unPAUSED with Dr. Mary Claire Haver - Menopause Is a Portal: Reclaiming the Body, the Story, and the Second Half with Dr. Hillary McBride

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

In this episode of unPAUSED, Dr. Mary Claire Haver sits down with Dr. Hillary McBride, a psychologist, researcher, and author whose work focuses on women's lived experience of embodiment across the lifespan, and particularly what happens during the perimenopausal and menopausal transition. She brings a feminist, biopsychosocial lens to the work, looking at the intersection of biology and culture and how the stories we are handed about aging as women can shape what we actually feel, right down to measurable health outcomes. Dr. McBride opens by naming what the research literature has gotten wrong. Women's voices have been largely absent from the empirical conversation about perimenopause and menopause, and what women are actually saying when asked about their experience is strikingly different from what the medical literature reflects. They are describing not just difficulty but clarity, not just loss but a deepening sense of self, not just symptoms but a portal. Guest links: Hillary L. McBride  Hillary L. McBride (Instagram) Hillary McBride (Facebook) Hillary McBride (X) Books: Hillary L. McBride For full show notes, please click here. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Women are saying things in the research data, like I thought I was going to be this used up, dried up, useless, decaying nearly dead women based on how I was portrayed in the media, based on how people were talking about menopause and perimenopause. And I feel more vibrant than I've ever felt. I feel more connected to myself. I feel more empowered. I care less about what people think than I've ever cared. and I feel more passionate about the things that make me feel alive. And there's all of these like existential things in there too. Like, okay, I'm aware that I'm in the second half of life, which puts me in a conversation around aging and death that I wasn't aware of previously, but I'm still young enough that I feel like I can do something about the life that I'm in. It's like that really tender, important death awareness, age awareness thing

that can sometimes catalyze us into living a life that we really want. And it was actually going through perimenopause and entering menopause and being postmenopausal that women said initiated for them the sense of a renewed experience of themselves. The views and opinions expressed on unpaused are those of the talent and guests alone and are provided for informational and entertainment purposes only. No part of this podcast or any related materials are intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Today's conversation is a different kind of menopause episode.

Because yes, we're going to talk about pari menopause and the menopausal transition, but we're not starting with a list of symptoms and a prescription pad. We're starting with the whole person, body, brain, story, culture, and the social scripts we've all been handed about what it means to age as a woman. My guest is Dr. Hilary McBride. She's a psychologist, researcher, author, who's a research. whose research focuses on women's lived experience of embodiment across the lifespan, and especially what happens in perimenopause and menopause during this critical biocytocytical

transition. She brings a feminist, feminological lens to the work, which means she's looking at the intersection of biology and culture, how our bodies change, and how the way we talk about those changes can literally shape what we feel right down to measurable health outcomes. And I want to name something up front. There's been pushed back to Hillary's work from people who assume that unless you're older, you don't get to speak about menopause. I completely disagree. If we wait until women are suffering and confused to start educating them, we've already failed.

Younger women need to be part of this dialogue. Clinicians need to be part of this dialogue. Partners and families need to be part of this dialogue because knowledge changes outcomes. Silence does not. In this episode, we are going to take. talk about the idea that menopause is not a wasteland. It is not a graveyard. It's not a punchline. It's a portal. And how stepping through that portal can be a difficult and powerful experience at the same time. We'll also explore finding freedom from the roles that no longer fit,

liberation from the male gaze and self-objectification, and the possibility of becoming more of who you are, not less. We'll also talk about something I believe is one of the most underused health interventions for women in midlife. Connection. Women doing this alongside other women, sharing stories, asking questions, laughing, and realizing they're not alone. I'm Dr. Mary Claire Haver, a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist and certified menopause practitioner. I'm also an adjunct professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Welcome to Unpaused, the podcast where we cut through the silence and talk about what it really takes for women to thrive in the second half of life.

So Dr. McBride, welcome to Unpaused. Thank you for having me. You traveled, right, from Canada to come down to Los Angeles for filming. Thank you so much for doing this. I think your voice is so important. Thank you. Tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. Where are you from?

Where'd you grow up? How'd you end up getting a PhD? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So I'm from just outside of Vancouver and grew up in Vancouver. And really, this is like, I like to say that having a PhD in psychology is kind of my third career option, I kind of fell into this. Yeah, like we were talking previously about the meandering path that we take. And I was a professional violinist and then wanted to get into midwifery

school and did not get into midwifery school. And so I went to grad school and counseling psych. And I remember feeling like, oh, I think I understood why I wanted to be a midwife. I feel like there's something about midwifing the mind or the school that feels like really important to me in my work. And really like so much of my clinical work, so much of my research has been shaped by the big questions inside of my own life. Like, what does it mean to be human? Why is it so difficult to be a body? What does the culture say about who we are as women in a way that sometimes makes our life a lot harder than it needs to be and adds a lot more complexity to things? And so it was really early on in my research career that a supervisor of mine asked me about something that

I was afraid of as like I was really having a hard time figuring out what I wanted my program of research to be. And she was like, well, tell me what feels scary for you. And the thing that kind of struck at my core from the get-go was I'm going to have a daughter one day who's going to hate her body as much as I do. And that set me off on this course of understanding how do we relate to our bodies as women. What can we do about it? What are the places where things get kind of tricky and sticky? And is there an opportunity for this to go differently? Can we give something to the next generation so that they don't hurt the way that we do?

And so now I have a practice, I teach, I research. and do things like this. Yeah. Yeah. You have a book. Several. Yes. Yeah. So the one that I'm probably most well known for is the wisdom of your body and I'm working on other things all the time. But really, the work around embodiment, my first book, Mother's, Daughters and Body Image was really about this, this research that I'd done. How do we as women pass messages between us about bodies? And is there something that we can shift in the conversations we're having to give ourselves a better chance to be at ease than at home in ourselves. So your work pushes back on medicalized, patriarchal, and androcentric. Framing of menopause. First of all, what are all those words mean for the audience? And what do you

mean by this? What does this mean when a woman thinks of how she feels in her body? Yeah. So this is like, those are all just fancy academic ways of saying that the story we've been handed about midlife bodies, particularly perimenopausal and menopausal bodies are shaped by a male-dominated pathology-driven conversation. Their entire medical field is shaped by the same thing. Exactly, right? And this is like when I'm doing academic research on what does it mean to be a woman at midlife? What does it mean to be a woman who's negotiating a changing body?

