Michelle Obama Says She’s in ‘Therapy’ for ‘Next Phase’ of Her Life

• Michelle Obama shares that she’s back in therapy as she enters a new phase of her life
• The former first lady noted that she considers therapy to be a “tune-up”
• Now that she’s doing more for herself and less for others, she wants to confront “old habits”

Michelle Obama is opening up about returning to therapy as she is “transitioning” into the “next phase” of her life.

The former first lady, 61, revealed in an appearance on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast about mental health on April 28 that she is currently in therapy to help navigate her next phase following her public life in the White House with husband Barack Obama, 63.

“At this phase of my life, I’m in therapy right now because I’m transitioning, you know?,” Michelle said of her decision to return to counseling. “I’m 60 years old, I finished a really hard thing in life with my family intact. I’m an empty nester. You know my girls are in — they’ve been launched. And now for the first time, as I’ve said before, every choice I’m making is completely mine.”

“I now don’t have the excuse of, ‘Well my kids need this,’ or ‘my husband needs that’ or ‘the country needs that.’ So how do I think about this next phase, and let me get some help,” she added.

Michelle — who has been a longtime “advocate” of therapy and has done it for years — likened it on the podcast to getting a “tune-up,” and she noted that she felt that this was the perfect time in her life to do so, knowing all the things she already did.

“Let me unwind some old habits. Let me sort through some old guilt that I’ve been carrying around. Let me talk about how my relationship with my mother has affected how I think about things,” she shared.

“So, I’m getting that tune-up for this next phase because I believe this is a whole other phase in life for me,” she continued. “And I now have the wisdom to know— let me go get some coaching while I’m doing it so that I have other voices other than the people who know me best. I’ve got a new person that’s getting to know me, and seeing me completely new and hearing all these emotions.”

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Michelle previously opened up about her newfound independence on an episode of Sophia Bush’s iHeart Radio podcast Work in Progress, saying that she can now do “whatever I want.” 

“It’s the first time in my life all of my choices are for me,” she said, before later adding, “I think if I’m honest with myself, I could have made a lot of these decisions years ago. But I didn’t give myself that freedom.”

She also touched upon how this newfound freedom combined with constant public scrutiny led to gossip and speculation about the state of her marriage with the former president.

“That’s the thing that we as women struggle with — disappointing people. I mean, so much so that this year people couldn’t even fathom that I was making a choice for myself. That they had to assume that my husband and I are divorcing.”

“This couldn’t be a grown woman just making a set of decisions herself, right? But that’s what society does to us,” she continued. “We start actually going, what am I? What am I doing? What am I doing this for? And if it doesn’t fit into the sort of stereotype of what people think we should do, then it gets labeled as something negative and horrible.”