My doctoral research was into the embodied experience of postmenopause.
You can access the full thesis here.
For many years I have been interested in the experience of being postmenopausal – what is this like in everyday life, living in the world, in our changing bodies? Partly this is from my own experience, having become menopausal in my mid-30s after cancer treatment, partly it is to do with the silence our culture has around POSTmenopause – the second time in our lives that we are non-reproductive but, unlike childhood, all too often ignored.
I hope that the work I further create from this research will make something that might help all of us, therapists and counsellors included, better understand what it is like to be postmenopausal. This is particularly important as postmenopause lasts from a quarter to a third of our lives, yet is rarely considered in the wider scope of menopause research.
In my interviews I focused on the personal, embodied experience; what is it like to live in the world, in your body? How does it show up for you on an everyday basis? What is it like to be being postmenopausal, for you, now?
Here are some thoughts I’ve shared recently:
Maybe your ‘menopause anger’ is because, by the time you get to menopause, you’ve been dealing with decades of misogyny and by menopause you’ve had enough?
Maybe your ‘menopausal anger’ is because you’re tired of being a targeted market for products that are jumping on the menopause bandwagon?
Maybe your ‘menopause anxiety’ is because menopause reminds us that we are ageing and will die and our culture despises ageing and is terrified of death?
Maybe the tough stuff in menopause is because menopause is a bio-psycho-socio-cultural transition and change is often hard, especially when your society hates change?
Maybe menopause is hard work because it’s a reversion to infertility in a brutally pronatal culture that teaches us we are worthless if we are not fertile?
Maybe you don’t have to ‘do’ menopause brilliantly. Maybe it would be ok to BE however you are and find out who you are becoming in postmenopause?
Stella Duffy Therapy 