What does it mean to be experiencing perimenopause and menopause? Women's voices have been nowhere to be found. I mean, if you're really digging every once in a while, you can find something. But to look at pushing back on that, we have to look from a different angle. And that angle is from women's lived experiences. What are women themselves saying about what this feels like? And it turns out that when you ask women, what does it like to be perimenopausal? What does it like to be postmenopaus? What's happening for you? They say very different things than we read in the empirical literature about menopause and perimenopause. So give me some examples. Well, we can think about the like predominantly what if you survey the research literature

from not just a biopsychosocial perspective, but purely from a psychological perspective, what you're seeing is conversations about symptoms, conversations about women saying, not even women's saying, but people talking about women's experiences. And when you're asking women, what's going on for you? They're saying things like,

I'm having a really hard time and I'm also feeling more connected to myself. Or they're saying things like, what is happening? And also, I feel like I actually kind of know, who I am for the first time in my life. I've seen the exact same thing. Yes. Like, I don't like the way I feel, but I am loving the way I'm thinking. Or some combination of contrasting ideas. Like maybe what is happening to me? I don't know something. And also I know something. Like these tensions,

we see a lot of these tensions. And what I'm seeing in my research literature, the review of the literature as well as the research that I'm doing and the patients that I'm working with, women are saying, I feel more connected to myself and more free and more empowered than I've ever felt. And not always and not consistently and not about everything. But that's definitely not represented in the research literature as a whole. Like we're just not hearing women's voices when we're talking about perimenopause from this kind of top-down, very medicalized, male-centric perspective. Right.

Where I think that conversation is happening, good or bad, is on social media. And now at the water cooler. The water cooler. I was going to say, like women have been gathering in circles to talk about life transitions since time and memorial. I mean, that's been one of our primary foundational ways as a species of making sense of change. And so when women have had conversations in groups, they've been able to navigate really difficult things together and the fabric of society is shifting a little bit. A lot of those conversations are moving digitally. And yet still, when women have their book clubs

or when they have their wine clubs or when they're going on vacation or they're talking at work together, they're having conversations that we're not capturing in research necessarily or in medicine in the way that they're represented in women's lives. What do you feel like mainstream medicine, modern medicine is getting wrong? I have very strong ideas about this. Yes. I mean, I can tell you what I was taught, but what do you see collectively? Yes. Well, of course there's like all of the getting wrong about the data. We know that there has been a lot of bungling of data in a way that has just disenfranchised women and disempowered them and made them feel. scared of interventions and new things like that. But what they're also getting wrong is that there's

this really important critical developmental opportunity that's happening here at midlife where women are getting an opening to do things differently, to reclaim, to feel power, to feel like instead of their body being viewed as this a used up male body, which I think one was the last time that that was talked about in the medical literature in the 80s or 70s, like that that was actually used as some sort of like. So, yeah, there's, oh, there was very few books on menopause. So like focusing on that in popular culture. But there was one and it was written by a male physician with no data and just kind of on

his gestalt. And he basically, it was a very pro estrogen book when estrogen was being commercialized as a treatment for menopause. But it was really framed as a get your wife back book. Oh, interesting. Like four men. Get your wives on estrogen and you will get her functioning, you know, sex life, like all the things she's meant to do. And then I'll tell you a story.

Sure. My mother, I remember I was in junior high. I was probably 13, 14. And she was, now I know she was perimenopausal if I do the math, right? She'd had a hysterectomy. So, but I, you know, the age was right. She was in her mid-40s. And she had this pill bottle in the bathroom.

And that was her, like, her medicine. Like when things were tough or she was stressed out, go get my family, my pills, my medicine, my medicine. And I remember they were called butosol, B-U-T-I-S-O-L. And you get the butosol, get the beat the bea-sol. I needed to calm me down. I'm like, okay. And later in medical school, when I was learning pharmacology, I learned that this is a sedative that we used to treat seizures in some patients. My mom was being sedated through her.

menopause. So I started looking at the advertisements of the back then. And there was a collection of drugs similar to butosol. And some of them even combined estrogen with a sedative. Right. Of course. And the pictures and images were of women wearing aprons holding cookies or like cooking breakfast. And it was like, get your, get your wife. I mean, these were national magazine in the 60s and 70s. articles, I mean, you know, advertisements for these pharmaceutical products that were sedating and giving estrogen back, which probably was helpful they needed to give progesterone too because of the initial cancer, but that's an whole other discussion. When we talk about where we came from and what

set up how we look at women and how they age and what their roles and responsibilities are, and if she can't do these things, she is not a woman. It's mind-blowing to me. And that was my own mother who was heavily sedated through her own paring their path. Yeah. It says so much about the level of social control around keeping women in this particularly subservient role and how our systems, which like I think it's important to name, even healthcare can very easily get co-opted into the patriarchal misogynistic message at times.

Like we might want to think of medicine as objective. And yet there's agendas, right? That's a perfect example. people being medicated in such a way that reinforces and keeps them constrained in this restrictive gender rule. Unbelievable. Yeah, it's no good. Well, talk to me about the portal and what you just covered.

So when you went into this research, you're young. You know, I'm assuming you have a ways to go before this, you know, hormonal transition will cross your path. One, what made you, why did you want to study this? Yeah. Okay. Because it's a blip on the radar of all medical research. search. Like, perimenopause isn't even, I mean, when we look at the number of articles, it's like 1.2 million for pregnancy, 98 now or 9,000 now for menopause, and it's getting better. And there

were about 8,000 for peri menopause. Like, you're starting from scratch. Did you get pushback from your thesis advisor? No, actually, she was the one who suggested it. So of course, like, the older woman who's like, here, listen, if you want to be researching women's relationships to their bodies and speaking to something that hasn't been looked at, go talk to old. older women, women who were older than you about what perimenopause was like for them. And what you're going to find is that what they're actually saying isn't represented in the research literature. So I was thinking at that time like, okay, this is what kind of wild goose chase are you sending me on? And this feels so irrelevant. And at that point, it was my late 20s that

