Demystifying Menopause

It is menopause awareness month and actually on October 18th, World Menopause day. This is an area I do a lot of work in - supporting women in their midlife transition. To be honest I am sick of the messaging around HRT being the silver bullet. It is not, not even close. It is helpful for some people, medical care matters and symptoms deserve attention. You don’t have to suffer. If you need it and it helps, go for it. But it will not fix everything, only a couple of things. So today I wanted to demystify the broader transition to help you make sense of what you might be seeing, hearing, thinking or feeling. Because there is a whole lot of conversation around the enormity of this transition that is not being spoken about and it is making people’s lives harder than they should be.

Menopause is a reckoning with how we have been living.

We are going through a re-wiring of our brain and nervous system. All our body systems are interconnected so when our hormone levels start to change, all hormones are impacted, not just your sex hormones. Your stomach hormones leptin and ghrelin, insulin, all of them. Of course our hormones interact with our nervous system all the time so it will be impacted to. Our brain is rewiring for this new hormonal cocktail just like it did when we were in adolescence and after giving birth. We will be tired and have brain fog, just like we did in earlier transitions. Our body needs time out and support.

For many of us the body changes alone don’t cause the exhaustion, over functioning and disconnection or loss of self. It can make the strategies we have relied upon for decades much harder to sustain. The scaffolding of our coping strategies becomes highly visible and the body has much less tolerance for the old deal most of us made with ourselves that sounds something like this. “I will keep giving, pushing, over-achieving, caring, anticipating, juggling all the balls, holding everything together and then eventually I will get to myself”.

Suddenly our body says, No, I am not doing that anymore.

Fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, hot flushes and the loss of resilience can become not simply problems to get rid of but information. Not information to not treat but information that invites you to ask yourself, How am I actually living? What is my body carrying? What am I no longer willing to carry?

Your body is asking you for a different economy, a different way of using your energy.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Menopause is known as the second spring. Our first spring in the five elements model is adolescence. TCM works with women’s bodies in a seven year cycle. It is around the age of 42 years that our perimenopause often starts in TCM terms, the next seven year cycle starts at 49. Most women in the western world go through menopause at the average age of 51. It differs across cultures. In the Indian subcontinent, the average age is 49.

TCM sees menopause as a life preserving action. Every month when we bleed we use up a lot of energy, both in creating the lining of the womb and then in shedding it. Once we enter second spring all that energy moves from the womb to the heart. It nourishes the heart as we age. I really like this explanation.

When we are depleting our reserves all the time, our yin starts to diminish. We start to really feel it in this 42-49 year cycle. The old ways of endlessly drawing on our reserves, without attending to ourselves become increasingly untenable.

In this time period our body starts to insist on reciprocity. That is, not so much How much more can I give? The questions become what nourishes me? What replenishes me? What is enough?

It really is a reckoning for us to look at our own limits and boundaries - or lack thereof.

There is a lot of messaging out there that says, your body is changing, here are all the things that can go wrong, here is how we can keep your functioning.

I feel this misses the point. What if you actually are not meant to return to who you were? Menopause can mark a threshold between one way of being a woman and another way that might be possible for you.

It is not a decline or an oestrogen deficiency. It is the Autumn season of our life where we get to review and decide what we don’t need anymore in our life and what we need to keep and what we need to birth. It is an initiation into the next phase of our life - to our wise woman power.

When the cloud of estrogen lifts I find many people remembering all their aspirations and goals they had when they were a young girl. They might find their inner activist who somewhere along the way got lost. Many women find that they care less what other people think. I think this is a good thing because what they are coming back to is their own internal compass and what they care about passionately, what lights them up and gives them meaning and purpose. Living life on their own terms, rather than looking after everyone else and sinking in the process.

The young girl isn’t necessarily the person you want to become again, but rather she may carry qualities that the adult woman within you finally feels free to claim. Curiosity, creativity, sensuality, adventure, fierceness, imagination. A particular fascination with something?

*Digital Image, Kellie Stirling - A woman connecting with her Maga archetype.*

Menopause connects us with our desire. It can be a profound connection for many women with what they really want. Like really actually want. Not what they should want, what their husband wants, what their family needs. Not what would make them a good partner, wife, employee or mother. But what does my body want now?

