Abstract:

Since my clients are mainly women around 50, many of them are going through, or have gone through peri-menopause. It’s a major time of transition in life, and it pains me to see how it is treated in public perception and the media.

One extreme is the way menopause is still being ignored in workplaces and mainstream movies. The other extreme is the focus on weight gain and loss of interest in sex, as though menopause was one big problem to solve.

Your mission today is to understand why menopause isn’t a curse, and not about weight gain.

Join the community of wild spirits! You’ll get a weekly email (100% spam free!) with things like book recommendations and special offers I only share by email. Simply fill in the form:

Background: Peri-menopause

For those who aren’t directly affected, peri-menopause may still be a bit of a mystery. Therefore, here’s a very brief summary: Peri-menopause is a few years in the life of biologically female persons, usually around the age of 50, where their monthly periods gradually stop. At the end of this phase, a woman is officially in menopause.

Like all changes menopause can bring with it complications, such as hot flashes, sudden attacks of feeling very warm and breaking out in sweat for a few minutes. Hormones are running wild and can cause depression in some women. Others might experience a lowering of their sex drive.

Task: Address the challenges, celebrate the change

Some women are having an awful time of it, and it’s great that help is available. However, the media’s focus on what they can make money with is particularly grating in this context.

Google “menopause” and the top results are about weight gain (and how to lose weight, fat, etc.) and how to regain one’s sex drive. Of course, if you’d like to lose weight or wish to get the spark back into your sex life, that’s fine, but it’s not all menopause is about.

The advertising once again reduces women to: How dare you not be slim and “beautiful” in the accepted mainstream sense? How dare you not want sex?

I say: See how you really feel about yourself. If you like your curves, keep them! And perhaps you enjoy focusing on things other than relationships and sex for now. Why shouldn’t this be a good thing?

My message is: You’re not broken. We need more spaces that celebrate menopause. It would be great to stop feeling ignored half the time and sold to the other half. We can do better than that.

Transcript

Here follows the exact transcript of everything that’s being said in the video.

Menopause is not a curse, and it's not just about weight gain.

Hello, welcome to this week's Wild Spirits News. I'm Sibylle, and I help women between 40 and 60 to do lots of what they love and find their unique life purpose, and if that sounds interesting, check out my website, wildspiritscoaching.com.

Today's subject is menopause, and if you haven't turned off yet, I would like to ask you: Even if if you're not affected by menopause or will be in the near future, I would encourage you to keep listening and keep watching because the fact is that half of the population are going through or will go through menopause at some point in their lives, and the other half will have a partner, friend, daughter, mother, sister, cousin, work colleague who will go through menopause at some point in their lives, and so it's actually beneficial to everyone to know a little bit about it.

Now I, as I said, work with women around 50 so a lot of my clients go through menopause, have gone through menopause or are facing it, are going towards peri-menopause, as it should be called, because it's peri-menopause really, the few years of change. It pains me a little how menopause is treated in public perception and in the media. There's the one extreme where menopause is still getting completely ignored by in places like workplaces - again, half of the population are affected, yet it's never even brought up in the workplace - mainstream Hollywood movies - doesn't happen - and the other extreme is all the advertising that is aimed at women in peri-menopause, which focuses solely on weight gain and on loss of sex drive. Your mission today is to understand why peri-menopause is not a curse and why it is not all about weight gain.

Background

The background to this is simply called 'Peri-menopause'. Because for those not directly affected, it can still be a bit of a mystery, so a very brief summary: peri-menopause is a few years in the life of a biologically female person where the the monthly periods gradually stop. And once have completely stopped and have gone for at least a year, a woman is officially through peri-menopause and in menopause, and that's what continues for the rest of her life.

Peri-menopause can, like every change, bring with it some complications and some challenges. There's a hormonal change related to the stopping of the fertility cycle. Some women can have a really hard time of it, up to and including clinical depression. Most women have symptoms like hot flashes; that means that you're suddenly very hot for a few minutes and sweating, right. Others might feel a lowering of their sex drive or loss of interest in sex.

Task

Your task is 'Address the challenges, celebrate the change'. Now like I said, some women are having an awful time of it. However, the way the media reacts to this and the advertising in this context is particularly grating when it comes to peri-menopause. Obviously, if you wish to lose some weight or if you want to get that spark back and you lost interest in sex, and you really wish you had it back, that is completely fine and there's-, it's great that there is help available. However, the prevalence of advertising that focuses solely on these things makes it seem like menopause is all about weight gain and is all about- It just smacks, you know, it smacks of this old perception of women of having to function and mostly for others. How dare you not look like the accepted ideal of a slim beauty? How dare you not be interested in sex? Now what is if you like your curves? I encourage you to just ask yourself, outside of the perception of others, is what I mean. If you like your curves, keep them! Maybe you are glad that you can now focus on other things in life rather than only relationships and sex for a while, just to take a bit of a reprieve from that. That might, why is that supposed to be a bad thing?

Again, it depends on how you perceive it. If you want to do something about it, absolutely do, but you shouldn't feel pressured to because that's what's expected of a woman, and least of all should we reduce menopause to these things, because like I said, some women have an awful time of it, but generally it's a change and it's something to be celebrated. It means the next stage in life, and it can be a good thing, it can be a fantastic thing. I loved it! I still, I mean, personally for me this was a fantastic experience. And we need more spaces that celebrate these changes, that celebrate getting older, that celebrate the gain - not the weight gain but the gain in wisdom, in personal growth, in giving less of a fuck when it comes to other people's opinions, which is what most women of that age report, and it's a good thing and it should be celebrated. We need these spaces that celebrate it, and we can't wait for others to create them, so my appeal is: Let us create these spaces for ourselves, because we deserve them and it's absolutely worth it.

Let me know

And yeah, that was my rant for today. A bit different than my usual videos, but, well, I'd love to see, to hear what you think about it. I hope this comes across the right way and not that I'm against, that I'm trying to ignore the problems that come, that can come with peri-menopause. I'm not. I wish there was more and better help available. I just hate people just making money out of people's insecurities which happens to women more all the time anyway, all our lives, and I would like to see more of the positive things, to see, to- It would be great to not feel ignored half the time and sold to the other half. That would be great. So, that's what I think. What do you think? Leave me a comment in below the video or reply to the email that you got the link to the video with. I reply to every comment.

If you'd like some more, like I said, check out my website, wildspiritscoaching.com, there you can also sign up for the Wild Spirits Community News, that's a 100% spam free, one email per week newsletter where I also share valuable information that I don't share anywhere else, so it's really worth it signing up for it, it's not some marketing-spam newsletter. I wish you a wonderful week, and we'll talk soon. Bye!