Special Topic And Why It Matters

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Special topic: The Autumn Queen. Becoming the woman who authors her own life. Honestly, this is one of the central kind of psychological pillars to the Vitality Clinic, and I just absolutely love the idea of the Autumn Queen for perimenopausal women. Really the opposite of this decline, this dried-up, finished, you know, done for old hag or crone. We're not there yet. We're moving through these beautiful natural phases of womanhood, you know, through monarchy, through motherhood, through perimenopause and intermenopause. So let's get to it. The Autumn Queen, becoming the woman who authors her own life. There comes a point in a woman's life when something begins to change. And I don't just mean her hormones. I mean her tolerance. Her willingness to abandon herself. Her willingness to make herself smaller so somebody else can feel bigger. Her willingness to keep the peace at the expense of her own peace. Her willingness to accommodate, explain, forgive, smooth things over, work harder, try harder, be nicer, be prettier, be thinner, be easier, need less, give more. For many women, that reckoning begins somewhere in their forties. And I think we've misunderstood it. We've been taught to think of a midlife as a crisis. What if it isn't a crisis at all? What if it is an awakening? What if the woman you are becoming is finally strong enough to question the woman you were taught to be?

Midlife Shift From Crisis To Awakening

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There is a beautiful archetype that I want to introduce you to today, the Autumn Queen. The term appears in Stacy Lindsay's beautiful book Being 40: The Decade of Letting Go and Embracing Who We Are, where she draws on the work of women's coach Steph Jager. But I've also learned a lot about the Autumn Queen from beautiful people, particularly Jane Hardwick-Collins. She also talks about the Autumn Queen. It describes something I see in women every single day: a movement away from performing womanhood and towards inhabiting ourselves. Lindsay describes the 40s as a period of profound self-discovery, a time when we can begin letting go of the endless shoulds and ask what we actually want. Being 40 by Stacey Lindsay. And I love the metaphor of autumn. Because autumn isn't death, autumn is discernment. The tree doesn't desperately hold on to every leaf because it worked so hard to grow it. It lets go of what has completed its purpose. And perhaps this is what many of us are being invited to do. Not become someone else, but let fall what is no longer

Why Autumn Means Letting Go

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us. I'm really experiencing this letting go in my personal life. Now having an empty nest, my two bonus girls are out of the house, my son is out of the house, and there's this real sort of gap, newness, space, homesickness, grief, delight, joy, excitement, expansion, adventure. There's so much that is still waiting for us. The woman we learnt to be, before we can decide who we are be who we're becoming, we have to become curious about who we've been, because so much of what we call our personality may actually be adaptation. Think about the young girl who learns don't upset dad, don't make mum anxious, be good, be helpful, don't be difficult, don't be too loud, don't be too emotional, don't be selfish, keep everyone happy, make yourself useful. Perhaps she becomes extraordinarily perceptive. She can walk into a room and immediately feel what everyone else needs. She knows when somebody is upset before they've said a word. She anticipates, she accommodates, she manages, and everybody tells her what a lovely, thoughtful, capable girl she is. Then she becomes a woman, and those same skills can make her exceptionally good at tolerating things she should never have had to tolerate. She can explain somebody else's behavior beautifully. She can understand why her partner is angry. She can understand why her mother criticizes her. She can understand why her boss treats her badly. She can understand why somebody keeps crossing her boundaries, and because she has enormous empathy for everybody else's story, she may repeatedly abandon her own. That is where I want us to be very careful with the word abuse. Abuse isn't always a black eye. It can be coercion, control, humiliation, manipulation, chronic criticism, sexual pressure, financial control, emotional withdrawal used as punishment, gaslighting, repeated violations of boundaries, and sometimes women don't recognize what is happening because the nervous system isn't asking is this healthy? It is asking is this familiar? Those are very different questions. Big T, Little T and the stories our bodies remember. When people hear the word trauma, they often imagine catastrophe, violence, assault, war, catastrophic loss. Those experiences matter enormously, but trauma informed psychology also asks us to look at the accumulation of experiences

