As Susan changed, she felt herself being torn in two, because the life around her, the life her husband had laid out for her, was not changing at all. “I became a married woman living a single life. We no longer went anywhere or did anything with each other.” There were a series of attempts at marriage counseling, separation, reconciliation, and alcoholism therapy for him, all to no avail. Then came the ultimate boost—menopause! Susan wrote: “I became perimenopausal at forty-two. I really feel this gave me the courage and the push and the honesty to look at my life with an eye for what I wanted and needed.” She started doing “so many things I’ve been wanting to do and never did.” Eventually she filed for divorce and started the life she’d always wanted to have, three thousand miles away from her native New York. “I had such an easy transition,” she marveled. “I walked away from my whole life there—husband, job, friends, and all but the few things I packed when I left—but I guess I did my grieving while I lived in the marriage. My life is so full today.”
The primary defense against unpleasant memories and emotions is avoidance. This subterfuge often works reasonably well until the perimenopausal transition, when the hormonal shift of focus and accompanying changes in brain activity conspire to call buried traumas and unresolved issues into the light, expressing them through physical symptoms that cannot be ignored. Whatever causes a woman’s lingering wounds, perimenopause can be seen as a built-in support system that sets her up to do deep healing and reclaiming of the treasure within. Although it may not be seen this way at first, it is a gift.
In addition to providing the clarity and courage to face past abuses or pain, menopause can help a woman step back, acknowledge the necessity to change, and do whatever is needed to separate herself from long-term destructive life patterns. Even the most deeply ingrained patterns can be changed with the support of menopause-induced shifts in the brain, energy, and focus. Sometimes the most effective way to make these changes is to begin adding pleasurable activities that you’ve always wanted to do, such as manicures, pedicures, or dancing lessons.
Caution: Reinforcing Past Trauma
The disturbing memories and the depression that so often arise at menopause are much less scary and disabling if we see them for what they are. They are evidence that we are now strong enough, deep within, to allow the pain and secrets of the past to rise to the surface and be cleared out once and for all. The midlife investigation and release of the painful patterns from the past is necessary if you are to truly heal. Trust your brain and body to give you the information you need to handle when you’re prepared to handle it. You don’t need to dwell on it. Think of it as an emotional “catch-and-release” program. It is valuable to have someone else witness and validate your pain. Many people have found that it was not just the painful experience itself that was so wounding to them as children, but also the fact that there was no one to whom they could safely turn, no one who could understand or validate their reality at the time.
You may choose to work with a therapist, and you may also consider a course of medication to deal with the sleep problems, anxiety, or panic that may arise. However, note that many antianxiety drugs are highly addictive. Far too many women have been put on drugs such as Xanax or Valium during their menopausal transition, only to find themselves dependent on them for the rest of their lives. If you’re willing to work in therapy and make the requisite changes in your life, you probably won’t need to remain on medication for more than six months to two years. (See chapter 10, “Nurturing Your Brain,” for more information on prescription medications and over-the-counter alternatives.)
While I cannot outline the course of recovery in detail here, I do want to caution you about one pitfall: some forms of therapy actually reinforce negative patterns both in your brain and in your body. These include “reliving” the trauma repeatedly and digging for buried memories. Here’s why: significant stress of any kind, including the re-experiencing of past painful memories, is associated with high levels of cortisol. This is the very hormonal milieu that increases the likelihood of laying down memories of all kinds, especially traumatic ones, which are mediated through an area of the brain known as the amygdala.20
If you are a highly sensitive or suggestible individual, receptive to mental imagery, and you have a lot of cortisol in your bloodstream (as when you’re stressed), it is very possible for you to incorporate new traumatic “memories” into your brain and body that have no basis in your past experiences. Instead, they may be the product of your current environment, combined with the suggestions and imagery you picked up from a well-meaning therapist. For example, if a therapist asks you, “Did your father rape you when you were three?” and you are in a susceptible biological state, your brain may simply incorporate the question as fact—“My father raped me when I was three”—whether or not that actually happened. This scenario may then be encoded as a new trauma memory—one that you’ll have to cope with on top of the original memories that have arisen on their own.
Ultimately, make it your goal to move on to forgiveness of yourself and those involved in causing you pain in the past. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that what happened to you was acceptable. It simply means that you are no longer willing to allow a past injury to keep you from living fully and healthfully in the present.
FINDING A LARGER MEANING
In some cultures, such as that of Hindu India, midlife is a time associated with the serious pursuit of the spiritual dimensions of life. I see something comparable occurring in this country, where the vast majority of attendees at conferences on the connection between the body and soul have been midlife women. (I’m happy to report that more and more men are now coming to these events as well—a change I’ve witnessed in the last five years.) With our child-rearing years behind us, our creative energies are freed. Our search for life’s meaning begins to take on new urgency, and we begin to experience ourselves as potential vessels for Spirit. I’ve long believed that each of our lives is directed by a force that I think of as God. This force is much bigger than our own intellects, and it always moves us toward our highest possible purpose, working directly through the unique expression that each of us represents. My lifelong interest in metaphysics and astrology has provided me with very clear evidence for this truth.