That can be very confronting. If you have spent thirty to forty years being highly functional, connecting with your desire can feel very strange and unfamiliar. I believe this is one of most powerful aspects of menopause. The possibility that you are connecting with your own inner compass and becoming more internally referenced. It is not becoming self-centred, it is having a centre within yourself from which to meet the world. When you connect with that, that is why you start to care less. That is why you find yourself speaking out more

Menopause is not asking you to become the woman you were again. It is asking you to become more fully the woman you actually are.

We are living longer these days and Archetypically this has brought a new archetype to our understanding of women’s transitions and modern feminist spirituality. We now have Maiden, Mother, Maga and Crone.

So who is the Maga? In the TCM model she is late summer and early autumn. The word Maga is Portuguese for magician, sorceress or wise woman, she is an enchantress and wild woman. In this transition time we are moving from being outward focused coming back to inner sovereignty. The Maga represents the reclamation of personal power, clear boundaries and creative alchemy. Our sexual and spiritual potency is no longer tied to our fertility. As I say to many clients we are becoming the sorceress and it is time to put our magic out into the world.

So you can see the conversation is much bigger than HRT. It is a conversation about how we have lived, about depletion, about what our bodies are trying to tell us. It is a conversation about our boundaries and limits, desire, identity, sexuality, ageing and about our power. It is a conversation about the parts of ourselves we have put aside or banished into the basement of our psyche and they are now screaming hard to come back. It is a conversation about what we are no longer willing to do and ultimately, it is a conversation about who we are becoming.

This is a profound initiation and a threshold, and thresholds always ask something of us.

Autumn doesn't ask the leaves to stay

Autumn is my favourite season by far. Where I live, the days are warm and the nights start to become cooler. Coming off the back of summer holidays, most people have a lot of energy and life is busy but there is an invitation somewhere in the air to start to slow down. I find myself being very reflective. The earth starts to have that pungent earthy smell and there is a feeling of letting go. Often there is a bit of sadness in the air; grief for the ending of what has happened and also what didn’t come to fruition.

Midlife is the autumn season of our life and I find that all these feelings are mirrored in people’s experience at this time. Yet many of us struggle to deal with the Autumn season of our life.

Nature does not cling to what has completed its season. Yet humans often do. We hold onto identities, roles, relationships, beliefs, coping strategies, and versions of ourselves long after they have fulfilled their purpose. Much of the suffering of midlife comes not from change itself, but from our resistance to the natural ending of things.

One thing that strikes me is how many humans see decay and loss as personal failure rather than a natural cycle of life. Autumn's leaves falling isn't a failure of the leaf or a punishment for anything, it's the design working correctly. Often I find with clients in midlife transitions, whether they are dealing with divorce, career endings or kids leaving home; they often carry a private sense that the loss means they did something wrong, or that they should have been able to prevent it. There is a natural intelligence in our body, we have these things called emotions that are superb at helping us process life and our experience of being human. It is just that modern culture doesn’t really like them, so many of us repress them so we can keep functioning. You know the leaves fall so the tree can bud again. Grief and sadness are regenerative, they help us let go of what we have loved that we have lost. Sometimes what we are losing is that is part of ourselves that we can let go of because it was an adaptive survival strategy that we created as a child and we don’t need it any more. It is not serving us in our adult relationships.

“If I was tucked inside a clock, then Autumn would be the magic hour.”

— Victoria Erikson

Autumn doesn't ask, bargain, or explain itself to the leaves, it simply arrives, and the season changes regardless of whether the leaves are ready. There's no negotiation, no guilt, no over-explaining. One thing I find about the midlife season of life is that for many people it highlights where they have been abandoning themselves and their own needs. This often shows up as Anger. Anger tells us where our body is saying No. It helps us set up our boundaries. No doesn’t have to be coming from a fight or flight response. A clean no doesn’t need force behind it for it to be true. This is one of the gifts of midlife, when we pay attention to the anger we find places where we have really porous boundaries and our body is exhausted and finally had enough. When we explore our inner world and find where our Yes and No live inside of us, we get clearer on our desires, what we really want in life. A no that comes when we feel safe, comes from a place of internal certainty that is so settled it doesn’t need defending. That is a no coming from someone who has arrived in a place in their life, where they know down to their bones, who they are.

