Rethinking Midlife and Menopause with Kellie Stirling

Kellie is a somatic coach, facilitator and guide - a certified Developmental Coach and VITA™ Integrated Sexuality, Love and Relationship Coach. She holds post-graduate qualifications in Complex Change and Adult Development, has been an Executive Coach for 15 years and is also a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner as well as a mother and a cancer survivor.. 

Kellie works at the intersection of adult development, systems thinking, integrated sexuality, embodiment work, somatic experiencing, leadership and business to support people through big changes in their lives during parenthood, midlife and menopause, and elderhood rites of passage; and other life transitions like grief, divorce and big career changes.  She is passionate about working with people to really focus on thriving in their life; taking off the masks we wear and getting back to the original essence of who we are. You can access her free ebook here Magical Midlife and Menopause and see more about her here.

We explore:

  • some of the meh and restlessness that often shows up in midlife

  • menopause getting “the blame” for midlife 

  • ego and meaning, emotions and societal conditioning, truth

  • the menopause “muse” and shapeshifting

  • how we could create change on a micro level and where to start

  • the radical act of listening to ourselves 

  • some reframes around supporting our health 

And so much more!

Prefer to listen? Get the podcast here: ​Midlife, menopause and finding meaning - a conversation with Kellie Stirling

Kelly, thank you for taking the time to speak with us today about midlife and various aspects that come up for women and humans in general. Do you wanna tell us who you are, where you are and the work that you do at the moment?

I'm based in Melbourne in Australia and I'm a coach and a somatic experiencing practitioner. And I work with people in the midlife audience. The work that I do is a little bit of consulting work. I do coaching. I've been doing executive coaching for a really long time. I do relationship coaching and life transitions coaching.

And I would say that particularly the relationship in life transitions coaching, what led me to it was coaching so many senior executives and working in that space for quite a while and seeing their relationships fall apart and then having a really tough sort of mid-life time because so much goes on for so many people that I was drawn down that thread and I was in that journey myself. So there was personal curiosity.

I'd been studying adult development for a really long time and looking at how adults learn and grow. It was always something that used to get people stuck and it was often the trauma piece. So I feel like I've just gone in this big complex web and I'm just kind of picking up all the bits. How does this work? What's getting in the way there?

I'm picking how do we support the humans?

Menopause is not the only transition I work with. I work with grief and divorce and becoming a parent and elderhood. So there's sort of different transitions, but I am passionate about menopause and have been for a few years because it's so grossly under supported. It's just such a shame.

And there's so much that we don't know about it. There's so much that we don't know about women's health. With so many women, they're at the peak of their lives in so many ways. And I think it doesn't have to be this hard. So how can we change the narrative? Think about the cultural piece? How can we be shape -shifters in terms of cultural change ourselves as practitioners?

But also women going through it ourselves and destigmatise it, but also offer support to people who need a hand or just sometimes they need more information. Here's where you can go and look. There's lots of different ways. So it's a little bit of a passion project of mine, I would say. Notwithstanding, I work with lots of guys as well. We all go through midlife transition and we have andropause and menopause.

One thing that you were talking about was that you started off with maybe what we call executive coaching, which is such an interesting term. Of how we're coaching professionals, maybe in their professional capacity or in their career. And one of the things that I've seen in the one-on-one work that I do with women is, as you're saying, we're kind of maybe moving to a career peak at the moment. We're holding a lot of responsibilities.

We're taking on more, we're stepping up in different ways. And often women are surprised when I ask them about where their hormones are at or whether they're cycle tracking or what's going on in their bodies. We haven't really put that together. How are we physically supporting ourselves or what's going on in other realms? And it sounds like through doing that, you're thinking about, okay, well, what's also happening in my life as a whole human or how is that affecting my relationships?

Yes, definitely. When I was working in corporate areas, like doing complex change where I did a lot of executive and leadership development where I was the head of leadership and talent for a very large Austral Asian bank for many years. And so I was working with these people pretty much my whole career and always like, what is going on with them? Males and females, and a big part of that is their midlife transition, which is going from an ego driven orientation, “I have to establish my career and establish my family”. It's all very outside in validation. Then you get to midlife and there's this inner restlessness and wanting more meaning and purpose.

