Reversing the narcissist's gaze.  How to see yourself clearly with your own eyes.

by Joanna Poppink, MFT

Summary

Reversing the narcissist’s gaze means breaking free from the distortion of seeing yourself through another person’s eyes. When a woman lives too long under that gaze, her sense of reality narrows to fit someone else’s story. Depth psychotherapy helps her reclaim her vision—seeing with clarity, depth, and compassion from within.
This recovery is not about revenge or judgment. It is about freedom: the restoration of inner sight and truth.

Free Instinctive energy protects the innocent self.

 

Claiming the Lost Self: An Essential Task for Midlife Women — Seven-Part Series

The Rescue Dream
By Joanna Poppink, MFT

Series Note
The Rescue Dream is Article 4 in the seven-part series, Claiming the Lost Self. The series explores how women lose connection to their inner truth through distorted ideas of love and loyalty, and how depth psychotherapy supports the return of the self that survived under a heavy cloak of defenses. Each article builds on the last. Together they trace the psyche’s movement from distortion to awakening through dreams, memory, embodiment, and spiritual renewal.

Summary
A rescue dream appears only when the psyche senses that a woman has created enough inner ground to face what once drove her into hiding. These dreams do not arrive early in therapy. They come after slow but profound internal shifts. When the psyche senses coherence, presence, and even brief moments of self-recognition, it releases a dream that carries danger, memory, instinct, and new possibilities. Such dreams show that the unconscious is ready to rewrite an old story and reveal the strength a woman has been growing one quiet change at a time.

The Fear of Speaking Up iin Midlife Women: The river has its own voice, honest and true.

By Joanna Poppink, MFT

I. The Parallel Between Corporate Hierarchies and Women’s Inner Lives

The fear of speaking up in midlife women mirrors what happens in the corporate middle. Recent research in Harvard Business Review reports that middle managers—those who bridge the gap between strategy and execution—experience the least psychological security in their organizations (Hagen & Zhao, 2025). They’re responsible for communication flow, yet often the least free to speak.

This same dynamic is alive in midlife women. The fear of speaking up in midlife women mirrors what happens in the corporate middle: those who hold families, teams, and communities together often feel the least safe expressing themselves.

Many women between forty and seventy live in this psychological middle ground. They mediate between generations, soothe conflict, and maintain stability—at significant personal cost. Outwardly composed, inwardly silenced, they fear that honest words could fracture the systems they sustain.

Under the flower, hidden from the sky or stretching to the sky? Permanent fail or temporary stall?

Discouragement versus depression in midlife women: The difference can shape how you understand your emotions and your healing path. Discouragement is a temporary emotional response to frustration or loss, while depression is a deeper withdrawal of vitality that signals psychological and spiritual distress. Knowing this difference helps you recognize when your struggle is part of ordinary discouragement—and when it has become depression that needs care.

Discouragement: A Temporary Shadow

Discouragement is part of being alive. It comes when effort meets resistance — when your hopes and reality collide. You may feel deflated when a project stalls, a relationship falters, or your energy falls short. Yet even in discouragement, you care. You still want to move forward, even if you need to rest first.

 

Depth recovery begins like strong roots—quiet, essential, unseen, yet nourishes, anchors, and sustains.

Depth oriented recovery begins when focus on symptom control ends. Lasting eating disorder recovery begins after the symptoms subside or stop, and a woman turns to healing psychic wounds beneath them. These are wounds that will power and control cannot touch.

Summary: Depth psychotherapy for eating disorder recovery

Many treatment programs focus on symptom management—what and when to eat, how to challenge distorted thoughts, and how to prevent relapse. These are essential beginnings, but they don’t complete recovery. Approaching eating disorder recovery only through management exposes the psychological and emotional vulnerabilities that shaped the disorder. Beneath stabilized behavior live the psychic wounds and trauma adaptations that created it. Depth-oriented psychotherapy addresses the unfinished work: healing the fears and vulnerabilities at the root of the disorder.

When Recovery Stops Too Soon

A woman may complete treatment, follow her nutrition plan, and appear fully recovered—yet still feel anxious, isolated, and eager to please. She may battle cravings she struggles to suppress, take on harmful relationships, or link herself to people who exploit her.

