Episode 8 transcript

So on this episode of Sniper’s Alley, we are joined by an expert guest. Sometimes on Snipers, it’s just me and Em banging on. Today we’ve got somebody who knows what they’re talking about, and we’re going to be hearing from Charlotte Braithwaite. And Charlotte is a psychotherapist and she’s a leadership coach, and we thought she’d be a really interesting person to talk to, didn’t we?

So I really wanted to talk to somebody about what happens at this age to your, I guess, your emotional well-being. That’s the kind of thing, because we talk a lot about physical stuff, you know, your knees. Oh, terrible at the minute. Terrible.

Your knees, your back, your sleep. We talk an awful lot about that. I’m amazed I made it here today. It’s a miracle.

It’s a miracle you’re here. Um, but you know, I’ve had some health issues, you’ve had some health issues. We know that in Sniper’s Alley you’re going to get health issues, but I don’t think what we talk about enough is how much pressure people at this age can feel under, and what that kind of does to their emotional well-being. So, and how that pressure, and why you feel that pressure.

So it could be, famously, Sandwich Generation. You’re still looking after teenagers, but you’ve also started looking after elderly parents. Your parents may have died, and the grief that that brings, and also the stress that that can bring as well, after you’ve suffered a bereavement. But there’s also that knock-on stress that you experience at work, in your relationships, in your friendships, kind of loneliness, asking yourself.

But also there’s a real sense— don’t want this to sound gloomy because she is far from gloomy— there’s a real sense of kind of time marching on and what do I want to do with the rest of my time. And she covered all of that and she covered it also brilliantly and positively. I, I absolutely loved talking to her. I think I fell in love with her.

I noticed that, yeah. Did you notice? I did. I picked up on that.

I was really disappointed that she didn’t notice when she said, I really love having Gen X friends, and I was like, I put my hand up to volunteer. Yeah, she was really, really professional and ignored me completely. So did you know? So anyway, I really— I just think she just comes to this with just some lovely insights and clarity, and I just came away feeling a bit better just listening to her.

That’s a really good— I’m glad you mentioned about the Gen X thing. We should point out, because only because she refers to it herself during the, the chat, is that so Charlotte’s a millennial. And it’s interesting because she brings that up a few times, quite sort of tongue-in-cheek as well. It’s quite funny.

Um, but yeah, loads of really interesting things about midlife being a second adolescence, uh, menopause being like a kind of psychological wake-up call, uh, what happens when you change but the people around you don’t want you to. There’s some, it’s just some really good stuff, some, some big stuff and some funny stuff and just all good stuff basically. I hope, I hope it’s helpful. Yeah, I know, I do too.

I genuinely think it will be. It’s at the very least, it’s thought-provoking. I think it’s really interesting. So yes, we’re talking to Charlotte Braithwaite, psychotherapist and leadership coach, and we started off by chatting to her about how change has been a bit of a theme on Snipers recently, like talking to Glenn in the last episode about changing career.

Uh, as Em mentioned, there’s lots of kind of big changes around this time of life, and we asked her if that’s a subject that she sees a lot of her clients coming to her with, those clients that are round about our age. Is change really rife for them as well? Yes, in a word. And I’m not saying that it’s only at that age, but I think particularly at sort of midlife, let’s say, is when there’s a lot of— I mean, ultimately you look ahead and there’s probably less years ahead of you than there are behind you, and that wakes people up.

Sometimes that emergence can present as a bit of an emergency depending on how our lives are set up, what our relationship with ourselves looks like, And so midlife crisis, as it were, though we sort of band the term around quite casually, really midlife crisis is something that in psychosynthesis psychology we called the crisis of meaning. When we get to the top of the mountain and how we imagined it might be doesn’t feel, and so there’s this sense of void or emptiness, or maybe I’ve climbed to the top of the ladder and I realized it wasn’t even the ladder I wanted to be on in the first place, and I just ended up here. Usually that’s what I see and what sort of repeats itself in various different forms. It’s just a different packaging.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense for what I see and kind of what I feel as well. I think you see that a lot around here, and sometimes that change has been forced on somebody, I guess, is that they’re going through a relationship breakup that they know perhaps they don’t want their relationship to end, or they’re suffering a bereavement, or they’ve been made redundant, and they’re being forced to look under you know, under the rug, and they’ve not looked there for a long time, and it’s things that they wish they didn’t have to look at. And I can see that you would then kind of assess your life and wonder, where do I go from here? I do, I want to, I do think that there’s probably a lot of fear as well at this age too.