Barbara Hand Clow, an author who specializes in using astrology to give us more access to our power, explains that all of us must go through several key life passages in order to reach our full wisdom. Each passage is associated with very specific and predictable shifts that, if negotiated consciously, open us to our full potential. In her 1996 book Liquid Light of Sex: Kundalini Rising at Mid-Life Crisis, Clow writes, “We form at age 30, we transform at age 40, and we transmute at age 50.”21
Around age forty, the universal energy known as kundalini (which is depicted as a snake in many ancient healing traditions) begins to rise naturally and gradually from the base of our spines, activating each energy center (or chakra) of our bodies as it does so. Sometimes the resulting sexual energy that is released at this time can be quite intense, driving some women to have affairs or to channel this energy into painting, building a new home, or some other creative pursuit.
Sources: C. N. Shealy and C. M. Myss, The Creation of Health: Merging Traditional Medicine with Intuitive Diagnosis (Walpole, NH: Stillpoint Publications, 1988). Scientific documentation of the human energy system and updated information from Mona Lisa Schulz, M.D., Ph.D., Awakening Intuition: Using Your Mind-Body Network for Insight and Healing (New York: Harmony Books, 1998).
FIGURE 6: EMOTIONAL ANATOMY
The connection between emotions and physical anatomy comes together in the seven emotional centers. These correspond roughly to traditional energy maps of the body that delineate seven energetic centers or chakras.
The degree of unfinished business we have in each of these energy centers will determine the type and severity of symptoms we will experience in that area. For example, I personally experienced several bouts of rath
er severe chest pain in the year when I started to skip periods and have hot flashes, an indication of grief and despair, emotions of which I hadn’t been fully conscious. In retrospect, I can now see that I had unmet needs for touch, affection, and a new “family” during that time, a time when I divorced and my youngest went off to college. Many other women find themselves feeling heart palpitations, anxiety, pelvic pain, or indigestion at midlife.
When we reframe our symptoms and see them as our inner guidance knocking on the door of each emotional center, asking us to allow more light, wisdom, and fulfillment into that particular area, then we don’t feel victimized by our bodies. Instead, we have the opportunity to feel empowered by the life energy that is coursing through us at midlife. For example, my divorce culminated during what is astrologically known as my Chiron return, the peak time for me to transmute and connect more powerfully than ever with my spirit and my life purpose. Simultaneously I had been under the influence of an astrological configuration known as a yod, which means “the finger of God.” The purpose of this was to move me out of my old life so that I had the time and motivation to create new, healthier relationships—which I eventually formed. Though this knowledge did not entirely free me from the suffering I went through, I took great comfort in knowing that there was a larger purpose and meaning in the events that coincided with perimenopause—that my experience amounted to something more than a painful divorce and the onset of hot flashes.
3
Coming Home to Yourself: From
Dependence to Healthy Autonomy
The need and desire to assume more dominion over our lives becomes a burning issue at menopause. Suddenly we find ourselves questioning the meaning and value of many of the relationships that we’d never dared to look at too closely before. Although we all want to maintain the relationships that support us at the deepest levels, we often discover that our old ways of feeling or behaving with those closest to us—whether parents, children, spouses, friends, or bosses—need updating. And anytime we update our lives, we have to grieve for the old life that has been lost. Having the courage both to embrace the necessary changes of midlife and to feel the loss that is associated with those changes is a crucial part of creating a firm foundation for health in the second half of our lives.
THE EMPTY-NEST SYNDROME
You don’t have to be a mother to experience the empty nest, that aching sense of personal loss, loneliness, and limbo that so often results when your life undergoes significant change. No matter how secure and settled a woman may feel prior to midlife, the transformative passage into the second half of life almost invariably involves an exodus of some kind. Whether it’s the final breakup with a husband from whom you have long been estranged, career changes or reversals, the departure of children who have come of age and left home to start lives of their own—lives that no longer include you as an everyday presence or necessity—or all of the above, when your once-bustling home becomes quiet and/or your daily routine suddenly changes and leaves you feeling at loose ends, the experience is not unlike the unexpected death of a loved one. And even if you saw it coming and thought you were prepared for it—even if, in fact, you are the one doing the leaving—it’s painful. This is because it’s impossible to fully prepare for the kind of upheaval that is so profound, it holds the potential to completely transform you from the inside out.
One of my friends, a woman who has managed to maintain a high-powered corporate career while also raising two children, recently told me, “When my youngest left for college this fall, I was very busy consulting with a wealthy, creative upscale company, which sent me on frequent trips overseas. Though my days were full of excitement, newness, and adventure, I nevertheless found myself bursting into tears at stoplights while driving. I sometimes feel as though a part of my heart has been ripped out of my chest. After all those years of purposeful and fierce mothering, always managing to put my children first in spite of my career, I have been surprised at how very physical and painful this loss feels. And there was no way I saw it coming.”
