The Hilary Silver Podcast - Why Menopause Isn’t Making You Crazy

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

Hot flashes aren’t the problem—gaslighting is. Hilary takes aim at the menopause conversation and asks the question no one else is asking: What if this isn’t your downfall, but your awakening? In this episode, she breaks down the cultural scripts, conditioning, and quiet misogyny wrapped in every “crazy menopausal woman” meme, and replaces it with truth, clarity, and power. This is not a hormonal crisis. This is your moment.   Episode Highlights: Why blaming hormones keeps women stuck The myth of the “crazy menopausal woman” What really causes women to question their marriage at midlife Why losing your cool isn’t the issue—losing yourself is The gift of finally putting yourself first (and meaning it)   Episode Breakdown: [00:00] Challenging the Menopause Narrative [01:05] The Gaslighting of Women's Health [02:10] Menopause and Divorce: What’s Really Going On [05:05] Midlife Awakening vs. Hormonal Blame [07:04] Cultural Conditioning and Losing Ourselves [08:06] Why the “Crazy Menopausal Woman” Trope is So Dangerous [11:11] Menopause Isn’t a Crisis—It’s a Revolution [12:32] Reclaiming Your Power in Midlife   💥 Midlife isn’t the end. It’s the turning point. Ready to stop tolerating and start owning it? Hit play. 💫 Subscribe to Hilary's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@HilarySilver?sub_confirmation=1 🔥 Grab Hilary’s FREE training, This Changes Everything (and other free resources!): https://hilarysilver.com/guides/ 👉 Follow Hilary on Instagram: @hilarysilver 🚀 What’s been your biggest midlife realization? Drop it in the comments!

So if you haven't already figured this out about me, I can be a little contrarian. This isn't something that I do on purpose, like, ooh, let me be edgy just for the sake of it. I'm not interested in being provocative for shock value. I'm just interested in telling the truth, the kind of truth that most people don't wanna talk about, and quite honestly, the kind of truth

that can sometimes make people a little uncomfortable at first, but wildly excited and hopeful once they hear it. I question everything. And today I am questioning the entire menopause media machine. Right now, menopause is having a moment. Everyone's talking about it. There are new products, new drugs,

new experts popping up like daisies. And of course now even celebrities are entering the conversation. Here's the thing, don't get me wrong, I'm glad that women's health is finally being acknowledged. It is way overdue. Think about it, Viagra came to market in 1998 because of course all hail the penis. And meanwhile, women have been suffering through hormonal shifts and perimenopause and chronic conditions with little to no support for decades. The world sees men's pain as urgent and real, while women's pain is brushed off,

minimized, dismissed, and ignored because of our hormones or our cycles or our moods. We're emotional, hysterical, dramatic, and overreacting. You've all heard it. How many times have you heard it? You must be PMSing. Is it your time of the month? You must be hormonal. As a way to dismiss our experiences, our very reality, and rendering our perspectives or experiences invalid. That is just a part of the gaslighting of women that we have been experiencing for generations. We've been left to just deal with symptoms and pain as if it doesn't matter, as if we don't matter.

If you've ever had an IUD put in, you know what I'm talking about. It is painful. It is literally a medical procedure and we are having this done with no pain medication. It's assumed we can just tolerate the pain. So I'm glad we are finally talking about menopause and other women's health issues without shame.

But I don't like some of what I'm hearing. Menopause has now become the latest playground for dismissing women's experiences, our voices, and even the patriarchal conditioning that we've been subjected to, and is so deeply entrenched that we can often miss it, we don't even notice it, and even women are perpetuating it without realizing it. So today I'm sharing three of the questionable themes so that you too can begin to detect the subtle BS that contributes to dismissing our experiences.

You have to let me know if you agree with these or not. Hi, it's Hillary. Welcome to the Hillary Silver Podcast. Thanks for tuning into the conversation today. If you haven't already, it would mean so much to me if you'd take a minute to just click that five star rating on your podcast app, leave a review and subscribe so you never miss one of my episodes. And if you're enjoying this podcast, please consider sharing it with a friend because

if you like it, they will probably like it too. So one of the most misguided and harmful conversations that I'm hearing is that menopause increases your chance of divorce. That literally women are getting divorced in midlife because of menopause. Literally, let's keep blaming women for all the problems. So to be exact, this is a quote. When you're in your reproductive years, so premenopause, you've got different levels of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone every day. And it makes you accommodate, makes you kind of roll with the punches,

