SPEAKER_01 0:16

So there's something that women whisper about privately, joke about publicly, and often feel deeply ashamed of underneath. Desire, intimacy, libido, exhaustion, and why so many women in midlife suddenly feel disconnected from themselves. Because it's a reality. But the interesting part is that it might not just be your desire that has disappeared. It might be that your nervous system has been running so hard for so long, since 20 years ago, that it doesn't know what to do. So welcome back to Empower Your Menopause, the podcast all about health, happiness, and hormones for women over 40. I'm Coach Julie.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

And I'm Coach James.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Today we have a really special guest who has spent decades helping women untangle all of those feelings so that you can start finding that desire again and feel more like yourself.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Yeah, so Julie Merriman is the woman after my own heart because she's got more letters after her name than I care to imagine. But let's take it from a roll call then. She's a counselor, she's an educator, she's a podcaster, she's an author, she's a speaker, and she's a clinician with almost 30 years' experience helping women stop disappearing into everyone else's needs. Her works, especially for women who have spent years being the strong one, the reliable one, the self-sacrificing one, and who are now realizing that constantly holding everything together can come at a cost. She's the creator of Soul Joy, author of In Pursuit of Soul Joy, and best book title ever, Are We Gonna Have Sex or What? And also the voice behind the top 100 motivational podcast, Compassion for Fatigue Cure, and she also hosts the podcast Sexy After 50. Through her work, she helps women understand what's happening in their bodies and nervous systems when burnout, shutdown, low desire, and emotional exhaustion take over. She blends clinical knowledge with practical, body-based tools to help women feel safer, more present, and more connected with themselves again. She's based all the way over in the good old US of A at her Texas ranch, and she works with high-achieving women who are tired of feeling invisible, numb, or stuck in survival mode. Her message is simple: Life After 50 isn't about fading quietly into the background, it's about taking yourself seriously again, with a bit more fire, honesty, and absolutely no interest in playing small. Now, Julie, my Julie, Julie from Fabulous Beyond 40, and I have just wrapped up our conversation with Julie Merriman. Believe me, I was confused as heck trying to hold this podcast together. And it is a fascinating, fascinating chat. So you're gonna love this one. Without further ado, let's bring in Julie Merriman. Julie, we've just told everybody who you are and what you do, but why don't you put it in your own words? Tell us a little bit, please, about how you got into your journey, where it started, and what made you want to work with women 40, 50, and above, and why you advocate for them so much.

SPEAKER_03 3:16

Absolutely. Thank you for that. And it's great to be here with y'all. I've been a clinician and a professor in um the mental health field for 30-something years. And so as I aged, the women I worked with aged as well. And I saw around 45, I had a real crash and burn. My first book in pursuit of soul joy is my journey through burnout. And also as professor, it's publisher parish, right? So my area of research has always been burnout and compassion fatigue. And as I researched that, I realized how eminently important the nervous system is as we're as we're looking at those um constructs. And the women that kept coming to me in my practice as we as they aged kept talking about this, just they kept saying, My life force feels like it's gone. I don't know what's happening to me. And that got me very curious. And that really, that's my second book, Are We Gonna Have Sex or What? Um, that's really the journey through midlife, being able to um reclaim, you know, your desire and and your body and just really live fully alive. So really it's uh been a work of living through it and um helping my all my lovely clients come through it as well. And you know, it's interesting, I teach graduate students over here in the States. A lot of my my students come into my program to become counselors, and they're older, and I even saw it in my students. So I think it's a really important thing to help women learn how to get embodied.

SPEAKER_01 4:48

So I I want to dive into the juicy stuff right away, because that's kind of how I roll. And I would love to know like women women go into menopause, and a lot of times libido just seems to evaporate. And you know, can we talk about maybe your libido didn't die? Um, maybe there's something else involved in that whole process because I think a lot of women are frustrated and confused, and so are their partners.

