If you haven’t already noticed, there is a huge conversation in mainstream American culture right now about perimenopause and menopause. The symptoms accompanying the menopausal transition are finally being named more accurately. In addition to the well-known hot flashes, symptoms such as hair loss, tinnitus, itchy skin, joint pain, and sleep disturbances are now understood to be directly linked to women’s shifting hormones—and the past 20+ years of medical warnings against the use of hormone replacement therapy have been largely reversed. Women are streaming into doctors’ offices demanding treatment for their symptoms, and doctors, most of whom have never received any education in menopausal care (including many gynecologists), are rushing to get better educated.
Peri/menopausal women are feeling less alone, less ashamed, less confused, and less crazy. They’re sharing their experiences with each other in online forums, and they’re refusing to be gaslit by doctors. They are taking their own suffering seriously, and the medical establishment is starting to respond. Despite the current backlash against women’s bodily autonomy in the United States, this emphasis on naming and treating the physical symptoms of peri/menopause gives me great hope.
An invitation to psychospiritual transformation
Yet to focus exclusively on the physical symptoms of the menopausal transition is to miss an opportunity. The physical changes are only part of the story.
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As a clinical psychologist who specializes in working with women during midlife, I view the menopausal transition as a time of potential psychospiritual transformation—not simply biological change. Just like puberty, the midlife transition is a developmental passage that requires compassion, care, and grit to navigate well. These are times that try women’s souls, times in which we are quite literally—think hot flashes—thrown into the fires of transformation. There is an alchemical process afoot, a process that is designed to change a woman, a process with the potential of properly initiating her into the second half of life.
The midlife years are calling you to let go of what no longer fits and dare to step into a more authentic, more real version of yourself. The goal is not to become a better version of yourself but to become more fully yourself.
Yet for so many women, this process, on a psychological level, flames out prematurely or never really gets fully sparked in the first place. While a woman might feel the heat of the hot flashes for many years, she may never fully enter the furnace of psychological transformation and stay there long enough to get properly cooked into a new form.
While her physical body changes, her psyche fails to transform.
A psychological death/rebirth process is called for, but change is scary and uncomfortable. In order to cross the threshold to the second half of life, psychologically speaking, we need to look honestly at ourselves, work through uncomfortable layers of feeling (often including repressed grief and anger), and be willing to make some needed sacrifices—of behaviors, forms of identity, and social roles that no longer fit, including forms of feminine performativity that we were trained to carry out in the first half of life but are no longer life-giving (if they ever were).
The desires of the ego—to be socially accepted, to be desired, to establish an identity and a well-defined social role—that were prioritized during the first half of life need to be put in their proper place such that a deeper part of the psyche can begin to call the shots. A subtle shift of internal gravity is required.
Too many women fail to answer the Call. Too many get stuck clinging to outworn ways of behaving and thinking of themselves that no longer fit. Too many give in to resignation or bitterness. Some take hormone replacement therapy with the fantasy of turning back the clock and restoring lost youth. This mindset may interfere with their ability to transition psychologically into the second half of life and contribute to them getting stuck.
Indeed, it is so easy to get stuck when your culture doesn’t support a midlife transformation process—and barely has the language for it—and you lack role models for how to do the second half of life well. Transformation can’t happen in a vacuum.
Stepping into a new story
To properly cross the threshold into fresh psychological territory at midlife, we have to first and foremost believe in the possibility of that fresh territory. In order to believe, we need to do the work of clearing out toxic stories handed down to us from the dominant culture about what it means to be a midlife woman and dare to step into a new kind of story about midlife and beyond, one which our patriarchal, youth-obsessed, adolescent culture doesn’t understand.
We must work hard to step outside of the dominant storyline that says that women’s worth and pleasure lie in their being pleasing, caretaking of others, young, reproductive, and a certain kind of beautiful. We need to be willing to look beyond the stories about midlife that focus exclusively on decline and diminishment (without denying the very real changes taking place as we age), and like the Fool in the tarot, jump off the cliff into the unknown in order to initiate a new adventure. We have to believe in the possibility that there is something meaningful and perhaps even delicious waiting to meet us there.
Menopause Essential Reads
Source: Susan Frazier/Pixabay
Waking up
The menopausal transition is an opportunity to wake up—to wake up more fully to the calls and cries from a deeper part of the self than we typically listen to. Some call this part the Self, some call it the soul, some call it the unconscious, some call it God. Call it whatever makes sense to you. My argument here is that we must do the hard work of listening at this level of our being if we want to have a deeply meaningful second half of life.
So if you’re 46 and just woke at 4 a.m. soaked from night sweats, consider that something precious may be at work within you. By all means, seek help for your physical symptoms, but try on the possibility that these changes are trying to help you wake up more fully. As Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi mystical poet, advised: “Don’t go back to sleep.”
Don’t Go Back to Sleep
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.People are going back and forth
across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.—Rumi
Go to the woods at dawn or dusk—threshold times that mirror the in-between time in which you currently find yourself. Listen closely to your dreams, listen for glimpses of your deeper longings. Listen for what seems to want to come through you such that your life might progressively serve something beyond your ego. Go alone to the hut if you need more space and time for this listening. Bring a notebook and a pen. Bring an open mind, heart, ears, eyes, and nose. Bring a sense of humor as well, because the trials of the midlife passage are both serious and absurd at the same time.
And please share your experiences with other midlife women and seek help from clinicians and other advisors who seem to have your largest and wildest interests in mind. While your process is yours alone, it truly takes a village to carry an initiate across the threshold.
Source: Casara Butler/Pexels
