Everyday in the United States, 6,000 women start their menopause journey. Some know it, many don’t. Countless others either don’t really know what menopause is, feel compelled to dismiss it or cringe due to their own lack of knowledge of what it all really entails. I was one of these women.
In order to thrive through menopause, women need and deserve to have a better understanding of what the heck is going on. Women want to feel comfortable in their own skin, inside and out. They want to feel capable and resilient to combat the unhelpful, negative self talk that can be magnified during times of stress and change. We don’t need just a list of what is happening to us, we need support to help us define what our emotional journey can look like and mental health processing tools to help us find our way through this life changing journey.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of stigma and ignorance around what menopause is and what it looks like for any individual. That lack of information can lead to new or increased mental health challenges and there is already enough to manage with all the other menopause symptoms! Being hard on yourself doesn’t make the journey any easier.
Also, throughout the book, I will add content from the over 100 women I surveyed during the course of writing this book who give eye opening and supportive perspectives around their experiences in menopause.
The majority of this book explores and defines the emotional experiences that can occur in menopause and some tools and exercises to help identify and process such experiences in an empowering, illuminating way. These experiences can be hard to define as they don’t measure like a broken arm would in an x-ray. We have to understand what a particular emotion is and then what that can and does look like inside of us. Everybody’s lived emotional experience is valid.