and it sets up this level of flexibility that starts to disappear when you go through perimenopause and menopause. The hormonal veil is lifted and you start to speak your truth and not accommodate. You speak your truth maybe for the first time about the state of your marriage, about the things that you're happy about,

the things that you're not happy about, and it does lead to an increased rate of divorce. Can you see what I'm talking about? I want you to really be able to read between the lines here. This is just another way to dismiss women's experience, to blame women for the problem, and to blame our hormones. It literally cancels out our real experience, which is the reality that most women carry the emotional load, the mental load, and even the physical load in marriages, often while also working and having careers. And when kids are involved, the load and even the physical load in marriages, often while also working and having careers.

And when kids are involved, the load is even heavier. It's not estrogen that causes this. It is social conditioning of both boys and girls. You've heard me say this so many times that girls are socialized to be kind and nice and agreeable and go with the flow. Be pretty, be a good girl. Do what you need to do to get the boy to pick you. We are not encouraged to find our own voice and to stand

out and be strong-willed and certain of who we are. So when we have families, we take it all on because that is what is expected of us. The good mom who does it all and looks amazing while doing it. So during those years, with young children, women are in survival mode and around the time we hit 50ish, which happens to be our menopausal years, but it's also midlife, the kids are a little older, we're not in survival mode, and we actually have come up for air and have woken up to just how much BS we have been tolerating and accepting.

We acknowledge how exhausted we are, how utterly sick and tired we are of carrying the load. And for those marriages that do end, it's because it's too late to make the correction, too much water under the bridge, the resentment has taken over and it has passed the point of no return. Women are not having a midlife crisis. It's actually a midlife awakening and it is not a hormonal temper tantrum. It's clarity. We're not going crazy. We're finally getting sane. The hormonal veil isn't lifting. The social conditioning is. And midlife, women are finally becoming more centered in ourselves. We are never more

sure of who we are and what we need and want, and we're no longer willing to settle or tolerate. We hear our own voice and are willing to speak it in a way that is unapologetic. It's not menopause that's making you question your relationship. It's the fact that for the first time, you have the audacity to put yourself first, to consider yourself, and maybe you're realizing your marriage never really worked for you. The damage here is when all of society blames women and blames our hormones, it dismisses our reality. This is what gaslighting is, twisting the narrative so that the person questions and even believes the altered story rather than what they know to be true for themselves.

Also, when we blame something, rather than take responsibility for ourselves, we are stuck. It means we can't do anything to change the situation, And women are then forever fated to suffer unfulfilling marriages that end in divorce. So we can blame ourselves, unrealistically so, and we can blame hormones, and we can even blame the men. But ultimately, it is we who have done this to ourselves. Yes, it's true. That's the truth that I was talking about. We all too eagerly step in and do it all.

Without expectation, without boundaries, without speaking up, we allow and tolerate and accept the unacceptable. It goes way back to our childhood and how we were socialized to be. But at some point, it is up to us to take responsibility for ourselves and decide who we are and what we want and make it happen with our behavior, our choices, and our actions. This is the bitter pill, but it's also the magic pill. We can change how we are showing up in our lives and in our relationships and the answers to be fully self-centered. So another conversation I'm taking aim at today

is the idea that women lose themselves because of their hormones. Again, another quote, when our hormones come in, our brains as females start working from left to right and we become relational creatures and everything we are doing is adapting to the relationship of another human, adapting to the relationship of a patriarchal society. We are constantly making sure everybody's okay. This person then makes the point that it's menopause when our hormones go away that we finally hear our own voice again. Again, in my very strong opinion, it is not hormones that make us act this way and behave this way. It's our psychology.

When you're born a female, automatically you are girl and then you're put in pink and then all the socialization begins. The rest is history. Sugar and spice and everything nice. This all happens long before we hit puberty and our hormones are even kicking in. And by the time we become mothers, we've already spent decades internalizing the idea that our value comes from how much we give, how well we sacrifice, and how happy we keep everyone else.

So when the pressures of motherhood arrive, of course we lose ourselves a little bit because there's just so much to do. I used to say, I love being a mom, but I hate the tasks involved in being a mom. All the things that we have to do to be a mom. It's not the hormones that have women carrying the mental load and the emotional load. It's just who we are because of how we've been trained to be until we know better. This isn't a biological design. It's a cultural script.