She may think, “At least I’m not bingeing, purging, or starving. I can look confident. But inside, I’m more afraid and limited than ever.”

That unease is not failure; it’s the psyche reminding her that recovery measured only by behavior leaves the deeper wound untouched. Depth psychotherapy for eating disorder recovery reaches those wounds.

Conventional therapies teach control and stabilization. Depth-oriented work begins where control ends—at the moment she dares to ask, What are my cravings saying? What part of me is afraid to show itself? Why?

(See also: Why Eating Disorder Recovery Needs Depth-Oriented Healing for how modern treatment often misses the soul.)

Trauma Adaptations and the Body’s Memory

An eating disorder is rarely about food. The body attempts to regulate terror, shame, and longing that once dominated the woman and left her disoriented and hopeless.

The binge may control panic; restriction may impose order; purging may release unbearable emotion. Each ritual carries intelligence—it once kept the psyche alive despite despair.

When these behaviors stop without addressing the pain beneath them, she can feel exposed, even terrified—ripped from familiar protections yet unable to rest in her new freedom. She may present false confidence while quietly scanning for danger she cannot anticipate or manage.

Research in trauma recovery supports this deeper approach. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. describes how the body carries unprocessed experience until it can be felt and integrated within safe connection.

Depth-oriented eating disorder recovery work honors the disorder’s original protective purpose while helping her build new ways to recognize and cope with fear from a grounded, adult self.

Listening Instead of Erasing

Depth psychotherapy invites curiosity rather than combat.

The question shifts from “How do I stop this?” to “What is this protecting?”

In the quiet of honest attention, new meaning emerges. The symptom becomes a bridge to the parts of herself that have waited to be known.

Depth-oriented psychotherapy begins here—with reverence for the intelligence behind the symptom. Instead of eradicating behavior, it listens and introduces healing and new inner wisdom.

This listening transforms self-control into self-contact. What once looked destructive often reveals itself as devotion—the psyche’s effort to preserve life when no one else could.

A Woman’s Journey Toward Integration

Clara (a composite drawn from many true stories) had been binge-free for more than two years but felt numb and frightened.

“Everyone says I’m doing great,” she told me. “I think I’m doing great too—because I eat like a normal person most of the time. But I’m always pretending to be someone I’m not. I can’t stand up for myself, even with friends.”

During in-depth therapy, her dreams revealed locked doors, silent rooms, and shadowed monsters. She saw fragile birds in cages and small candles burning in vast dark caverns. Gradually, she recognized them as images of her childhood: years spent protecting her younger sister while denying her own fear.

The caged bird was her pure self—protected but unable to sing or fly. The candles showed her inner light, flickering but unextinguished amid danger.

What she could not yet know was that the bird and the light were still alive in her. That part of her needed freedom—the chance to grow and claim authority over her life.

As Clara learned to feel and name what she once suppressed, the darkness lifted. She began to act from the inner self she had kept caged in silence. She painted again, laughed easily, and trusted her body’s signals. Healing arrived not through perfection but through the gradual emergence of her own light and inner song.

The Work of Midlife Healing

Many women meet unfinished recovery again in midlife. Hormonal changes, loss, and shifting identities loosen old defenses. What was once contained resurfaces—grief, anger, desire, creativity. Rather than regression, this is an invitation to integration. It's time to go deep or deeper than before. Depth oriented recovery work reaches the new psychic energies that need attention now.

Earlier recovery helped her face the challenges of that time; midlife brings new ones. She now needs more of her inner light and inner song than ever before. What remains in the dark must emerge.

Depth psychotherapy for eating disorder recovery at this stage unites the younger self who suffered with the woman who can now protect her. The task is not to perform strength but to embody wholeness.

(See also: Depth-Oriented Psychotherapy for Midlife Women: How It Works and Why It Matters for how this process unfolds beyond eating disorders.)

Freedom Beyond Control

Behavioral stability matters, but genuine freedom is something else.

Freedom appears when a woman inhabits her body without fear, recognizes cravings and emotions as information, and trusts her feelings as an ally rather than a threat.

