Dismantling the Gilded Cage

Feeling "trapped" by success in life, career or business and how to rethink what comes next.

TRANSCRIPT:

Dismantling the Golden Cage

When the Life You Built No Longer Fits Your Evolving Identity

If you’ve achieved everything you set out to build, but you secretly feel trapped by your own success, I want to tell you something right at the beginning of this conversation: You aren’t ungrateful. And you may not be having a crisis. You may be standing at an identity threshold.

There is a particular kind of disorientation that happens when you look around at a life you intentionally built - a life you worked incredibly hard for - and realize that somehow, inexplicably, it doesn’t fit anymore. Maybe it’s your career. Maybe it’s your business. Maybe it’s the role you’ve occupied in your family or your community. Maybe it’s the pace of your life. Maybe it’s the way you’ve organized everything around achievement, responsibility, competence, productivity. Or maybe you can’t even identify what it is. You just know that something is off.

You’re restless. Irritable. Bored. Exhausted. Resentful. Numb. Maybe work that used to energize you has become almost intolerable. Maybe you fantasize about walking away from things you spent years building. Maybe some part of you wants to blow the whole thing up. And then another part of you is horrified that you would even think that.

Because this is what you wanted. You chose this. You worked for this. You may have sacrificed enormously for this. And there may be absolutely nothing objectively wrong with it.

So why aren’t you happy? Why isn’t this enough? Why don’t you want it anymore?

And I think this is where a lot of very accomplished women begin to quietly turn on themselves. We interpret the disorientation as personal failure. Or strategic failure. Maybe I got it wrong. Maybe I made the wrong choices. Maybe I should have chosen a different career, married a different person, built a different business, lived somewhere else.

Or worse: Maybe something is wrong with me. Maybe I’m impossible to satisfy. Maybe I’m selfish. Maybe I’m ungrateful. Maybe this is just what happens in midlife and I’m having some kind of stereotypical midlife crisis.

But I want to offer you another possibility. Maybe you didn’t get it wrong at all. Maybe the life you are outgrowing was exactly right. Right then.

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Think about the woman who built this life. She may have been incredibly strategic. Formulaic, even. She was intelligent. She was educated. She figured out what mattered to her, set her sights on it, and went after it.

Maybe she wanted financial security. Maybe she wanted freedom. Maybe she wanted to build a career that would allow her to show up for her family in a way that mattered deeply to her. Maybe she wanted to escape the nine-to-five. Maybe she wanted impact, authority, independence, expertise. Maybe she had a very clear picture of the woman she wanted to become.

And she became what she set out to become.

We don’t need to make any of that wrong. In fact, I think it’s incredibly important that we don’t. 

Because one of the mistakes we make when we reach an identity threshold is looking backward and rewriting our own history. We decide that because something doesn’t fit now, it must never have fit. And that’s simply not true.

The woman who made those choices ten or fifteen or twenty years ago was working with the truth that was available to her then. Those desires were real. Those goals mattered. Those experiences developed her. They gave her skills and resources and wisdom and resilience that she has today precisely because she lived that life.

But there may have been other things mixed into those goals, too. Because for many of us, success wasn’t only about success. It was also about proving. Proving our competence. Proving our value. Proving our worth. Even if it’s not primary or even if it’s entirely subconscious, it’s incredibly common. 

And proving is psychologically complicated because we can spend decades doing it without realizing we’re doing it. We can be performing for an invisible audience. We can call it ambition. We can call it achievement. We can call it excellence. And some of it genuinely is.

But underneath some of that striving there can also be a quiet hope that if I accomplish enough, achieve enough, become impressive enough, secure enough, successful enough… I will finally arrive at some internal place that all of that external achievement was supposed to create.

And sometimes we arrive. We check the boxes. We get the thing. And the fulfillment we expected to find there simply isn’t there. Or maybe it was there for a while. And then something changed.

And this is where I think one of the most important distinctions in this entire conversation lives: The compass can update before the map does.

You are still navigating according to a map that was drawn by a former version of you. The career is on the map. The business is on the map. The goals are on the map. The responsibilities are on the map. The definition of success is on the map.

But the internal compass you are using to navigate has quietly recalibrated. And suddenly the map and the compass no longer agree. Of course that feels disorienting. Of course it does.

