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

This is where my work has evolved. After thirty years in the consulting room, I am winding down clinical practice and dedicating most of my work to mentoring, writing, speaking and teaching. But some clinical work I am keeping. And for the rest, there are clear doors.

If something in you is leaning forward as you read this, that is the part of you my work is for. The quiet rebellion. The I can't keep living like this. The knowing that your life needs to fit who you are now rather than who you were twenty years ago. You are not failing. You are awakening. This work, this presence, exists so you do not have to walk it alone.

Three doors. Here is how to find yours.

Door 1: 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, a community of women doing this work alongside you, and discounts on the broader midlife events I run. 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 be offered a place at our in-person Midlife Rebellion events. And 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 as long as you need it.