I was doing my doctoral work. And I trusted her. She was a huge name in the research about women's sexuality across the lifespan. And I knew her voice and her leadership was important. But I remember thinking, like, this feels really irrelevant to me. And then, as I was listening to women who were saying all sorts of things, you know, the feminist research in me, researcher in me, started realizing women's voices have not been captured. Women's lived experience has been missed in the conversation about all of this. That's what I find you. Yes. And that's, once women were given permission or felt agency to be able to talk about their living spirit, the whole conversation exploding. It blows up and there's all of these things that women are saying that aren't being captured

in research literature. And of course, that's all about like what questions are you asking and who's measuring and how are you measuring. Exactly. But the other piece that was so fascinating to me about this all is as I started to understand the whole experience of perimenopause and it being 10 to 15 years of a change. So yes, you know, the mean age of having that actual day of, you know, cessation of period after one years, 51 for women in Canada. I think it's similar in the States. Yeah. And I remember thinking, okay, if I'm, you know, the last period that I have is when I'm 50 and 10 to 15 years before that, that means that women who are 35 need to be having these conversations. And it is not something that is way off in the distant future. That was right around the corner for me. And now,

obviously, I'm in my late 30s. And so these are conversations that feel a lot more relevant to me because I'm in that window now. And so I'm looking at like what's happening. to my body and how does what I know, how does what I know empower me to, to feel like I can be more proactive about things? But it was listening to older women. Tell me. Were they through or were they actively in the middle of it? You were just all ages. No. So, well, the piece that feels like salient in terms of why I researched this was I had an older woman say, you need to be thinking about this. And then what we decided to look at is women who had just completed menopause. We're now like newly postmenopausal and we're reflecting back.

on their experience of the menopausal transition. Okay. And of course, I'd asked other groups of women before and in other research studies I'd done about how do women feel about their changing bodies, but had kind of more broadly included women who were negotiating all sorts of changes and whatnot. But it was fascinating to hear the kinds of things

that were nowhere to be found in research. For example, like on the end of my seat. Yes, well, you're talking about this. You mentioned the portal. So women are saying things in the research data like I thought I was going to be this used up, dried up, useless, decaying, nearly dead women based on how I was portrayed in the media, based on how people were talking about menopause and perimenopause. And I feel more vibrant than I've ever felt. I feel more connected to myself. I feel more

empowered. I care less about what people think than I've ever cared. And I feel more passionate about the things that make me feel alive. And there's all of these like existential things in there. there too, like, okay, I'm aware that I'm in the second half of life, which puts me in a conversation around aging and death that I wasn't aware of previously, but I'm still young enough that I feel like I can do something about the life that I'm in. It's like that really tender, important death awareness, age awareness thing that can sometimes catalyze us into living a life that we really want. And it was actually going through perimenopause and entering menopause and being postmenopausal that women said initiated for them the sense of a renewed experience of themselves. In fact,

I had women say in one of my studies, everything up until now felt like a dress rehearsal. Everything up until now felt like I was getting ready and now I actually get to live the life that I meant to live. Our patients say very similar things. A lot of them didn't have many symptoms of menopause, but they're like, hey, I feel like I'm at a really critical inflection point for how am I going to live the next 30 years? and they're feeling good about who they are. But they want help with the health end of it to make sure they're optimizing their nutrition and their movement and all the things

because it's very confusing on social media. But when we look at sex-based differences for longevity, and I think women in general, not all, of course, have a very different goal than what I see on social media with the men who are in charge of this space are talking about. Interesting. Women are looking at being more of,

a benefactor and don't want to be a burden. And the conversations they say that their husbands or their partners are having if they're male is, they don't care about that. Like, you're just have to take care of me when I get old. You know, like, that's just part of the, you know, signing up to be hitched to me for the next 30 years. And they're not worried about that part because, well, that's just going to happen, you know. But like, women are like acutely aware of that I can change this trajectory, especially if their moms, you know, had a difficult aging process. Right. And having women? and done that forever. Like there's something about, I think, the unique experience of being a woman

in this world and that there is something around, I'm going to connect with other people, I'm going to get information, I'm going to fight for the things that are mine. I'm going to join together with other people who have a similar experience. And I want to live a good life. And I want to do it with the people that I love. And there's just something that I hear over and over again in my research that women don't experience by and large the same kind of social isolation that men do and that there's something about the community element of women empowering each other that feels like it's a really untapped resource at this particular time in life like thinking about this really big change but what we know is that when women do well that they give that information away that everybody in

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available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You've been really clear that this transition doesn't have to be easy to be powerful. What did you mean by that? Well, that actually comes from the data itself. Women are saying it's actually part of the challenge of this that connected me to my sense of knowing the felt sense of having accomplished something and coming through on the other side and feeling empowered. And that's something that's really replicable across, you know, different domains of

mental psychology. We see things like stress mindset theory or anti-fragility. What is that? Oh, yes. Okay. Please teach me. Okay. So the idea in some of these concepts, like stress mindset theory is a really fascinating piece of data that shows like very well replicated in the empirical literature. That is actually not stress itself isn't that. It's how you are in relationship with the stress. Okay. Yes. We're going to have stress. Yes, exactly. So a good example of this. would be, okay, let's just say you're about to go do something that you feel really nervous about. And when you experience the nervousness, what do you say to yourself about that? Gosh, I signed up for this. It's going to be okay. You've done this before, often before a podcast. Right, exactly.

You know, like just move through it, just go, you know, and it's going to pass. And it's almost like I've learned to CBT it. Right, exactly. That's a big part of it. Yeah. How could I interpret what's happening? So the research from stress mindset theory is particularly, particularly relevant to our bodies, because if what we say is, oh my gosh, this is my body giving me the energy to do something I care about. That's your like heart clapping for you or something. Yes, right? Like this is our body saying, hey, I'm giving you the energy to do something really matters. That if when you feel nervous, you say, thanks for telling me that matters body. Like, yes, my heart clapping for me.

It moves the indicators or it moves the metrics. from being more predictive of death, like when people are experiencing stress, they're less likely to experience the negative health outcomes of stress if they're interpreting the stress as, this is my body helping me. Wow. So there's stress mindset theory, there's anti-fragility theory. These are, you know, ideas that say when we have things that are hard in our life, it's actually that, the absence of those things isn't what makes a good life. It's how we are in relationship with the things that are hard. And this is like the truth about paramedopause is that it's a developmental transition, just like any other developmental transition. And in order to negotiate moving through it into what comes next. And like for our listeners, developmental transition is things like adolescence. Exactly. Matressants, adolescence, your first big career, finishing school, aging, empty nesting, all of the big things that shape the course of your life and how it feels to be you. That part of a developmental transition is a little bit of a crisis.

And not like a, oh my gosh, I have to call 911 crisis, but the tension inside between, wait, who was I and who am I going to be? And what do I have to leave behind? And what am I getting? And the wrestling of the letting go and the stepping into and the feeling ourselves be changed, that challenge is actually part of accumulating the skills that we need to face what comes next. And so it's through the challenge. It's through a little bit of like the conflict inside and outside that we rise to the occasion

and become more of ourselves. In your dissertation, you talk about menopause as like a found freedom. And I see that with my patients, like once they're through the fire of it, you know. But what are they, what do you find that they're freeing themselves from? So there's a few different tiers of what the data says. There's obviously the physical things like, oh, I'm free of menstruation. It's going to change my sex life. What I wear.