Recalibrating can feel like unraveling. That does not mean that something is wrong.

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I think many women at this threshold find themselves in a very particular internal polarization.

On one side there is something saying: Look at your life. Look at everything we have. Do you have any idea how lucky you are? You wanted this. We worked for this. Other people would give anything to have this. Why can’t you just be happy?

And then there’s something else. And she simply will not relent. She says: I know. I know all of that. And this cannot be as good as it gets.

She may not know what she wants instead. She may not have a plan. She may not be able to give you a rational explanation. She just knows that this isn’t it.

And then we begin doing battle with ourselves. We try to convince the unfulfilled parts that the life we built still fits. We shame them. We lecture them. We remind them how fortunate we are. We try to gratitude-journal them into submission.

Because we think that wanting something else means rejecting what we already have. And I don’t think that’s what is happening at all.

I think we need to make a shift here from thinking about ourselves as ungrateful to understanding ourselves as constricted. Because the fundamental energy underneath this process isn’t rejection. It’s expansion.

Something is trying to become larger. And that can feel threatening when we’ve built a dynamic life on a static framework. We’ve created a life that was always supposed to keep evolving… on scaffolding that doesn’t. And eventually, we grow beyond the architecture.

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Years ago, when I was preparing to have my second child, I remember being genuinely afraid that I wasn’t going to have enough love to go around. I had one child who had had all of me. All of my love. All of my availability. And now somehow I was supposed to divide that.

And a woman said something to me that completely changed the way I understood it. She said: Love only multiplies. It cannot be divided.

And I think something similar is true here. We treat gratitude and desire as though they are competing for a finite resource. If I want more, I must appreciate this less. If I acknowledge that something no longer fits, I must be dishonoring everything it gave me. If I desire another life, I must be rejecting this one.

No. We will make more. More appreciation. More desire. More capacity. More life.

You can be profoundly grateful for what something has been and know that it is no longer enough for who you are becoming. Those things can coexist.

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And I do think there is something particularly gendered about this. Women have inherited an incredibly complicated relationship with desire.

We don’t have to go very far back in our history to find women who could not independently access many of the basic structures of financial and social power that we take for granted now. And I think there can be something like what we would call in Internal Family Systems a legacy burden around that history.

Something in us looks backward. At our mothers. Our grandmothers. Our foremothers. And says: Look what you have. Look what you have been able to build. Look at the independence you have. Look at the money you can make. Look at the choices you can make. What would they think of this life? How impressed would they be? Would they really want more?

And then desire starts to feel almost obscene. Because wanting more means centering yourself. And women have been taught to confuse centering ourselves with selfishness.

They aren’t the same thing.

There is a degree of determination, appetite, desire and personal authority that we still tolerate far more readily in men than we do in women. So she doesn’t only have to contend with wanting something different. She has to contend with what she believes wanting something different says about who she is.

And I think we need to reclaim desire here. Because when I say “more,” I don’t necessarily mean more money. I don’t necessarily mean a bigger business. More status. More recognition. More achievement.

Sometimes expansion looks like less. Less responsibility. Less performance. Less proving. Less noise. Maybe more beauty. More creativity. More intimacy. More spirituality. More spaciousness. More impact.

The deeper appetite isn’t simply for more. The deeper appetite is for fulfillment.

Wealth and abundance are wonderful. Achievement is wonderful. Success is wonderful. But for the women I work with - and for me - they are secondary. Because we are impact-driven.

And impact-driven women must be compensated by the currency of fulfillment.

Fulfillment is not a luxury. It is a metric. It tells us something about our path and purpose alignment.

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And this is where the accomplished woman is particularly vulnerable to building another cage. Because you know what she’s incredibly good at? Strategy.

Give her a problem and she can build an exit route. She can make the spreadsheet. She can research the degree. She can build the business plan. She can find the consultant. She can create the timeline. She can identify the next goal and start moving.

And that capacity is extraordinary. But it can also become the mechanism through which she avoids the transition entirely.

In IFS language, many highly accomplished women have incredibly skillful, Self-like managerial parts. They are competent. They are sophisticated. They know how to build an out-road.