And if that's not addressed appropriately, within the self, it can be projected out really easily. And so that projection, I'd seen it in work, it's derailing sometimes, marriage is breaking up some really kind of odd behaviour. I was super curious and was like, what, like what happens? Then because of the job that I had, and we were doing some really interesting stuff, and so it was getting a lot of attention globally. So I was exposed to a lot of really great thought leaders around the world. I would just, being the curious person that I am, I was always asking questions. And then when I decided to leave, which, in hindsight, I was like, okay, that's when my midlife transition really started. I was about 38.

I wanted to focus more on my mothering responsibilities than deal with office politics, quite frankly. But that's why it led me to study it in great detail and then continue to do this work.

Because I found it so fascinating. It's a very sacred journey. Our hormones facilitate our development throughout our life. They're like the little changes that push us on to the next stage.

There's like a thread. I just keep following it. I want to know more.

One of the things that I'm picking up on is this restlessness, this feeling of like, I'm not in alignment anymore, or maybe the behaviours or the way I was doesn't suit who I am right now. And I feel like I want things to change. And what I see in a lot of people at this stage is that feeling of feeling a little bit trapped. Maybe I need the income to support my dependence. I feel like I can't create much change. I feel like I don't have much power, and I'm starting to feel depressed around that or angry or frustrated.

When you think about midlife transitions and that time of maybe moving from outside in or how does the world perceive me to what do I want to do and how do I want to serve? What do you see as challenges within that for people when they're maybe trying to create change or wanting to transition?

This is a complex topic, right? I always talk about midlife and menopause together. I don't think you can talk about them separately. Menopause gets the blame for a lot of midlife stuff. But then I work with men and so I see them go through their own piece as well. So I know there's something there.

Always, we could be here for days.

So I would say the stifling is all the parts of ourselves, our original essence of who we are, that we've repressed when we're younger to stay safe and survive. Whether it's due to the allostatic load in the nervous system and the body just can't do this anymore. There's heaps. I'm a student of Jungian theory. I love all the Jungian work, the depth psychology. Through that lens, it's like, the soul wants to be in charge. It's about letting go of all those adaptive strategies, some that were built on neural networks of trauma, some not, not everyone has a rough childhood and they're, I would say, developmentally appropriate for when they were created. But I think what happens with most people is they find that those old strategies and adaptations don't really serve them in their life very longer. And so there's this kind of need to bust out of whatever because, call it the soul, the original essence.

I think with midlife women, I call it the menopausal muse. And I always say when the muse arrives, let her in or she'll burn the house down. So the muse is us, right? It's the true essence of who we are. And all the stuff that we've repressed over the years comes up. And so in that way, I see this as a very sacred journey. It's a very healing journey because it's about coming back to the truth of ourselves. And it's no surprise when you study life transitions that the developmental challenge of midlife is radical honesty. Come back to the truth of who you really are. That's the thing we've got to master.

So the stifling, it's very clear to me, the stifling is just the ego that's pulling us back. And then of course we've created our life around that. And so how can you do that without blowing your life up? How can you go towards more meaning and purpose? So I would say your purpose is not your job.

Your purpose is to be your absolute true self. And if you have work that supports you to do that, fantastic. Maybe it's not the work, maybe the work just facilitates the life so that you can go and do the purpose. Just for example, imagine painting was your purpose, like you would be an oil painter. Well, it takes a bit of work to earn money to be a really good painter, but maybe you can downscale it, work a little bit, do an easier job so that you can pour your heart and creativity into your painting, which is your passion.

Some people, their purpose is to be parent. We're all so different and unique. So in that sense, that stifling comes in. I think also, particularly in large organisations, we adapt the cultural conditioning that we're all experiencing every day, but in a large organisation, there's a culture around it and we want to have a strong sense of belonging to fit in. And so we adapt and we morph and change ourselves to fit into those cultures. But after a period of time, most of us, particularly once we in midlife, we're like, I can't do this anymore. I can't pretend to be something that I'm not.

