The Story

I spent seven years in the trenches of perimenopause. Bone-deep exhaustion. Words slipping mid-sentence. A mood weather system that could take out a small village. HRT did nothing for me, and for the small percentage of women whose bodies also don't take to it, I see you. To make it interesting, perimenopause didn't arrive alone. It came alongside divorce, raising three sons, a seven-year living-apart-together relationship, and the building and eventual selling of an eighteen-year private practice, Perth Psychology Collective, that I had once thought I would never sell.

I had spent nearly three decades as a clinician. I had sat with women in courtrooms, hospitals, universities, prisons and therapy rooms. I could hold complex stories without flinching. But nothing had cracked me open like my own midlife.

The cracking was the turning point.

Perimenopause stripped me down to the truth I had been managing around. The patterns of self-silencing. The reflex to be capable, agreeable, useful, fine. The slow, decades-long contract of self-abandonment I had signed without ever reading. By the time I crossed into menopause, what was left of me was sharper. Clearer. Less interested in being easy. More interested in being honest.

And I realised something else. The standard mental health model could not hold what I had just walked through. It would have pathologised me. It would have offered me labels and medications and management strategies for what was, in fact, a developmental reckoning. Not a disorder. A threshold.

That recognition is the whole body of work.

The Reframe

Most midlife distress is not pathology. It is psychological developmental transition, as significant to the Self as adolescence or matrescence. The activating event is a major hormonal change. The work is the renegotiation of identity, meaning, power, relationships, individuation, narrative and transition itself.

I have given this work language. The Menopausal Transition Matrix (MTM) maps how identity destabilises and reorganises across midlife. IMPRINT names the seven developmental tasks at the heart of the transition. Both have come out of three decades of clinical listening and the lived experience of walking the territory myself.

What I do now

That body of work shows up in different ways these days, depending on what you need. Three doors. Here is how to find yours.

Door 1: Developmental Work via The Midlife Rebellion

Mentoring and developmental work with me, through The Midlife Psychologist.

This is for you if what you are actually navigating is identity, meaning, boundaries, the who am I now of midlife, and you are not in clinical crisis. It is not therapy. I am clear about that, and I will be clear with you. It is psychologically informed mentoring, grounded in clinical rigour, held with care.

Two ways in. The Circle is group mentoring: one live group session a month, reflection prompts and embodiment practices between calls, a psychologically informed developmental framework underpinning all of it, replays of every session, a community of women doing this work with you. The Inner Circle adds one 1:1 session with me each month on top of all of that. Places in the Inner Circle are limited, so the work stays sustainable on both sides.

And the added perk of being the first to not only be offered a place at our in-person Midlife Rebellion events but to receive a discount. These events are for the sole purpose of bringing women together to chase (create and experience) joy.

No GP referral. No six-session check-in. No reapplying next year to keep going. One consistent relationship, for the 9-month program and the opportunity to continue beyond that should you wish.