 000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching mental wellness. Welcome to the podcast. On Monday, we explored estrangement from the perspective of being cut off. Today we're flipping the lens. We're talking about one of the most emotionally complicated experiences in midlife. What happens when you're the one who chooses distance from someone you once loved? In today's episode, you'll discover healthy ways to cope with the emotional aftermath of stepping away from a relationship, how to stay grounded in your decision, how to carry your values forward even without reconciliation, and how to avoid repeating the same hurt with others or passing it down to the next generation. Before we dive in, I wanna check in how did Monday's Inner Challenge land for you? Maybe you sat with your values in a new way or felt clarity start to take shape, whether it brought peace, discomfort, or both. It's all part of the process. Let's begin with emotional honesty. Choosing to distance yourself from someone you love is emotionally complicated. Coping. Skill number one is allow for the complexity when you are the one who initiates space. The outside world might not understand, and honestly, sometimes you don't fully understand your own emotions either one moment you feel relief. The next, a wave of guilt or sadness crashes in some days, you can't stop thinking about it. Other days you avoid it altogether. That's because stepping away doesn't just trigger loss. It can also bring on what we call disenfranchised grief. Grief that isn't socially validated because you were the one that made the choice. Your feelings are valid, even if at times they feel really contradictory. I worked with a midlife executive who received a promotion that altered a lifelong friendship. A year after the promotion, her friend who didn't receive the promotion continued to make jabs. My client responded with kindness at first. She often said. I'm so sorry. You too didn't get promoted, but eventually she said, I need space. I just can't take it anymore. Months later, her friend apologized via text. She found herself missing her friend, but she realized it wasn't just the promotion that was the tip of the iceberg. Underneath it was a pattern, constant competition around kids, spouses, careers, even clothes. She was tired of it, but she also missed the fun parts, the workouts, the wine tastings, and memories of raising their kids together. She needed space. She still felt love. Give yourself permission to feel the full spectrum, sadness, anger relief, hope, exhaustion. Emotional maturity means allowing two things to be true at once you can need the space and you can really miss the person, and I want you to use notice name and tame as those emotions arise in you., Which leads us to coping. Skill number two, anchor in your why. I want you to return to the power and clarity of your why, because when doubt creeps in. It will, it's essential to return to the why behind your decision. You didn't make this decision easily, even if it was one of those impulsive moments you probably had had before. This time was different. You held the distance. I want you to return to your why. So you know, was it to protect your mental health? Did you uphold a boundary that was being continually violated? Did you step into your own agency and say, I need to end the cycle of belittlement, the cycle of hurt, the cycle of being judged and misunderstood. The most common estrangements I've worked with have involved alcohol or drug abuse. Years ago, a midlife mom I worked with made the difficult decision to step back from her father who showed up at her daughter's wedding, drunk. She wrote her dad letter. I still love you, but I can't be in a relationship with you where you're always choosing alcohol over what's best for your family. In the letter, she encouraged him to seek help. She kept that letter in her journal right next to the entry that was filled with heartbreak and anger, and how he had really disrupted her daughter's wedding she worked to move through her grief about her dad and to hold him in her heart in a compassionate way, praying that he would one day step into recovery. The letters in her journal really helped her stay grounded in her why? Your why is not a weapon. It's a compassionate reminder of what matters most at this time in your life. Being clear on your why doesn't harden your heart. It actually calms your mind, which then softens your heart and allows you to have feelings of compassion hoping that he can step into his own path of healing. And if sometimes you wonder, did I make a mistake? That's okay too. Be brave and hold your doubt in front of you. Doubt doesn't erase your reasons. It just means you're human. Doubt may be inviting you to explore where you're at. Healing process. Healing is rarely linear, but clarity often returns when you look at doubt and revisit your why. And if your why no longer feels true, that may be a sign that you're growing, perhaps a signal that you've done the necessary Inner work, the necessary growth. Which gives you options in the relationship that could lead to some connection, some repair. And that leads us to coping skill Number three, choose how you want to show up now. Now that you're anchored in your why. Let's talk about how to live it. Estrangement sometimes means no contact, and sometimes it means contact that's limited and intentional. I worked with a woman whose mother-in-law was deeply critical. Her visits left. My