Shedding light on life transitions for women

As a society, we are generally pretty good at understanding and accepting that adolescence is a time of significant change in an individual’s life. An individual’s body will change as well as their brain and their role in society. We don’t ever expect an 18 year old woman to go back to her 8 year old body or self. We would not see this as healthy or desirable. And yet, there is much less awareness and discussion about other periods of transition in women’s lives, specifically matrescense (the process of becoming a mother) and perimenopause (the process of transitioning out of a period of reproductive fertility), when we often expect women to look and act as they did before the transition occurred.

These important transitional periods in a woman’s life are often misunderstood or downplayed. We acknowledge that a woman has had a baby and that her body is temporarily changed by that, but there is often an expectation that her body and mind will go back to what they were before her pregnancy. And many women are met with feelings of defeat, shame, frustration when they find that their body and their minds are resistant to returning to a pre-matrescense.

Even less is discussed about the woman who is going through perimenopause. While menopause is more largely in our vernacular, it is often misunderstood. Menopause is the one day in which it has been exactly one year since a woman had her last menses. Perimenopause is the 7-14 years before this occurs when a woman’s hormones are shifting in preparation for menopause.  Awareness that a woman is in this stage may be unknown to a woman, her spouse, and her medical providers as the age at which it starts and the initial symptoms are so variable. And yet, a woman who has begun perimenopause may be experiencing changes in mood, anxiety, brain fog, weight gain, and myriad other changes that are confusing or unexpected. These changes may best be understood by acknowledging hormonal fluctuations of perimenopause, and yet a woman may feel she needs to reverse the changes and find a way to force her 40 or 50 something year old body to look and function like her 30 something year old body.

Our goal in treatment is always to better understand what phase of life a woman is in, what transitions she has gone through, and to acknowledge and make space for the changes. This often involves grieving the younger self who cannot and should not be returned to, in the same way we would never ask an adult to return to their pre-adolescent body and mind. The goal of this type of work is to come to accept and begin to truly value the person you are becoming in the new phase of life.