Former First Lady Michelle Obama has shared that she’s now in therapy to help her transition into the next stage of her life as an ’empty nester’.

Speaking on The Jay Shetty Podcast, the mother-of-two shared, ‘At this phase of my life, I’m in therapy right now because I’m transitioning, you know? 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,’ she said.

‘I now don’t have the excuse of, “Well, my kids need this” or “My husband needs that” or “The country needs that”. 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 married the former US president Barack Obama in 1992, and they share two daughters, Malia, 26, and Sasha, 23. The pair celebrated their 32nd anniversary last year in October.

Last month she addressed rumours the pair were splitting up, telling Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO podcast on May 1: ‘If I were having problems with my husband, everybody would know about it. I’m not a martyr. I would be problem-solving in public, like, “Let me tell you what he did.”‘

Speculation around a divorce started swirling after the former US President attended Jimmy Carter’s funeral and Donald Trump’s second inauguration without her. The former was especially surprising, as all five living presidents and their partners were in attendance except for her.

Obama has been making the podcast rounds to promote her own new podcast, IMO, which she co-hosts with her older brother, Craig Robinson. On her podcast she went into the reasons she skipped Trump’s inauguration, explaining that she was learning to not simply do things based on the fact they’re the ‘right’ thing to do, but rather what worked for her. ‘My decision to skip the inauguration – or my decision to make choices at the beginning of this year that suited me – were met with such ridicule and criticism. People couldn’t believe that I was saying no for any other reason. They had to assume that my marriage was falling apart.’

She went on to say she’s been learning the art of saying no.

On IMO, Obama also admitted her marriage was ‘hard’ but said she ‘wouldn’t trade it’ as Barrack is ‘my person’. ‘Because they look at me and Barack and go, ‘#couple goals.’ And I’m like, it’s hard,’ she said. ‘The beauty of my husband and our partnership is that neither one of us was ever really, ever going to quit at it, because that’s not who we are,’ she said.

‘I talk about these things because I think that people give up too quickly on marriage,’ she said. ‘Because there is so much friction built into the equation. And if you’re not getting help, talking about it, going to therapy, just understanding how things are changing, and how do you continuously renegotiate your relationship with your partner, I just see people quitting.’

On her podcast, IMO, the former First Lady interviews big names, including Taraji P. Henson, Tracee Ellis Ross and Keke Palmer. The series is described as diving into the pair’s ‘unique experiences and candid perspectives to a range of listeners’ personal dilemmas, from the everyday to the existential’. Topics include dating and relationships, parenting and financial planning.

This isn’t the first time she’s been candid about how tough her marriage has been. She previously opened up about the impact of Barack’s political career on her and their relationship in her book Becoming, sharing that it led to loneliness and exhaustion.

Since they left the White House, she’s been more outspoken on politics and campaigned for Kamala Harris last year. She also spoke out about Trump telling one Michigan crowd in the days before the 2024 election: ‘Please, please do not hand our fates over to the likes of Trump, who knows nothing about us, who has shown deep contempt for us.’ She continued, ‘Because a vote for him is a vote against us, against our health, against our worth.’

She also described him as ‘a convicted felon, a known slumlord’ and a ‘predator found liable for sexual abuse’.

In 2023, on her former podcast, The Light Podcast, she shared the toll of attending his first inauguration in 2020. She shared just how difficult it was ‘to sit on that stage and watch the opposite of what we represented on display — there was no diversity, there was no colour on that stage, there was no reflection of the broader sense of America’. She went on to say she ‘cried for 30 minutes straight’ after the event.