And if the task at hand were simply to build a different vehicle, you probably wouldn’t need any help at all. You know how to do that.

But if you feel trapped in a gilded cage and immediately hand the problem back to the same strategic architecture that built it… you may build another beautiful cage.

Maybe it looks completely different. Maybe it’s in a different city. Maybe it’s a new business. Maybe it’s a different career. Maybe it’s another degree. Maybe it comes with a completely different title.

But internally? Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

And if you’d like to do this entire thing again in seven years, by all means.

But if you want to rewrite your life around a different kind of success - one built on fulfillment and deep, enduring truth - we need to do something different. We need to do the work of identity refinement first. From the inside out.

Only then do the plans take shape - the strategies, structure and new maps. But we must orient that map to a new compass that's irrefutable yours. Not the old one the world gave you. 

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And this is where things become very uncomfortable for intelligent people. Because you have to stop trying to figure it out.

It is incredibly seductive to believe that we already know why we feel the way we do. Or that if we just think hard enough, we can produce the answer. But one of the paradoxical difficulties of deep inner work is developing enough faith to believe that there is information inside of you that you genuinely do not know yet.

In IFS work, when someone is trying to listen internally and thinking parts keep interrupting, sometimes we’ll say: Don’t think of an answer. Wait for an answer.

Those are radically different things.

Don’t manufacture it. Don’t solve it. Don’t interrogate yourself until you produce something plausible. Wait. Listen. Become curious.

Because so much of this process involves gently allowing subconscious material to surface. And you cannot tease something out while simultaneously trying to figure it out. You have to suspend the latter to facilitate the former.

This is what it means to trust The Path Unseen. This is what I mean when I talk about navigating by starlight.

There will be periods when you cannot see the road. But you can learn to orient yourself differently. And one of the ways we do that is through resonance.

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Resonance isn’t an answer. It’s a phenomenological response. It can’t be manufactured. 

One functional definition of resonance that I love, from Ariel Spillsbury’s 13 Moon Oracle, is that “Resonance is the act of sounding again due to similar vibrational structure or frequency”. It’s like responding to like. It’s recognition.

In working terms, I think of resonance as a felt sense of truth. It’s bones-deep. It lives in your body, not your head. It’s that moment when something makes you perk up and something inside says: Yes. That’s it.

Resonance has a bedrock quality. It’s a kind of energetic mirroring - the same imprint appearing in two different things and the natural magnetism that occurs between them.

For me, resonance can also carry something sacred. There can be an almost tangible sense of sacred energy in it, as though you can feel the granular presence of the divine.

And resonance is not necessarily comfortable. That’s important. Something can be profoundly resonant and scare the hell out of you. Because recognizing something as true does not mean that living according to that truth will be easy.

Sometimes the thing that resonates stands in wild contrast to everything you’ve spent your life building.

I know this personally. I invested enormously in a clinical career.

In fact, I had a sense that I wanted to become a psychologist when I was sixteen or seventeen years old. What I couldn’t understand then, and can see much more clearly now, was that I had this very natural gift—and desire—for sitting with people, reflecting things back to them, offering guidance, helping them understand themselves and find their way. And that gift was trying to find an acceptable container through which it could enter the world.

At that stage in my life, I was also deeply immersed in sacred feminine work through independent study and practice. But I didn’t have a community around that. I didn’t have a professional framework for it. I certainly didn’t have a vision at sixteen or seventeen for how any of that might become a vocation.

Psychology made sense.

Psychology was legible. It was credible. It gave something I already knew about myself a structure and a language and a path into adulthood.

And my actual path there wasn’t linear. I did a variety of other things first. But when I became a mother, I doubled down on my psychology education. I stayed home with my children for the first several years of their lives, and alongside raising them, I invested in my education.

And eventually I did exactly what I had set out to do.

I got the degree. I built a private practice. I trained with the IFS Institute and became a Level 2 IFS therapist. And there was so much about that work that was genuinely right for me.

I loved helping people meet themselves more deeply. I loved helping someone get underneath the surface story and encounter what was actually happening inside them. I loved watching people uncover deeper truths about themselves that had been there all along but hadn’t yet had a way to come forward.

That was profoundly fulfilling.

