Carly’s Wild Middle

It didn’t arrive as hot flashes for me. It arrived as anger. A shorter fuse. A tolerance that had quietly disappeared. Irritation that felt disproportionate to the moment but impossible to ignore. I remember thinking, who is this version of me? Because I wasn’t an angry person. I was the capable one. The teacher. The helper. The person who could hold a lot. The person everyone else leaned on. Recovering eldest daughter energy, perhaps.

Looking back now, I can see it wasn’t really anger at all. It was years of people pleasing, masking, biting my tongue, and overriding my own needs finally running out of places to go. Years of being agreeable. Easy-going. Accommodating. The one who kept the peace, remembered the birthdays, carried the emotional temperature of the room, and somehow ended up responsible for things I never actually volunteered for. I had become exceptionally good at carrying what wasn’t mine to carry.

So when my reactions started feeling bigger than the situation in front of me, I assumed something was wrong with me. What I understand now is that my body wasn’t malfunctioning. It was communicating.

That anger wasn’t the problem. It was information.

It was pointing toward years of pushing past my limits, staying regulated for everyone else while my own nervous system quietly carried the bill. The exhaustion that sleep didn’t touch. The resentment I didn’t want to admit was there. The feeling of being surrounded by people I loved and somehow still feeling completely alone inside myself. The completely unreasonable rage when someone asked what was for dinner while standing directly in front of the fridge. If you know, you know.

I didn’t have language for any of it then. I just knew that whatever had worked before wasn’t working anymore. The strategies that had gotten me this far, working harder, being more helpful, staying positive, holding it all together, suddenly felt impossible to maintain. My body had simply stopped agreeing to the arrangement.

Finding nervous system work and EFT tapping changed the conversation completely. For the first time, I stopped trying to think my way out of experiences that were living in my body. I stopped treating my symptoms like personal failures or character flaws. I stopped asking, what’s wrong with me? and started asking, what is my nervous system trying to tell me?

That question changed everything. Not because life suddenly became easier. Not because stress disappeared. But because I finally had a way to work with my body instead of constantly trying to override it.

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Ashley’s Wild Middle

It started small. Puffiness around my eyes that I could’ve sworn wasn’t there before. I was running a business, raising my kids, moving fast, so I did what a lot of us do. I explained it away. Allergies. Bad sleep. Getting older. I told myself that story for months.

But it didn’t go away. It got worse. And somewhere in there, I stopped believing my own excuses.

When I finally got labs done, I remember sitting with the results and feeling the floor tilt a little. My DHEA was basically flatlined. My gut was a mess. My hormones weren’t just “a little off” they were in freefall. This wasn’t tiredness. This was my body running on empty, and had been for a while.

Here’s the part I keep coming back to: the only reason I was still standing was the nervous system work I’d already been doing for years. All that time spent learning to regulate, noticing my patterns, building capacity to stay present under stress, it didn’t prevent the crash, but it gave me somewhere to land. It’s the reason I could keep functioning, keep showing up, while underneath the surface my body was quietly falling apart.

But regulation was only half of it. The harder part, the part nobody warns you about, was that I didn’t recognize myself anymore. I’d built an identity around being capable, energetic, the one who holds everything together. And suddenly none of that felt true. I didn’t know who I was if I wasn’t that person. That disconnect was almost harder to face than the numbers on the page.

Finding my way back wasn’t just about restoring my hormones or calming my nervous system. It was about rebuilding my sense of self from the inside out, figuring out who I was underneath the roles and the output, and learning to trust that person again. That’s the piece that changed everything for me. Not just healing my body, but reclaiming my identity along with it.

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Where our stories meet

Two different arrivals, one of us in a wave of anger she didn’t recognize, one of us staring at lab results on a living room floor. But the same wall. The same disorientation. The same quiet question underneath it: who is this, if not who I’ve always been? The frustration of not being believed by our own bodies. The fear. And underneath it, a quiet grief for the version of ourselves we each thought we’d lost for good.

Here’s the part that made this hit differently for both of us: this wasn’t new territory. We were already doing nervous system and EFT tapping work with women, professionally, before any of this landed in our own lives. We’d spent years helping other women regulate, find safety in their bodies, work with their nervous systems instead of against them.

Then this stage of life landed on us too and we turned the same tools we’d been using with clients on ourselves. Not as an experiment. Because we didn’t know what else to do. And it worked. Not perfectly, not instantly, but it worked, the same regulation, the same tapping, the same nervous system approach we’d spent years teaching, now applied to our own perimenopause, our own anger, our own unrecognizable reflection in the mirror. We watched it hold us up when nothing else did.

We both discovered the same thing on the other side of it: our bodies weren’t malfunctioning. They were communicating. And the way back wasn’t pushing harder or holding it together tighter, it was learning to work with the nervous system instead of constantly overriding it. It’s not just the space between symptoms and answers, it’s the space between the person you used to be and whoever you’re becoming.

The other surprise was realizing how many other women were standing in exactly the same place. Successful. Capable. Holding careers, families, relationships, and communities together while quietly wondering why they suddenly couldn’t hold themselves the same way anymore.

That’s the Wild Middle. The place between who you’ve always been and who you’re becoming. The place where old strategies stop working before new ones fully arrive. The place where your nervous system starts asking for something different.

We built it because we needed it too. Not as two people standing years beyond this looking back with perfect clarity, but as two women who lived it in real time, watched our own work carry us through it, and knew we couldn’t keep that to ourselves.

If you’re in it right now, the dismissing, the powering through, the quiet suspicion that something’s not right, or the harder question of who you even are on the other side of it we’re not coaching you from the outside. We’re sharing exactly what got us through, because we didn’t want any other woman to have to find her way through this alone.

The Wild Middle is opening its doors soon. We’d love for you to be there.

Get on the list. https://ashleywilton.myflodesk.com/e06ebc7f-f7e5-45ef-b4ba-6d3a86134835

xo Ashley & Carly