We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jen Berlingo a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Jen, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.
My current body of work (book, coaching, and courses) is called midlife emergence® because midlife doesn’t need to be a crisis or emergency – it can be an emergence. Emergence is defined as “the process of coming into view or becoming exposed after being previously concealed.” The concept of emergence feels absolutely resonant to my personal experience of unveiling in midlife what in me had previously been unseen. In my book, I write about the moment I could not turn back from entering my own midlife passage. One morning it all broke loose inside me, and I was pulled to drive over to the beach, basically in my pajamas from the night before and with bare feet, dirty-haired, wild-eyed. An Ani DiFranco song came on in my car, and it hit different. I was able to admit to myself a truth that had been brewing beneath the surface for a very long time… one that would undoubtedly shake the foundation I had built for my life.
I had always known I was queer, but I had married a wonderful man at age 27 due to compulsory heterosexuality in the time and place I grew up. At this midlife stage, the lack of expression of the fullness of my sexuality had gotten so internally loud and painful for me that I knew I needed to explore it. With that, I knew that the sweet, comfortable, familiar life I was living would have to somehow shift. It was both terrifying and exhilarating.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Professionally I’m a midlife coach, a licensed prof counselor in Colorado, a nationally registered art therapist, a Reiki master, a visual artist, and an author and teacher on what I call Midlife Emergence. Personally, I’m a recently divorced, 47-year-old, queer mom to a non-binary teenager.
I earned my master’s degree in transpersonal counseling psychology and art therapy from Naropa University, a Buddhist-oriented school for experiential and contemplative education. I have used coaching, transpersonal counseling, art psychotherapy, energy work, ceremony, and ritual to support women in becoming their most authentic, sovereign selves. Through my private practice, groups, and online courses, I’ve midwifed hundreds of women through life’s turning points, as they rebirth and reparent themselves into more fully expressed, whole beings. In addition to my healing work, I run a successful online shop. There, I sell the oracle deck I created and self-published in 2016, the SoulSpace Oracle. I also channels custom soul essence portraits, painting commissions, and art prints for collectors worldwide. I exhibit my fluid, abstract art in a few spots in my beloved town of Boulder, Colorado.
I’ve had about 20 years of experience in guiding my therapy and coaching clients through life’s transitions, but it was when I experienced my own profoundly transformative passage in my early forties that I began to write about my experience. In this time, I was able to live more fully into my queerness and other seemingly subversive aspects of myself. Most of my clients, like myself, are “recovering good girls” who have done all the “right” things and met the expectations to create the life we “should” want, but we still feel unsatisfied. Making changes in midlife can be disruptive because the stakes feel high when we are settled into careers, mortgages, relationships, parenting, taking care of elders, etc. at this stage. Most of us have no roadmaps, models, or cheerleaders helping us to unfurl into our most expansive, aligned way of being in the world. So, we are tempted to stay in our safe, sleepy, stagnant habits because it is too difficult to face the voice inside us that perpetually wonders, “Is this all there is?”
I understand how it feels to burn in that way. There’s an unexpressed and beautiful part of each of us that is longing to be set free. As I’ve been working to realign to my own integrity, I became a cartographer, charting the course, marking the waypoints, pinpointing the universal signposts along the journey. I centered my practice and my book on this fiery midlife threshold so other women wouldn’t need to walk the path alone.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
With age, I have become a big fan of pivoting and reinventing myself so that I’m most fully aligned with my integrity. We get to be new every day, to make new choices, to try new things. In my book, I share so many stories of when I’ve needed to shift in my personal life, but I’ll share now about a major career pivot I made in my twenties. I moved to New York City in the late nineties and became a successful cog in the early dot-com machine. After a few years working in ad tech, I became quite “successful” in my salary and title, but I felt numb, exhausted, and empty. Despite my boss tempting me with a raise, I quit that career entirely and began to take art classes in NYC, soul-searching for what would feel deeply satisfying to me. Eventually, I applied to masters programs for art therapy and moved to Boulder, Colorado, for grad school. To go from a global product manager in internet advertising to a transpersonal art psychotherapist was a 180 degree turn which surprised those around me, but the call came from within, and those are the ones I cannot ignore.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
Given my upbringing, in the first half of my life, I made decisions that helped me to feel safe and secure. I didn’t take a lot of risks, thus I didn’t reap great rewards. When I’ve chosen the safer path, it has generally left me feeling stuck in someone else’s idea of who I am rather than my own. For example, I chose an undergraduate university based on the fact that it was where my sister had gone to school, it was relatively close to home, and a lot of people I knew were going there. As it turns out, the class size was too large and anonymous for me, the academics were not challenging enough, and I never found my groove socially. I longed to transfer, but at that point in my life, I had never really quit anything and had no support around me for doing so. The lesson I’ve learned is that I shouldn’t ever choose something simply because it seems safe. After that undergraduate experience, I got better at saying “no” to what’s not for me and “yes” to my unique, inner voice with her offbeat ideas. Through this, I learned that when something is growth-producing, it can also feel scary. And we can do it anyway. We can absolutely do it scared.
Contact Info:
- Website: jenberlingo.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/jenberlingo
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jenberlingotherapy
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenberlingo/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/jenberlingo
- Other: buy the book: https://a.co/h5UDU4Y etsy shop: https://www.etsy.com/shop/artsorceress tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jenberlingo
Image Credits
Portrait photography by Jewel Afflerbaugh of essencesessions.com Art by Jen Berlingo