And I want to be really clear about that, because it would be very easy for me to look backward from where I am now and decide that psychology was some kind of wrong turn.

It wasn’t. It was right, right then. But the container around the work - the medicalization of mental health, insurance, billing, regulated professions - never really felt like home to me.

I had some crushing experiences inside those systems. Insurance clawbacks. The incredibly steep and complicated process of professional licensure. All of the machinery surrounding clinical work had very little to do with the thing I actually loved about sitting across from another human being.

But even that wasn’t the deepest reason something began to change.

The deeper shift happened as I started noticing where in the human journey I most wanted to meet people.

Therapy can be profoundly restorative. We can work with trauma and suffering and help someone return to a baseline where life becomes inhabitable again.

And I began realizing that I was increasingly fascinated by what happened after that.

I didn’t only want to help someone repair what had been wounded. I wanted to meet her when she began asking: Now what? What do I really want? What am I here to create? What wants to become possible through me? 

I became increasingly interested in the expansion of someone’s dreams rather than only the repair of their trauma.

And following Covid, I closed my therapy practice. I also took a pause from formal IFS training and began training in sacred feminine arts and ceremony.

And something very interesting happened. These two streams of my life - which had lived within me, yet compartmentalized for years - began weaving themselves together.

Because the deeper I went into IFS, the more spiritual I found it to be. It is an evidence-based method of psychotherapy, yes. But I also experience it as an extraordinarily powerful spiritual framework for understanding human nature.

And at the same time, I was going deeper into sacred feminine work, archetypal work, ritual and ceremony.

The synthesis became more and more compelling to me. And eventually I had to recognize that my own energy of expansion was in the integration of those things.

Clinical work wasn’t home for that expansion.

And this is where the golden cage becomes such a useful metaphor for me personally.

Because nothing about the psychology path had failed. I had succeeded at it. I had become who I set out to become.

And the very gifts that had led sixteen-year-old me toward psychology were still there. In fact, they were clearer and more developed than they had ever been.

What had changed was the container.

The thing that had once been large enough to hold the work was no longer large enough for what the work had become.

And that’s a very different story from failure. It is also a very different story from rejection.

I don’t have to reject psychology. I don’t have to reject clinical work. I don’t have to reject the therapist I became or all of the years and money and study and experience that went into becoming her.

She comes with me. No part left behind.

But I also don’t have to keep living inside the container simply because I invested so much in building it.

My clinical work was not a home for this expansion I longed for, and the longing only got louder.

So the task became building a new home for the work, and for me, that new home eventually became Theoria.

The truth of this necessary transition has been resonant in me for years. It has been trying to get my attention. Trying to get my trust. And accepting it has required me to make peace with a massive, and at times incredibly uncomfortable, identity evolution. 

It has required that I listen closely, and differently within, for the quieter underlying truth beneath so much other noise.

That’s why we can’t confuse resonance with excitement. Or relief. Or fantasy. Or even a strong sense that something is “right.” Parts can generate all of those experiences. They have jobs. They have agendas. They are trying to accomplish something.

I have personally experienced enormous relief from turning back toward a strategically sensible professional goal because it promised financial security. In my world that looks like the pursuit of a license that would let me offer clinical evaluation work. It felt good. It felt exciting. It felt positive, but for one reason only - it was lucrative. It made all the sense in the world.

Despite how truly “right” that decision was, the deeper “why” underneath it was simply survival. Financial Resources. Safety. For me, when I got brutally honest, there was no fulfillment in the goal of opening an evaluation practice. 

And that’s information.

Things that make sense don’t always resonate, and things that resonate don’t always make sense. That’s part of what makes this work so difficult.

So when you’re trying to distinguish between a powerful internal reaction and the signal of the compass, get curious about the agenda. Why am I doing this? What job is this choice performing? What does some part of me believe will happen if I do it? What does she believe will happen if I don’t?

Is this movement primarily organized around fear, lack and protection? Or am I encountering something generative? Something that wants to expand? Something connected to desire, purpose, expression, creation?

We learn to trust the compass by developing a much more intimate understanding of why we are doing what we are doing.

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And this is where I want to return to the golden cage.