Depth work transforms recovery from management to meaning. The goal is not to fix the past but to live from an integrated present—where nourishment, expression, and intimacy coexist, and the woman who once fought herself can finally live whole.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What does “unfinished work” mean in recovery?

A: It refers to the emotional and symbolic layers that remain after symptoms subside—the unresolved trauma, grief, and identity conflicts that the disorder once managed.

Q: Is depth-oriented recovery opposed to CBT or medication?

A: No. Those approaches create stability. Depth work continues the process by addressing the underlying psychic wounds and restoring inner authority.

Q: How long does depth therapy take?

A: It unfolds at the pace of authenticity. There is no fixed duration—only the gradual emergence of self-trust and ease within one’s own being.

Q: Why does midlife often reopen earlier struggles?

A: Midlife transitions expose what adaptation once concealed. Depth work turns these crises into opportunities for genuine transformation.

Resources

• Poppink, J. Healing Your Hungry Heart: Recovering from Your Eating Disorder. Conari Press, 2011.
• Woodman, M. Addiction to Perfection. Inner City Books, 1982.
• Kalsched, D. The Inner World of Trauma. Routledge, 1996.
• van der Kolk, B. The Body Keeps the Score. Viking, 2014.
• Ogden, P. & Fisher, J. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Norton, 2015.

Midlife Professional Women: Depth Psychotherapy for Hidden Patterns of Compliance

Diane Keaton Suffered from Bulimia

Why Eating Disorder Treatment Needs Depth Oriented Recovery Work

When the Bark Splits: This article explores the moment inner development becomes visible and disruptive. It helps readers recognize how psychological rupture is often the first sign of authentic emergence.

Reversing the Narcissist’s Gaze: This article shows how women reclaim their own perception after years of being defined by someone else. It offers insight into the lived experience of recovering inner authority from distortion.

 

Joanna Poppink, MFT, is a depth-oriented psychotherapist specializing in midlife and older women’s recovery, trauma integration, and the transformation of eating disorders. She offers virtual psychotherapy in California, Arizona, Florida, and Oregon. For a free telephone consultation, write to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

 

For a free telephone consultation, e-mail her at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 

The tree's unseen roots reach farther than its branches. Depth versus surface steadies the tree. Us too.

 Depth Oriented Recovery Work:  A Psychotherapist’s Reflection

Summary

Many modern treatment programs promise eating disorder recovery through rapid symptom control, cognitive techniques, or medication. But beneath the visible patterns of restriction, bingeing, and purging lie psychic wounds that cannot be managed into healing. This essay explores why depth-oriented recovery work remains essential—and how genuine transformation arises not from control, but from contact with the self that the disorder once protected.

Main Article (1,650 words)

The Age of Quick Fixes

After forty years of sitting with people who struggle to make peace with their bodies and their hungers, I find myself both grateful for modern progress and uneasy with its direction. The eating disorder field now emphasizes techniques—CBT worksheets, exposure hierarchies, and medical management—designed to regulate behavior and thought. Insurance companies, research protocols, and even the language of recovery have followed suit.

A woman may learn to eat three balanced meals and two snacks, replace “distorted cognitions,” and identify her triggers. She may even achieve some symptom remission. But often she remains at war with herself in subtler ways—haunted by shame, restlessness, a desire to participate in mild to severe self-harm activities, and a persistent fear of being seen. These inner fractures, once the source of her eating disorder symptoms, now live silently beneath her new routines. When they emerge and she binges, restricts, or vomits, she holds on to the diagnosis that this behavior is not serious if it happens only once or twice a month. She experiences a kind of cognitive distortion and a sense of lying to herself because she knows those behaviors are not correct, are not recovery, and are always lurking, ready to emerge when her pressures or triggers are too intense for her to bear.

Depth work begins where the manualized approaches end.

When Treatment Forgets the Soul: the need for depth oriented recovery work

The shift toward evidence-based therapy has helped thousands stabilize, but it has also quietly exiled the psyche. In most treatment centers, a woman’s dreams, memories, and symbolic inner life are often viewed as distractions from measurable outcomes. Her eating disorder is framed as a problem to be managed, not a language to be understood.