It’s too scary to change. Is this a personal therapy question for you? How is it, has this become life therapy all of a sudden? Might as well get our money’s worth, do you know what I mean?

Well, luckily, Charlotte, I’m really shallow, so I tend tend not to have these deep feelings, but yeah, this is what I see. That’s like a red rag to a bull for me, but I’ll, I’ll be professional. So yes, I think, I think there is a lot of fear. I think there’s a lot of fear, to be honest, at any age.

And, and we were laughing earlier before we began about sort of not to make it, uh, not do the millennial thing and make it about me, but that, that often I think what is interesting now is that midlife crisis is— we’re seeing it earlier and earlier and earlier. And that sort of the quarter-life crisis is now coming in, whereby there is this, where should I be by a certain age, that’s getting earlier and earlier, but is more documented or more sort of colloquially understood of when you get to a certain age. I think there’s a question which is, is the life I’ve got my choosing, or did I just end up here? Was it my choice, or was there a series of consequences of other choices by which I suddenly wake up from a sort of an autopilot and go, what the fuck?

And that is scary. It is scary. But it’s also scary to remain in that state of stagnation. It’s scary to change.

It’s scary to stay. And ultimately, what we know about the brain, to sort of make it a little bit more neurosciences-y, um, is that our brain will always favor a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven. Oh, really? And so, better the devil you know, to some degree.

But then often what, what happens, especially within sort of the, the midlife crisis, um, narrative, is that it looks very sudden. It looks like they wake up one day and go, I’m not doing this, when there’s been a series of existential dis-eases where there is a, there is a quieter discomfort that all of a sudden goes bang. It’s not usually as knee-jerk as we think. I think that, that chimes with, um, the episode we did talking to Glenn, who changed from working in the music industry and then quite suddenly ended up becoming a decorator.

And if people haven’t heard it, I’d advise you check it out because it’s really interesting. And that, that’s certainly what happened to him. His wife had, um, health issues. He found that COVID— he didn’t enjoy the whole kind of COVID working remotely thing that fed into it.

Somebody left from work, didn’t they? There were all these kind of, like you say, it looks on the headline is 55-year-old has huge career change, but actually there’s all these little stepping stones in there. Yes, it’s either— the headline more accurately would be 55-year-old has slow awakening to that he has no meaning in his life, and then the things that wake him up suddenly give him meaning, and so he actively goes looking for it. And that’s why you’re not a headline writer, Charlotte.

It is not. But so do you find that when you see— when you’re in your practice, are you seeing similar themes of people of certain ages that they’re coming in with kind of mirrored life stories. Yes, whether it’s the— normally it’s like the big crisis that gets noticed. It’s the affair, it’s the divorce, it’s the redundancy, it’s the job change, it’s the, um, I’m going to try and rekindle a hobby that I did in my teens, but my body is reminding me that that’s not the case.

There’s a wanting to reconnect with vitality, with youth, with energy, with a sense of aliveness Because life has become very responsible, sensible, and predictable. And in the paradox of human experience, we both want spontaneity and we want predictability. We want the security of love but the excitement of lust. We want to feel alive, but we also want to feel safe.

So we really come up against that, uh, sort of too polarized places. Um, Esther Perel talks about this beautifully, and Brené Brown, because I can’t fangirl— I do any podcast without referencing Brené Brown— and she describes it as when the universe gently places her hands on your shoulders and goes, I’m not fucking around. And I think that that is, uh, midlife. I think for women, often it’s menopause.