The Girl You Learned To Be

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that may never have appeared dramatic from the outside. The parent who was emotionally unavailable, the household where everybody walked on eggshells, the child who learned that achievement earned love, the girl who was praised for never needing anything, the mother whose own fear became the atmosphere of the home. The repeated message that boys matter more, the family in which anger was dangerous, the family in which nobody apologized, the family in which nobody talked about what happened. Sometimes people describe these as big T and little T trauma. I don't particularly want us to get caught up in ranking pain. The useful question is what did I have to learn in order to belong, survive or remain connected? Because children are extraordinary adapters. If being quiet keeps you safe, you become quiet. If being useful earns connection, you become useful. If monitoring somebody else's emotional state prevents an explosion, you become hypervigilant. If saying no threatens attachment, you learn to say yes. These aren't character flaws, they were intelligent adaptations to an environment. The problem comes when the environment changes but the adaptation remains. The family inside us. This is where I find the framework of internal family systems or IFS incredibly useful. IFS asks us to imagine that rather than being one singular psychological voice, we have different parts within us. There may be the achiever, the caretaker, the perfectionist, the frightened child, the peacemaker, the controller, the critic, the rebel, the woman who wants to run away, the woman who desperately wants everyone to love her. And importantly, the premise isn't that these parts are bad, they have jobs. The people pleasing part may have learnt if everybody is happy with us, we're safe. The perfectionist might believe if we never make a mistake, nobody can criticize us. The hyper independent woman may carry a part saying don't ever depend on anyone again. The part that keeps forgiving unacceptable behavior may be saying, Please don't leave me. And underneath many of these protectors are younger, more vulnerable parts carrying fear, shame, grief, or abandonment. The question becomes not what is wrong with me, but what is this part of me trying to protect? That is

When Familiar Isn’t Healthy

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an extraordinarily different conversation, and it allows us to meet ourselves with curiosity rather than judgment. Sometimes the story began before you. And then there is another layer, because families transmit stories, sometimes explicitly, sometimes without a single word. A grandmother survives violence and learns never to rely on a man. A mother watches her own mother sacrifice everything for her family and learns that this is what a good woman does. A daughter watches her mother tolerate criticism and learns that this is simply marriage. Another girl watches her mother disappear into everybody else's needs and learns that motherhood means self-erasure. And then one generation hands the survival strategy to the next. This is what we mean when we talk about intergenerational trauma. We should be cautious about reducing this to simplistic claims that every trauma is somehow biologically inherited. Human intergenerational transmission is complex. It can involve attachment, modeling, family narratives, social conditions, learned behavior and potentially biological pathways. But psychologically we know something very simple. Children learn what relationships are by living inside them. And what is familiar can later feel normal, even when it hurts. So perhaps there are questions worth asking. What did the woman in my family tolerate? What were they forbidden to say? Who were they allowed to become? What happened when they said no? What did they have to sacrifice to belong? And what have I unconsciously continued? The forties can expose

Big T Little T And Adaptation

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the contract. This is why I think the forties can be such an extraordinary developmental moment for women. The old contract starts becoming visible. Perhaps you did everything correctly. You got the education, built the career, found the partner, had the children, or spent years wondering whether you should. Bought the house, looked after your parents, looked after everybody else, stayed attractive, stayed thin, stayed productive, stayed pleasant, and when somewhere around forty something inside you asks, Is this actually my life? Lindsay's work in this book describes these societal checklists particularly beautifully, the pressure around partnership, children, career, appearance, aging, and where a woman believes she should be by a particular age. And interestingly, this psychological reckoning often coincides with a biological one. Perimenopause arrives. There's never been a time in your life where you have been more inflamed with less energy, and I think sometimes that that restriction is the thing that really makes us focus on that which really matters. Sleep may change, stress tolerance may change, the menstrual cycle changes, the body changes, progesterone changes, estrogen becomes more erratic, sometimes two to three times as high as in your fertile years. And suddenly the woman who could carry 17 people on her back while answering emails and organizing dinner thinks, I can't do this anymore. I hear this constantly, and sometimes

