Ep. 275 Why Anxiety In Midlife Makes You Disconnect From Your Identity & Stop Expressing Yourself In Relationships

Have you slowly stopped expressing parts of yourself just to keep relationships comfortable?
You’re not alone—many midlife adults quietly lose connection with themselves while trying to avoid conflict, preserve harmony, and keep relationships stable.
In this episode, you’ll discover:

1. Why anxiety can slowly train you to silence yourself and disconnect from parts of your identity
2. How healthy intimacy actually requires discomfort, honesty, and the ability to stay relational through difference
3. Small ways to begin expressing yourself more honestly without becoming confrontational or emotionally reactive

 Take 14 minutes to reconnect with the parts of yourself you may have slowly stopped expressing—you’re worth it.
Learn more about the Inner Challenge Masterclass:
mailto:mj@mjmurrayvachon.com?subject=Inner%20Challenge%20Masterclass

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About the Host: 

MJ Murray Vachon, LCSW, is a seasoned clinician, educator, and host of the podcast Creating Midlife Calm, recognized by Maria Shriver as a “Listen of the Week.” Over the past 40 years, MJ has led more than 50,000 therapy sessions and developed the Inner Challenge mental wellness program and the Inner Challenge Master Class, practical tools for emotional regulation, self-awareness, and resilience taught for more than 30 years in junior high schools and at the University of Notre Dame for freshman football players. Through her podcast, teaching, and coaching, MJ helps people build calmer lives, stronger relationships, and healthier communities.

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 the hidden cost of silencing yourself to avoid emotional discomfort

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW 0:06

Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, the podcast where you and I tackle stress and anxiety in midlife so you can stop feeling like crap, feel more present at home, and thrive at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over 50,000 hours of therapy sessions and 32 years of teaching practical science-backed mental wellness.