Um, I think that, you know, biochemically, psychologically, that there’s a lot there. That, that has gravity to it. And so however it looks, I always used to laugh with— and I still laugh now with my clients— where I’m like, I kind of wish we could just sidestep confidentiality and me go, oh my God, you need to talk to this person, this person, this person, this person, because you should all be friends because you’re all going through the same thing. It’s just different flavors of, of a similar recipe that looks very different.

Thinking about that, is, is there— and we obviously, this is very broad strokes, so we always preface this when we talk about Gen X or Millennials, that obviously we’re talking broad strokes, we know everybody’s different, blah blah. Um, when it comes to different sexes and, and what they’re going through round about this time of life, the kind of, you know, Gen X sniper’s alley, are there kind of noticeable trends with what men come to you with as opposed to women? I can’t separate out, and I don’t think it’s right to, that often with menopause there is an awakening to what about me. And, um, women have had a tendency, and because of history where there has been an oppression or a suppression, that, um, actually I remember we spoke about this, Rob, a little bit too, because I went to a really amazing panel talk recently called Aging Disgracefully, and I learned all sorts of stuff there.

But the liberation of being able to talk about perimenopause, menopause, postmenopause, which is just not really even still, you know, it’s spoken about medically but not necessarily psychologically. And the link between as estrogen drops and what estrogen does, which is the caretaking hormone, the one that wants to nurture, as it drops, women biologically and psychologically go, I actually don’t give as much of a shit about what anybody else thinks of me. And so there is a freedom to, you know what, fuck it, I’m— I, I need to live my life. With men, what I see, um, and obviously I can only refer to the sample of which I see It’s more of a— the weight of responsibility, a feeling of I’m not sure if people know the version of me that I feel I am, but there’s not necessarily practice of conversations, or how do I tell my wife, or how do I tell my best friend, or how do I— that, that actually I’ve how do I reintroduce myself?

And I think that there is a wider— regardless of gender or however you identify, there is sort of a, how do I reintroduce myself? Because I don’t feel like the version of me you know is necessarily the version of me that now resonates. But I have lots of roles that I’m expected to play, lots of roles, some of which I love, but they feel burdensome. There’s a lot more of the human experience rather than it being men and women.

But there’s certainly accents that, that speak louder through those certain gender conversations. I think you really touched on it earlier when you said when people in their 50s come to you, they are really aware that they’ve got more years behind them than in front of them. And I think in terms of the people that I’ve spoken to, the friends that I’ve spoken to, that really, really resonates. And it’s not just that they’ve got more years behind them, they know that the years ahead of them are not guaranteed.

So, they’re not guaranteed in terms of physical health, they’re not necessarily guaranteed in terms of mental health as well, and they’re not guaranteed in terms of financial security and all of those other things. So, that— if you want to do something, if you want to change, now is the time to do it. You can’t put things off anymore. You can’t kind of keep sweeping things under the rug.

And thinking, I’m gonna come back and look at this in 5 years when perhaps I feel braver. You’ve gotta do it now, right? There’s that kind of sense. And I wonder if that’s, without wanting to sound too Instagrammy, if that’s a bit of a gift.

You know, that’s not, that’s, you know, that’s a nice thing. And so that’s kind of what I see in people. But also the other thing, when Rob was asking about the menopause and the difference between men and women, again, I think in a way the menopause, perimenopause, It’s not easy for everybody. I’m not suggesting by any sense that it is, but also it’s a real, it’s what you said about Brené Brown.

This is a wake-up call, you know, that women are given a feeling physically and emotionally, the aging process. And I think sometimes men can kind of lie to themselves about it. You know, you can kind of sort of kid yourself that you’ve got more time. Women know for sure they haven’t got more time because they’re feeling it.

They’re feeling very different. That estrogen has gone, got no time for anybody else. Make your own fucking lunch, I’m off, you know. I’m going, you know, I’m off mountaineering, or whatever it is they want to go off and do, you know.