client emotionally drained for weeks. Her husband used to his mother's behavior, didn't really understand her distress, the tricky part. The mother-in-law was wonderful with the grandkids. I am honest with clients in cases of physical or sexual abuse, cutoff is necessary. But in this case, it was more about constant criticism about her banana bread, shoes not working full-time. I asked her to think about what cutting off from her mother-in-law would model for her children. Estrangements are often generational. Her mother-in-law visited twice a year instead of cutting her off. My client shortened those visits and made plans to see her sister while her mother-in-law. Was visiting her children. Other clients choose to meet at public places or for activities away from home. You can protect your wellbeing without severing ties completely. Creating distance doesn't mean you've stopped caring. It means you're choosing how to show up in a way that aligns with your emotional safety. Emotional maturity is choosing to be who you want to be, not who the relationship made you feel like, and that's one of the trickiest parts of estrangement because the patterns with this person are often deeply embedded in your own childhood wounds, and that leads us to coping skill number four, interrupting the cycle of hurt. This asks you to go one layer deeper. One of the most powerful things you can do after stepping away from a painful relationship is to reflect on how not to repeat the same hurt with yourself, with others, with that person if things shift or in the next generation. Everyone I've worked with starts with this intention. They look at me and they say, I am not gonna do this to my kids. I am not gonna do this to my wife. I am not gonna do this to myself. But truly interrupting the cycle takes awareness, humility, and effort. A client of mine had been dominated by her older sister since childhood after their mother died young. As adults living in the same town. She just grew tired of her sister's domineering presence in her life, so she began to avoid her calls, ignore her texts, and not answer the door when her sister came over. She wanted space, but her way of creating it mirrored the same controlling energy she resented. I asked her, have you considered telling your sister you need space? She said she'd never respect it. I reflected you're doing to her, which she did to you, but in a passive reactive way. You don't need to be close, but you do need to communicate. As a therapist, I value family. Family can be healing and deeply hurtful. Estrangement often brings relief at first, but can become more taxing over time. One concern I have about therapy is how often it focuses only on the individual. But healing, especially in families, must be relational. You do need space to restore, but too much space often becomes avoidance, and for most families, avoidance is far more comfortable than communicating in a new, honest and vulnerable way. For example, I've worked with clients whose parents disapproved of their gender or sexual identity. The disapproval was so loud they couldn't hear their own voice. As they became more grounded in who they were, I encouraged them to explore new ways to relate, not to erase the past, but to create a new future. I encourage them to look at what they had in common with their families, not just this one value difference. And if reconciliation ever becomes possible, the work you're doing now will make that pathway healthier, clearer, and more intentional. That's one of the reasons I think it's really important to be in therapy. If you've chosen some type of estrangement, it's helpful to have someone accompany you and guide you in this really complex dynamic. One of my early supervisors told me her parents were shocked that she was considering marrying someone outside of their faith. They went to therapy together and she learned that they were projecting their guilt and fear onto her. She told them, I didn't even know his religion for over a year. Her dad was shocked. How could that not come up in the first few dates? She laughed and she said, dad, I don't even go to church. It's the seventies. No one is swinging through. Confession on their way to the movie. Having this discussion in therapy together was not only life changing for her relationship with her parents, but also for her as a therapist. She learned firsthand that without people talking about. What their assumptions are, how they're feeling, that they just get tangled up inside in ways that can be so problematic. Not just for a month, not just for a year, but for generations to come. Interrupting the cycle. Isn't enough. You also have to create something new. Identifying the hurt is easy. Building healthier ways of relating takes practice. Whether you have children, nieces and nephews, friends or students, your growth ripples outward modeling healthy emotional relationships may be the most healing legacy you leave. In today's episode, you discovered four ways to care for yourself. When you've stepped away from a close relationship, allow the complexity of your emotions anchor in your why. and How To Continue showing up with integrity and how to interrupt the cycle of hurt so it doesn't get passed on. Choosing to walk away with self-awareness and compassion is a form of self-growth. And it's not easy, but it is part of what makes you healthier and more resilient. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Monday with more creating midlife calm.