Member since July 2026
Julie Merriman, Ph.D., LPC-S, is a clinical expert, author, and speaker who helps women reclaim energy, desire, and aliveness after decades of putting everyone else first. With 30 years of clinical and academic experience, and credentials as a Ph.D., LPC-S, and certified yoga therapist, she brings a rare blend of neuroscience and emotional truth to the stage. Julie reframes the exhaustion, compassion fatigue, burnout, and lost desire so many women feel in midlife not as a personal failing or a hormone problem, but as a nervous system stuck in protection mode after years of overfunctioning. Through her books Are We Gonna Have Sex or What? and In Pursuit of Soul Joy, her Sexy After 50 and Compassion Fatigue Cure podcasts, and her keynotes, she gives audiences both the science of why they disappeared and a practical, somatic path back to pleasure and presence. Her message: Tamed, not broken: you are not too late — you are waking up.
I'm passionate about the moment a woman realizes she isn't broken. So many women reach midlife believing they've lost their desire, their spark, their very selves when what they've really lost is safety in their own bodies after decades of carrying too much. My passion is handing them both the science and the permission to finally come home to themselves.
One of the most accomplished women I ever worked with came to me certain something was deeply wrong with her. Brilliant career, a partner she loved and she dreaded intimacy, felt nothing, and assumed she was the failure. I asked her to do one thing: place a hand on her chest and a hand on her belly and take five slow breaths. She started to cry. It was the first time all day, maybe all year, she had actually checked in with herself. Nothing was wrong with her body. It had simply learned to associate closeness with pressure and performance instead of safety. Watching the shame drain out of the room as she understood that...that is why I do this work.
For years, I treated burnout and compassion fatigue in everyone else. Then, in my early forties, it became my own story. I gave a keynote I'd poured weeks into, and I earned a standing ovation for it. Then I walked offstage and felt… nothing. Numb. As if all that work had been for nothing. I was a floating head of competence, completely disembodied. Burned out. Compassion fatigued. Running on pure expertise with no one home inside. I remember thinking, is this it? That was the moment I finally admitted something was deeply off, and something had to change.
That's when the science clicked into something bigger. What I was living wasn't a willpower problem or a hormone problem. It was a nervous system in survival mode. That single understanding became my mission. It's where my books, Are We Gonna Have Sex or What? and In Pursuit of Soul Joy, and my podcasts, Sexy After 50 and Compassion Fatigue Cure, were born. And it led to the work I do today: helping women stop performing their lives and finally inhabit them.
One of the most accomplished women I ever worked with came to me certain something was deeply wrong with her. Brilliant career, a partner she loved and she dreaded intimacy, felt nothing, and assumed she was the failure. I asked her to do one thing: place a hand on her chest and a hand on her belly and take five slow breaths. She started to cry. It was the first time all day, maybe all year, she had actually checked in with herself. Nothing was wrong with her body. It had simply learned to associate closeness with pressure and performance instead of safety. Watching the shame drain out of the room as she understood that...that is why I do this work.
For years, I treated burnout and compassion fatigue in everyone else. Then, in my early forties, it became my own story. I gave a keynote I'd poured weeks into, and I earned a standing ovation for it. Then I walked offstage and felt… nothing. Numb. As if all that work had been for nothing. I was a floating head of competence, completely disembodied. Burned out. Compassion fatigued. Running on pure expertise with no one home inside. I remember thinking, is this it? That was the moment I finally admitted something was deeply off, and something had to change.
That's when the science clicked into something bigger. What I was living wasn't a willpower problem or a hormone problem. It was a nervous system in survival mode. That single understanding became my mission. It's where my books, Are We Gonna Have Sex or What? and In Pursuit of Soul Joy, and my podcasts, Sexy After 50 and Compassion Fatigue Cure, were born. And it led to the work I do today: helping women stop performing their lives and finally inhabit them.