With that comes a challenge and that's why I think a lot of relationships get really rocky at this time. Because maybe earlier, you know, the bonding or what pulled us together, especially when you understand attachment theory, it's like the old trauma wounds. I love Diane Poole-Heller. She's an American clinical psych, she's a somatic experiencing person, but she's quite deep in the attachment space and does a lot of teaching. Her program's called DARE. She always says, we're attracted to our unfinished business. And I think that's really true. Relationships offer, I know this through our work and our training, but they offer such a massively beautiful container for healing.

If you can recognise this deep yearning. I feel like sometimes it's like our foundations feel really, really shaky on the inside. But rather than project that out, if you can focus in and do it in the container of your relationship, it can be a really beautiful experience. And also maybe some relationships are not meant to last and that's okay. But going in rather than projecting out, I think is what is the pathway through and we'll deal with the stuff. People have created their life around earning big bucks or they don't want to do that anymore. Well, you know, sometimes we do have to make some hard choices, if it's our own mental health that might be at risk in front of us. So it's I guess it's super complex. And it's at a time in our life where we're often doing really well at work, where we've got kids, we might have sick parents. We have so many demands placed upon us every day, as well as our own growth and development.

One of the things that I like to talk about and think about is almost those micro choices, you know, when you were saying of maybe I can scale back, maybe there's a boundary that I can set here so that I can create a little bit more time over here. Often that when we get into that feeling of I can't anymore and we're at the end of that burnout scale and we feel like I've got to burn the house down, there's no other option. It's either me running away to Costa Rica by myself or what?

I'm going to collapse in this and where can I slowly create change, slowly turn inward, slowly have those moments of pause and listening.

Absolutely. Particularly if we're talking about females, particularly if they've got a high pressure job because there's sort of four pillars on good health. You talk to any health professional on a diet, sleep hygiene, our exercise, and then how we manage stress. And I think where menopause, in particular, kind of throws a spanner in the works is that because a lot of us haven't really learned how to manage our stress well. A lot of us have ridden the waves of oestrogen and progesterone coming in. And so when a lot of our old stuff comes up, because you've been repressing your anger.

I have so many people I've worked with and they'll just say to me, I don't get angry. And I'm like, like never?

What if someone cuts in front of you when you're driving? No. I'm like, well, anger is so important! We need it, it's a protective response. We need it to reinforce our boundaries, to look after ourselves. There's a lot of work to do there. But when we haven't learned, like when we have repressed stuff or we haven't learned to manage stress, we just kind of push through. That's often where we can get really derailed at this time in life because a whole lot of stuff hits us at once. So it can be surprising, but I find with most clients, once we start the education process around understanding all the different hormones in the body and the different organs and what they do, then there is acceptance of all emotions. There's no bad emotions.

Then how do we reinstate some of those protective responses in your body that you've been repressing for a really long time and I use a lot of SE to do that. There's an acceptance and a welcoming and a... Like even feeling safe to slow down. When you're going flat chat all the time, often it doesn't even feel safe in your body to slow down.

So it's easy for us to say it's a mindset thing or it's often a nervous system thing. It's that deep.

What are the interesting things I find about nervous system work or bringing that into coaching is that I think collectively as a society, we've got a fantasy of feeling good automatically. Promotion, success, rest, like that equals God. And what I see in my clients, and it sounds like it's similar with you is actually that can feel so dangerous. It can feel so foreign. It can feel so unknown if we've never let ourselves rest before. We've never had this level of success or visibility, it actually feels quite edgy and it feels quite scary. We may avoid that or create other kinds of drama to not be in that state. So it sounds like you're seeing that as well, there's a mindset piece of what am I thinking? What am I believing about myself, my place in the world, the work that I need to do, but also how does it feel? And have I ever let myself feel angry? Have I let myself feel frustrated. Have I let myself feel proud or whatever it is.

Even the exalted emotions in the upper limits as well. Yes, all of that. Yes, to all of that. Absolutely. It's so liberating to people when they can experience that.