This neglect is not malicious—it is cultural. We live in an era where recovery is often equated with productivity. The goal is to return quickly to function, to “move on,” to perform wellness. But psychic healing unfolds differently. It is cyclical, imaginal, and mysterious. It requires time, solitude, and a willingness to engage with what has been hidden.

Depth psychotherapy invites the woman not to suppress her symptom but to ask what it expresses and what it accomplishes. Yes, it has negative consequences, but it also relieves her of anxiety and gives her a sense of control and peace, if only for a short time.  Bingeing may have once been her body’s protest or solace during emotional starvation. Restriction may have been an act of control when life felt formless or unsafe. These gestures carry meaning; they are not merely mistakes or behavioral malfunctions.

The Protective Genius of the Disorder

When we label bulimia or anorexia purely as pathology, we miss the intelligence that created them. The disorder is often a psychic compromise—a survival adaptation to trauma, neglect, or unbearable longing. In neurological terms, the brain attempts to regulate overwhelming emotion through ritualized behavior. In psychological terms, it is the ego’s defense against the terror of annihilation.

But when the symptom is stripped away without addressing the terror it concealed, the woman may feel more fragile than before. The behaviors vanish, yet the raw pain beneath remains unintegrated. She may relapse or transfer the compulsion to another domain: perfectionism, work, relationships, or even spiritual striving. She may isolate herself and exercise extreme control over who can enter her life. She may act out her feelings sexually, by becoming sexually anorexic or sexually bulimic, i.e., having no sex or excessive sex or alternating between bingeing on sex and then restricting her sexual activities.

The deeper task, addressed by depth oriented recovery work,  is not simply to stop the behavior but to meet the self that the behavior defended. The goal is to find, develop, and strengthen the self’s ability to care for itself sturdily and healthily.

The Slow Return to Inner Authority

Depth oriented psychotherapy asks something radical of both therapist and patient: patience. In the beginning, nothing changes. But beneath the surface, a new internal relationship begins to form—between the frightened parts of the self and the witnessing consciousness that can hold them.

Gradually, the woman learns to inhabit her own interior space without dissociating or numbing. She relies on the presence and sensed experience of her therapist to risk knowing more about her own inner life. She begins to sense the origins of her hunger—not just for food, but for safety, recognition, and truth. What once seemed dangerous to feel becomes tolerable. Over time, this reclaims what neuroscience calls neural integration—and what the psyche calls wholeness.

Recovery then becomes more than the absence of symptoms. It becomes the presence of self.

The Cultural Displacement of Depth

Why has depth recovery work fallen so far from favor? Because it cannot be mass-produced. It requires devotion, mystery, and language that resists quantification. It values metaphor over metric. It asks questions that disrupt the very systems eager to declare a cure.

Insurance plans will not reimburse a conversation about a dream of a locked door, nor will a randomized controlled trial easily capture the slow emergence of courage in a woman who finally speaks what was once unspeakable. Yet this is where transformation lives—in what cannot be counted.

The modern world prefers measurable wellness to soulful integration. But the women who come to therapy after exhausting all other routes already know: symptom management does not touch the deepest wound.

The Return of Meaning

What does it mean to heal from an eating disorder at depth? It means that hunger becomes human again. Food loses its moral charge. The woman no longer measures her worth in control or purity. She begins to feel curiosity toward her inner life, her body, and her relationships. She develops a tolerance for uncertainty, and with it, the freedom to live authentically.

In this sense, recovery is not an end state but a return to participation with life. It is not compliance with a program but reconciliation with one’s own being.

A Therapist’s Weariness, and Hope

After decades of writing and speaking about eating disorders, I, too, have felt weary of repeating what feels self-evident, of witnessing new generations suffer the same distortions in a culture that glorifies control.  I become disheartened when a woman has spent years bingeing and purging or compulsively overeating and still thinks her problem is with food. She may call because she is terrified that her life is in danger.  She’s had stents implanted and knees replaced, yet she still talks about diets, exercise, and failures at following behavioral protocols. 

Yet my weariness and heartache, when I examine myself and my work, are also a call. It reminds me that the conversation must move deeper still, to the level of meaning and psyche.

The next step in our understanding of recovery must not be faster cognitive restructuring or new medications. It must be the restoration of the human spirit to the center of treatment.

