The Relational Layer: The Layer Nobody Warns You About

This is the layer nobody warns you about, and it is where the most damage gets done.

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Relationships follow the same arc. The patterns many of us learned in our 20's and 30's, over-giving, going quiet, holding it all together, shape the marriages and friendships of our 40's and 50's, and the Connection you choose to build now is the Connection that holds you at 60 and beyond.

For a lot of Women, that shows up first, and loudest, inside a marriage or a partnership.

When a Woman's capacity runs out, the people closest to her feel it first, and they get the least explanation for it, because she does not yet know what is happening either.

Here is what it can look like inside a home:

• She comes home with nothing left for conversation. The 20 minutes at the end of the day that used to belong to her partner get spent staring at a screen, because staring at a screen is all she can manage.
• She stops initiating touch. Then she starts dreading being touched. Then she feels guilty about both and says nothing about either.
• She cancels on her friends. Twice. 3 times. Eventually the invitations stop coming, and she is alone in a way she never chose.

Everyone in her life may read it as character, including her. She is difficult now. She is cold now. She has changed.

Gray Divorce, and Deciding With Your Whole System Online

Divorce has risen for Women 45 and older and fallen for everyone younger. The steepest rise is among Women 65 and older. Across marriages generally, research on heterosexual breakups finds Women are the ones who wanted the split more in about 2 out of every 3 cases, which is a different thing than who filed the paperwork.

Many hard marriages have nothing to do with hormones. I still wonder how many of those marriage decisions were made from inside a temporary, treatable physiological state, by a Woman who was never told there was a physiological state.

If you are in that place right now, that is worth knowing before anything is decided.

Some marriages genuinely need to end. Some Women got free, and leaving was the healthiest thing they ever did. What you do with your own marriage is yours to decide.

What was tolerable for 20 years can become unbearable as your hormones shift. Sometimes that is your body finally refusing to keep adapting around something it was never settled with. Sometimes it is a depleted Nervous System with no buffer left for ordinary friction.

So before you decide anything permanent, have your sex hormones, your thyroid, and your iron reviewed, and review them again once whatever is low has been addressed. Then ask the real questions, with your whole system online:

• How are my relationships, honestly?
• Who am I in my relationships?
• Am I the version of myself I want to be in them?
• Can I imagine something else as possible?

Years ago, in a former marriage, I lived inside that not-knowing for a long time. 'Should I stay or should I go' went around and around and gave me nothing.

So I asked 1 question every day: am I ready to leave today? It worked like a tree diagram. If the answer was yes: communicate, pack, leave.

More often than not, the answer was 'no, but.' Then the only logical next question was, what do I need to do to take care of myself while I am choosing to remain in this relationship?

I paired those 2 questions with 1 declaration: I give up trying to figure it out. Bring me what I need so I can get clear. Those were the only questions I worked with until I had clarity.

We Are Not Designed to Heal in Isolation

There is another kind of damage in this layer that rarely gets named, and it has nothing to do with marriage. It is isolation itself.

We are not designed to heal in isolation. We are literally and fundamentally hardwired for Connection. And isolation is not neutral. It's its own kind of stress, and stress is a trigger for Autoimmunity. So loneliness is not only painful, it has a physiological impact.

Being in a room where others understand your world, where no one is asking you to just push through, where your healing is Witnessed, it changes your Nervous System before you've even changed a single other thing. I've seen Women's whole system settle when they finally found people who understood, before they even altered what goes on their plate.

Healing goes better and faster when it is Witnessed.

Connection Is Healing. A Nervous System settles more easily in the presence of another steady Nervous System than it does alone. Your body reads safety partly through the people around you, so when you sit with someone who is calm, your own system borrows that calm and settles faster than it would on its own.

Researchers can see this happen. In a well-known study at the University of Wisconsin, married Women waiting for a mild electric shock showed less threat activity in the brain while holding their husband's hand, and the effect was strongest in the most supportive marriages.