I have a woman in one of my data sets that say, I'm wearing white pants again. Like, this feels great for me. It's a whole new wardrobe that's opened up. So freedom to make choices around my body, freedom around my sexuality in some ways, maybe freedom from this pregnancy worry. Right, exactly. Yeah. Especially if your periods were bothersome, you know.

And then we have the psychosocial pieces. Like, and maybe we could say the psychological relational, like, oh, I'm caring less about what other people think. Oh, I'm feeling like I'm more connected to what I know instead of filtering everything through who I'm supposed to be. But then we start to see this. broader societal kind of freedom, which is that I'm starting to feel free from the game. I didn't even know I was playing. Okay, so what is the game? You're supposed to be this, to be a woman.

Your body has to look this way. These are the ways that you're socially valuable. And as you get further and further from those things, there can be some conflict and some tension inside, especially if that was the way that we knew that we were good and loved and safe. Yeah. But the truth is that we know what's going to win, like aging is going to win. Our body slipping further and further away from that very narrow story is going to be what wins. And there's a liberation in that realizing I never chose to be part of those stories that were harming me, but now I get to be free from them and I get to do life on my terms. You've talked about how women who are actually doing well can feel socially silenced. Like they're not given permission to talk about.

us. Yeah. Why I see less of that. Like I see women kicking that door down anyway, but why do you think that is? Yes. I'm so glad that that's the case, right? We need more of that. At least on my social media page, you know. Yes. Yeah. Right. It's important that there are spaces for us to talk about doing well. And I can I can talk about that in a moment. But in my research data, what I found is that women were saying, if I'm doing well, it feels threatening to the relationships around me. And it feels like there isn't enough relational space for me to be connected to the people that I love who are struggling if I'm doing well. And this principle of I'm going to self-silence around my thriving, my well-being, my flourishing, I have seen in research about matrescence. I've seen in research

about cubity. Explain what metrescence is for our listeners. Matrescens is primarily the first three years of the transition into motherhood. And so that experience, the word thinking about it like adolescence, right? This like huge time of developmental, again, developmental transition as women are becoming mothers and the neurological, hormonal, relational, social, psychological, complete disorganization and reorganization as you're kind of moving into this new way of seeing the world. I saw that in the research in, in my research around matressants. I saw that as young women who loved their bodies. We're trying to negotiate social relationships. This has shown up in pretty much every single study that I've done asking women, how do you feel about your bodies?

What's going right? How are you doing well? Looking kind of at how we protect positive relationships with bodies, women will say, if I tell the truth about doing well, I feel excluded from relationships. And this principle was first talked about by meaning nature in the early 1990s, late 1990s. And she coined the term fat talk. And the idea with fat talk, this is like an really interesting, principle. Fat talk is not necessarily even about fat, but as an anthropological term, what she said is that it's part of the social contract around connection and social bonding to talk poorly about your body and about yourself. And if you don't do that, you're seen as arrogant, detached from reality, and women report reliably, I don't get to stay connected to the people

that I love. There's no room in our conversations for me to be doing well. And so what happens as women don't share about doing well is it contributes to this story that's really one-sided when actually what women are saying kind of in their private thoughts might be really different than what they're saying on social media or even to their friends in that our experiences of being a body can include so much more than we're ever allowed to talk about and can include maybe this is feeling good or maybe this is not feeling good but there are social contracts that we've entered into that we don't even know we've entered into that restrict us from talking about what it's really like to be us, including doing positive stuff. Including the positive. I am recognizing

patterns in my own friend groups through the years, you know, where we, you kept quiet about the good things because you were connected by the meaningful complaining, you know, and, you know, oh, yeah, me too. and da-da-da-da-da. You celebrated the big high points, but just that every day, I'm actually doing great. You know, wasn't what bonded us together. Okay, but this is where like the psychologist and me, when I move into the clinician as opposed to the researcher, here's women talk about this every day in my practice. Like when I'm working with women in clinic, it's not just about, I can't talk about those things, but like what actually happens in the dynamics. Let's just say we're sitting down at coffee and I say, how are you? doing and what's going on. This is really, really hard for me. What's going to happen in our connection if you say, and I'm actually really doing well about that thing or like that thing is going well for

me. How do we negotiate that as a friend, like as a dyad? How do our friend groups hold the space for complexity? And so our ability to hold complexity to emotionally regulate, our ability to be able to say your experience can be different than mine and we could still be connected. Our ability to talk, I think, in more broad terms as a society about the spectrum of experiences and one, not excluding the other, that actually comes down to the mechanics of the conversations that we have with the person over coffee and our ability to say, oh, hey, I just, I know you had a miscarriage and I know what's really painful for you and I wanted you to know that I'm expecting. And I know that might be hard and I really trust that you can be with me and my joy and we can hold both together.

Or I know this treatment has not worked for you and it feels hard to say, but it's really worked for me. And I felt nervous to tell you that. But I actually want, I want you on my team and I want our friendship to be able to hold all of it. And those conversations are like, you're giving me palpitations right now. Do you want to say more? You're imagining having that conversation. I'm like, yeah. We need better skills. We need better skills for women to be able to do well and stay connected to each other. So in your work, there's this theme that menopause is not losing who you are, but it is becoming more of who you are. Yeah. How does that show up in this big identity shift? Well, one thing that I found really

novel in findings from one of my studies is that women described that on the other side of menopause, that there was a new role that were taking on. And in one sense, I don't know, like, oh, that feels like such an important novel finding. But when I step back, I think, duh, when women have been saying that forever. And we just have these archetypes that maybe, you know, maybe feel a little bit outdated in the language, like the crone or the elder or the queen, like these social stories. But women are saying I'm stepping into something. And although I've been told that this stage of my life is all about loss, what I'm finding is that there is a new role that I have. I feel like I have a new role.

not just in society or for my community, but also in terms of, you know, I know some things and I have some things that I need to share and I have some creative expression inside of me that still is wanting to come out and I have a passion and I have the time for it and I have the energy for it. And I was told that this season in my life

is all about decay and yet I am doing something important in the world. So when I think about 30-year-old Mary Claire, who was a resident and like up to her neck and, you know, trying desperately to be pregnant and took a couple years, but we finally got there. But when she thought about 60-year-old Mary Claire and what that would be, it would be my grandmother at 60 had gray hair and looked, she looked exactly the same from 60 to 90 in my little brain, you know. But it would be slowed down, retirement, you know, grandma. Like, if she would have seen me at 57, you know, who's not going to be stopped, well, you know, God, you know, God, you know, God, you know, God, willing not stopping at 60 and still building and creating and starting companies and pivoting and changing her career, you know, to another direction. I think she would have been exhausted for one.