That’s it. It’s a— that’s a really interesting point too, because as you were talking, I was thinking around, um, I, I— well, if I speak about it from like a true therapist, I’ll stay in the I position rather than speak of anybody else’s behalf. From young adolescence, I was aware of time when it came to fertility. So you start your period, now you’re on a timeline.

Then it’s tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Then it is— I had my daughter at 33, and I remember being mortified reading on the, on the little thing about being a geriatric mother and being like, oh my God, is that what I am? Like, am I— I thought geriatric was like in the movie, it’s like a really old lady. Then it’s perimenopause, then it’s menopause.

Then it’s post-menopause. And so there is a timeline according to a woman’s body that is far more— you’re here, you’re here, you’re here, and you know you are closer, closer, closer. Whereas I think when I think about some of my male clients, normally it is— and not just male, but normally there’s some sort of health crisis that goes, oh my goodness, like, I’m here. And it’s like they’ve just got there.

Whereas often there is more of a nudging with women in terms of timeline, because I think we are constantly reminded, time’s running out, time’s running out, time’s running out. And also, when you’re midlife, when you’re, you know, where Gen Xs are now also, we’ve got aging parents. The boomer generation, who are quite an extraordinary generation, in— when you look sort of societally, culturally, behaviorally, what they’ve achieved, you know, mass wealth, that, you know, they’ve done, they’ve done a lot, they’ve got a lot. And we’re sort of waiting to see what happens after they’re not here, to some degree.

But there, there is a, oh, they’re here and now I’m caretaking for younger kids, but I’m caretaking for older, and I’m in the middle and I’m next. And friends are getting ailments Our language changes from I fell over to I had a fall. When did that happen? There’s all that sort of very subtle shifts that we do notice, even if we’re not really conscious of it.

We— it accumulates, it builds up. And so I think that there is that, um, slow building, and then there usually is something, some form of catalyst some form of a health crisis, whether it’s ours or somebody else’s, that suddenly goes, oh heck, I really am not immortal. Because we forget. We— and, and to some degree, we need to for our survival, right?

Otherwise, we would just stay paralyzed by fear all the time. But we suddenly go, oh gosh, okay, my parents who remain crystallized in my head at a certain age, I suddenly see them in the supermarket and I go, oh God, who’s that old man over there? Oh shit, that’s my dad. I believe it is mostly existential.

It presents neurotic, but it’s existential. There’s something very interesting, Charlotte, that you mentioned, uh, before we were— we started recording. This is this concept of a second adolescence, which I think is really interesting. Can you, can you tell us a bit about that?

Yeah, so this is again the psychology, or one of those psychologies that I studied, is called psychosynthesis. And psychosynthesis is the synthesis of the self. And we look at self as part of identity, and it’s not just that there is a personality, because often we describe people’s personalities, but our personalities ultimately, through the lens of psychology, are lots of different sub-personalities and defence mechanisms bundled up. It’s why you can hang out with your friend in one area and you see one version of them, and then you see them in another and you’re like, who is this person?

And the same for ourselves. Adolescence is when identity first gets sort of gets constructed under pressure. It’s, who am I apart from my family? It’s the process of individuation.

And midlife is sort of when it has to be reconstructed, often sort of in a quieter way. Like we said, it’s more of an internal but equally destabilizing pressure because the who am I apart from the roles that I’ve spent 20 years maybe building, whether that’s sort of parent or provider or the reliable one, that it’s step rather than sort of adolescence that goes, who will I become? Midlife goes, was this who I actually wanted to become or who I have become through default? And so there’s an invitation to start sort of exploring identity versus the roles that I have.

And so often what we, what we see in that midlife crisis, let’s say, is like quite adolescent behaviour. It’s quite risk-taking. Um, to be horrifyingly clichéd, it’s somebody pulls up and like, you’ve got a Porsche? Like, when did that happen?

Um, it’s, it’s a real fuck it. And when we look at adolescents and we’re like, that’s really irresponsible of you, we often don’t have to look too many years down the line and go, we’re kind of saying the same thing. Um, but it’s— I understand it and I always view it as this seeking of life force. It’s that existential, maybe we’ve not got much life ahead, you know, psychologically or practically if we are having a health crisis.

