While couples wrestle with capacity, some of the women I work with are encountering a parallel shift — not necessarily in partnership, but in identity.
And if you are a woman, you know: there comes a moment when the version of yourself that once felt safe begins to feel constricting.
The competent one.
The accommodating one.
The driven one.
The endlessly capable one.
What once functioned as strength begins to feel like overextension.
The internal dialogue sounds quieter than relational conflict:
“I should be grateful — so why am I restless?”
“I’ve built everything I thought I wanted. Why does it feel incomplete?”
“If I slow down, everything might fall apart.”
“Who would I be if I stopped performing this role?”
This can look like crisis.
But it is often a golden door to reorganization.
Identity expansion is rarely dramatic from the outside. It is a subtle recalibration inside. A recognition that the strategies that once created stability are now limiting growth.
Leadership - whether in career, family, or partnership - eventually demands inner authority.
And inner authority is different from competence.
Competence manages expectations.
Authority manages self.
Competence responds to external demands.
Authority listens inwardly before acting outwardly.
For many women, this threshold feels destabilizing because it disrupts approval-based stability — something I know intimately.
The question shifts from:
“Am I doing this well enough?” to
“Is this aligned with who I am becoming?”
That shift can feel lonely. But it is developmental.
This kind of change does not require dramatic reinvention. It requires honest integration.
What needs to stay?
What needs to soften?
What needs to be released?
What new capacity is emerging?
The same principle applies here as in partnership:
Intensity is not the marker of growth.
Capacity is.
Capacity to hold ambiguity.
Capacity to disappoint expectations.
Capacity to choose deliberately rather than reactively.
This is mature power.
Not loud.
Not urgent.
But deeply stabilizing.
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