In November, a post called ‘Ageing Out of F*cks: The Neuroscience Of Why You Suddenly Can’t Pretend Anymore’ went viral on psychotherapist Ellen Scherr’s Substack. Now she has released a Midlife Clarity Assessment as a personalised, customised roadmap to help women with their unique challenges as they navigate midlife
American psychotherapist Ellen Scherr, who works with many women facing midlife challenges, decided to start a Substack in June last year to reach more people than just her private clients. As you probably know, people use Substack to publish and distribute content to an audience, either for free or on a subscription model. Ellen’s is free, with some paid-member benefits.
Speaking to me over Zoom, Ellen says she didn’t have a clue at first about Substack. “It was like throwing spaghetti at a wall.” Then, in November, one post went viral. “The next thing I know, my phone is blowing up, and I’m telling my sister, ‘I don’t know what’s going on here!’”
That post ‘Ageing Out of F*cks: The Neuroscience Of Why You Suddenly Can’t Pretend Anymore’ – you could call it The Great Unf*ckening – explains that many women hit a midlife neurological and hormonal shift that makes them unable or unwilling to people please or care as much what others think. It’s science. “It shows there is a true reason from biology about what’s going on,” Ellen tells me. “It’s not just about losing estrogen, but also other major hormonal chemicals. Estrogen is like the popular girl at the party, and when she leaves, everybody else leaves.”
Most women don’t know all this. “I think that’s why it resonated so much. It was like a light-bulb. Women went, ‘Oh, wow. This is more than me just losing estrogen. Nobody ever told me this’.”
So forget the people-pleasing! “Perimenopause and menopause can be a big wake-up call for people-pleasers. It’s ‘nope, not doing it anymore. I can do what I want. Somebody doesn’t like it? Excuse my language: **** them’.”
People are still commenting on and discussing the ‘Ageing Out Of F*cks’ post online, in person, on podcasts, in articles.
An editor from the health and wellness division of OprahDaily.com asked Ellen to write a short piece on it. “That gave me a clear idea on what women were needing.”
Time to Assess
Ellen had been reading women’s DMs, emails, and comments on her Substack. There was a lot about feeling stuck, something she’d also come across in her clinical practice and knowledge.
How are they stuck? “A lot are stuck between taking care of elderly parents and working full-time, and are exhausted. There’s a lot of divorce. A lot of corporations pushing out women in their 50s, so they’re thinking ‘I’m 55, what now?’”. She also says often women aren’t really enjoying their jobs anymore, but feel too old to change careers.
Then Ellen had her own light-bulb moment. “I got an idea for helping women to determine where they are in midlife. I wanted to be able to reach more people as I’m limited with how many private clients I can see.”
In January, she released her Midlife Clarity Assessment: a clinical evaluation, not a quiz. She wanted it to be customised, not generic.
I did it. Make a cuppa and put a good half hour aside, as you answer around 60 questions. A couple of hours later, you get a report that was created by AI which was built and trained on Ellen’s own clinical framework from her private practice. “AI is the mechanism I use to be able to capture the data and to analyze it into the framework that I’ve developed.”AI designer James Presbitero helped. “I gave him all the material, the questions, he did the back-end technical stuff, and I launched it.”
“Initially I had no idea how it would turn out. When it was first finished and I took the assessment myself, I thought, “Oh, this is pretty good’.”
Has anyone said ‘It’s using AI, therefore I can’t rely on it’? “No, because it has 20 years of my knowledge built into it. I reviewed it. I had friends and clients take it. I wasn’t going to put anything out there that I didn’t truly believe in.”
Ellen says there is an “attention problem” with the coaching and wellness space, but that the Midlife Clarity Assessment isn’t for people just browsing. “It’s for someone who’s really getting stuck in. It’s about providing accurate insight, personalised to be more useful.”
Costing US$139, the assessment helps determine where women are at, and where they want to be. It looks at five domains:
- Recognition. How clearly you can see what’s happening
- Emotional capacity. Not ‘how are you feeling’ – how much bandwidth you have to feel it and still function
- Psychological barriers. The specific internal obstacles that are making movement harder than it should be
- Change readiness. Where you actually are in relation to change – not where you think you should be
- Vision clarity. How clearly you can see what you want next
A road map
The assessment will show where you’re at on:
- Life Satisfaction
- Transition Readiness
- Identity Clarity
- Emotional Integration
- Vision & Values
- Action Readiness
Data to Start Ya
I received a 90-day action plan with good suggestions for next steps. It was all bang-on.
The report might be a bit confronting for some. After all, if people are looking for guidance, they’ll naturally see things they’re uncomfortable with. But it’s a snapshot of right now, and right now is temporary.
It’s primarily about data.
“That’s why I call it a roadmap. It’s taking that data, interpreting it, seeing how it fits your life and where you are, and what the next steps are. Those next steps are where many women don’t have the support they need.”
For some women, reading the report and following the suggested steps is enough. Others may take up Ellen’s offer of a free discovery call. “I try to figure out if I can help them, and if it’s a good fit.”
“Some women say, ‘It’s great, but I’m not ready to move forward right now’. I say ‘okay, call me when you are’.” Other women have signed up for her one-on-one, personalised, eight-week coaching programme online (not part of her regular practice). “That’s when I do a Midlife Clarity Roadmap to help women figure out their next move.” (This takes the Midlife Clarity Assessment a step further.)
My Midlife Clarity Assessment report told me three things to do in the following week. I did one, which Ellen thinks is fine. “If people take too much on at one time, our brains can’t handle it. Our brain overloads. So my philosophy is: always take baby steps, one little step at a time.”
I tell Ellen my report said I’m lucky to have a career that aligns with my purpose and energises me. But it also said that’s unusual, because many midlife women feel trapped in work that drains them.
Ellen says we’re conditioned to be influenced by our parents, friends or others about our career choice. “I got my undergrad in finance. I hate finance. Why did I do that? Because the perception was it was a good degree.”
At age 46, she took a big chance. “I left a very successful sales career to go back to grad school to become a therapist, with two classes back-to-back one night a week. Two weeks after I started grad school, my husband of 18 years decided he didn’t want to be married anymore. So he left me with an 11-year-old and a 15-year-old.” So she was working full-time, studying, mothering and going through a divorce and perimenopause. Wow.
“I took out a US$40,000 loan for grad school, while not knowing if this would be what I really wanted to do. I’d been making over US$100,000 in sales. My first job out of grad school was US$36,000.”
Fast forward 25 years and she’s very glad she took that risk. At age 71 she has no plans to retire. If she got sick of being a therapist, she’d do something else.
Well, she’s a writer already, and a very good one. Her Substack (substack.com/@ellenscherr) and its email newsletters have posts like these: ‘The Shit Midlife Takes, But Also What it Hands Back Quietly’; ‘Getting Older Isn’t a Loss, It’s Getting Yourself Back’; ‘You Don’t Have To Pretend You Have Your Shit Together’; ‘You Won’t Regret the Risk, You’ll Regret Playing It Safe’; and ‘Dear Everyone: I Quit Being Your Feelings Manager’.
How does it feel to have more than 26,000 Substack followers?
“Well, I look to see how many followers or subscribers I have, but that’s not what’s important to me. What’s important is, how many women am I helping? How many women now don’t feel so alone?”
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