And this sudden surge of wanting to feel alive. And I think that really comes through in that sort of second adolescence. It’s, it’s like we’re trying on lots of different hats of identity again. And, and I think that’s a helpful way to, to listen to what people are saying when they’re, when they’re struggling, or when they’re like, that my life just doesn’t resonate with me anymore.

There is an experimentation of who could I have been? Is there still time for me to become that? And when you say life doesn’t resonate, with me anymore, or the, you know, people say that. So, what I’m really interested in is how— so, people change, and I think people should be allowed to change, and people— and in Glenn’s conversation that we had with him, what was really lovely is that his wife was very encouraging of him to change.

There was no demand that he stay the same for her. And I have seen that in other people in my life, that they have wanted to change, and the demand. So when you say, my life doesn’t resonate anymore, is that because the people around them are like, no, you can’t give up your job, you can’t give up your status, you can’t lose the weight, you can’t get in shape, you can’t be, you can’t be somebody different, because everybody’s lives are all sort of intermeshed, and the role that you play is sacrosanct to that person. You can’t, you can’t adjust it.

Yes, we all kind of come out of the womb not really in a shape, like we’re very malleable, and then we adapt in order to survive. You know, as a young child, we are dependent upon the people we just rock up in the world to, and so we start to create a shape, and we take on these roles, and we learn how we get our needs met. So I become the dutiful daughter, I become the people pleaser, I become the class clown, in order to be seen, be heard, be fed. You know, it’s— we’ve— we develop these roles and then we keep playing those roles or we expand in those roles long after we have needed them to survive.

Because if we— if you’re— you know, it’s healthy. It’s really fucking annoying as a parent, but when your kid develops a will of their own, and as a therapist, I’m constantly with my daughter who’s 4-ish So I’ve still got a long way to go. You know, when she’s really finding her own sense of will and she’s effectively saying, no, I’m not going to be what you want me to be, I’m going to be what I’m going to be. As a therapist, I’m like, wow, what an empowering expression of will.

And as a parent, I’m like, for fuck’s sake, do as you’re told. I just, I don’t have the bandwidth, right? But that we then grow into these roles and we, and they become identities, they become these sub-identities that we may not realize that we had to become but don’t have to be forevermore. Often what happens is then we, in our sort of particular puzzle piece shape, we go to what’s familiar, and because that’s what our brain prioritises, and we go to what’s familiar and we slot into place with somebody else’s shape that happens to sort of work as a puzzle piece.

Then maybe one of you changes shape, and that’s that sort of, maybe I’m not a square, maybe I am more of a circle, or I’m more of a triangle. The problem is, is that everything around me works if I am a square, and if I change to be a circle, there is going to have to be adjustment around me. And it’s whether the people around you are willing or have flexibility, adaptability, and their own needs and, and identity to be able to meet you as you are, or whether their role that they play and their identity is dependent upon you playing a role in their own psychodrama. From your point of view, Charlotte, it must be very rewarding when people, you know, come to you with— they’ve got these existential things going on and it leads to this change.

And if they, they do follow through and they do change, it must be very rewarding to see that? I do find this work really rewarding. I actually find it really hopeful, and we need hope. I think that the world that we’re living in now is so dehumanizing a lot of the time that when you see somebody in the struggle and in the thick of it and you see them slowly start to believe in themselves and that it’s possible and that they don’t carry the weight of being at loggerheads with the one person you cannot escape, and that is the relationship you have with you.

It gives me great hope. It gives me great, great hope. And I think that, um, it’s the dark night of the soul. It’s what every movie is, is reflects back to us.

Every fable, every story. We don’t like it if we— they wake up, uh, everything’s hunky-dory, you get everything you’re given, and you live happy ever after. We’re dissatisfied with that. And that part of what I see in the world happening now, where everything is available and it is, you know, we, we have way too much access to things.