I can relate completely. As a sneak preview into my own empty-nest scenario, my younger child left home the summer before her senior year of high school for a month at camp, just two weeks after my firstborn left for another summer program in preparation for starting college in the fall. With my husband gone and the divorce nearly complete, this marked the first time in my life since college and medical school that I had been truly alone in my house. For a while it felt okay. My house was cleaner than it had been in years (not that this was ever a goal of mine), and the freedom from other people’s chaos was a pleasant side effect as I began the process of re-creating the house on my terms. I ate whatever and whenever I wanted, worked whenever I felt like it, lit candles, and watched movies late into the night. I slowly began to enjoy the opportunity to be still and contemplate my life without interruption. After all, I told myself, I wasn’t really alone. My daughters would be home soon enough.
But I had a head-on collision with grief and loneliness a month later. I’d picked up my younger daughter at camp, and together we had driven to Dartmouth for a tour, since she was beginning to contemplate her college options. As my medical school alma mater, not to mention the place where I first met my husband, Dartmouth held many fond memories for me. I remembered vividly the exhilaration I’d felt on arriving twenty-eight years before, when I was completely smitten by the place. Now I was standing on that same campus, a fifty-year-old, newly divorced mom watching the second of her two children make plans for her own life. I was facing not only the loss of my husband and my daughters, but also the loss of all the dreams I’d had for my future. During the three-hour drive home, my daughter slept the whole way, and I realized with surprise that I felt even more lonely than I had when she was gone.
Back at home the next morning, I awoke feeling acutely grief-stricken, and I said to myself, “Ah, this is the empty-nest feeling I’ve heard about, the feeling that says, ‘You’re not at home in your new world, and your old world no longer fits you.’” I was in limbo, aching for what was and for what might have been. Intellectually I knew this was a growth phase, a kind of labor pain that would yield wonderful things if I could just allow myself to go through it. (It helped to know that I didn’t really have a choice.) Rather than smooth it over and find mind-numbing ways to spare myself the anguish, I let myself feel it. I was lonely, disappointed, heartbroken, and scared, and I sat on my bed and cried for everything about my life that was dying.
But there is good news, too. Anyone who has undergone the emotional upheaval of midlife changes can tell you that though the painful feelings associated with the empty nest arise again and again, over time they come less often, their stay is briefer, and their pain penetrates less deeply with each revisit. So our job is simply to be present with them. My own experience, and that of all the women who have shared their empty-nest experiences with me, indicates that the ultimate reward for fully participating in the emotions that wash over us at this time is that the struggle is over sooner than it would be if we tried to resist or deny them. Whether or not a woman realizes it going in, that hollow, unsettling, empty-nest experience is a blessing in disguise. Think of it as a kind of labor pain. What you are trying to give birth to is your new life, which your hormones, your brain, and your body have already welcomed and embraced, even though you may not yet be consciously aware of it. To create a renewed life, it is necessary to go into the abyss, into the emptiness you may have spent a lifetime using relationships and busyness to avoid. Having looked into the abyss myself, I can understand why a woman entering it might find the prospect of a positive outcome very difficult to believe in. But now that I have come out on the other side, I can assure you that letting go of the past, albeit painful, is well worth it. I am now happier and freer, and even feel younger than I did at fifty.
To make this an easier, more joyful transition, give at least as much attention to what you want to create for yourself as you give to what you ar
e letting go of. Start doing some of those things that you’ve been pushing aside for years. Maybe you want to earn a degree, travel to places you’ve always dreamed about, get into shape, redecorate your house, or dive into a new interest, such as horseback riding, ballroom dance lessons, yoga, meditation, writing, cooking classes, or singing. If an interest doesn’t automatically come to mind, remember what you loved when you were eleven—chances are that will give you some clues to a long-buried passion waiting to be rediscovered. The important thing isn’t what you do—it’s that you’re willing to explore your desires. Remember, this is the time to reinvent yourself as more than someone’s mother or wife or employee. And your children or other loved ones will end up loving you for this because the alternative is to collapse your life into theirs (longing for the “good old days”), eventually becoming more of a burden than a source of unconditional love and continuing inspiration. (For lots of ideas about how to rebirth yourself at this stage of life, see my books The Secret Pleasures of Menopause [Hay House, 2008] and The Secret Pleasures of Menopause Playbook [Hay House, 2009].)
PATRICIA: Delaying the Inevitable
Many women do everything in their power to try to resist change and transformation, often retreating into the kind of nurturing and caretaking they’ve participated in for their whole lives. They spend precious energy trying to keep vital life changes at bay, in essence paddling upstream rather than letting the current carry them into new, uncharted waters. Often their fear of going forward is so great that it leads to a step backward instead.
The Wisdom of Menopause Page 10