SPEAKER_03 5:14

Oh so very true. Um, I'm 63 and I've been in my marriage close to 40 years. So we God love my husband. We have lived through this together, and I've seen this with my clients as well. And yes, the medical, um the medical profession, and and we love our doctors, but so often they will tell you, you're just old, just deal with it. And here's a hormone, go deal with it. And and it's so much more than hormones. Hormones are important. I mean, don't get me wrong, I take mine every day. Just took them before I came and sat down in here, actually. But but it's so much more than that. The women I work with tend to be kind of high achieving gals, but you don't have to be a high achieving girl to gal to impact this. Your libido is not gone. I'm here, I'm living it. I mean, I get personal, but I you know, I mean, I have found my orgasms to get better as I got older. You just have to, they're deeper, they're more spiritual than they were at 20. Libido is still there, but what's happened? We've been in survival mode for so long, fight or flight. I'm I'm talking polyvagal system, but I'm also a very somatic therapist, and we use chakras. I use chakra psychology as well. As a neuroscientist, I'm gonna talk about the polyvagal system. As a yoga instructor, which I am, I've got yoga goats right out there. Um, I'm gonna talk about chakras. It's the same thing, except we're using different terminology. Your vagal nerve runs right through your chakras. So it's for me as I'm working with my ladies, it gives more of a concrete kind of idea than just looking at all the spaghetti on a on a screen when you're looking at a vague, you know, the vagal system. Um, not all of us have degrees in anatomy and physiology. So what happens, these ladies, we've lived for 20, 30 years just going, going, going, and your nervous system is just braced and in fight or flight, or have have gone down to dorsal vagal where you're numbing and you're just disconnected, you're dissociated from your body. And the very first thing that's gonna happen, because our brain is very selfish with energy, and the very first thing that's gonna happen, that frontal cortex doesn't function as well. The the nervous system says, This chick is just trying to survive, you know, pleasure and desire is coming offline, and we wonder why we're not feeling uh libido, why we're not feeling desire. Because we've told our body we are just trying to survive here. So we really have to go through a um defrosting, if you remember those old refrigerators where you had to open the door, you know, and and defrost. Um that really has to happen to help her get that desire back online.

SPEAKER_01 8:10

So, what would it look like in real life if a woman wanted to protect her nervous system?

SPEAKER_03 8:16

So, to protect that nervous system, it takes so much work. I mean, it's really some deep work. You think, oh, I can just say no and things are fine, but that's it's so much more. We have to learn first and foremost to get embodied. The gals I start working with, and I was guilty of it myself in my first crash and burn, we become floating heads of competence. So we think we can think our way through everything and you know fix it. Um, but we can't. This is something the issues are in the tissues. You have got to go into your body and work through things. So the very first thing I work on with my ladies is teaching them how to get into their body. And we start with full body scans, um, scanning chakras and and trying to realize, okay, I'm feeling anxious. Where in your body are you feeling that? And that might take months to just get her trained to get back into her body because it's that root chakra. If you don't feel safe in your body, you're not gonna get into your body. And if you are not balanced, there's no way desire is gonna show up for you because that's a very vulnerable place to be. And our we've got to feel safe in our body. So it takes um baby steps, right? We don't blow up the system, we start with baby steps so that she can at least learn that safety piece.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

For sure. Well, blowing up the system is how we got there in the first place, right? Not that I would know anything about that, of course.

SPEAKER_02 9:48

I tell you, I'm gifted with that for myself. I really had to work on that.

SPEAKER_01 9:54

Yeah, it's amazing. And I just one other question on this particular topic, and that's you know, how can women tell the difference because we're not in tune with our bodies very well? How can we tell the difference between what's a hormonal change and what's a nervous system issue? Or is there a way to even understand those as separate things? Because I know it all works together.