IFS And The Parts Inside Us

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I want to say, Good. Perhaps your body isn't betraying you, perhaps something has become impossible to ignore because there is an enormous difference between I can't cope anymore and I am no longer prepared to cope with this. So I want you to imagine and also meet your autumn queen. I want you to bring her into existence and imagine who she is, what she looks like, and how she feels most importantly. So who is the autumn queen? She isn't necessarily louder, she isn't selfish, she doesn't suddenly stop loving everybody, and she doesn't have to burn her life to the ground. She becomes discerning. She understands that compassion without boundaries becomes self-abandonment or idiot compassion, I think, as the Dalai Lama likes to teach. She can understand somebody's trauma without volunteering to become its collateral damage. She can forgive someone without granting them unlimited access to her. She can love her parents and recognize what they couldn't give her. She can understand why her partner behaves the way they do and still say, This is not acceptable to me. She can disappoint somebody without immediately assuming she has done something wrong. She can hear somebody else's needs without automatically placing them above her own. And perhaps most importantly, she stops outsourcing the authorship of her own life. Alchemizing pain. There is another idea I would love for you to take away today. Healing doesn't

Intergenerational Patterns And The Contract

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require pretending that painful things were secretly wonderful. Sometimes terrible things happened. Sometimes people failed us. Sometimes we abandoned ourselves. Sometimes years were lost. Sometimes we stayed too long. Sometimes we knew something wasn't right and didn't yet have the capacity to leave. Healing doesn't require rewriting those facts. We can rewrite. What we can rewrite is the meaning that we continue to give them. Pain can become information. Anger can become a boundary. Grief can become clarity. Shame can become compassion. Survival can become wisdom. And the pattern that traveled through generations can stop with one woman who becomes conscious enough to say, it ends differently with me. That is alchemy. Not turning something terrible into something good, turning what happened into something that no longer gets to unconsciously author what happens next. So let's rewrite the story. Take out your journal, at the top of one page, write the woman I learned to be, and underneath it, finish these sentences. A good partner should to be loved, I need to

Perimenopause As A Reckoning

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be safe, I need to. If somebody is angry with me, my needs are my body should by this age I should have. Don't censor yourself. Some of the answers may really surprise you. Then turn the page and write, The woman I am choosing to become. What does

Boundaries Without Burning It Down

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she want? And finally, what does my autumn queen look and feel like? How does she feel in her skin? How does she walk into a room? How does she nourish herself? How does she love? How does she protect herself? How does she connect? How does she rest? How does she choose? How does she live? Because perhaps the great work of our forties and beyond isn't becoming better at being the woman everybody needed us to be. Perhaps it is finally meeting the woman who was underneath all of that adaptation and giving her permission to lead. Your autumn isn't the beginning of your decline. It may be the beginning of your authorship. And I think that is an incredibly beautiful place from which to begin. So the recommended reading, I would recommend being 40, the decade of letting go,

Alchemising Pain Into Wisdom

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and embracing who we are by Stacy Lindsay. It is unusually aligned with this teaching. Lindsay frames the 40s not as a prescribed milestone, but as an opportunity to interrogate inherited expectations around relationships, children, career, beauty, and health, and to determine what you actually want. For the IFS component, I would also recommend Richard Swartz's No Bad Parts. The central IFS idea fits beautifully beside the Autumn Queen. We don't have to wage war against the younger, accommodating, frightened, or perfectionistic versions of ourselves. We can understand why they developed, thank them for trying to protect us, and gradually allow the adult self to lead. And that may actually be the deeper definition of the Autumn Queen. She is the woman who can finally

Journaling Prompts Reading And Closing

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lead all the younger versions of herself rather than continuing to be led by them. Thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Dr. Kirsty Holland, and I run the Vitality Clinic from Melbourne, Australia globally, for all of these beautiful autumn queens. My book, This is Perimenopause: The Symptoms That Were Missed, The Diagnosis You Deserve, and The Healing Plan That Really Works, published on the 17th of July 2026. Grab yourself a copy, join the clinic today, and let's continue to do this beautiful work so that we can become our most vital, vibrant selves in perimenopause and beyond. Take it easy, have a gorgeous day, see you next time.