Dealing with the Feelings

I awoke feeling depressed again this morning and have had real trouble shaking the feeling. I find it truly amazing that when I am here in this feeling, it is impossible to just ‘snap out of it’ even when I know it is being hormonally triggered. It just feels so REAL and so incredibly overwhelming.

I took a break from the Black Cohosh (and Angelica) for the first three days of my period and this seems to have sent me into another mini tail spin. I have already gone back on the herbs and hope they kick in again soon but I am feeling scared that maybe the herbs are not as helpful as I initially thought; what if it is just coincidental that the mood swings lifted for a few weeks? Now I have experienced some much needed relief, I really can’t bear the thought of getting stuck in this emotional quagmire again.

I want so much to be active and useful, there is so much I could be doing, so much I feel passionate and excited about but right now I feel completely blocked by feelings of heaviness and futility. I have considered that perhaps this is a calling for me to ‘slow down’ so I can get more in touch with my inner self, but when I feel like this that just doesn't seem possible. In fact what I find most disconcerting about being in this state, is that I feel so completely alienated from myself and my connection to the Goddess / Spirit. It is like I just don't know what to do to gain any real relief - as I write this I am crying and I don’t even know what I am crying about...

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I just put on some Florence and the Machine and had a good cry while dancing around the living room. I feel so much better for connecting to my emotions and moving my body to release them, especially to Florence who really speaks to me as an artist. It is so easy for me to think I can rationalise my way out of my feelings, this is a really ingrained habit of mine which I expect was born out of being emotionally repressed as a child. I always felt things so deeply but there was never any room in my family for me to express or release my emotions so everything just ends up in my head. (It's really not surprising that I ended up suffering from terribly debilitating migraines as a child.)

My usual strategy for 'dealing with feelings' is to think my way out of them; first I have to identify ‘the problem’ that is causing the feeling and then to work out a way to ‘fix’ the problem so that I can make the difficult feeling go away. Writing is a fantastic outlet but it relies completely on a mental process and it seems that ultimately I also need to learn how to express and release the physical aspect of my emotions. This is especially true when my feelings get so overwhelming that I can no longer engage my mind to manage them. It seems that in these instances I am going to have to try to remember to disengage my mind and engage my body through music and dance.

Perhaps the lesson here is to learn to befriend my feelings and give them space, whatever seems to be ‘causing’ them; just because hormones are triggering the intense emotions doesn’t mean they are somehow invalid...

Maybe the menopause is challenging me to stop trying to deal with my feelings in my head and to practise bringing emotions down into my body so that I can fully express and release them.

Goddess Blessings ♥

Seeing the Wood for the Trees

Well, it has been quite a while! I have been meaning to write but other things have been taking up my time and energy, which is a good thing because I have just enjoyed almost an entire month without major incident! My mood has really lifted and evened out and this has been a HUGE relief…

I seemed to reach a crisis point a few weeks ago and though I had managed to reduce my intense rages by taking Chinese Angelica, I was still feeling very depressed and anxious, especially on waking in the morning. I was so very close to going to the doctor’s for some HRT but really wanted to try and help myself as naturally as possible. So I decided to take some action; I went back to see my counsellor, agreed with my partner that he give me more space at home and started taking 0.5ml of Black Cohosh twice a day. I also started a (back dated) mood diary of the last few months so I could identify any patterns and the potential effects of herbs, hormones and the lunar cycles more easily.

I started the counselling right at the beginning of my last cycle. On the first session I had a good vent about everything that was bothering me, but I was still very much 'in it'. Around this time my partner had realised that our relationship was in serious jeopardy so he started to give me regular space to be alone and this also took some of the pressure off. But the most noticeable shift in my mood came when I started taking the Black Cohosh about a week into my cycle – the depression and anxiety lifted noticeably for the first time in a few months and amazingly, it stayed that way for the rest of my cycle – I didn’t even have any major premenstrual mood swings. What is really interesting is that when my partner suffered a couple of moody days, for the first time in months I was able to avoid over-reacting to him. Instead of feed-backing off each other and getting into a huge row, I was able to show my upset in a calm way and then take my space until he was ready to re-engage emotionally. This really is major progress!

My conclusion in all this is that I have definitely been struggling with a chemical/hormonal imbalance that has been severely affecting my mood, even to the point of making me feel suicidal. When I was ‘in it’ it was incredibly hard for me to really see this or to believe that hormones could be having such a huge effect on me; I really wasn’t convinced that there wasn’t some other terrible threat that was causing me to feel the way I felt. Looking at my mood diary entries, it is absolutely clear that the Black Cohosh has been the main factor in stabilising my moods, so I am putting my mood swings down to ‘hormones’ with ‘other factors’ having exacerbated things. To my great relief, my mental clarity also returned when my mood lifted so I was able to get on with other things – hence a welcome break from the 'blog of insanity'! 

If I wasn’t already completely convinced, I became so when I stopped taking the herb for a short break on the first day of my period and the next day my ‘morning anxiety’ returned with a vengeance. I think it is important to take a few days off all the herbs but I will definitely be going back on them tomorrow. (FYI, I also stopped taking Agnus Castus last cycle as I had been on it for over three years and my period didn’t suddenly arrive ridiculously early as I feared it would. Perhaps the Chinese Angelica and Black Cohosh are helping keep things regular…)

Despite my conclusion that I have been suffering a ‘hormonal imbalance’, there are clearly other issues that needed to be resolved and I am really glad I returned to counselling so I could start to address them. As long as I was ‘under the influence’ there really was no way out because no matter what I did, I could never seem to find my inner balance – not even sitting alone in nature which always usually works for me. I honestly believe if I hadn’t managed to get a handle on the hormonal imbalance, I would still be going around in circles in counselling trying to get relief from some other perceived threat. Thankfully, the Black Cohosh did work and as soon as the anxiety and depression lifted, it became much easier to see things clearly and to start to figure other things out. Yay!! :)

   

Goddess Blessings ♥