It doesn’t, it doesn’t do us any good to be constantly on, constantly available, constantly accessible. It’s why mental health is an issue. I don’t wish anyone to have trauma, but often it’s from the woundings we find the wisdom. So I find it rewarding, but more than that, I find This is really interesting, isn’t it?

We’ll have more from Charlotte in, in a couple of moments, but we just wanted to say that if If anything that we’ve talked about today has resonated with you, please do get in touch. Yeah, you can get in touch. I think the best way to get in touch with us is on Instagram. If you’re on Instagram, come and find us.

You can DM us on that and just send us, send us a message. That would be really easy. Or just go to our website and you can message us there. You know we love a voice note, but if you don’t love a voice note, we’re going to respect your boundaries and you can just send us, you can send us a DM.

Isn’t that good? You can tell we’ve been talking to a psychotherapist because we’re respecting boundaries. I know, I’ve grown as a person already. You have.

I think you are embracing your inner child. Well done, Em. So yeah, Instagram, it’s Snipers Alley Podcast, or the website is snipers-alley.co.uk. Right, back to Charlotte.

In my own life, probably since becoming a mother, I am really drawn to Gen X friendships. I want to be friends with people 10 or so years, 15 or so years older than me. I’m available. It’s a little bit needy, but okay.

I’m, I’ve got no shame here. No, but also that’s what’s appealing. There’s no shame. There is, there is a permission.

There is a done with love. Because for me, there’s sort of a patronizing narrative from the boomers. You don’t know how easy you’ve got it. Gen Xs often get forgotten, quite frankly.

Um, but there is kind of like a, you’ll be all right. Not, not a, you’ve got it easy, but you’ll be all right. I feel weirdly maternal. Yeah, it’s, it’s— no, but it’s, it’s kind of like that what we want each generation to do is to lend the wisdom down.

We’ve, we’ve lost that, the collapse of where generations— because the world is changing so quickly, lots of the wisdom, the storytelling doesn’t feel as applicable because we are comparing one working landscape, one housing market, one, you know, technological market to, to one that is so different. We’re like, well, I can’t really explain to you about mortgages anymore because it’s a completely different thing. But the wisdom of humanity what it means to go through shit and come out the other side covered in scars, but go, wow, what a beautiful thing to be covered in scars. I’m totally taking that from that program, uh, Shrinking.

Highly watch that, by the way. So my theory on this is, so when, when, so like, when I come across a woman like you, say, with a young child, and I’m with my friends, we do gravitate to you in this sort of crony sort of, kind of, you know, we swoop in, can’t help it. And I think, so my theory is, is we sort of slightly look at, we, where the stage that you’re at is still very much within our memory. You know, we absolutely know what it felt like.

And we know what we needed. And we needed to be told, you’re doing amazing. You’re doing amazingly. You look amazing.

You are amazing. Your kids are amazing. Keep being amazing. And we will just, and we will do it with our tongue in our cheek, just kind of, not, you know, we’ll kind of all say, we know it’s shit, we know it’s hard, but you are amazing.

And so we, and I feel, and my family get really kind of annoyed with me, ’cause I will stop, and I will always talk to a woman with a small baby, woman with a small toddler, and try and be a kind of double thumbs up, you know? I know that it’s really tough, you know, ’cause you can see the expressions on that woman’s face. You know how badly she slept the night before. You know how she feels judged and all this kind of stuff.

And it’s just absolutely what you said, is that we want them to know that you’re doing fine and it’s gonna be fine. And everything that you’re worried about, you won’t be worried about that soon. It’s all right. And it was really weird ’cause when you were talking about your child being 3, I wrote down and go, remember to tell Charlotte that it’s the terrible twos, it’s the tiresome threes, But it’s the fucking falls.

And that, you know. And that you’ve got all of that to come. But I want it, but you know, ’cause you want to say that to another mum, to say, it’s not your fault. It’s difficult for everybody.

Everybody finds it hard, and you’re being amazing. And I think that’s where Gen X should be fitting with millennials. And this inter— this manufactured intergenerational antipathy you know, is, is bullshit. We would have been all around the campfire together.