Because maybe you’re listening to this thinking: Okay. Fine. I’m in the cage. I know the cage doesn’t fit. I understand that I’m not supposed to blow up my life tomorrow. But where is the key?

And here’s what I believe.

Maybe you don’t have it. Not yet.

The key isn’t lying somewhere inside you, fully formed, waiting for you to find it. What you actually have something far more interesting. You have all the elements required to make it.

And this is where the work becomes alchemical.

Alchemy begins with material. The prima materia. The raw stuff. And you already have it.

The dissatisfaction is here. The desire is here. The confusion is here. The woman who built this life is here. The parts that drove her are here. The parts that protected her are here. The strategic parts are here.

The part saying, Why can’t you just be grateful? is here. The part saying, This cannot be as good as it gets is here.

Your history is here. Your wisdom is here. Your contradictions are here. Your longing is here. 

These are the elements.

Nothing needs to be thrown away. Nothing needs to be exiled. Nothing needs to be abandoned. In the work I do, it all comes along for the ride.

This is something I feel very strongly about in parts work: No part left behind.

The parts that ran the show you are now outgrowing are not the enemy. They got you here. They worked incredibly hard. And when we develop a more trusting relationship with them from Self, they can begin to de-escalate from jobs they may have been performing for decades.

Often, they don’t want to disappear at all. They want to be restored to something more natural. A positive role that doesn’t require them to carry the enormous burden they’ve been carrying.

Everybody gets to come with us - and this is essential. Too many approaches to growth want to kill off, shame or exile what’s “in the way”. 

We don’t do that here for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that we need them. They’re source material for what’s next. 

This is the alchemy of this particular threshold. You’re standing inside the golden cage looking everywhere for the key. And you can’t find it because the key doesn’t exist yet.

But everything you need to make it is already in the room.

The inner work is the alchemy through which those elements become the key.

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So what do you do now?

First: Give yourself permission not to know.

Please stop demanding a new pathway at gunpoint.

You do not need to replace the old map by Tuesday. You don’t need to justify your dissatisfaction by immediately producing a solution. You don’t need to turn uncertainty into an emergency.

What if uncertainty is a fertile field? What if nothing appearing to grow yet doesn’t mean nothing is happening beneath the soil? What if beginner’s mind is not evidence that you’ve lost your way? What if it’s the key to finding a way you’ve never walked before?

Listen for the thoughts you’ve been exiling. The ones you’ve been shaming. The ones you’ve been telling to shut up because they’re impractical or disruptive or ungrateful or ridiculous.

You don’t have to obey them. Just stop exiling them.

Turn toward them with curiosity. What are you trying to tell me? What do you know? What have I been unwilling to know?

And then… don’t think of an answer.

Wait for an answer.

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There is something about this period of a woman’s life that I think we misunderstand when we categorize it as problematic and fail to see it as natural, prosperous and full of opportunity. Ironically, as our biological fertility wanes, a new kind of fertility wants to emerge. 

This era can include a swan song, if we can manage to hear it. And a swan song is the final call, signaling an end. But in sacred feminine terms, every ending is a new beginning and this is where our culture, left to its own devices, would have us miss the boat. 

The deeper truth and the new, emerging framework is that an old configuration may be reaching completion. A way of organizing your life. A definition of success. A particular relationship to achievement. A role. An identity that has carried you extraordinarily far.

And perhaps it is singing its final song because something else is preparing to begin.

Life. Death. Rebirth.

Not as annihilation. As transition. As alchemy. As the transformation of everything you’ve already lived into material for what comes next.

You don’t have to abandon the woman you’ve been in order to become the woman you’re becoming. She comes too. All of her comes.

And maybe what we have been taught to call a female midlife crisis is sometimes something much more interesting.

Maybe this isn’t a crisis. Maybe it’s an opportunity.

If only we can hear the call.

So if you are standing there right now - successful on paper, grateful for much of what you have, and privately wondering why some part of you still whispers, This cannot be as good as it gets - I want to leave you with this:

Your inner world is a literal gold mine of insight, wisdom and direction that is yet untapped.

You can learn to navigate it. You can learn to negotiate with it. You can learn to lead your life from it in a revolutionary new way.

You don’t need the whole map yet. You don’t even need the key.

You have the elements.

And for now… that is enough.