We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jen Berlingo. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jen below.
Hi Jen, so happy to have you with us today and there is so much we want to ask you about. So many of us go through similar pain points throughout our journeys and so hearing about how others developed certain skills or qualities that we are struggling with can be helpful. Along those lines, we’d love to hear from you about how you developed your ability to take risk?
As human beings, we are wired for survival and safety. Taking risks isn’t natural or comfortable, but it is absolutely necessary for growth. One of my core values is to evolve beyond any limiting beliefs from my conditioning that keep me numb, asleep, and assimilating to a status quo that is antiquated.
In doing qualitative research for my book, Midlife Emergence, I spoke with over 100 women in midlife, and every single one said they are more enticed by risk-taking now than any other time in their lives. Erik Erikson (a psychologist in the 1950s) said that the midlife period brings us the challenge of stagnation vs generativity. This is a time in which we feel our mortality, and we reevaluate, often looking at the paths not taken and at bucket list items. In midlife, we find ourselves at a threshold where it may feel nearly impossible to choose between the safety and familiarity of the lives we’ve so carefully constructed and the seductive allure of evolving beyond others’ expectations to align with our innately beautiful truths.
Of course, it soothes our nervous systems to feel stable and secure. Familiarity can be really nice to lean into and rest into sometimes. However, the seduction of the mystery, a yearning for something more, something growth-producing, is more pronounced in midlife. The question naturally becomes how to balance our penchant for the security of a familiar homeostasis with exploring how we might expand and unfold by traversing uncertainty.
My fear of stagnation is far greater than my fear of not evolving personally and collectively. That’s reason enough for me to take risks, even if I have to take them scared — and I do.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’m a life coach, a licensed professional counselor, a nationally registered art therapist, a master-level Reiki practitioner, an author, and a visual artist. After struggling for years with how to hone my passions into one area of focus, I’ve come to embrace the fact that I’m a multi-hyphenate. I now recognize the gift of blending and offering the full spectrum of my medicine.
After working for about 20 years as a psychotherapist, when the pandemic hit, I pivoted to a coaching approach and began to see clients worldwide. I currently support adults who yearn to peel pack the acculturated expectations and personas that have been put upon them so they can reveal and live as the most authentically expressed version of themselves. Many of my clients are former people pleasers or recovering “good girls” who may have disappointed or abandoned themselves in their youth as a survival strategy so as not to lose connection with others. Many come to me feeling simultaneously terrified of and electrified by what it might mean to unfurl into a more expansive version of themselves. As a coach, I see myself as their companion, cheerleader, and guide who asks the good-kind-of-hard questions and holds clients accountable as they traverse the often messy, non-linear path of a human life.
In addition to applying a solid, rich, and profound coaching approach to this work, because of my multifaceted interests, I come with a wildly abundant cauldron of offerings. Every coaching relationship is unique and customized to each client’s quest and curiosities. In that co-created space, we may choose to call upon any of the following practices, including but not limited to: journaling, art-making and art therapy prompts, guided visualization exercises, designing personal rituals and ceremonies, energetic counseling and the chakra system, the enneagram, dreamwork, supports from the earth (such as stones and plants), supports from the unseen world (such as archetypes, guides, and ancestors), divination (tarot or oracle cards, etc), astrology, and working with seasonal and celestial cycles. For me, it’s important to keep things that feel “woo woo” deeply grounded and to be respectful by aligning with one’s own cultural lineage.
In addition to my coaching work, my book, Midlife Emergence: Free Your Inner Fire was published in 2023. Upon its release in paperback, ebook, and audiobook, I was thrilled that it reached #1 in several Amazon categories, including midlife management, divorce, LGBTQ+ memoirs, LGBTQ+ parenting and families, adulthood and aging, and self-help. Midlife Emergence is part revealing and vulnerable memoir and part personal growth book, with psychology wisdom peppered throughout and creative, self-inquiry invitations for the reader at the end of each chapter.
I now write for Substack on a weekly basis, covering topics such as the messy opportunities of midlife, being queer and the experience of embracing the fullness of my sexuality later in life, the creative process, hexing the patriarchy, relationships, intimacy, and connection of all flavors, wellness (of soul + of soma), the sacred and the profane, and much more. There, I also curate art, resources, and playlists!
I’m also a visual artist who makes custom pieces for collectors worldwide and exhibits my fluid, abstract art locally in my beloved town of Boulder, Colorado. I self-published an intuitive watercolor oracle deck in 2016 called the SoulSpace Oracle, which is still available in my Etsy shop.
I’m currently accepting new individual coaching clients and taking applications for members of new group coaching program. I offer various guided and self-paced online courses on midlife topics, self-care for helpers and healers, and on the chakra system. All of these offerings can be found on my website: jenberlingo.com
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
When I feel into this question, three qualities rise to the top of my list. They aren’t externally acquired skills or didactic knowledge. They are qualities that we all have within us and that we can develop with more use, like exercising a muscle.
The first is tenderness. I’m a supremely sensitive being, and I think I arrived on the planet this way. I’m a highly sensitive person, an empath, and an enneagram type 4. While I think tenderness is an inherent trait of mine, it also took years of self-discovery and self-acceptance to unlearn the shame I’d been taught around my tenderness, to unlearn the habit of overriding it and trying to hide it. In my family, I’d been teased for my sensitive nature. In the patriarchal, capitalistic, corporate world (where I worked prior to becoming a therapist), I’d been taught that tenderness is weakness. In midlife, I can now honor my tenderness as my greatest strength. I truly don’t think I could be an effective therapist, coach, or healer without my empathic nature (once I learned how to take care of myself while being of service to another.) I also think sensitivity serves me as an artist and writer because I convey my acute perceptions through this hyper-impressionable lens.
The second is creativity. We are all creative; we are all makers. When I am able to give into the parts of me that are playful, spontaneous, inventive, expressive, and flexible, I feel more in the flow with and connected to my own inner divinity. I’m able to put something new in the world that hasn’t existed, to solve problems from new perspectives, and to open my mind to new perspectives and ideas.
The third is integrity. Arriving into any situation with wholeness (the full spectrum of myself) and radical honesty is challenging, but it has served me well. As Martha Beck says in her book, The Way of Integrity, “If you don’t walk your true path, you don’t find your true people. You end up in places you don’t like, learning skills that don’t fulfill you, adopting values and customs that feel wrong.” I’ve found that it works out best for everyone when I am my true self; that’s when the universe can find me.
Tell us what your ideal client would be like?
In my individual coaching work, I support adults of any age who are ready and willing to explore their longing to shed the “shoulds” and becoming more aligned to their integrity and truth. I love to help people face and honor life’s transitions at any age (such as shifts in identity, relationships, vocation, location, health, spirituality, etc.)
Because of the nature of my book and research, I specialize in (but am not limited to) working with women and non-binary people who are traversing the midlife passage (roughly between ages 40-60). Many of my clients are exploring sexuality and/or gender as an adult. This may include “coming out” later in life, grappling with early compulsory heterosexuality/gender binary messaging, internalized oppression, etc.
Others who are ideal clients for me are people moving through separation, divorce, and rebuilding after divorce; adults who wish to heal and grow beyond familial, cultural, and social conditioning; and those who desire deeper connections with their intuitive and spiritual nature.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jenberlingo.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jenberlingo/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jenberlingotherapy
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenberlingo/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/jenberlingo
- Other: My book, Midlife Emergence: https://a.co/h5UDU4Y
Substack is where I’m currently writing weekly: https://jenberlingo.substack.com
Image Credits
Portrait photography by Jewel Afflerbaugh