Right. But, but shocked. But I mean, I really think that menopause gave me that power. You talk about a new role. What I'm seeing and tell me if you're seeing this in your research, it's also a culling, a pruning, and trimming. Like suddenly all the little things you were trying to manage and the balls you were balancing your drop. And no shame. And no shame. And, drop in those balls because you're going to focus on these balls. Yes, exactly. And that's part of the clarity and the self-knowing and the intuition that women are reporting. I don't have time for this anymore. That was somebody else's goal for my life. That was me doing that because I thought I had to be good. But I'm not concerned about keeping everybody happy anymore. I'm concerned about living a life that

feels authentic, that feels empowered, that feels embodied. And it means not doing any of that stuff anymore. And maybe going hard on this or saying no to all of these other things. We're really. really letting myself live into this dream that I never got to live. People going back to school. People starting to careers. Right. Businesses. There's just some data that came out looking at the biggest percentage of the population that is starting a businesses or women of my age. Yes. It makes so much sense to me. Like you've got time, you've got energy. You're clear on who you want to be. You're clear that life will not last forever. And it's really important to make something meaningful with the time you have left. I love that.

Your research mentioned that anticipating, so like the premonition of a difficult menopause, can help predict the kind of symptoms women experience. Yeah. Do you want to talk about that? In the empirical literature, there is some really, I think, fascinating findings if we can hold them lightly and with like, you know, some cautious interpretation around it, show us would actually just make sense on an intuitive level. If you're scared of something and then you experience that thing you're scared of, it would make sense that it would feel scary for you. you, that there's like that level of common sense to this. Let's just say women have been told your body is going to hurt more, you're going to lose social value, you're going to have less viability in the labor market, your sex life is going to suffer, and all of that is going to make

you irrelevant and, you know, lose your value. It would make sense that as women are experiencing the transition, that that would feel really scary for them. And that things like psychological symptoms are going to increase, social symptoms are going to increase. What is surprising is that women who, this was a study from 2003, in particular Bush and colleagues, they found that women who have negative anticipations of menopause are more likely to experience sleep disturbances, joint pain. And without blaming women, like, I think it's very easy. Right, because like there's a few out there going, oh no, it's all in her head, you know. Yeah. Yeah. What we can say is that we have been undersupported with how to navigate the

transition and that when women are not doing well, very rarely is that a woman's problem alone. That is a social problem. That is a systems problem. That is a lack of resources problem. The women have been navigating perimenopause and menopause since the beginning of time. What's making it so hard is that there is so much that we have been taught to be afraid of without the support around how to deal with it and without the connections around feeling like, oh, this is actually part of what to expect and this is normal and this is not normal. And here's what you can do to support yourself. So the conversation around menopause and perimenopause, mostly menopause, has really exploded in the last three years. So in your research, are you seeing,

now that we have, at least there's better education, there's better awareness, women are talking about this openly, are you seeing better outcomes at the end now that we're starting to get some systems in place? And the, you know, the medication and the training part will catch up. We're far behind there. What are you seeing like today? So if you think about that question and ask what do we mean by outcomes, we can say yes, like there are some women who are suffering less in certain ways, like the things that they were going to seek their doctor for support with. Okay, they're getting some treatment for it. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. They're having conversations. But where the conversation still needs to go is what does it feel like to be you? And what do you

want to do with this time in your life? And thinking about outcomes not just in terms of managing pathology, but outcomes in terms of flourishing and well-being and women feeling like they get to drive their life, I think we have a lot further to go in that conversation. Because there's been such an absence of dialogue about menopause and perimenopause. You talk about three buckets. Oh, yes. Yeah. The discourses.

Uh-huh. Yeah. So how is that conversation going? The discourse around menopause and perimenopause is a way of understanding the different kinds of filters that were given on an experience. and those filters actually shape what it feels like to be asked. So an example of that, like the, I'm going to paraphrase some of the discourses. One of them is your body is a problem.

And if your body is a problem, well, one, who's saying that and who benefits from that statement? And also, how does that make a woman feel? But if that is also something that we've been told our whole life, we might not even realize that that's a specific framework. And you could see it differently than that. And then we have the, this is really hard, but I'm going to liberate myself. I'm going to come to my own rescue kind of discourse, which is like take take charge of your health, right? You can be empowered to do something different. There's still a risk and a problem here. And what we see for women is that there's a little bit more agency to that. But the underlying tone of that often is still, this is like something bad is happening here. I need to fix something that's broken. Yeah. And then there's the emancipation dialogue or discourse, which is a filter that's put on all of this, where. where perhaps we're invited or encouraged to see, what do I get to be free from here?

If this is not just about the ending of something, but about the beginning. Or if I get to, like you said, like if I get to chuck things and not just chuck tasks or jobs, but also ideas about bodies, or I get to chuck stories about myself that no longer serve me, there's an opportunity instead of seeing this whole thing as a problem, seeing this as part of the way that my body is joining,

with me towards my liberation. And what is the point of all this? Like, is it that women overall are happier or they live longer? Like, like, where does this go? Yeah. Yeah. Is there a problem we're trying to fix overall? With what? Well, the way that women think about their bodies, think about menopause and how they transition. What I was seeing was silence in the medical world. Like, well, there's nothing we can really do for it. And she's probably a little bit crazy. so just cut on the knee and get her going. But when I saw that the New York Times article from Susan Dominus that really kind of ignited

the conversation around, hey, but it still feels like, are we trying to fix something that's broken? You know, we're women not happy. I think the point of all of this is that we get to enjoy our lives. I want to enjoy my life. And when I know that people want, in addition to having a sense of meaning

and feeling like their body is safe, and like the relationships of our feelings. Like when we get to the end that we get to look back and say, I lived well and it felt really good to be me and I got to live the way that I wanted to. And it's really hard to do that when it feels like the conversations about how to have agency in your life are gate kept from you or the pathways or the opportunities

that can catalyze this deep personal change in growth are characterized as a problem. Yeah. It's really hard to lean in. Like there's even some women who will say, you know, I'm not really struggling with, you know, symptoms of menopause. It feels like, whoa, all of a sudden I'm here and I didn't even know that the transition happened. And like, okay, I was ready for this big, you know, I was bracing for this big thing.