Sometimes the yearning, so when we start to feel stifled and that longing and yearning for something else, what we're actually longing for is our real self. And so to be able to feel safe enough to be able to be in that is the liberation.

You might need to change a job, but you might not. You don't need to sell everything and move on. It's actually just doing that. The longing is for you. The longing that you're longing for is you basically. That real essence of who you are and all that ego stuff. Because the ego is so tricky, it'll cling on with its fingernails.

When you say ego, what do you mean by that?

So the ego, I don't want to get into psych speak. How can I explain it in plain English? Our ego is really important. It's really healthy. It's just something that we develop when we're younger to keep us safe. I'm not going to go into like mega deep psych speak on what it is, but it's often the survival strategies that we create to keep us safe when we're younger.

So that shows up in particular ways of being. So it might be around, example, being the good person, being the good girl or the good boy and pleasing people and doing the right thing. I've seen it in a lot of my professional career, because I worked in a lot of big consulting firms, like overachieving, like crazy overachieving. I've got to please and do all the right things and people burning themselves out.

It might be a persona is created. The ego creates these personas around having to be smart and brilliant and knowing all the answers. Maybe it's around, being a little controlling because if I don't get it done, I won't feel safe. So this, the safety through childhood is that achievement orientation in very early stages, when it's immature often shows up as very controlling, dictatorial behaviour, but when it matures and grows, if it does appropriately, then those people they're very good at strategy and they're very good at making decisions and they're very good at sort of having that future sight in an organisational sense. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. And I think one of the things that really speaks to me and I talk about a lot is how those survival strategies, how those things that we've developed often serve us in lots of ways. And so when we think about changing or we think about shifting away from them, that feels like we don't know if we can do it without them, especially in a socioeconomic culture that often venerates a lot of those attributes of overachieving and pleasing for women. then creating change or thinking about changing those habitual patterns can feel unsurvivable.

Often terrifying. Often what sits underneath them, the reason they were created in the first place is terror. You know, is it three or two or a four year old who didn't have attunement from parents or didn't have the acknowledgement that they needed and the only way they could get it was through doing really well at school or doing all the right things or never upsetting mum and dad.

So to not receive the love and the connection and the patience and the kindness and attunement they needed. They created this strategy and to not receive that is terrifying when you are that age.

So when you say coming back to yourself, it's almost like how can I give myself that love and acceptance in all that I am? Or how can I turn up the volume at least? How can I give myself a little bit more and pour into myself, pour that acceptance into myself, that unconditional acceptance, which is so foreign to so many of us if we haven't seen that modelled in our growing up in our childhood.

A lot of people, historically, were all the children of people whose parents were in the war, they were in the depression, these were all our grandparents, they were in the industrial revolution of maybe great grandparents. We've got these ancestral lines of a lot of trauma, a lot of people who were in survival mode, a lot of kids who were parentless, who didn't receive any of that.

Maybe our parents were the first lot of people who had parents who lived to a decent age, but they were very traumatised and that all gets passed down through the nervous system.

And that's why I think with menopause as well, like Gen X, we're the shape-shifters of all of this stuff because as my father always says to me, you're so lucky that it's so okay to do therapy and coaching and personal development and all these things. It's a gift and he's right.

You talked right at the beginning about changing the narrative of midlife and shape-shifting just reminded me of that, of how do you frame that for yourself and for the people that you work with? How do you look at this life transition of 40s, 50s and beyond?

For me, and I'll talk a little bit about my experience as well when I get into this, but to me there's one question that sits over the top of this and that is how do I set myself up to live well in my second half of life? Because menopause itself is not an event of aging, but it's like a gateway into aging because our hormone cocktail changes quite significantly. So those four pillars I talked about before, diet, sleep, exercise and stress management.

We really have to do a bit of reflection on where we're at, in the spirit of midlife, being honest with ourselves. So for me, I haven't really ever been afraid of menopause. I think my mum had a pretty okay experience with it. She was pretty okay with aging. So I learned that off her, even if I wasn't living with her when it happened, I was living in Europe at the time. I don't have a lot of strong memories, but she was okay.

