Befriending Your Emotions: Living Wide-Open in Midlife & Beyond
We are wired for extraordinarily attuned emotional experiences. That’s just how we’re built. In this lifetime, we get to feel the whole, messy, magnificent spectrum—those heart-swelling, endorphin-releasing moments of awe, wonder, laughter, joy, peace, and gratitude.
And yes, that also means we’ll face embarrassment, heartbreak, regret, anxiety, and the occasional gut-punch of disappointment.
But here’s something fascinating: women’s emotional processing is uniquely attuned to what’s happening inside the body. Our brains are wired to communicate closely with the systems that regulate hormones, heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, and breath. This means our emotions don’t just sit in our minds; they ripple through our whole body, influencing everything from our gut to our heartbeat.
Meanwhile, men’s emotional centers tend to be more hooked into external cues—scanning the world and priming for action. Women’s emotions, though, are an inside job, asking us to listen closely to the signals our bodies send.
Every Emotion Needs Expression
Here’s the truth: every single emotion needs to be expressed. When we suppress, repress, or project them, they don’t disappear—they simply burrow deeper, showing up later as stress, illness, fractured relationships, or explosive reactions.
The work is not in avoiding emotions, but in learning to express them in healthy, appropriate ways. Louise Hay once said that a weekly angry pillow-punching session is good for the body and soul. That kind of physical release allows anger to move through instead of calcifying inside.
Joy, sadness, frustration, delight—all of them need air, voice, and movement. Expression is how we feel and heal.
The Both/And of Midlife
One of the gifts of midlife and beyond is our growing capacity to hold seemingly incompatible emotions all at once.
It’s the both/and of it all:
To be angry at an injustice while singing happily at your grandbaby’s birthday party.
To feel deep grief over what’s been lost while also laughing freely with a friend.
To hold compassion for someone who’s hurt you while also protecting your own boundaries.
And here’s the beautiful thing: it feels totally normal—because it is. By this stage of life, we know we are not one thing or another. We contain multitudes.
The Regrets We Don’t Want to Have
Part of the sacred work of a woman’s Second Half of Life is to create a life she loves so deeply that she has no regrets left on the table.
Two of the top five regrets of the dying speak directly to the way we relate to our emotions:
“I wish I’d let myself be happier.”
How many of us have developed the “heart habit” of holding back from joy? Maybe you’ve caught yourself thinking: Who am I to live moments of unmitigated delight? or I haven’t done enough yet to deserve this joy. We’ve been trained to treat happiness as a dessert to be earned, instead of as daily bread.“I wish I’d had the courage to express my love.”
Too often we silence our affirmations and gratitude, afraid of vulnerability or worried it might “give someone an inflated ego.” But love unexpressed is love withheld—and it becomes one of those emotional knots that weighs heavy over time.
Midlife is the perfect moment to unravel those knots. To say the words. To laugh freely. To savor joy in real time instead of postponing it.
Befriending Your Emotional Wiring
Befriending our wiring isn’t about picking and choosing only the “good” feelings while dodging the hard ones. It’s about developing the capacity to ride the full emotional wave:
Getting curious about our emotional triggers (“That makes me so angry!”).
Paying attention to somatic signals like clenched stomachs, tension headaches, tight jaws, or locked lips.
Choosing to experience, express, and manage emotions in ways that let us savor delight while also transforming our harder emotions—so we don’t pass them on to others.
It’s the appointed time to end suppression, repression, and projection. To feel. And to heal.
Wide-Open Living
To befriend your emotions in midlife is to say yes to life in its fullness. It’s to refuse regret and instead cultivate a wide-open heart, capable of both holding the hard and savoring the joy.
Because it’s all worth getting emotional about, isn’t it?