Toward the Unfinished Work

In the companion essay to this essay, The Unfinished Work Beneath Symptom Relief, I’ll explore what happens when depth healing begins—the encounter with trauma memory, the symbolic language of the body, and the slow, courageous reconstruction of self-trust. For now, it is enough to remember that eating disorders are not solved through willpower or techniques. They are invitations to know the self that has lived unseen.

FAQ

Q: What’s the difference between modern evidence-based treatment and depth psychotherapy?

A: Evidence-based treatments target behaviors and thoughts, while depth psychotherapy addresses the unconscious meanings, trauma patterns, and relational wounds beneath those symptoms.

Q: Are CBT and medication wrong for treating eating disorders?

A: Not at all. They can stabilize acute distress. But without addressing the underlying psychic injuries, recovery often remains incomplete or fragile.

Q: Why do some women relapse even after years of apparent recovery?

A: When the inner causes of the disorder—shame, deprivation, fear of visibility—remain unintegrated, the psyche seeks other ways to express them. Deep work brings those causes into consciousness.

Resources

• Keaton, D. Then Again. Random House, 2011.
• Poppink, J. Healing Your Hungry Heart: Recovering from Your Eating Disorder. Conari Press, 2011.
• Woodman, M. The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation. Inner City Books, 1985.
• Kalsched, D. The Inner World of Trauma. Routledge, 1996.
• van der Kolk, B. The Body Keeps the Score. Viking, 2014.
• Diane Keaton Suffered From Bulimia

Signature

Joanna Poppink, MFT, is a depth-oriented psychotherapist specializing in midlife women’s development through life transitions,  trauma integration, and deep eating disorder recovery. She offers virtual psychotherapy in California, Arizona, Florida, and Oregon.

For a free 20 minute consultation, e-mail This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 

Strength and rooted confidence despite workplace betrayal.

Summary

Talented women are often targeted at work by jealous executives and insecure colleagues. This article, Workplace Sabotage: Why and How Talented Women Are Undermined, explores why and how workplace sabotage occurs, the psychology of envy in leadership, the toll this takes women, and how depth psychotherapy facilitates the transformation of betrayal into independence and strength.

A Case Story: When Excellence Threatens Mediocrity

A professional woman in a large, respected organization had built her reputation through years of high-quality work. She consistently met challenges, was given increasing responsibility, and became a trusted leader in her field.

 From womb to midlife: You are learning through experience in your earliest moments of life

Introduction: Why Gestational and Birth Imprints Matter at Midlife

by Joanna Poppink, MFT

Summary: Healing Your Earliest Imprints at Midlife

Your beginnings matter. Whether you were a twin, premature, born through violence, or carried the weight of your mother’s fear, those early experiences live on in body and psyche. They shape anxiety, relationships, and identity — but they also hold resilience, creativity, and depth.

At midlife, you have the strength to revisit these earliest imprints, not to retraumatize, but to integrate. Through psychotherapy, symbolic work, and body-based practices, your earliest beginnings can become a source of wholeness and renewal.

Introduction: Why Gestational and Birth Imprints Matter at Midlife

At midlife, many women begin to feel currents beneath the surface of their lives. On the outside, they may appear resilient, accomplished, and steady. Inside, though, they carry an undertow of anxiety, fragility, or exhaustion that doesn’t match the surface. Often, these feelings seem to come from nowhere. In truth, they are echoes of beginnings that have lived quietly in the body since gestation and birth.

These earliest imprints do not fade simply because we cannot consciously remember them. They shape our nervous systems, our attachment patterns, and our unconscious expectations of the world. For some women, these imprints carry wounds of loss, rejection, or struggle. Others have gifts of resilience, endurance, or deep connection. Most of us carry both.

Depth psychotherapy for women offers a safe and steady approach to bringing these unconscious stories into awareness. At midlife, you have the strength, wisdom, and perspective to revisit your earliest beginnings — not to retraumatize yourself, but to discover new meaning and strength in what you have carried all along. This is the heart of midlife women's psychotherapy.