SPEAKER_03 10:16

Yeah, yes, it absolutely does. And when we hit midlife, that that wonderful estrogen that helped, I mean, it's it's important for reproduction and those kinds of things, but it also functions in our brain. It's it it helps us have a lot of tolerance. I think that's why we're able to raise children and do all the things that we do. And we hit midlife and the tolerance kind of goes. You're like, why am I doing this? What have I done to myself? And we we have taught ourselves to stay in the stress cycle, never letting it complete. And we're living on this cocktail of adrenaline and and cortisol and wondering why we feel like hell, you know, and um, I think it's it's very muddled together. Yeah um, but I it but I'm here to tell you it's good news. We can get this worked out, and really our brain is really poised for some wonderful things in midlife where we can reframe and really excavate our our identity and look at what we want those next years to look like, unlike we've ever been able to do before.

unknown 11:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Okay, so yeah, let's come on to a little uh to the fix in a little bit. I want to delve into this idea. You mentioned that you work mainly with high achieving women, and you know, as a man looking in, I don't know any women above the age of 40 who who aren't high achievers, right? Irrespective of what's happening in their career, they tend to be juggling family parents, their own parents who are getting getting older. They're working, they're there for their friends, they're there every time the PTA comes calling, they're they're rushing to help. They won't say no to anything. So I almost don't see any woman who I who I think isn't doesn't seem to be overachieving and juggling a million balls at this at the same time. But is there something, do you think, specific about high achieving career women that adds on an extra layer on top of all that? Or is it just another function of womanhood?

SPEAKER_03 12:29

Oh, that's a good question, and you're absolutely right. Women have been um conditioned from very early in life to appease and please and swallow their truth to keep the peace and over function. We're living way past capacity by doing all the things you're talking about, and then you bring in a woman who's trained to be a doctor or a lawyer or a counselor or a PhD professor, you add in that layer of what they went through in school. Because I'm telling you, that's not a fun that that's a rigor in itself, just to get through grad school and all the threats, and now you and then you have to do internships, you're having to prove yourself. So it's not just high achieving women, you're right, it's all women. There's a we have learned to tie our worth to our production, to what we do, instead of just being valuable for being here. We're just I mean, I work with women, y'all, and and I will give her an assignment just color for 10 minutes on Saturday. That's all I want you to do this week. And she comes back and she's like, I couldn't do it. I was gonna crawl out of my skin. Busy becomes a drug. We get great dopamine hits from all the busy and and being rewarded for, oh, you worked 14 hours this week and took on five new clients when you had no capacity and you're rewarded for it, you know. It um, and yes, you lay in, you factor in the parents that now I mean there's some grief that goes in there that we have to work through and perhaps some resentment because when we don't get our needs met, resentment is a very natural and sacred emotion that's gonna come up. And so many women feel so guilty if they feel resentful about something. Oh, I shouldn't do that. Yeah, any emotion that comes up is a right emotion, and you need to explore that and really get embodied and see what it's trying to tell you. But it's with these overachieving women, the extra layer, and especially as you get into later um, you know, later profession, like right now, I'm a department chair at a university, and I'm responsible for everything counseling going through this. Um, we're going through an accreditation visit. I can't here I'm preaching this stuff, and I was telling my husband last night, my God, I can't even sleep. I'm so wound up. You know, I'm in fight or flight right now. What happens as we get better in our career, we get the harder cases, we get more responsibility. We're the ones that train the new people coming in. So that adds another layer of um stress, if you will.

SPEAKER_00 15:15

Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? Because we talk about all this stuff that's going on and then wonder why there's a disconnection from pleasure. And you know, really the question is where do we even find time for the pleasure in the first place?

SPEAKER_03 15:29

Oh, yeah. Well, it I mean, yesterday morning my husband was feeling a bit frisky, and I was like, You you're crazy, man. I got way too much to do right now if you know and then I had to go back and go, I'm so sorry. You know, we'll make some time here, but but that's I mean, for women, desire just feels like one more thing on their to-do list. How I if you talk to women, they will tell you about the oblig and and you know, um, we love our partners. Oblig obligatory sex comes in very frequently. Uh faking an orgasm comes in very frequently because we love the partner, okay. We'll just we'll have the sex and this over. Oh, he he or she needs to hear this. So fake fake an orgasm. So we're teaching our body not to be safe. I you know, we're we don't mean to, but over years we've we've we've we've taught confused. Yeah, there's some confusion there. What does what does desire even look like these days?