Many people talk about letting go as a mindset shift, a decision to stop holding on. I don’t agree with this, it is physiological first and the mind follows. Autumn doesn’t decide anything. The leaves release when the tree stops sending resources to it. There is that wisdom again; its time. This reminds me of the somatic process in the body. When the body starts to feel safe, the body starts to let go of old trauma and stress it has been holding onto for a long time. There is a loosening or a letting go that happens before the story and belief systems catch up. There is a natural wisdom and intelligence in our body that moves with our life transitions. Insight alone doesn't create change, for someone to truly let go of an identity, relationship, or role, the body has to be able to feel safe enough to let go of the protective strategy it has been holding onto. In midlife, many clients experience emotional distress or pain and it is the bodies way of saying, it is time. We are in the autumn season of life, come home to the truth of who you really are.

Autumn doesn't ask the leaves to stay. It doesn't judge them for changing colour or rush their falling. Nature trusts the wisdom of the cycle. Perhaps there are parts of us that are ready to be released too; not because they were wrong, but because their season is complete. Perhaps what feels like an ending is also making space for something deeper to emerge. Not a new self, but a truer one.

Trauma, Joy and the Space between

I was reading the newspaper on the weekend and I saw an interview with Bessel van der Kolk. It was one of those Q and A style interviews and he was talking about MDMA therapy which is very interesting but he was asked a few general questions about trauma. In one of his responses he said ‘I don’t know a single person who doesn't have trauma’. This stopped me and it got me thinking about our definitions of trauma, the clinical definitions and then what we understand about it in popular culture.

We've inherited a story about trauma that is too narrow, too dramatic. We imagine it belongs to people who've survived catastrophe, war, abuse, disasters, big accidents. Yes it is associated with those things but there are many more categories that we work with in somatic experiencing practice. What I have noticed with many clients is that we place it at a safe distance from ourselves and from our ordinary yet very complex lives. The reality is most of us carry something we don't have a name for. A tightness that arrives without warning. A habit of bracing. A way of going quiet in rooms where we used to feel at home.

Trauma isn't the story of what happened to us. It's what happened inside of us in response to what happened or a series of things happening. It is the imprint it left on your nervous system, the way your body learned to brace, to shut down, to stay small, to stay safe. It doesn't care how big or small the event looks from the outside. It only knows what it felt like to be you, in that moment, without enough support or safety to absorb what was happening.

That's a very different thing and when you understand that it changes your meaning making around the topic of trauma.

Because if trauma is that ordinary, that universal, it means we are all, to varying degrees, navigating life with some part of us still keeping watch, still waiting for something or maybe still braced for what might come next.

Sometimes it is also about things that didn’t happen. Not being attuned to, not feeling like we are being seen or heard. Not receiving physical touch. Not feeling like we belong and having to disconnect from what we feel in our body to survive the environment we are in.

It widens the lens on it a bit doesn’t it?

There is a huge cost to all of this. It costs us presence. It costs us the easy pleasure of being in our own bodies. It costs us spontaneity, delight, the capacity to be genuinely moved by something beautiful. Not because we don't want those things but because a nervous system that has learned to protect you from pain will, inevitably, protect you from the full depth of joy as well.

Let me tell you what I know about healing. If trauma lives in the nervous system, so does healing. Healing doesn’t only happen through processing pain, it lives and grows through joy, connection, pleasure and co-regulation.

We seem to have created this story that healing trauma means processing pain and diving into it which is not strictly correct. In my somatic world it definitely isn’t. We’ve over-associated healing with pain processing and under-recognised the role of pleasure and connection. I understand why because trauma often narrows interoception; we feel less, or only certain ranges. But did you know that pleasure expands interoception? We begin to feel more safe and co-regulation gives the nervous system a lived experience of safety in relationships.

So joy isn’t superficial, it is regulating, organising and restorative.

Another really inspiring thing happened last week that motivated me to write this blog. I was watching the Artemis landing and I had been following the astronauts a little when they were in space. Jeremy Hansen the Canadian astronaut made a comment:

"Our purpose on the planet as humans is to find joy, to find the joy in lifting each other up, by creating solutions together instead of destroying."