Why Earliest Imprints Matter

Gestation and birth are not blank slates. The fetus is not passive. Even before birth, the developing child is sensing, registering, and responding. Maternal stress, nourishment, illness, or joy become part of the womb environment. The fetus responds to sound, rhythm, touch, and hormonal states.

This is the basis of gestational psychology. Our first experiences of safety, danger, nourishment, or deprivation are encoded into our systems long before we develop memory. These imprints shape the developing nervous system, our capacity to regulate stress, and our unconscious sense of whether the world can be trusted.

Later in life, these early experiences resurface in ways that feel confusing: sudden anxiety without cause, difficulty trusting intimacy, or a restless sense of being different. In therapy, we come to see that these are not random flaws but traces of our first environment.

The Range of Beginnings

No two gestations or births are alike. Among the women I work with, I have seen themes such as:

• Twins and Multiples: The gift of connection from the very beginning, but also the sorrow of lost siblings or the struggle to claim individuality.

• Prematurity: The will to survive against the odds, alongside a lifelong sense of fragility or rushing to catch up.

• Failed Abortion Survivors: The imprint of rejection and existential insecurity, but also the extraordinary resilience of clinging to life.

• Maternal Trauma: Growing in the womb of a mother facing violence, war, famine, or profound stress; inheriting her cortisol and adrenaline, but also her survival strength.

• Ordinary Complications: Breech births, cesareans, or difficult deliveries that leave subtle yet lasting effects on body memory and attachment.

Some women discover these stories through family history. Others feel them emerging symbolically in dreams or through body symptoms. However they surface, they are part of the living fabric of the psyche.

How Early Experiences Resurface at Midlife

Midlife is a threshold. It brings questions of identity, mortality, relationships, and purpose. Transitions such as menopause, caregiving, or loss can stir long-buried patterns.

This is often when early imprints return — not as memories, but as dreams, bodily symptoms, or recurring relational struggles. These womb experiences in midlife often feel like fresh pain, but they are echoes of beginnings.

Common signs include:

• Dreams of drowning, clinging, being trapped, or struggling to emerge (symbolic healing through dreams).

• Body memories: shallow breathing, chest tightness, and unexplained restlessness.

• Repeating patterns of fear of abandonment, survivor guilt, or difficulty trusting love.

These signs do not mean something is wrong with you. They are invitations from the unconscious to revisit beginnings and bring them into conscious life.

Three Ways of Processing Early Imprints

1. Literal Retelling

When a woman first learns her story — that she was premature, a twin, or a failed abortion survivor — it can be both clarifying and destabilizing. Literal retelling can validate feelings long carried in silence, but it also risks retraumatization if not handled with care. In therapy, retelling is used sparingly: enough to give shape, but not so much that the old wound is reopened raw.

2. Symbolic Work

The psyche often presents birth experiences symbolically: in dreams, guided imagery, or spontaneous metaphors. A woman might dream of drowning, clinging to a rock, or being pushed through a narrow passage.

The power of symbolic work lies in its ability to hold trauma at a distance, allowing us to approach and transform it through images. Staying with the symbol — the barnacle, the rock, the waves — allows the story to be lived, felt, and reframed without collapsing back into the unbearable. This is a key pathway for healing birth imprints.

3. Somatic and Aesthetic Practices

Because many early imprints are preverbal, they live most strongly in the body. Shallow breathing, restless sleep, unexplained tension — these can all be echoes of beginnings.

Somatic practices for early trauma (grounding, mindful movement, breathwork) and creative expression (art, ritual, music) let the body speak and release. Rituals can be especially healing: lighting a candle for a lost twin, planting a tree to honor survival, or creating art that externalizes what was once hidden.

Together, these three approaches form a safe, layered way of working:

• Retelling provides context.

• Symbolic work offers meaning.

• Somatic/aesthetic practices bring integration.

• Six Steps Toward Healing and Integration

Step 1 – Opening the Story Field
Healing begins with curiosity. You gently gather what you know — stories told, medical records, or the simple intuition that something happened. What matters is not accuracy, but resonance.

Step 2 – Listening to Symbols and Dreams
Dreams and images carry truths the body can bear. These symbols create distance and containment, allowing you to face the unbearable in a tolerable form.