We didn't become selfless because of our hormones. We became selfless because that's what we were trained to be. So no, you didn't suddenly become relational and selfless because of your hormones and because your hormones told you to be this way. You became relational and selfless because the patriarchal conditioning and socialization told you that's what makes you lovable. Again, why this angle is so much better is because if it's conditioning and not chemistry,

then it's changeable. We can wake up to it, unlearn it, and reclaim our identities. We don't have to spend half of our lives a stranger to ourselves, shapeshifting to accommodate those around us, but to be fully self-aware and centered in ourselves and in our lives and in our relationships, holding on to ourselves all the way through. OK, so this last one really gets me.

The parody of the crazy menopausal woman. This caricature of us is just insulting. It's a deliberate exaggeration for comic effect. But that then makes us the butt of the joke rather than a human to be taken seriously. And I've had enough of that. What about you? The memes, the jokes, the TikToks of women screaming at their husbands over cereal.

The, I can't help it, it's my hormones stuff. I know it's supposed to be funny and I get it, I laughed too. My favorite is Kitty from that 70s show. She's the best example of this. If you follow me on Instagram, I posted a really funny one just for the sake of this episode. So make sure you follow me over on Instagram at IamHillarySilver if you want to have a good laugh out loud. But let's be honest, this narrative does real damage. It reinforces the idea that women are

unstable, irrational, not of sound mind, we're hysterical. It paints a picture of menopausal women as out of control liabilities, something men just have to put up with. Like it's a phase that we go through until we become rational again. No, we are not irrational. We're just done tolerating shit.

Maybe your husband's chewing has always sounded like a jackhammer, but you finally stopped ignoring yourself and pretending that it didn't bother you. I mean, I can literally hear my husband chewing all the way in the other room. And it's not because my estrogen levels dropped. It's not because I've lost my mind and now I become irrationally annoyed and that I'm super sensitive.

What if he has gotten louder as he's gotten older, right? Even my daughter says she can hear him in the other room. This whole crazy menopausal woman trope makes women the punchline. It implies that our reactions are suddenly unreasonable instead of acknowledging that we've been unreasonably swallowing our needs and anger for decades. It's not that our hormones are making us unbearable.

It's that our silence has finally reached its limit. And when we make jokes about it, when we nod and play along, haha, yep, I'm losing it, we're reinforcing the very thing that has kept us stuck. This idea that our needs don't matter, that we aren't important, that we're not to be taken seriously, that what we actually think and speak needs to be listened to and heard, that our rage, our clarity, our truth, our opinions are to be dismissed.

It's diminishing and it only perpetuates the patriarchy. So don't buy into it, ladies. Hot flashes are real. Being an emotional psycho who is irrational and crashing out is not. So let's stop accepting the caricature and start demanding the conversation evolve. Let's stop laughing at ourselves when what we really need to do is listen to ourselves. Because here's the truth, when women enter this phase of life and stop tolerating things they never should have tolerated

in the first place, it is not a crisis. It's a revolution. So now what? Well, I'm 52 and I've never looked better, felt stronger in who I am. I'm not losing anything. I am more fully myself than ever. I've taken back my time, my energy, my peace,

and I've learned to set better boundaries and to prioritize myself without guilt and to make decisions based on my needs instead of everybody else's expectations. And no, I'm not acting out. I'm operating more in alignment than I ever have. This is the gift of midlife. Not some dreaded decline, not a descent into madness,

not a joke, not hormonal fog, but it's time to take back what is ours, what has always been ours, but we just didn't know it. The question is, will you see it for what it is? Because here's what I believe. This chapter isn't about your body betraying you. It's about your conditioning no longer working for you. It's not about your hormones making you crazy or irrational or unreasonable. It's about your intuition getting louder. It's not about losing your mind. It's about finding your voice.

Trust it, don't question it. That's how we got here in the first place. Self-trust is everything. And it begins by accepting it's time to be self-centered. From this self-centered place, we can take care of any symptoms that we are experiencing because they are real and legitimate. And be discerning about what information

you are taking in and believing. And if you need someone to help you navigate this, if you wanna stop spinning in confusion and finally come home to yourself, I am here for that. That's what this podcast and YouTube channel is all about. That's what this movement is about. So share this episode with the women in your life and I'll see you next time.

I'm here for that. That's what this podcast and YouTube channel is all about. That's what this movement is about. So share this episode with the women in your life and I'll see you next time.