Loneliness runs the other way. In people who are chronically lonely, researchers have found immune cells with inflammatory genes turned up and antiviral defenses turned down. Isolation can activate some of the same threat responses as physical danger, and the immune system responds as if the world were less safe.

In 2023, the US Surgeon General issued an advisory on loneliness, and it compared the health risk of lacking social Connection to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

Many Women in Midlife are more isolated than they realize. The children have gone, the work friendships have thinned, the fatigue makes reaching out feel like 1 more thing, and the friends who remain may not understand what she is navigating. Googling alone at midnight, the way I did, is its own kind of load.

Community can be small. It can be 1 person who understands what you are going through and asks about it. It can be a practitioner who sees you as a whole person. It can be a small group of Women walking the same road.

Community also holds knowledge that lives nowhere else: what actually worked, what the first hard weeks felt like, how to talk to a doctor who is skeptical. Much of what helped me most, I learned from other Women walking the same path.

I think of friendship as a spiritual practice. The Buddhist tradition names 3 jewels: the teacher, the teaching, and the Sangha, the community of friends on the path. The Sangha matters as much as the other 2. I count on my true friends to help me see what I cannot see in my own blind spots, and I do the same for them.

In her poem 'Sometimes,' from the collection Red Bird, the poet Mary Oliver wrote a set of instructions for living a life: pay attention, be astonished, tell about it. The telling needs someone to tell it to. Red Bird is in the Resource Directory.

The Relationships That Drain You

This is also why the relationships that quietly drain you matter more than you think, even the ones you have made peace with. What you carry in these relationships has a physiology, whether it is old griefs or resentments.

Here is what that can include:

• Old grief that never completed its process
• Resentment that never resolved
• The habit of overriding your own needs until your body finally insists on being heard
• The voice of inner criticism
• A partnership where you consistently do not feel valued

Chronic relational stress keeps the same alarm circuitry switched on that drives inflammation. So whether or not you ever say the hard thing out loud, it is still running in your system. For many of the Women I work with, this is the piece that moves what food alone could not.

You can eat anti-inflammatory food, sleep well, and take every supplement on your list, and a relationship that is genuinely unhealthy can quietly undo much of that work. Most of the many Women with Autoimmunity I have worked with have had something in the quality and health of their relationships that needed attending to.

In a study at Ohio State University, couples were given small blister wounds and then asked to discuss a conflict. The wounds healed more slowly after the conflict, and in the most hostile couples they healed at about 60 percent of the speed of the least hostile couples.

In Relationsick, Dr. Lissa Rankin and Dr. Jeffrey Rediger describe patients with access to every test and every treatment who still could not get well until the unhealthy relationship in their life was addressed.

We do not get well inside relationships that leave us feeling unseen, dismissed, responsible for managing someone else's comfort, or like we have to shrink ourselves to keep the peace. Physical danger is part of what makes a relationship unsafe, and so is the everyday unsafety of never being able to be fully yourself.

On its own, 'how are my relationships?' can invite a reasonable answer, something like, we're fine.

Ask this instead: What does my Nervous System do when this person walks into the room?

Does your body settle, or does it organize? Settling is safety. Organizing is work. Shoulders that drop and a breath that deepens belong to a Nervous System that feels safe. Bracing, scanning, getting ready, and managing belong to a Nervous System doing work it should not have to do just to be in a room.

Use it to notice, the way you would notice the weather. Your body already knows the answer, and it knew it long before your mind was willing to say it out loud.

The Givers, and the Word No

Many Women reading this are generous, compassionate givers. You can say no and leave it there, without a reason attached.

Their disappointment is theirs to manage. You are not saying no into a vacuum, and there may be a real person on the other end who feels a real letdown. Your job is to be honest, clear, and firm, without betraying yourself. Managing how they feel about your honesty was never part of that job.

Trust that the people in your life are capable of being disappointed and surviving it, the same way you have survived other people's no.