He said seeing the Earth from space helped them all realise this. This brought tears to my eyes, especially with all the crazy shit going on in the world at the moment.

We are not here to be unaffected. We are not here to have gotten it all sorted. We are here, nervous systems and all, to feel as much as we can bear to feel and to help each other bear a little more. We are here not just to heal ourselves, but to help each other feel safe enough to come back to experience and feel the fullness of life.

This is what helps us metabolise and integrate the overwhelm that we all experience often each day.

This is what I mean when I talk about integration. It is not fixing, not erasing, not arriving somewhere unblemished. Integration is the slow, patient process of your nervous system finding enough safety to loosen its grip. To let a little more life in. To discover that aliveness is available to you again.

The signs of that are most often quieter than you might expect. A moment when you actually taste your food. A laugh that surprises you from somewhere low in your belly. The ability to receive kindness or a compliment without immediately deflecting it. A morning when your body doesn't feel like something to manage, but something to inhabit. A changed reaction to regular dysfunctional behaviour you experience from another on the regular.

Coming full circle on my thoughts at the start of the blog, when you understand all of this it really changes how you view all the people that come into your life each day. I think it brings us more compassion toward each other and it makes us reflect on what we can do to support each other.

When we understand that everyone is carrying something; that the person who cut you off in traffic, the colleague who snapped at you, the friend who disappeared when you needed them, the parent who couldn't quite get it right. When we understand that all of them are navigating some version of a nervous system that learned to cope, we start to see and feel our world a little differently.

I am not talking about excusing what isn't okay. I am talking about a kind of tenderness that makes more room for yourself and others. For the whole complicated, tender mess of being human together.

When our inner child is leading the fight

Our relationships can be the most fantastic containers for healing our inner child wounding. When we argue with our partners it is not our wise adult self having the argument it is almost always one of our adaptive childhood parts. These are the parts of us that learned very early how to survive emotionally in our families of origin.

When I work with couples through a systemic lens, I can see the recurring patterns that keep looping and generating conflict, alongside each partner’s adaptive child strategies. Once these patterns become visible, they’re impossible to unsee.

We think our fights are about the dishes, about a shutdown after a small comment, about tension around sex. Or maybe it is someone always needing to be right, or to be in control. Maybe it about someone who withdraws in the middle of tension, they clam up and say nothing. There is always something deeper there.

Once you see it, it makes a different kind of sense. The fight isn’t about the housework or the small irritations, those are just the signs. What’s really happening is that an adaptive child has taken the lead. The adaptive children are in the house.

It is our adaptive child that runs the fight. The problem with this is our adaptive child has no place running our adult relationships. It doesn’t have the discernment or capacity to make adult decisions.

The adaptive child is the part of us that learned how to stay connected, safe, or invisible in childhood. This is a very intelligent survival strategy that helped us survive when we were a child to stay safe. The only problem is that when this part is running the show in adult relationships, we don’t respond we react.

So when two adaptive children collide, the relationship quickly becomes a battleground rather than a place of safety.

In Terry Real’s framework, there are three common adaptive child imprints that often show up in adult intimacy. These are:

The Hero Child. This is the person who '“holds it all together.” They learned early that love came through competence, responsibility, or emotional caretaking. They took up a particular role in their family system and it was often either, the good one, the achiever, the surrogate spouse, the family therapist or they calmed things down.

They are often very competent, loyal and responsible people in their adult life. They show up, do their job and they do it well. They are often seen by others as competent, logical and good people.

When they are not good, what does that look like?

Well they can be passive sometimes and they are not particuarly good at being vulnerable because they have had to be good and responsible for a very long time. This means surrender, being open and receiving can be really challenging for them.

In adult relationships, this can look like:

Over-functioning
Carrying the emotional load for both partners
Resentment building beneath “being fine”
Struggling to ask for help or show vulnerability

When the Hero Child is activated, they often feel: “If I don’t manage this, everything will fall apart.” When they do eventually explode or withdraw, it often shocks their partner because their exhaustion has been invisible for a long time. The Hero child has had to hold a lot in the family system; in fact, they have probably been given more power than a child should have but it has not been based on them as an individual. It has been based on what the parents needed them to do to regulate the family system.