SPEAKER_01 16:34

I was just thinking, you know, when we look at the two things that we talked about so far, we think we can we can run businesses. Women are professors and CEOs and department chairs, and um, you know, we remember everybody's appointments and we call them to remind them and and because they'll forget, we do our meal prep and we answer, you know, emails and while we're waiting for the light to change, and then we get home and we wonder why we're suddenly not this sex goddess at 9 45 p.m. when there's no energy left, right? And and like you say, we we love our partners, but I think that that desire isn't something we can just flip on like a light switch. So so what you know one of the things that that I think comes up is we become roommates and sometimes instead of partners and and lovers and all of the other things that we're meant to to be together. So um, you know, how how do we know? Like what are some of the warning signs that we're we might be slipping into the roommate territory, as it were?

SPEAKER_03 17:42

Yeah, and you know, that's really insiduous. It I've done a lot of marriage counseling in my in my career and um worked with couples who, you know, are waking up going, I didn't like him anymore. I didn't like her anymore. When did this happen? It's very insiduous. We we stay so busy, we and we don't necessarily take care of ourselves, we're so busy giving to others, and and we, you know, there's a um myth that we can't pour from an empty cup. I think that's BS. We do it all the time, and we become that empty cup. And when we're that empty cup, there's not much left to nurture a relationship or nurture that marriage in the manner that it needs to be nurtured. And and then I've worked with a lot of folks where resentment, you know, we swallow our truth, keep the peace, blah, blah, blah, or those needs aren't getting met, and couples, the partners start resenting each other and um don't work through through that resentment. Like I said, it's a very sacred emotion if we get in there and really listen to it. But if we don't, it can build cement around our heart with with our marriage, with our partners. So that that roommate marriage, and it's more sadly, it's more common than not, even with couples have just moved out of the bedroom together and they're just tolerating each other, which sends, you know, if the kids are still home, that really sends a matter, which is a whole other whole other gig. But the kids are watching this and learning about what marriage looks like. And a lot of that, well, that's your nervous system so worn out that it can't to try and think about maintenanceing a marriage just feels like one more thing on the to-do list. And I just I'm overwhelmed. I can't even think about having the energy to do that. And it's a very um, it's a it's a very fixable thing. Good old Texas. I'm in Texas. We fix things out here. So, you know, it's a it's a very fixable thing if you take the time to get nervous systems regulated, which is, you know, his and hers, or how whatever, however, we're coupled, getting both nervous systems regulated. That co-regulation is imminently necessary for desire to come back online, getting out of sympathetic and out of dorsal vagal and into ventral, where that's our sympathetic. That's um, that's our connected. We're able to connect, that's our social place, that's where desire lives. Curiosity. Trying to get couples to get curiosity back online. Um, and one thing about desire, I I just want to say right quick, so many women don't realize only about 10 to 15 of women, I don't care if you're 20 or 65, experience spontaneous desire. We're not gonna wake up horny for women that just doesn't happen. It's very important for women to understand only about 10 to 15 percent percent of women have spontaneous desire where you just wake up wanting it. 85 to 90, 90 percent of us, it's contextual, it's responsive desire. And as we get older, that's gonna take a little longer. And also that's something to think about as you're trying to recover from that roommate um situation, you don't want the other partner to feel hurt, you know. It's it's nothing personal, it's just you know, responsive desire might look different as we get older.

SPEAKER_00 21:13

This is really interesting, isn't it? I think because that 85, 90% stat that you just gave us a lot of men hear low libido and they assume that that's rejection, and that might be coming at this time of life because you know all the things that we've talked about, all that business, wearing business as a badge of honour, right? So, how can a man make that easier for his wife, or what can he do to help change that around? You know, what do we need to understand as guys that will help you feel more comfortable when it comes to initiating sex?