But even they will say, but I didn't get to participate in it because I didn't know what was happening. And I want to know what's happening so that I can join in, like constructing my life, having agency, feeling like I got to be the author of my story. And it's really hard to do that when men are holding the pen, when medicine is holding the pen, when society and patriarchy are writing the rules, exactly, and writing the scripts and, you know, how women are showing up and TV and media, I think we're getting better. It's a debate about that. You know, I think women's stories are becoming more representative.

Yes. We talked before about the CBC had done small achievable goals. The BBC has done riot women. Yeah. And I'm seeing Reese Witherspoon and her work, you know, elevating women's stories as women as a central character who's not looking for Amanda Saver. Yeah. Or even I'm thinking about Kate Winslet, who has said very publicly, this is what an aging woman's face looks like. This is actually it. You might not see it very often, but here it is. Right. Like we're having this like more. You're right. There is a little bit more room to have some of these conversations.

So myself, my patients, you know, people I see. have spent, you know, decades relate, you know, their body is this object they have to control. When I tell you, thin was always the goal, how you looked. I was exercising to look a certain way for a certain gaze. I was eating to maintain a certain weight, so I would look a certain way. And even medicine reinforced that. If you weigh X and you're on this scale, regardless of how much muscle or how much my bones weighed or if where the fat was deposited, you know, you were healthy.

There's a lot of undoing to be done here. So what changes, you know, when their body rebels in, they can no longer, because I see it every day, they can no longer maintain this. It is physically impossible. This is a predictable biological consequence of menopause, is your body composition will change. And women are not okay with it. There's a lot of grief to be had. And I mean that in a couple ways.

Like the grief of losing a body that we thought we could keep forever and we were told was our way to be loved and valuable. That actually deserves grief. If you were holding on to an ideal and everybody in your life and the systems around you was reinforcing that was important. And we bought in to be able to actually let that go requires feeling the pain of it. It's in terms of affective neuroscience, the role of grief and the function. of it is to allow something to be released. We can't move on to something new unless we feel the

pain of letting go of the old thing. So we need to grieve, but we also need to grieve that that was normal. Those stories were reinforced and all they did was keep us from our power and our ability to enjoy our lives and feel pleasure and a sense of agency. Enjoy it like the number of I was going to say like to have a really good meal and enjoy the pleasure of it or to have like I'm thinking about even having an erotic experience or having a sexual encounter, which isn't filtered through the angle of how is my appearance being perceived, but oh my God, this feels good. Like the different way we show up in our bodies when this feels good is what's driving us instead of, okay, I'm going to lose, I'm going to lose my appearance value if I don't make these choices. It's a really important thing to

be able to grieve. But this is where the embodiment literature comes in here. And embodiment, when we're looking at it from a psychological and philosophical perspective is about what does it mean to be me in my own skin and what does it feel like to be a body? And how does the world around us shape what it feels like to be me and my body? And there's a whole subsection of research literature about positive embodiment, which reminds us that our body has always been so much more than an object. And so when we're navigating this change of an aging, a midlife body, a body that's now through menopause or is in parimenopause, all of a sudden, yes, there can be the grief and the loss and the struggle and the tension and the conflict. And, you know, we can spend lots more time

talking about that. But there's also this whole other way of relating to our body that opens up, which is to see our body as this place that holds all the memories of what we've been through that holds like strength and power. If I'm not thinking about being thin, maybe I can actually get to be strong. Right? And maybe the strong. I'm saying that. Yes, maybe the strong in my body. isn't just something that shifts my muscle mass, but changes the way that I see the world and gives me a sense of like a fortified and embodied power that I carry into every conversation. This like the conversation about embodiment suggests that mind and body are not so separate. And every time our body is changing that it's shaping what it feels like to be us and on our mind

and the way that we think about things. You talk about that we can't really separate the menopause experience from fertility. relationships, social support, stress, trauma, all the things. But what are modifiers? Like, what do you, how do you think? So here's a woman listening to this today. And she's like, give me five things. Yes. Like, what are my five things? How can I modify this? So you're probably going to answer that question really differently than I would based on the disciplines. Yeah. But when I'm thinking about, okay, not just symptom management, but the developmental arc. Like, who am I becoming? You're giving women permission to think about this. Do you understand that? Like we've always framed ourselves, at least I have, as how am I serving? Yeah, right. It is my job to make the world better, not to make me better. It's so time for that to shift. And what we know, like, it's just what we know that we know that we know in feminist scholarship is that when women are connected to their power, everybody does better. Like that old myth that we were told that it's going to make you selfish. No, guess what happens to women who are self-assure?

and confident, they give information away, they contribute to their communities, they model healthy integration of a self, they give a different story to younger women saying that this is something that's available for you now, you don't have to wait. Like here, this is what's coming, this is what's possible. And it completely changes the experience of anticipating and experiencing many menopause if you know that what's on the other side of it is this deeply empowered, self-connected, sovereign place. So we know that there are lots of people. So we know that there are lots of things that shape, that predict if this is going to go well for you. Or is that kind of what you're asking? Like, how do we help women do better? Yeah. So someone's struggling with her

body image. Oh, it's for her body image. Yes. Okay. I think we need to kind of forget the body image conversation. We've way over indexed on image. And this is like something, you know, this is like maybe a little bit of a new idea for some people, but our body is actually not just the image that we have of it, right? Our body is not just the mental story we tell about how we appear. What is it? Our body is that feeling you get when you see the person you love. Our body is the memory of being a kid and running off the end of the dock and jumping into the water. Our body is the experience of looking down and seeing the scar from the time that thing happened. You're like, oh yeah. That really happened. Our body is that felt sense of knowing. Don't get into

the cab. Our body is the intuition and wisdom. it's not right, I need to go this direction. Our body is cognition, our body is memory, our body is intuition, our body is emotion, our body is pleasure, our body is expansion. You can even go into embodiment and talk about embodiment and our bodies really is being the pathway of connection to all things. Like everything that's alive is breathing. And so there is a huge territory here around seeing our aging bodies as replicating nature

in a way that moves us into a spiritual conversation. Like, oh, my gosh, my body is growing rings, kind of like a tree is. I am expanding or like everything in age decays and softens. Everything. Do men have this? Is this just a female thing? I don't see my husband lamenting too much about body image or body use. Yeah.

