EP 165: Disrupting the Narratives of Perimenopause + Menopause, and Radical Self-Care with Catherine Hale

Sex Birth Trauma with Kimberly Ann Johnson

In this episode, Kimberly and Catherine discuss their personal experiences of perimenopause and menopause. Catherine shares how her identity as a holistic health practitioner and educator initially conflicted against her need for allopathic medical treatment or HRT, hormone replacement therapy, which has been life-changing through her experience of menopause. Together, they discuss symptoms of perimenopause and menopause and how menopause changes pelvic health, business, sex, and relationships. Menopause serves as a season that invites us inward while disrupting areas in our lives that need shifted. They also discuss how today’s generation of menopausal women are disrupting the narratives around this life-changing initiation.

Bio

Catherine Hale is a UK-based practitioner and educator. She is trained in Sexological Body Work, Tantra, Sexual Shamanism and supports clients collectively and individually around trauma, sex, pelvic health, nervous system regulation, money, business, and more. Recently, she has publicly shared her menopausal journey as a practitioner which has helped her further support her community. She offers coaching, courses, and more on her website below.

What She Shares:

–Symptoms of perimenopause and menopause

–Using Hormone Replacement Therapy

–Radical self-care and self-love

–Navigating business, sex, and relationships through menopause

What You’ll Hear:

–Identifying perimenopause

–Irregular cycle, change in length of cycle, hot flashes, etc.

–Feeling like cognitive function dissipated during hot flashes

–Debilitating hot flashes during nighttime

–Difficulty as a sex, tantra, women’s health practitioner but not finding solutions

–Menopausal underwear

–Identity as a practitioner, belief about Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT)

–Strong identification against HRT created sense of belonging in community

–Sense of being a failure using HRT

–Becoming humbled by menopause journey and HRT

–Change in newer data showing not as strong link between cancer and HRT

–Spiritual healer identity

–Synthetic hormones versus bio-identical hormones

–Dutch test to identify hormones

–Radical self-care and fully caretaking of body in business

–Changing relationship with business through menopause

–Prioritizing body and self more fully in business

–New levels of needs and organization through and post menopause

–Finding new sources of energy and needs for rest

–Menopause and relationships

–Menopause gives blueprint for who you’re moving towards

–Fear in some men around women’s power during menopause

–Gap in communities for men to be supported during partners’ menopause

–Vaginal and libido changes

–Creating closer relationship to vulva and internal felt senses for vaginal tissue

–Misinformation in tantra trainings around sexuality and menopause

–Intimacy, sexual, and spiritual communities ignoring menopausal bodies

–Catherine’s offerings around nervous system, trauma, money, and more

Resources

Website: https://catherinehale.co.uk/

IG: https://www.instagram.com/catherinehaleuk/