Perimenopause Rage, Mood Swings and the Emotional Layer Nobody Asks About

A man writing about menopause may sound like a Martian writing about the human society. Of course, the Martian is an outsider and doesn’t have the human experience. But he is also more likely to see the patterns that the Terrans are too close to notice. 

I don't profess to be writing from the inside. But since I read emotional patterns first and next the body – gender notwithstanding. And from that viewpoint, there are many things that seem to be totally misread. And perimenopause is one of them. Misread by everyone around the woman, and eventually, exhaustingly, by her too. 

Now before that thought of – ‘this guy doesn’t know anything’ comes up, let me show you what I mean.

The joke at the family gathering

A perimenopausal woman told me that the first time she felt old was when her husband made a joke about her hot flushes in front of relatives. “Getting irregular periods was expected but not this. And he said it was just a joke”. 

Just a joke – like many people tend to defend such things when called out. Everyone laughed including her, because that is what she had learned to do – to laugh at something which had actually hurt, just to keep the peace.

That night she lay awake, sweating, while he slept soundly beside her. For him, it may not have been much. But for her, it was the same man who had once wanted her body, who was now finding its changes amusing. 

The family now spoke of her moods as though she had become ‘difficult’. The children who still expected her to handle everything had started saying, "Mumma, you get irritated so fast now."

This is usually how perimenopause actually enters most women's lives. And the medical science also negates it by saying - "It's just hormones". 

It’s just hormones: the same family joke, wearing a lab coat!

Choose any article and almost each will tell you the same thing: That it's hormonal, it's temporary and it will pass, so speak to your doctor about managing it.

Fair enough - it is hormonal, and it will pass, and treatment does help many women. But why close the conversation in just one phrase - "it's just hormones"?  Why take everything that you're feeling and file it under biochemistry? 

Isn’t it the same texture as the family joke – not giving you any credit for and deciding on your behalf as to what you are feeling, just in a more dignified, educated voice? But still the same not real, not about anything, wait for it to stabilise? 

Hormones don’t explain why what you're feeling, is not one big thing but daily routine that you have managed for last so many years – as the family’s memory, holding anger in so not cause drama, of being watched, judged and used as a body.

• Your husband asking where his shirt is – even when it is right in front of him. 
• Your child asking "Why are you shouting?" – even after hours of not listening to you.
• Your mother-in-law commenting on your weight – while sitting herself and not lifting a finger. 

What perimenopause is actually doing

So, let me bust this myth that it’s just hormones. What research says against this ‘story’ – This transition is hard but hormones alone hardly predict how hard. What affects it more than anything else is - how much you have been carrying, how much support you have and what happened to you decades ago. 

The fluctuation in oestrogen doesn't make women randomly moody. All it’s drop does is act as an amplifier for your emotions - specifically around anger, rejection and sadness. Let me say it – it is not pulling emotions out of a magician’s hat but amplifying what is already there. The fall in oestrogen turns down the control that you used for twenty plus years to keep things manageable, contained or rationalised. 

It is not decline though – just that the body has run out of the capacity to pretend.

Most women aren't looking for shadow work

Now I know you are probably the last person to look for shadow work in this phase. Most probably – 

• You are just trying to survive the emotional volume while a tiny part of you is asking – what is happening to me?
• You are just trying to get through a workday after having woken up five times last night and trying to sit through a meeting while your body suddenly heats up.
• You are just trying to have sex in a body that feels dry, sore or uninterested, and then trying to manage your husband's sulk (if he feels hurt) without admitting your own. 
• You are just trying to watch your weight while everyone still thinks weight is a discipline issue. 
• You are just trying to look at your face in the mirror and not judge yourself a bit daily. 
• You are just trying to parent teenagers, care for ageing parents, remain employable, remain pleasant, remain sexually and socially legible, and not become the angry woman everyone jokes about.

Inside all this, the old life begins to crack.

And then the rage comes.