I was perimenopausal for probably about six years. The only thing for me is I had terrible periods and I ended up getting a Mirana IUD just in terms of hormone therapy. My iron was really low my whole menstruating life, basically, I always had low iron. So it was a bit of a hard choice, but I ended up doing it.

Then in 2020, I got diagnosed with stage three colon cancer and I'd been really tired and I'd sort of been going to the doctor like there's something wrong, I don't drink, I don't smoke. I'm really fit. I eat really well. The doctors were like, it's probably a bacteria or have you been to Central America? Yes. So we did some investigation and they found the tumour. And that was a really challenging year, obviously. Surgery and then six months of chemotherapy which was quite gruelling. So I was just still happy to be here after all of that. And I in a way like I felt like I had my knees chopped off.

I was the typical kind of crazy overachiever and it was a really hard way to learn a lesson but in some ways it was easy. There were many gifts. It was hard going through the pandemic, doing the treatment, just because you need a bit of co-regulation and support and I couldn't get that because people couldn't come to the hospital with me. We're very strict in Australia around all of that.

So that was a little challenging, but it taught me lots of really good things and I think I've been totally okay since then and have slowed down significantly. And I think also my somatic experiencing training, because you do so much deep work on your nervous system yourself. So that's really kind of cemented everything for me. But I've been in, basically from the time I turned 38 through I'm now 52, I've been in constant learning process. Years of studying adult development, then the sex, love, relationship coaching, and then some experience in training. So I almost feel like, for myself, my own internal rumblings, I have dealt with it because I've been in a constant therapeutic process for the last 14 years.

It's been so expansive and it's had a really positive impact on me, the work that I'm doing, the people that I'm supporting, my marriage, my relationship with my kids. So I feel kind of lucky that I'm in a position to be able to invest in that.

When I was having a lot of period issues, a gynae oncologist that I was talking to, she just said to me, you're in perimenopause. And I went, okay. And she said, do you know much about it? I said, not really, but I'm gonna start. And I just started reading. I just read so many books. This is before I had started studying the sex, love, relationship coaching.

So going into that, and because I'd been studying adult development for years, I was putting a lot of that theory with it and seeing all the crossovers. And then during the pandemic, because I really couldn't work because of my treatment, I just went deep into the esoteric and mystical side of it and just read and read and read and read. And I was like, my God, this is amazing.

I learned about the body. The richest understanding of this transition comes through looking through multiple lenses. Biologically what's going on, you have to learn about your hormones. It's not just your sex hormones that are affected, it's all your metabolic hormones because they're this amazing symphony and they all work together.

Psychological, well what's the deep inner work. It's so unique to all of us. We're all so unique. Whatever comes up for you is what needs focus. Your psyche, your body mind will show you the way. And then it's all the social and cultural stuff. Because we internalise everything and it creates all our belief systems.

What's my imprinting on ageing? How did I feel about getting older? I'm just glad I'm still here, quite frankly. But I've been having this whole battle around dying my hair or not dying my hair for the last couple of years. And I finally got to the stage where I'm like, I'm done. Let it grow out. There's always little things all the time. And I think back to the question around shape shifting and being the generation that changes it, you have to kind of embrace your inner wild woman, that inner rebellious part of you that comes out at this time in life and really look at all your life story and all the things you've learned about what it means to be a woman. How do you feel about your menstrual cycles, your health, just everything. Someone said to me, I interviewed for my podcast recently, she said menopause is a full body job or something like that. But I think it's true.

It's like every aspect of our life is up for review. And it's all like a thread, like a spider web. It's all woven in together. So I think that's what's so overwhelming for so many people. And they're like, well, where do I start? Start with the thing that's bugging you the most. So for me, it was my health. So I learned everything, now I understand how hormones work. Now I understand why the liver is important. Now I understand why diet's so critical.

