Michelle Obama’s life looks vastly different in 2025 than it did a decade ago. No longer living in the White House or raising young girls, Obama is in a new phase of her life — and she’s going to therapy to work through some things.
On the April 28 episode of the On Purpose podcast, Obama, 61, shared the reason she decided to go to therapy.
“At this phase of my life, I’m in therapy right now because I’m transitioning, you know?” she told podcast host Jay Shetty. “I’m 60 years old. I’ve finished a really hard thing in my life with my family intact. I’m an empty nester. My girls are in — you know, they’ve been launched.”
Many wives and moms often go through a period of finding themselves after no longer being needed in the same ways as when they were raising their families — and Obama expressed the same.
“I now don’t have the excuse of, ‘Well, my kids need this’ or ‘My husband needs that’ or ‘The country needs that,'” she continued. “So, I’m getting that tune-up for this next phase because I believe this is a whole ‘nother phase in life for me. And I now have the wisdom to know — let me go get some coaching while I’m doing it.”
Obama’s comments about therapy came just a couple of days before she outright denied that she and her husband, former president Barack Obama, were having marital issues.
“If I were having problems with my husband, everybody would know about it,” Michelle said on the May 1 episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast. “He would know it,” she continued, pointing to her brother. “And everybody would know it. I’m not a martyr. I would be problem solving in public. ‘Let me tell you what he did.'”