For a giver, the hardest work in this layer may have nothing to do with a conversation with anyone else. It may be the first time you decline something you would normally have absorbed. An honest no is, in its own way, an honest yes to everyone, including the body that has to live in tomorrow.

It helps to know the difference between being helpful and being useful. Helpful can slide into fixing, and into projecting what we think someone needs. Useful begins with listening and asks what is actually needed. It does not need thanks, recognition, or anything in return.

2 questions sort this out quickly: Am I helping so that I feel needed? And would listening be more useful here than advising?

Listening begins with a better question. When someone asks how we are, most of us answer 'fine.' Try asking the Women in your life, 'What is bringing you delight right now?' or 'What are you navigating that you would like clarity or support around?'

Then listen without rushing to fix, and witness instead of solving. Hold room for how her Midlife actually is, free of any imagined standard of how it should look.

Of everything in this layer, the relationship almost nobody names is the one you are in with yourself. It is the nature of the thoughts you have decided are true about you. Your self-honesty, your inner dialogue, and your boundaries are all the same relationship, the one with yourself, showing up in different rooms.

I learned this in my own life. Part of moving my own Autoimmunity toward Remission meant taking a real, honest look at my relationships, with myself, with friends, and with colleagues, and making the necessary shifts, which were uncomfortable at first.

Truthfulness sets everyone free, and mistruths hold everyone hostage. Today I live with a very clear mind. My fatigue and my joint aches are gone, my shocking hair loss stopped, and I get to take part in life fully.

Forgiveness and Innocence

So much of what lives in this layer, the resentments, the withheld no, the old grief, eventually asks to be forgiven, in yourself and in others.

Forgiveness arrives on its own timing. When it is organic, it moves through you rather than being manufactured by you. Your only task is to stop blocking the conditions that let it arrive.

I hold something I call innocence. We are always doing the best we can with what we know, and as Maya Angelou taught, when we know better, we do better. In my experience, the opposite of love is judgment, and remembering the innocence underneath someone's behavior, your own included, softens the judgment.

Innocence does not deny anger, and it does not oblige you to stay. You can remember someone's innocence and still say, 'I choose this relationship no longer.'

Neutrality is our greatest immunity. It's simply you feel your Nervous System settled at ease in harmony.

If forgiveness is somewhere you want to keep going, I lead Sacred Sunday, a free forgiveness gathering held online each month. It draws on Ho'oponopono, a Hawaiian practice of reconciliation and forgiveness, and it is 1 hour of tending exactly this.

Practices for the Relational Layer

• Take a relationship inventory. List the 10 people you spend the most time with, including coworkers. After time with each, notice: do I feel more energized or more depleted? Can I be fully myself here? What do I give, and what do I receive?
• Ask the room question for 1 week. Each time someone walks into the room, notice what your body does before your mind offers an opinion.
• Say 1 honest no this week. Something you would normally absorb. Notice what happens in your body afterward.
• Reach for 1 Connection. A text, a walk, a call to someone who understands what you are navigating. For a depleted Woman, 1 is plenty.
• Replace 1 performance of okayness with the truth. 'Actually, I am having a hard week.'
• Clean up 1 loop. An unresolved conversation keeps draining energy. 'That didn't feel good earlier. Can we reset?'
• Breathe before you answer. Inhale deep, exhale long, once, before you respond to something that stings. That single breath gives your Nervous System a moment to come back online.
• Practice together. Great Energy Qigong, optional and highly recommended, is taught live online, and practicing alongside other people is part of what makes it steadying. Community Sunday offers a free efficiency practice with Christopher each month.

The Hardest Number in This Guide

I will not close this layer without naming the hardest number in this guide. The suicide rate for Women peaks between 45 and 64.

And if you are having thoughts of ending your life, please reach out today. In the US and Canada, call or text 988. Someone is there, 24 hours a day. Elsewhere, your national crisis line is listed at findahelpline.com. Nothing in this guide is a reason to wait.