We would have been taking each other’s children. We would have been chatting to each other. We would have been helping each other out. And that’s our role now that we’re being, you know, moved into perimenopause.

That’s where we are now. We’re an extra pair of hands to help out. That’s, that’s what we should be. What is interesting, and it, it’s around the narratives that we empathize with or stages of life we empathize with, and it’s sort of the Interesting how, you know, in this case it was around sort of motherhood, like, I get it.

Or whether it’s fatherhood, like, I get it. Or it’s— we naturally empathize with something we’ve been through, and we’re like, oh God, I know what you need because what I needed was this. But how in other ways we find it more difficult to say it, or, or it prickles us a bit more, or we’re sort of, um, we think of it as entitled as opposed to like, it’s a really, really hard time. And also, I think the— I do think there is a shift, and it was on the back of the study.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the study Blanchflower, the U-shaped happiness curve, and that Blanchflower basically said, and I can’t remember, it was a while ago, that happiness is high in youth, it dips around midlife, sort of 50, and then it recovers later. And it was one of the most sort of replicated findings in wellbeing economics and And it was published lots and lots and lots of times revealing this sort of stable pattern. But actually, he himself released a 2025 paper declaring that the U-shape has essentially vanished, and that new research says that now happiness is more of an increasing with age. And I think that’s really interesting that because youth mental health has sharply sort of declined, It’s almost flattened a curve.

And I think that’s really useful because it brings into conversation about what is the story we tell about midlife? Is the story midlife crisis out of date? Is midlife about isolation? I referenced earlier around sort of the quarter-life crisis, but is there something about the role that Gen Xers could do that is around showing up, being brave, demonstrating that happiness is available.

And it’s not sort of this baked-in narrative where it’s the hardest point, but it is much to your welcomed eye-rolling, is it a gift? And is part of the gift of Gen X to be able to demonstrate what we’ve not had demonstrated to younger generations, to give them hope? Because you give me hope. Because I see you doing the hard shit.

And we should, we should, rather than brand it as some sort of midlife crisis and mock someone maybe when they do turn up in a Porsche, to go, fuck yeah, they bought a Porsche, amazing! And give us hope that way. And isn’t it funny because the, the kind of standard Gen X trope is that we are these cynical sarcastic bastards. Yeah, but also we kind of like that.

Yeah. Yeah, there’s a space for that. Yeah, there is, there is a space, but there’s all— there is every piece of the puzzle has something to give. And, and I have felt previously, before I actually had lots of sort of Gen X friendships, kind of like, oh man, like, oh, midlife, I don’t like that, it’s not something I’m looking forward to.

Or, you know, boomers did so much, millennials are changing this, and kind of Gen Xers are like, who? But actually, there’s a gift, I think, that needs to come forward because there is— the world, like I said, is moving so fast and we need to bridge each other, not as much with, you know, all the tech and the stuff that’s going to change. Humanity really over the years hasn’t really changed that much. So we need to return to the campfire.

COVID, we all went, oh wow, never going to take that for granted again. And then kind of all carried on. We don’t want it to get to the point where we have to have a crisis to wake ourselves up, and yet unfortunately often it is. I’d rather it be— to drop my brand in— be conscious rather than have crisis.

And I think that’s the invitation for me. I think you’ve articulated something really well that we— that me and Em have always thought, but we’ve not really spoken about it on the podcast yet, which is that the, the reason for doing this was never a kind of Gen X versus the world thing, or take— okay, okay, maybe we take the piss out of boomers a little bit, but, but it’s, it’s a friendly sort of thing, you know what I mean? But yeah, it was never about kind of playing off generations against each other. It just, it was just because we happened to be obviously at this age, and we thought there’s plenty to talk about, and we didn’t think that people were maybe talking about it quite in this way that we’re attempting to.

And I think it’s really nice to, to kind of— that’s a very hopeful, optimistic way of talking about the kind of play between the generations. And I think I really like that. And I think that’s something we’ll probably talk more about in the future as well, I think. And I feel— it sounds really cheesy, but we can be cheesy, can’t we?