SPEAKER_03 21:54

Yeah, such a good question. And you know, it's that safety factor um not pressure. Please never schedule sex. That's just one more thing on your to-do list that it feels like a lot of pressure. And it's really important to have these conversations with clothes on at the kitchen table or you know, out on the back porch to keep that bedroom sacred and to keep shame and blame out of the game because it's not about anyone doing anything wrong, it's about helping both nervous systems feel safe and regulated so that desire can even present itself. So I mean, I I lucked out with my hubby. He like I said, he yesterday morning, and and I am in the midst of this site visit stuff that is a special kind of hell. And he realizes that. And he was like, it's okay, baby. And you know, he just kind of rubbed my neck. He said, I don't want anything, just gonna rub your neck. I just I just love you and want to connect with you. I think those are very important messages that I don't expect anything. In fact, with couples, when we're trying to help get things back online, I'll give assignments that, you know, genitals and sex are off the table for this next month. We're we're just gonna work on connection, touching, getting yours both of you back re-embodied, where you sit on the sofa and maybe just hold hands and feel the warmth of the hand, feel where the calluses are, just touch, just trying to get that root chakra and that sacral chakra balanced. Because men, I mean, men have those same chakras, you know, balanced, so that eventually we can get to um you know back to where genitals come back online. I mean, they're online, but but think about it if a woman is in fight or flight for so many years or dorsal vagal when she's braced, just getting ready for things, that pelvic floor is braced, and then we tell her to go kegel, you know, go do kegels, and she's like, hello, pig kegling for and what's happened, blood flow to your genitals are cut off, plus that's your root chakra, everything's just braced, so you really have to work on relaxing and um you know, um, bringing that into the equation when it comes to connecting with your partner. Um, those mirror neurons are really important when you're co-regulating, and they'll they'll come into play and they can help with safety very much.

SPEAKER_00 24:28

Okay, here's an interesting question for you, Julie. Other times where or other relationships where it's okay for a couple to just decide, you know what, we aren't we aren't gonna bother with it anymore. We are just gonna live live a co-parenting, co-habiting relationship, and and sex is just off the table for both of us. Is that okay, or is it should it still be an integral part of a couple's relationship?

SPEAKER_03 24:57

Well, yeah, I I'm trained in a um therapy called discernment counseling, and it's where a couple, because generally when they hit marriage counseling, it's like I'm done, I just want to prove I tried, I'm out, you know, I'm out the door. So in discernment counseling, it's it's I think it's four weeks, and it's um at the end of the four weeks, the goal is you either decide to live in the special kind of hell that you made for each other, and that's fine, man. That's up to you. That's your life. Or you choose to actually do some marriage counseling, or you choose to go find a divorce lawyer. I mean, that's that's really trying to help them get to the nuts and bolts. And I can't tell you how many people choose to just stay in the um in the situation where they're just gonna be roommates and that they don't want to try to work on having a sexual life again. And um, they want to live with that resentment, you know, they don't want to work past it. And and we're free, I mean, we have free will, right? We get to make that choice. Um, so I can't judge if it's right or wrong. They they get to make that choice for themselves. For me personally, uh, I think that would be awful. Um Esther Perrell, and I'm sure y'all have heard of her, she's a great sex therapist. She has a great video that I will uh refer my couples to. And what she says, you know, maybe it was an affair, maybe some there was some kind of uh break, some kind of rupture in the relationship that can um look betrayal look is far more than just um an affair, but there's a betrayal in the relationship. And she says, okay, that marriage is over, you know, we're just gonna put that one to bed. But this new marriage, from here forward, you can create a new marriage that has all the yumminess that you want and leave that in the dirt. And that um that's helped quite a few of couples I've worked with to kind of reframe things. Yeah, we can leave that resentment, we can kind of work through whatever we need to work through there and start this fresh chapter, this exciting chapter together. And and midlife gives gives us that opportunity. We can start this fresh chapter, you know.

SPEAKER_00 27:06

It's a great opportunity to start again, right? Or or to reinvent oneself uh for both men and women, I'd say. So you talked, we've talked a lot, and we've we've moved around this idea of you know, this is a long, deep-seated challenge for some people, isn't it? You said that for some people you've been working with them for months and months and months before they can start to open up. But let's just pull it into a couple of quick fire practical questions, then. So, if you had to give one thing a woman could do today to reconnect with herself, what would it be? What kind of exercise would you give her?