The rage may come seemingly at random. It may come –

• While making tea.
• When everyone is sitting and you are still standing.
• When your husband asks a question, which he could have answered himself.
• When a doctor says "everything is normal" and closes the file. 
• When your grownup child still expects you to remember the dentist appointment. 
• When you see your mother's hands and suddenly realise that you are looking at the next version of your own body. 
• During sex, when discomfort is misunderstood as rejection.

And it may come when you realise the truth underneath it all that people are willing to accept your symptoms, as long as the symptoms do not disrupt the status quo.

Most women describe the rage as coming from nowhere, wildly out of proportion to the trigger, followed by shame. Who am I becoming?  Why am I like this now?

The part nobody says clearly is that the rage may mean something but sometimes it doesn't. And you are not required to know which.

• Sometimes it could be speaking out twenty plus years of swallowed truth - the "no" you never said and the anger that was never allowed. The so called ‘midlife anger’, for a woman who spent decades being the good one, the calm one, the one who absorbed everyone's weather, midlife anger is often the first honest thing her nervous system has said in years. That rage has been right for a long time and it is pointing at something. 
• And sometimes, it is just a wave. It attaches to nothing but floods, peaks, passes over and there is nothing to excavate - no buried truth nor any address. The tears could be just of tiredness.

Both sides are real and neither is a failure. There is no point of trying to force a story onto every wave. That is not the work - but to read which is which, because they ask for opposite things. It may ask for a boundary, or a truth be told or a sentence finally said. Or it may ask for riding the wave – breath, movement or just letting the body burn it off without making any meaning of it all.

Nobody teaches women to tell them apart. You are handed over one thing, apart from the medicines, another order disguised as advice - age gracefully. Essentially translating to - stay composed, keep managing, and if you can't, it's your hormones. You are neither offered the answer to nor the question about what is underneath: is this feeling telling me something, or does it just need to move through me?

You're allowed to ask that question. That's most of the work.

Why you can't sleep when the house finally does

The house is quiet, everyone is asleep, and yet here you are - wide awake at 3am. It is usually explained as ‘menopausal insomnia’, and medicated. But a nervous system that has been on watch for over two decades – listening, tracking moods and appointments, and acting as memory, doesn't stand down just like that. That's not a sleep disorder. It is a vigilance that never comes to an end. If you are a GoT fan, it is the watch of the night of the watch.

"Am I depressed or is this perimenopause?"

The sadness that you are feeling for this transition cannot be attributed to hormones alone, but more accurately to everything you have been carrying. A major part of what is interpreted as depression is a kind of grief – of the life that you didn’t live. The career you didn’t pursue or the self that you postponed at 32, for marriage or family or something else. And now, the mind has started calculating. 

That grief isn't a disorder rather it is the most honest account of your life. It needs to be felt and not medicated away, nor added to a ‘things to let go’ list.

What I'm offering and what I'm not

I will be straight with you. About time someone is, about this ‘transition’. 

If you are in real distress – frightened out of your own mind, can’t function or the darkness seems more than grief, please talk to a doctor or a therapist. Because there are limits to what a blog or a workbook can do and there are times when you want to talk to someone, a person – you know whom you can reach out to. 

What I have for you is something sharper, narrower - a workbook called The Threshold.  It is not something to be completed and be done with.  It is deeper, somewhat private companion to this transition. Something to be kept with you, for however long it may take. 

It doesn't give you false comfort – that the second half of life is secretly the best half, or that your symptoms are a spiritual gift. But it treats what you feel – anger, heat, insomnia etc as information and not as a malfunction to be switched off.

It sits at the place that asks what your body has been trying to say, away from both "it's just hormones, wait it out" and "here's a prescription”, and helps you tell whether your body is saying anything at all.

You are not difficult or too much, nor is it only your hormones. And the people who told you otherwise, either didn’t know you or preferred the never angry version of you. 

This transition maybe trying to introduce you to her - the one underneath the managing. This is a place to meet her.