Breaking the Taboo of Menopause: Understanding the Physical, Emotional and Spiritual Turbulence of this Critical Life Transition for Women
EVENT POSTPONED
Saturday 22 April 2023
A live webinar with Dr Margaret Altemus, Letticia Banton, Sarah Benamer and Jane Catherine Severn
CPD Credits: 4 hours
- Includes a subtitled recording of the event and a transcript, with access for a year (14 days post the event)
- Bookings close at 9:00am BST Wednesday 19 April
The menopause is a profound bio-psycho-social-spiritual transition and can be a time of great day-to-day uncertainty for women. This can include uncertainty regarding physical signs and symptoms in their reproductive bodies, and the emotional and mental impact of this.
READ MORE...While every woman’s transition is unique, phenomenologically it could include: the end of the possibility of motherhood, ageing and mortality, and looking ahead to a different stage of life and shedding regrets, hopes and dreams that may not have come to fruition. Whilst this process can bring deep discomfort and intensity it can also open women up to a great initiation. A connection to a wider and deeper feminine consciousness, leading to a more fulfilled and satisfying second half of life.
There is a growing body of clinical and attitudinal research on the menopause, and public discourse on the menopause has increased more recently, led by campaigns to enhance medical treatment and care. But the lived experience of women is often taken for granted, including in psychotherapeutic research, training, and practice. How can we ensure psychotherapy more effectively supports women during this transition in a way that can both complement and challenge the dominant medical discourse? How can psychotherapists help women to acknowledge their experience, and find agency within the uncertainty menopause can entail?
In this conference, we will take a multidisciplinary view to better understand the place of the menopause transition in women’s lives. We will hear from medical, developmental, psychoanalytical and psychospiritual perspectives. While the content will primarily be about women’s experience, we recognise not all women experience menopause and not all people who experience menopause identify as women. We intend this to be an inclusive event that recognises subjectivity. We welcome women, men, and gender non-conforming therapists to join us to learn more about how the menstrual cycle and menopause may impact clients of all genders in a variety of ways.
We will close with a panel discussion taking a pragmatic lens, to ensure you leave with some ideas of how you can incorporate working with the menopause in your therapeutic practice.
FULL PROGRAMME
14:00 BST
Introductions
14:10
Letticia Banton
Contextual Lens
From ‘witch hunt’ to ‘feminine forever’: the impact of history on why psychotherapy has been so silent on the menopause and where this leaves us as practicing therapists today.
14:30
Dr Margaret Altemus
The Biomedical Lens
The menopause transition is a time of psychological, social and physical development. A staged sequence of hormonal changes has been identified across the menopause transition. Physical symptoms that can emerge during perimenopause include vasomotor instability, weight gain, musculoskeletal pain, migraine and urogenital symptoms. During perimenopause there is also increased risk of new onset of depression, anxiety, suicidality, cognitive changes and psychotic symptoms. For women with a history of psychiatric disorders, symptoms can recur or be exacerbated during the menopause transition. A number of medical treatments for perimenopausal symptoms have been identified which can improve quality of life, but these treatments are under utilised. Treatment guidelines for hormone replacement therapy have shifted over the past 10 years to be less restrictive.
Learning Objectives:
- Explain the hormonal changes across the menopause transition and how they relate to physical symptoms of menopause, include vasomotor instability, weight gain, musculoskeletal pain, migraine and urogenital symptoms.
- Describe the effects of hormone changes across the menopause transition on mood and cognition in healthy women and women with psychiatric disorders
- Appraise risks and benefits of hormone replacement therapy for physical and mood symptoms associated with the menopause transition.
15.15
Q&A with Dr Margaret Altemus
15.30
Break
15.45
Sarah Benamer
Minding the Menopause – From Misogyny to Therapeutic Meaning Making
Historically wombs, menstrual cycles and concurrent hormones, have seen women ascribed madness, insatiability, untrustworthiness, and danger. Psychoanalytic theory has reflected this patriarchal paradigm in dissecting, demeaning, and scapegoating women’s bodies. We are either victim of our embodiment and apparently perpetrate the irrational and unexplainable because of them, or conversely our experience of the world through our inhabited physicality is shameful, to be ignored or subjugated to the male norm. Nowhere is this more evident than regarding menopause as experienced by either client or therapist. Therapeutic attention to this aspect of women’s lives has been sparse, often imposing top-down misogynistic ideas that perpetuate the Cartesian split between psyche and soma rather than supporting women’s holistic meaning making including their body narratives. Sarah will consider the possibilities if we bring the hot flush in from the cold and seek to integrate both the physical and psychological experience of the menopause as part of, not set apart from psychoanalytic endeavour. Exploring what has informed therapeutic practice thus far and how we should widen the analytic lens to include the embodied and sociocultural to better understand and empower menopausal women living and loving in contemporary times.
Learning Objectives
- Integrate the unacknowledged often body-based narratives that women need support to name in therapy.
- Use menopausal themes and issues in therapy more generally with clients regardless of gender or age to normalize this issue.
16.30
Q&A with Sarah Benamer
16.45
Break
17.00
Jane Catherine Severn
Femenome: a psyche-logical approach to therapy with menopausal women
In the middle of every woman’s life comes – if she can allow it – a profoundly functionality-altering, status-quo disrupting developmental turbo-thrust. Alas, it is rarely acknowledged as such, and psychotherapy’s failure to be ablaze with curiosity about its mysterious manifestations risks leaving major revelatory doors unopened. This presentation will offer a radical re-cognition of the role of hormones in the mid-life expansion of women’s consciousness. Its psyche-logical model opens a whole new world of therapeutic potential, with custom-built diagnostic and remedial tools to ensure we align ourselves with, rather than against, the specifically menopausal developmental imperatives inherent in our clients.
Learning Objectives
- Identify any elements of cultural conditioning, prejudice, assumption or unawareness that could unconsciously limit or influence their work with menopausal clients
- Apply an understanding of female hormones as catalysts of consciousness and co-facilitators of therapy
- Discover a new psycho-spiritual model of specifically feminine human developmental maturation, in which the “symptoms” of menopause can be recognised as diagnostic and remedial guides in psychotherapy with menopausal clients (and in their own lives)
17.45
Q&A with Jane Catherine Severn
18.00
Panel Session with Q&A
Drawing on a multidisciplinary perspective to support clients through the menopause in psychotherapy
18:30
End