I feel like genuine love and affection for the younger generations, partly because I gave birth to 3 of them. But so I know them and I see their friends So, I have a Gen Z and 2 Gen Alphas, and they’re just lovely. You know, this idea that what’s coming after us is doomed and terrible and awful, and they spend— it’s just not true. They’re so funny and witty and brilliant and lovely.

And if anything, I think they’ve taken the best of Gen X and kind of made it better. I think that’s a lovely way to kind of round this off. Do you think? Yeah, I mean, I also have a client in 5 minutes.

Oh, right, sorry. They can join as well. There is, there is that. Yeah, no, it’s— I haven’t found a workaround for confidentiality yet to invite them onto podcast live.

Oh, we love Charlotte. We love Charlotte. I love her a bit too much, I think. Noticed.

I wanted her. Yeah, she’s just brilliant. She’s just brilliant. I absolutely loved hearing from her.

I love talking to her, and I loved the way. I loved it. I loved her whole approach to psychotherapy as well. I don’t mean this as an insult to other psychotherapists.

I actually don’t know that many psychotherapists. But she just seemed really— she just was jargon-free. Yeah, incredibly wise, really caring, but came to the conversation with, I don’t know, proper insights. And yeah, I just really liked her.

There was no— you Normally, I don’t like therapists. I find I can find them a little bit twee, maybe patronising, but that’s not Charlotte at all. She’s absolutely brilliant. Do you know who would find that interesting?

A therapist. They’d love to unpick that. Tell me why. Why do you think that, Emilie?

If you want to find out more about our lovely therapist, charlottebraithwaite.com is her website, or on Instagram, you can find her at Be Conscious with Charlotte. But thank you so much to Charlotte, because because it was a really interesting chat. I really enjoyed it. Now, next episode, Em, what are we talking about?

We are going to be talking about hobbies. So I’ve been desperate to talk— yeah, I’ve been desperate to talk about hobbies because I think, I feel like, I don’t know whether this is an urban myth or whatever, but I feel like in your 50s you start developing new hobbies. And you start kind of filling your time with different kind of interests, and they become more important to you. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, so we’re going to look into that.

And if that is true for you, contact us. We want— yeah, we want to know about everybody’s hobbies, because to be honest, we’re sort of on the lookout for some for ourselves, really, aren’t we? This is the main reason why we’re doing it. We’d quite like some inspiration.

So If you have— perhaps you’ve rekindled a hobby that you had to shelve because of kids and job and life and things like that, and you’ve gone back to something that you loved maybe as a child or a teenager, or you’ve just kind of developed this new hobby. The more niche, the better. We love a bit of niche. If it’s slightly, you know, geeky, and that’s great.

You can leave it anonymously. You don’t even have to say who you are. But we would love to find out more. Exactly.

And my gut feeling— I might be wrong— but my gut feeling on this is that we are now entering the age where we’re no longer embarrassed by stuff. We’re no longer kind of restricted by wondering what other people might think of us if we, you know, kind of go completely geek out, get really nerdy, and develop this nerdy, nerdy hobby. And so I think if you could, if that’s what you’ve embraced, if you have become somebody who, I mean, birdwatching isn’t geeky, birdwatching is cool. But you know what I mean, the kind of reputation that that kind of thing used to have.

And if that’s you, desperate to hear from you. I have a funny feeling, it’d be interesting to see what people get in touch with. But given that our kind of core audience is about 45 to 65-year-old, I reckon 85% of us will be into birdwatching. That’s my hunch. ‘Cause it just happens, I don’t know how, it just happens.

But I’ll tell you what would be interesting as well, if you tried a hobby in your Snipers Alley years and it was an absolute disaster, really want to know about that. That would be good. So, get in touch on Instagram, it’s @snipersalleypodcast, or there’s the contact page on our website, snipers-alley.co.uk. Let’s hear all about them, me and Em need some new hobbies, otherwise we’ll just end up, we’ll just keep podcasting and nobody wants that.

Yeah, this could be, this could be, this could be our exit strategy.