The Scapegoat Child. The scapegoat is the classic rebel or problem child. They learned that conflict, intensity, or acting out was the only way to stay seen. They often have very big feelings and express all that is not being expressed in the family system. They might be the person who fights with one of the parents all the time. Maybe the overbearing parent. They are often overtly or covertly shamed, being seen as the source of all the problems in the family.

In adult relationships, this can show up as:

Anger that feels bigger and disproportionate to the moment
Defensiveness or blaming
A sense of being misunderstood or unfairly criticised
Feeling chronically “wrong” or rejected

Underneath the reactivity is often a deep fear; fear that they are going to be shamed again. Often the whole family system can be organised around keeping this child in line. So they seem to carry a lot of power because everyone is walking around on egg shells around them. In some ways, they are the truth teller of what is not being expressed.

This child fights not to win but to protect against collapse. They are very emotional and often have big hearts. They are the rebels and the creatives of the world. Sometimes the bad boys. Why do we love the bad boys; because they have big hearts.

The Lost Child. The lost child runs their own race. Behind it is the belief, “If I disappear, I’ll be safe.”

The Lost Child adapted by minimising needs, emotions, and presence. The core wound here is often abandonment and that was learned early when this child went to their parent for co-regulation and they learned quickly that that was not available so they become independent and walled off as they have had to regulate themselves. They went and hid in their bedroom.

In adult relationships, this often looks like:

Withdrawal or emotional shutdown
Avoidance of conflict
Difficulty expressing wants or desires
A partner feeling shut out or alone

The Lost Child’s strategy isn’t disinterest, it’s self-protection. Their nervous system learned very early that connection is overwhelming or unsafe. There are lots of repressed emotions here because growing up there was no one they felt safe enough to be with to express how they were feeling.

When we eventually find a partner, the person we want to commit to, we often pick a partner that enables us to predictably repeat our role. Hence they saying ‘we marry our unfinished business’. We pair off with people who mirror the experience we received from our parents/caregivers so we can finally heal that pattern.

Why do fights often escalate so fast?

Here’s the key piece, when we are fighting from our adaptive child, we cannot access our Wise Adult self because our pre-frontal cortex, the part of our brain responsible for logical and rational thought, goes offline. We go into a survival response, our limbic system comes online and all our early adaptive patterns are alive and ready to go.

When we can stay in the Wise Adult part of ourselves we;

Can stay present
Can hold complexity
Can self-soothe
Can take responsibility without collapsing or attacking

But the adaptive child doesn’t have that capacity. Instead, the nervous system is organised around threat, survival and attachment loss. So the fight isn’t about the content. It is about our old unmet needs colliding in the present.

Two children are trying to feel safe, using strategies that once worked, but now damage intimacy. Our adaptive child strategies rarely serve us well in our adult relationships.

From Fighting to Repair

The work of adult relationship healing isn’t about erasing these parts. It’s about learning to:

Recognise when your adaptive child is running the interaction
Learning how to self soothe so that you can pause before responding
Build the capacity to come back online as your Wise Adult
Speak from the present rather than the past

This is deep nervous-system work. Because you can’t “think” your way out of an adaptive state.
You have to feel your way back into safety first. Only then can true repair happen.

The Quiet Shift That Changes Everything

When couples can see that this isn’t you versus me, but younger parts trying to keep us safe, the nervous system settles. Defensiveness eases, blame falls away, and curiosity makes space for compassion, for ourselves and for one another.

Very slowly, the relationship becomes less about winning or withdrawing and more about learning how to stay connected, even when it’s hard.

Here are some reflection questions for you to sit with.

When conflict arises in my relationship, what do I notice happening in my body first?
Do I tend to move toward fixing, fighting, or disappearing when things feel tense?
Which adaptive child strategy do you recognise most easily in yourself; the Hero, the Scapegoat, or the Lost Child? Do you see see a combination of two or maybe that you as you have matured you have moved from one to another?
What familiar loop do my partner and I seem to fall into when we’re under stress?
If this pattern had a job, what might it be trying to protect?
What old story or fear might be getting activated beneath the surface of our current conflict?