He lost his hair at 25. Yeah. So one time ago he's bald. And that was hard for him. Yeah. We're past that. But he just is going with it and it doesn't shape who he is or many of his decisions. Men have historically been kind of inoculated from some of the same stressors and pressures

around image. I would say that like they're increasing and that as social media is increasing and access to resources that can shift appearance are increasing, that men are more likely to have some struggles than they have. But the truth is that this has really been a misogynistic patriarchal conversation, that to entrap women in the conversation about their body being the only thing that matters about them and a thing that they have to control, otherwise they're going to lose any access to social power that they have. That's a gendered narrative. And so women postmenopausal are getting free from that. Because that story, when we look at what the research literature says about where that starts, it starts, yes, in childhood, but really around puberty when you start

menstruating and your body becomes sexualized, all of a sudden the gaze is on you. And you leave inhabiting your body from an inside place to observing your body and objectifying yourself on an outside, from an outside place. Do you think that's starting younger and younger now with the access to social media that the kids have? Yeah, I think it's starting younger and it's feeling more insidious and normalized. And the world is really changing. And I think parents have to have a lot more skills at their disposal and information around protecting their children from the stuff that's out there.

Because what we're seeing is kids are requesting plastic surgery earlier and earlier, that their efforts in order to change their appearance are increasing earlier. Instead of letting kids be kids and have freedom from that. Like that's going to come at us. It's going to come at us in the world that we're in. But can we protect our kids from being exposed to that? That they're harmful ideas that are connected to anxiety and depression and eating disorders and all sorts of self-harming behaviors.

It's really important that we gatekeep, I think, social media for kids and their exposure to those ideas and then give them tools to critically think about what they see when they see it. Talk to me about connection and health outcomes. So this is like something that has been so unexpected in the research that I've done. which is that women do better all around and they're connected to each other. And what has been shocking about this? Like I just ran, I've been running group therapy for paramedopausal women for years and we just did this particular condition where we were doing pre-post measures and really, really looking at what are your symptoms coming in? What are your symptoms going out?

As well as other indicators of health, like how's your access to your emotions and your motion regulation? What's your level of social connection? What's your sense of meaning in life? And what we found is that women's, not only their symptoms of perimenopause decreased, but their distress about their existing symptoms decreased when they were connected to another group of women and actually processing through the transition. And they're talking about it, like they're not just talking about, you know, whatever else is going on, what shows they're watching. We were there intentionally to say, what's happening in your life, how is this feeling,

what's concerning you, what does it like to be you? What kind of stuff are you wrestling with? that at the end of the 12-week program, as I mentioned, women's symptoms decreased, but their distress about their symptoms also decreased. And that's a really interesting thing to note, too, that you could have symptoms in perimenopause and not be distressed by them, right? That they could be present, but instead of feeling like it's coming with all of this shame or anxiety, like, oh, I know what's going on.

I have some acceptance over it. I have some ways of being with it. I have some strategies for it. that all of that came from women talking to each other. So one of the reasons I wrote the new perimenopause was that women said over and over again, you know, when we did the post-mortem, you know, from my post-menopausal patients,

I wish I would have known more so that I wasn't blindsided because that just made it worse, you know, and I can just, now that I understand so much more about inflammation and cytokines and, you know, anxiety, that, you know, I remember Brooks Shields getting her period on the Blue Lagoon movie. I'm old. Okay, so I'm dating myself. But, and it was this, like, she thought

she was, you know, because no one had taught her what menstruation was. And here she is on this desert island running around this kid. And she literally was petrified. And like, I started my period surrounded by my friends who were cheering me on and they had all the stuff ready. And I was like one of the last ones. And I was like, thank God, finally. You know, and like how different. And it just struck me how different and like what that would have done in my cortisol levels and my stress had I not had all of that preparation and information ready to go and that this is normal. And yeah, I might have cramps or might be really heavy, you know, but we have ways to deal with that. So it's not scary. It also speaks to the importance of intergenerational dialogue. Like when we were not talking to women

who are older and younger than this, everybody loses out. There is something so important about having those friends who went through it or the cool mom you can ask the questions to or your friends auntie who's like hey this is what's coming for you you can ask me any questions I got you or the way that mothers use that as part of a transition to motherhood to be able to say okay who's got the stuff what did you do how do like how do we do this or how do we navigate this yeah and I'm sure you probably even had that when you were going to medical school like talking to other people like how did you cope what we had it was cool because we had like big brothers and big sisters okay who we were assigned to and thank God mine were incredible mentors.

And they saved like the old tests and they had like a care package and, you know, kind of like shepherded me through all the scary parts. No, it was incredible. We need those conversations. And yes, there are lots of other things that help women do well in perimenopause. But it seems that that is one of the things that mitigates the fact that there still isn't access to information for so many women that if you were talking to a friend, but she's got information or she's read a book or she's tried something that when we are connected to other people

we get exposure to different ideas different pathways even someone saying hey here's how i got through something hard all of a sudden creates the possibility in us maybe that could work for me too so you did therapy with psychedelics and were they legal how did that go for you so in a met in the context of a medical clinic we have a physician prescribed and administered and is tracking all of the data to make sure that everybody's healthy and they're screened appropriately. But we're using the psychedelic in conjunction with group therapy. And the idea is that women are supporting each other to process through what what is this season of life like. But then the psychedelic condition is giving them a chance to disorganize and reorganize some of the deeply held beliefs about themselves,

to look at things from the past, but without the same kind of fear, and to begin to hold new ideas about themselves. How long does this take? Yeah, so this was a 12-week program. Well, like, I'm, I'm just so curious about psychedelics and I'm sure people listening are. How long does the medication last? How long are they in the room? Are they laying down? Are they sitting up? Are they like, please? I'm like, because I'm envisioning a room full of people laying with someone doing music or they're all just talking. No. No. No. So the dose, the dose depends on the person. There's also like a length of medication that depends on which medication you're using in the context of what we're doing here. The medicine lasts about 90 minutes to two hours. But we're in a group context where everybody is in the room having their experience at the exact same time.

