Episode 3 — Midlife Friendships

Season 1
Written By Tanya & Lisa
Episode 3 — Midlife Friendships
Tanya & Lisa - 2-Together

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Friendship, Loneliness, and Letting Go: Navigating Changing Social Worlds

Two friends reflect on a recent conversation about visibility that highlighted their ability to disagree, then discuss how friendships change with age, limited time, and shifting priorities. They revisit a past fallout when one abruptly announced plans to move to Gibraltar due to loneliness, exploring how shrinking social circles, life demands, and unmet needs shape reactions. They contrast quantity versus quality of friendships, connect early social patterns to childhood experiences of being alone, and describe coping styles such as “storming” (taking charge) and “submitting” (tolerating poor treatment). They talk about setting boundaries, intentionally choosing friendships, and the pain of friendship “culls,” emphasising self-awareness: identifying needs, recognising unhelpful patterns, and asking what maintains loneliness or keeps someone stuck in unsatisfying relationships.

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Schema Psychology Insights: The Unstuck Edit Blog
The Good Friend: When Being Easy, Helpful and Available Starts Costing You
The Good Friend: When Being Easy, Helpful and Available Starts Costing You

Turning up, remembering birthdays, never making it all about you. Lovely qualities, until being thoughtful quietly becomes never saying no. We are both prone to people pleasing, and we both know the small, furious voice that arrives later asking: what about me? Some of our most familiar coping patterns look remarkably like being nice. Here is how to tell the difference between caring about a friend and disappearing inside the friendship.

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Midlife Friendships: When Your Social World Shrinks, Changes and Gets More Intentional
Midlife Friendships: When Your Social World Shrinks, Changes and Gets More Intentional

There was, for example, Gibraltar. Our friendship has survived rows, distance, small children and one threat to emigrate. It has also changed, as most midlife friendships do. Social worlds shrink quietly. People move, jobs change, weekends get complicated. So perhaps the question is not whether you need a dramatic friendship cull, but what you actually need from friendship now, and whether the relationships in your life are giving you enough of it.

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The Invisible Woman: What Happens When We Stop Feeling Seen?
The Invisible Woman: What Happens When We Stop Feeling Seen?

Do women become invisible after a certain age? We did not agree. One of us said no, look around. The other said yes, sometimes I do feel it. Once we got into it, we realised we were not talking about the same thing at all. Visibility can mean being found attractive, being listened to, having a role, feeling useful, or simply mattering. Perhaps the better question is not whether women disappear, but what happens when the particular way we were used to being seen begins to change.

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Tanya & Lisa

Dr Tanya Petersen and Dr Lisa Corbett met at university at 18, living next door to each other in halls. Nearly thirty years later, they're still friends, and for the past seven years they've been colleagues too.

Tanya is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist (DClinPsy), HCPC-registered, and an ISST Advanced Accredited Schema Therapist and Supervisor. She qualified in 2008, worked for years in NHS forensic services, and first encountered schema therapy in 2004 — which, in her words, felt like coming home.

Lisa is an HCPC-registered Counselling Psychologist (PsychD). She took the scenic route into psychology, via corporate work and volunteering with children's charities in South Africa, and has since worked across NHS and private settings.

They founded 2 Together to make schema psychology accessible — through the free Unstuck podcast, self-guided courses, and one-to-one online therapy.

Next

Episode 2 — The Invisible Woman