Women's Midlife & Wellness
Mood swings, broken sleep, the identity wobble, the anxiety with a new engine — the parts of perimenopause, menopause, and midlife that your physician's care doesn't cover. CBT-based skills coaching for staying steady through the shift, from someone with professional training in this work — and a personal stake in this season.
In short
Rose Markotic offers menopause and midlife coaching for women, online and in English, from Croatia, including women who have moved abroad to Portugal, Spain, Croatia or elsewhere in Europe and the UK. It’s CBT-based skills coaching for mood, sleep habits and identity, alongside your doctor’s care.
Why Rose does this work
Rose’s path here runs through more than a decade of clinical training and practice — graduate training at Santa Clara University and years inside Dr. David Burns’ TEAM-CBT group at Stanford, the home of the measurement-driven framework. And she brings the season itself. This isn’t work she chose from a market analysis. It’s work she understands from the inside: the 3am rehearsals, the mood that arrives sideways, the strange grief and strange freedom of the identity shift.
That combination matters, because midlife work fails in two predictable ways. Purely personal “I’ve been there” support runs out of tools fast. Purely technical skills work misses how disorienting the season actually is. This practice is built to be both: rigorous about the skills, unsurprised by the experience.
And to say it plainly: this season is workable. Not by pretending it’s a gift, and not by white-knuckling to the other side — by building the specific capacities it demands, one at a time, and keeping them.
Midlife, abroad
Many women make a big move in midlife: for a partner’s job, for early retirement, for the sun, or for a fresh start. Rose has made an international move herself, to Croatia, where she works from today. Midlife abroad has its own shape:
Two transitions at once
Moving country in your forties or fifties stacks a life transition on top of a midlife one. The roles that defined you change, the people who knew you are far away, and you're learning a new system for everything, including your healthcare, at the same time as your body and mood are shifting.
Identity, without the usual mirrors
At home, other people reflect back who you are. Abroad, nobody knows your history, your work or your competence yet. For many women that turns the midlife question "who am I now?" up to full volume.
Ageing parents and adult children, far away
Distance changes the guilt and the logistics of caring. Calls replace visits, worries arrive at 3am in a different time zone, and plans have to be renegotiated across borders.
Rebuilding a life that's yours
Friendships, routines and purpose have to be built again, often in a second language. That's slow work, and it's very doable with the right skills and a plan.
Sessions are online and in English, so where you live doesn’t change the work. Online sessions work for women living in:
For the medical side, register with a doctor where you live; questions about hormones, medication and symptoms belong with them.
The method
CBT — the cognitive-behavioural approach — is one of the most studied ways of working with anxiety and low mood. Rose’s coaching is built on it: specifically TEAM-CBT, the structured, measurement-driven form she practised for years in Dr. David Burns’ group at Stanford.
To be precise: this is coaching that teaches CBT skills. It isn’t psychotherapy and involves no diagnosis. If you need CBT as clinical care, Rose will tell you so and help you find it.
Common patterns
You don’t need all six to belong here. Many women notice two loud ones first, with the others waiting quietly behind them.
Irritability that arrives sideways. Tears with no obvious trigger. A shorter fuse with the people you love most, followed by guilt about the fuse. The skill is regulation built for this specific volatility — catching the wave earlier, and repairing faster when it lands anyway.
The 3am wake-up that becomes a 3am worry session. Night sweats that fragment the night, and days that run on the deficit. Alongside whatever your physician is doing on the medical side, there's a skills side: the wind-down practice, the middle-of-the-night protocol, the daytime habits that protect the night.
The identity you've run on — capable, sharp, needed — feels suddenly negotiable. Brain fog makes you doubt your competence; a changing body makes you doubt the mirror. The skill is separating what's actually changing from what the anxious mind says is changing, and building the next version of the identity on purpose.
The world starts looking past you at exactly the moment you have the most to say. Some women grieve it, some rage at it, most do both. The work is using it: midlife is a renegotiation of what you spend yourself on, and this season's honesty is a tool if you point it somewhere.
Maybe you've managed worry your whole life — and the old tools suddenly underperform, because the engine changed. Health worries, family worries, the 2am accounting of everything and everyone. The skill is updating your regulation toolkit for the body you have now, not the one the old tools were calibrated on.
A partner who doesn't understand what changed. Adult children recalibrating distance. Aging parents needing more. Every relationship renegotiates at once, and you're the one holding the calendar. The skill is communication and boundaries for this exact season — said out loud, practiced, not just intended.
The boundary that keeps this honest
Perimenopause and menopause are medical territory, and this practice does not step into it. No opinions on hormones. No opinions on medication. No second-guessing your physician’s plan. If you don’t yet have a doctor engaged with this season of your health, that’s the first referral I’ll make — in that direction, not away from it.
What lives on this side of the line: the skills. Regulation for the mood volatility. The sleep-adjacent habits and protocols. The identity work. The communication and boundary work. The anxiety tools recalibrated for this body and this season. Built in structured sessions, rehearsed, and tracked — coaching is non-clinical, and there is no diagnosis here.
The line is bright on purpose, which is also why it suits physician referrals. If you’re a physician or specialist wondering whether this fits the people in your care, the page for referring physicians spells out scope, boundaries, and how referrals work.
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