Step 3 – Noticing the Body’s Memory
Your body remembers. Breath, posture, muscle tone — all carry traces of early life. Learning to listen with compassion transforms the body from an enemy into an ally.

Step 4 – Expressing Through Art and Ritual
Drawing, painting, writing, or ritual externalizes what is inside. Expression gives dignity to what was hidden.

Step 5 – Reframing the Story
The central task: transforming the story of the wound into a story of meaning. From “I almost didn’t make it” to “I carry a fierce will to live.” From “I was unwanted” to “I am uniquely here, with purpose.”

Step 6 – Living with Integration
Integration is ongoing. As you weave symbols, body awareness, and new meaning into your daily life, you begin to live with deeper trust, strength, and a sense of belonging. This builds lasting resilience in midlife women.

Depth Psychotherapy in Midlife

Depth psychotherapy is uniquely suited to this work. A midlife woman does not need quick symptom relief. She needs to understand her life at a deeper level — to reclaim what was hidden, to integrate what was split, and to discover new pathways forward.

In therapy, you are not alone. Your therapist holds the map while you bring honesty and willingness. The unconscious does not overwhelm you with more than you can bear. It reveals pieces of the story at the right time, in the form best for you to accept and process. Together, you honor the pain, discover the gifts, and move toward freedom. This is the promise of healing early life imprints through depth psychotherapy.

Frequently Asked Questions about Healing Your Earliest Imprints

Q1: I don’t remember my birth. How can it affect me now?
You don’t need conscious memory for early imprints to shape your life. Gestational and birth experiences remain in the body and psyche as patterns of emotion, anxiety, and relational dynamics.

Q2: Will exploring this retraumatize me?
No. Depth psychotherapy approaches these early imprints symbolically and gradually. The psyche presents what you are ready to face, and the therapeutic process provides safety, pacing, and containment.

Q3: What if my birth story includes something positive, like being a twin?
Your work then includes honoring the gifts alongside the wounds. Being a twin, for example, may mean you carry both deep early connection and the grief of separation. Integration allows you to hold both truths.

Q4: How long does it take to move through these steps?
There is no fixed timeline. Some women spend weeks on one stage; others return to the same theme over years. Healing is not linear—stages may overlap or recur.

Q5: Why is midlife the right time for this work?
By midlife, many women have the strength, perspective, and motivation to face what was once too overwhelming. This is often a season of reevaluation — of identity, relationships, and purpose.

Q6: How does depth psychotherapy differ from other therapies?
Depth psychotherapy does not only manage symptoms. It goes beneath them, exploring unconscious imprints, symbols, and relational patterns. It honors both the wound and the gift, supporting long-term transformation rather than short-term coping.

Resources for Further Exploration

Books

• Marion Woodman – Addiction to Perfection; The Pregnant Virgin

• Thomas Verny – The Secret Life of the Unborn Child

• Otto Rank – The Trauma of Birth

• Stanislav Grof – Beyond the Brain; The Human Encounter with Death

• Gabor Maté – In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

Organizations & Websites

• Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH): birthpsychology.com

• The Marian Woodman Foundation

• Somatic Experiencing International

Resources on this site

• Midlife Women: When Rage Becomes a Healing Force
• Midlife Women Worksheet: Power After Narcissistic Manipulation
• Women and the Stages of a Midlife Breakthrough
• Midlife Women as Consciousness Pioneers: Claiming Your Unlived Life
• "Women's Compliance and Triumph: The Cost of Both in Midlife"
• Worksheet: Midlife Women's Compliance, Reflections on Cost and Current Choices.

If you sense that your earliest beginnings still echo in your life, know that you are not alone. Depth-oriented psychotherapy provides a safe and steady space to explore these imprints and transform them into meaning and strength.

About Joanna Poppink, MFT
Joanna Poppink, MFT, is a depth oriented psychotherapist specializing in psychotherapy for midlife women, eating disorder recovery, and recovery from the impacts of narcissistic abuse. She is licensed in California, Arizona, Florida, and Oregon, and offers secure virtual sessions. If you sense your deeper self pressing upward and are ready to explore this work, please reach out. For a free telephone consultation, write This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit www.eatingdisorderrecovery.net.