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW 0:31

Welcome to the podcast. Have you ever walked away from a conversation and thought, "Why didn't I just say what I was thinking?" Or maybe you've gotten so used to editing yourself, you don't even realize you're doing it anymore. In this episode, you'll discover why silencing yourself slowly increases anxiety, stress, and emotional exhaustion, what chronic self-editing does to your identity over time, and how to stay connected to yourself without becoming confrontational or blowing up relationships. At the end of the episode, we'll do a simple inner challenge to help you begin noticing this pattern in everyday life Have you ever had this experience where late at night you're replaying an interaction in your head? You think of the thing you wished you had said, or maybe it's smaller than that. Someone asks, "Where do you wanna eat?" And you immediately say, wherever you want," even though you actually did have a preference. Maybe you edit texts over and over before sending them. Maybe you feel emotionally tight or constricted before family gatherings. Maybe you mentally rehearse conversations before they happen, or maybe you feel relief when plans get canceled because you no longer have to emotionally manage everybody, including yourself. Many people think anxiety only comes from overthinking, but sometimes anxiety comes from years of slowly editing yourself, not dramatically, but quietly, gradually, until you remain externally functional, but internally disconnected from parts of yourself. Often people silence themselves not because they don't value their thoughts, but because they value connection. They want to avoid conflict, preserve belonging, maintain harmony, and keep relationships stable Perhaps for you, this pattern began very early. Maybe you grew up in a family where disagreement didn't feel safe, where emotions weren't explored very deeply, where peace mattered more than honesty, Where curiosity went out the door and the armor came on when somebody became emotional And for many people today, this pattern has become even stronger in adulthood because relationships, workplaces, social media, and even the culture itself can feel increasingly reactive and divided. You know, there was a time when disagreement was more often an invitation to explore and understand each other. But today, many of you probably experience disagreement as something to survive, avoid, or even defend yourself against. When this pattern is part of your life, your nervous system quietly learns it's safer to edit myself than risk discomfort. Now let me make an important clarification here. Healthy relationships absolutely require connection and flexibility, but healthy relationships also require some discomfort. Think about it. No two people are exactly alike. You're naturally going to have different opinions, different emotional reactions, values, sensitivities, and different perspectives and ways of seeing the world. And those differences naturally create tension sometimes, and that tension can create frustration, awkwardness, sadness, anxiety, misunderstanding, or the pain of not feeling understood. This is not failure. This is relationship. Real intimacy is not sameness. Intimacy is being able to share your emotions, your opinions, your values, your perspective, while also hearing another person's emotions, opinions, values, and perspective in a mutual way. And that takes emotional maturity because closeness naturally creates moments of discomfort. But emotional maturity is learning how to stay connected through some of that discomfort without disappearing, overpowering, shutting down, or making the relationship unsafe. Because healthy intimacy says, "We are different, and I can stay connected." Self-erasure says, "We are different, so I disappear." And this distinction matters. This episode is not about becoming confrontational, speaking your truth to the world. It's not about saying everything impulsively. It's not about proving you're right. The issue is slowly abandoning yourself in order to avoid discomfort. Let me give you a simple example. You're sitting in a meeting at work. You have an idea or maybe a different perspective, but instead of sharing it, you become internally preoccupied. You start anticipating pushback, criticism, disagreement, defensiveness, tension. So while the meeting continues externally, internally, your nervous system is working so hard as you manage emotional risk. And afterward, you leave feeling deflated, emotionally flat, not because your idea was wrong, but because once again, you disappeared inside the room. Sometimes this happens in marriage too You stop bringing things up because conversations start feeling emotionally expensive. Instead of curiosity, there's defensiveness, correction, or emotional shutdown, and eventually silence feels easier than carrying emotional exhaustion and relational disconnection afterward. So little by little, you stop bringing parts of yourself forward, not because they disappeared, but because expressing them stopped feeling emotionally safe. There's a hidden cost to this. Not just people pleasing, but the hidden cost is what chronic self-editing does to your identity and your nervous system over time. you start noticing simple conversations leave you emotionally tired, not physically tired, emotionally tired, like you've been bracing the entire interaction. You begin over-monitoring your reactions, second-guessing yourself, becoming emotionally careful all the time. And many people eventually say to me, "I don't even know what I think anymore." If you're listening to this and you're thinking, "Ah, some of this sounds like me, but I'm not quite sure," here's one way that you could possibly assess yourself. When you see people who freely express themselves, what do you feel? Admiration, longing, envy, irritation, even judgment. Often underneath those reactions is something deeper. Part of you longs for that same freedom. Not freedom to dominate, freedom to exist more honestly inside your own life. And honestly, many midlife adults are not only exhausted from responsibility, they're exhausted from years of managing themselves around other people. You know what I mean. Years of emotionally monitoring, years of internally bracing, years of trying not to upset the emotional system around you And slowly, you lose access to your grounded, buoyant self. Your spontaneity fades, your creativity dims, and your confidence in your own perception weakens. Eventually, you begin feeling emotionally absent from your life. Let me share one of the most universal struggles I hear in my office. Women who live in houses where kids rarely pick up after themselves. Shoes everywhere, backpacks everywhere, dishes left out. One woman would bring it up to her husband, and instead of curiosity, she often felt dismissed. He would say, "They're kids. Look at all the good things they do. Hey, they're overscheduled. No wonder they don't have time to hang up their backpack." So over time, she stopped saying much. But internally, she kept carrying the emotional weight of it. She would clean while resentful. She said to me, "I walk through the house so emotionally tight, I get headaches while I watch them play video games. I never sit down. I feel like the invisible maid." Of course, every few months, she would explode, screaming, throwing shoes, crying about how nobody listened to her And actually, that kind of worked for two or three days, and then the pattern returned Here's a profound truth. What exploded later was often abandoned much earlier. Her real issue was not anger. Her real issue was years of emotional invisibility. And what made healing difficult was this, part of her believed if people listened better, I'd finally feel okay. And yes, better listening absolutely matters. But she also had to slowly learn how to tolerate the discomfort of expressing herself earlier, more honestly, and more consistently without disappearing first. Healing does not require becoming louder. It requires becoming steadier and a little braver because it takes courage in midlife to look at a deeply established pattern and say, I can do better than this." And honestly, isn't it easier to blame everyone else? To focus entirely on how reactive people are, how uncomfortable disagreement feels, or how poorly others listen than to step into your own emotional power and try something different? Because real change asks you to tolerate discomfort, normalize tension, test the waters differently, and stay emotionally present a little longer, and sometimes much longer than what feels comfortable. Real change also asks yourself to exist inside disagreement without drowning in it This is deep work. Not becoming aggressive, not overpowering others, but learning how to stay connected to yourself when emotional tension appears. One of the healthiest shifts in midlife is realizing my goal isn't to be right all the time. My goal is to stay authentically relational. But being relational does not mean accommodating, fawning, or disappearing. It means learning how to stay connected to yourself, to another person, and to the relationship itself, whether it's at work, home, or in your community, even when there's discomfort, tension, disagreement, or even moments of disrespect. This is actually a big part of the work we do inside the Inner Challenge master class. Not learning how to become confrontational, but learning how to stay connected to yourself emotionally, understand your nervous system, tolerate discomfort without shutting down, and rebuild self-trust and emotional steadiness. If you'd like more information, I'll place it in the show notes. So here's your inner challenge for the week. Notice a moment where you silence yourself. No judgment, just curiosity. What emotion showed up? What reaction were you afraid of? What story did you tell yourself to keep yourself silent? And then ask, what would one small truthful response sound like here? Nothing dramatic, just slightly more honest. You don't have to become louder to stop disappearing. The goal is not becoming someone else. The goal is slowly returning to yourself because anxiety and stress often increase when your inner life and outer life drift too far apart. On Thursday's episode, we're gonna make this very practical. We're gonna talk about three small ways to stop silencing yourself that help you become more grounded and solid in who you are at this time in your life This work doesn't begin with dramatic change. It actually begins with small moments of honesty that help you stay connected to yourself, others, and to your life. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Thursday with more Creating Midlife Calm.