SPEAKER_03 27:47

The very first thing I'm gonna tell her to do is a full body scan. Get trained in that. Uh, and you just from your head, um, you know, throat, chest, uh, you're scanning the chakras and be curious about whatever physical sensations might come up. I promise our body is very wise and will tell you things. If you get quiet and curious, we so often judge and we're very mean to ourselves. So self-compassion is another very important component. Kristen Neff, Dr. Neff out at the University of Texas, she has done research on self-compassion. Great book, a great, great website. If someone's like, what the hell is self-compassion? You can figure that out pretty quick off that website. But approaching that body scan with self-compassion and curiosity is it can be a game changer, complete game changer.

SPEAKER_01 28:40

What's one thing that partners should know about midlife women in their relationship?

SPEAKER_03 28:48

I would just invite, well, curiosity. I mean, I think that that's a that's a cure all for a lot of things, bringing curiosity into the relationship, but also knowing that both of us have changed. Yeah, um, we've had illness. I mean, I've had breast cancer, my husband's had brain cancer. I mean, you know, life has changed. Our kids are grown, our bodies have changed. Um, where in the 20s you can pop off some orgasms pretty quick and woo-hoo, here we go. You know, in your 50s, 60s, you need to approach things differently with um allowing time and space and take expectations off the table. Maybe we just connect and just feel good holding hands. Just allowing change, I think, is very important. Um, because I think we we approach things with the same expectations that we had maybe in our 20s and 30s, and that's just not gonna happen.

SPEAKER_01 29:45

No, well, and you know, intimacy is very different from sex, and I think for some people they don't really see a difference there, right?

SPEAKER_03 29:55

Yeah, that's a good point. That's absolutely and and when intimacy is uh is gone, uh you're not uh intimacy is very important, and that's where uh that connection, that's what I'm trying to say, the connection that happens with intimacy, be it uh just we're co-regulated, and I can we can sit and look in each other's eyes for a few moments. We spend, we have a ritual each morning, we drink coffee together. I mean, it's very important to stay connected and to share each other's lives. Would I see those roommate marriages? Man, they're not even sharing lives. They're they are doing different bank accounts, different vacations, different, don't even ride in the car together to their kids' graduation. It's important that connection, all those little things. Um, especially in long-term relationships, you have such history you've shared with each other. It's um honoring that.

SPEAKER_00 30:54

Last question for you, Julie, before we let you go. What's the biggest myth about libido after 40, would you say?

SPEAKER_03 31:03

That it's gone. Um it's there. She has not died. She we've just lost track of her because we've been so busy and so braced. Our nervous system has said, fine, Chicky Pooh, we're gonna put her over here. You just have to excavate her and make space in your life again by getting that nervous system regulated. Um, and it isn't that I wish I'd known more about that when I was raising kids. My kids are in their 40s, but I think we just show up so different when we're regulated and have um think about it, y'all. When it when you're upset, can you really listen to others and be connected to others? I mean, we just kind of shut down. That's not available. And um, that's what's happened to that libido. She's still there, she's just sitting over in the corner waiting for the invitation to come back online.

SPEAKER_01 31:59

Amazing. Well, this is this has been really helpful and very enlightening. And I know that our listeners are gonna love it because this is something I think that's a really important piece of aging and relationships and just rediscovering ourselves and reinventing ourselves in in this phase of life. Um, so so where can people find you and what's the best way to connect with you?

SPEAKER_03 32:25

Um probably my website. I've got two podcasts. Each one goes with each one of my books, and um everything's linked on my podcast, my books, and um, I have a radiance, uh somatic radiance intensive I do with ladies. It's a seven-day thing, but all of that good stuff is on my website.

SPEAKER_01 32:45

Fantastic. And we'll make sure to put all of that information down in the show notes. So thank you. Thank you so thank you so much for joining us today. It's been such a great conversation, and uh, we definitely hope that we can connect again later in the future. Um, is there anything you would like to say before we sign off?

SPEAKER_03 33:08

Just um, you're enough and you're worth the effort. It's gonna get messy before it gets better, but that's okay.

SPEAKER_01 33:14

All right. So if this conversation hits home for you, please share it with another woman who needs to hear it because trust us, she probably does. This has been James and Julie from Fabulous Beyond 40. We'll see you again next week at our next podcast. In the meantime, stay strong and stay fabulous.