And it's a really powerful thing if you're in the middle of your your psychedelic trip and somebody is in the corner you've been journeying with and they're over there and they're weeping or this person's over here laughing. And all of a sudden it feels like, whoa, it kind of shifts and impacts my experience. It's a really powerful, really powerful way to do the work together. Amazing. You've talked about reorganizing body scripts. What is a body script? I think I know what it is, but please educate me and my listeners. Yeah, we just have stories that have been handed to us really since the get-go,

and we often pass them down intergenerationalally. But a lot of them are like, you know, your body needs to be thin in order to be good, or young or fertile, or pain-free, or your body needs to look like this, or you need to have this kind of shape to this body part. Or how about things like your body's bad, right? Your body's inherently bad and dangerous, and you need to control. it, right? There's a lot of religious trauma in that temptation. Yes, exactly. It's going to lead someone astray, but also wield your body appropriately because it's how you get power. I mean,

there's a lot of stories that are embedded at the implicit level in our culture and also things that we might have been told, like suck in your stomach or like watch your posture or don't. That was not about you. That was about, you know, what we say. I tell it to myself all the time. Well, can you help women rewrite that script? Yeah. Is that what you do in therapy? Yeah, I mean, therapy is really important, but also consciousness raising. Like, what are the scripts? Like, before we even start to rewrite them, what are the scripts that we've been told? Do you feel like we're on, this is all internal? Because I've seen the, oh, it was a commercial or something, but it was an experiment and then a woman would describe herself. And then a stranger would, like, view her photo or image and then describe them. And it was so different. She focused on what she felt was negative. And the stranger who didn't even know her told, God, your hair is so beautiful. and bouncing and curly and you have these big blue eyes and da-da-da-da. And it was just such a mind-altering for me, you know, to watch this experiment because we are so self-negative. Yeah. And we loop on a lot of the same things around our bodies. It's really, when you think about it, it's actually really hard to

have a new and novel thought about your body that's positive because we have so much rehearsal. We've just been practicing many of us since we were young. This is how to see my body. And sometimes it's a cultural shift that changes and we get exposed to a new idea from the outside. Sometimes it's a physiological shift. All of a sudden you lose movement or mobility. Maybe you lose access to a certain athlete patients really struggle with it. Yeah. And they lose their ability to function at what was their peak. Right. Or there's pain. All of a sudden you have pain and you never had pain and you're not able to do the things that you were able to do. To be able to reorganize our scripts, sometimes that happens because of unexpected things, you know, like loss or illness. And you're

or aging or whatnot. So to reorganize our body scripts, again, usually requires us on some level if we're going to be conscious about it thinking, like, what was I taught? And who benefited from that? Where did I learn that? Did that do any good for me? Does it actually lead me to live a life that I want to be living? But as I was saying before, I think that there's a lot about shifting our scripts that

actually has to do with experience. So we might have a story in our head that says, your body's only good if it looks like this. But then let's just say you have a friend who comes into town and they're like, hey, you want to go kayaking? And you go kayaking. You're not really used to going kayaking, but then you go and you have this experience of feeling like strong and connected to nature and connected to your friend and feeling free. And you're like, I can go anywhere in the water. And that's a new body experience that if you let it integrate into your body story can actually help us push back on the appearance-only conversation.

So when I said earlier, like, I think we kind of need to. to drop the body image conversation. I'm just not interested in that as like a really useful avenue to explore. What we see is that if women are less concerned with how they look and are more preoccupied with what makes me feel good. See, I worry I'm trading the look for performance. Right. Yeah.

So how far can I hike? How high did I go? I'm constantly like chasing those metrics. Yeah. Okay, maybe I'm not thin in the way used to, but I'm going to try to be strong. And it's fun to have a challenge sometime and it's fun to realize like, oh, I can, I can like work on something and improve. But at the end of the day, am I connected to the place of pleasure inside of myself? Do I know how to listen to my body cues? Am I resisting objectification? Do I feel a sense of comfort inside of myself? Do I know that I'm more than an object that I'm actually like a full human that has a body worth listening and paying attention to? Those metrics or those ways of looking at embodying. tend to be more predictive of a positive relationship with our bodies. Maybe we could forget about trying to even do body positivity or loving our image. Like, I don't know if anybody is actually like,

I'm the perfect specimen. Like, we know that the closer you get to the appearance ideal, the more anxious you are about losing it. So, like, the truth is that people who society has said look the best, often have to worry a lot about, like, losing that. And so maybe we can just kind of opt out of that conversation in that game and have a conversation about what food do I like to eat and when do I feel free and what is the way that I want to have sex that actually feels the best for me and not is about like performing some sort of story of sexuality that looks like I think it's supposed to look like can I inhabit myself and can it be good and I think perimenopause is an invitation into all of that what makes you hopeful that we're having these conversations right

that you and I are here talking cross-discipline, maybe cross-generation, and inviting in conversations that take us past pathology, take us past symptom management into who do I get to become. I think that makes me feel hopeful that women are finally getting access to the thing that has been ours and is our right and has been our right all along, which is I get to shape the life that I want to be in and I get to feel good about it. As we wrap up, what are your top three takeaways for our listeners, knowing our demographic is heavily females of 35 to 70-ish. Well, the thing that we've been told about our bodies all along doesn't have to be true, and you get to change that. That feels like a big, a big takeaway. Talk to people. Talk to people

about what's going well, what's not going well, make space for a wider story. That feels really important. And I think like seeing the challenge not necessarily as a barrier to growth, but actually the pathway through it, that anything that feels like this, this struggle, there is something for you in it. There is something that can be learned that you get to have and know about yourself on the other side that nobody can take from you. And that's a gift going into whatever comes next. Awesome. Well, Dr. Hilary McBride, thank you for joining us on Unpaused. Thank you for having me. You can follow Dr. McBride on Instagram at Hillary Leanna McBride or through her website, www.

Hilary Macbryde.com where you can find more information on her perimenopause therapy groups. Season 5 of her CBC podcast, Other People's Problems, is out now. Her next book, Embracing Mortality, will be out in early 2027. And her other books,

including The Wisdom of Your Body, Mother's, Daughters, and Body Image, and Practices for Embodied Living are all available now. You can find full episodes of Unpaused on YouTube at Dr. Mary Claire. I'd love to hear from you

about this topic, and anything else that's on your mind. You can find me on Instagram at Dr. Mary Claire and get honest, accurate information on health, fitness, and navigating midlife at thepawslife.com. My book, The New Perimenopause, is available for order on Amazon. Please take a moment to follow and pause on your favorite podcast app. Following and listening is what pushes this information to more women who need it.

So if this podcast has helped you feel seen, understood or supported, hit follow right now so you never miss an episode. Thank you for being here with me. Let's keep going. Unpaused. Unpaused is presented by Odyssey in conjunction with Pod People. I'm your host, Dr. Mary Claire Haver. The views and opinions expressed on unpaused are those of the talent and guests alone

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