Yep, I should give up drinking wine and I should give up coffee because they give me night sweats. No drama. I don't get addicted to stuff. I'm not that type of person. I can just go, yep, fine. For some people it's hard, right? Cause they use food, alcohol, caffeine to regulate themselves. I need caffeine to get some sympathetic arousal in the morning. I need wine to bring myself down. I don't like how I'm feeling. I'm going to eat carbs or chocolate or whatever.

Your body will show you where to go. It's the way that I kind of frame it.

It's such an interesting one when we think about we haven't learned how to tune into our bodies and we've often been spoken at, spoken to as women, particularly our bodies have been used, treated, cut open, snipped, moved around.

We see it in art, we see it in social media, we see it in anatomy books, we see a lot of our body, we see a lot of the female body, but actually tapping into what do I need or what do I want separate to what I've been told is quite difficult for a lot of us, right? What is a yes for me? What is a no?

It's so challenging.

So when you think about a tiny place to start for anyone who's listening and wants to practice listening to their own body, what would you say that is?

In terms of a practice, I like a body scan to be honest and using the felt sense language so this felt sense is the language of the five senses and and actually I should say people who've got ADHD or a little bit on the spectrum, sensory stuff can be really hard so maybe it's emotions or image but just scanning your body and starting at your head. Sometimes it's the easiest way to start is where do I notice a bit of constriction versus expansion. And then to just kind of lean into the two of them, using your mind's eye to scan your body. If we use the felt sense language, for example, my shoulders a little tight, my left shoulder, I'm noticing that, well, what is the felt sense of that? So the sensory language would be, it might be colour, might be shape, might be an image that's coming up. It might be emotion.

Just calling that out. And just being with it. Just for a minute. And then go to a place that feels kind of expanded, safe enough, good. Then go sit in that other place for a bit. And just stay there a little bit longer and use the same language. Feels grassy, feels pink, feels tight, feels warm. That's that's a simple, simple practice.

And that requires us to slow down and tune in. Come back to what's happening within me, which again, when we think about a challenge at this time, where we're often looking at to-do lists or what's the next thing or who am I taking care of? That moment of five minutes to breathe and tap into my body can be such a shift in how we're operating.

Another one is you cross your fingers over and put your hands behind your head under your brain stem. You can actually lay down, you can do it in a chair. But when we give ourselves some support through touch on the brain stem, you can also put your hands over your kidneys, same thing. Just giving, you know, we think of support as being interpersonal and having to come from someone else, but you can give yourself your own support.

So you just lay with your hands on your kidneys or behind your brain stem. For five minutes, you'll notice your breath will kick in.

If I can't sleep, I do this all the time. If my brain's rushing at night, I just put my hands on my kidneys and then I move it to my brain stem, just hold it and give it some support and feeling that touch. Beautiful. Taking a breath just thinking about that.

When you think about challenges that women face in maybe looking for external support. So you were saying we're so lucky these days that we have access to doctors who've been more informed than ever before, or coaches who are specialised in this kind of work or the internet even.

What do you see the challenges in accessing good quality support for women as they're going through a midlife transition as they're moving into perimenopause?

I can only speak for the Australian medical system because I'm privy to that. I have clients all over, so I only get their view. But I think if you look on the media doctors haven't really been trained in menopause in their medical degree.

I'm talking about general practitioners here. Unless they've gone and studied menopause as sort of an extra piece or aging around women, a lot of them are struggling. I've got quite a few doctor friends and I've actually coached a lot of doctors in one of the hospitals here and they often say, we spent an hour in our medical degrees on it.

We actually had a Senate inquiry. It's I think it's still going on in Australia on menopause It's been going on for six months I wrote a submission for it because I deal with a lot of people who are struggling from a mental health perspective or with trauma, so I see that side of it. I have a great GP. She's a specialist in women's health that I go to and she's post-menopausal herself, so she understands, so I find her really good.

So if you can find a general practitioner, in South Africa, you guys go straight to the gynaecologist, like the Americans, finding a gynae who's also trained can be fantastic. And then educate yourself. Start learning about your hormonal changes.

I can recommend two really good books. So Lara Briden's got a book called Hormone Repair Manual. She's a naturopath based in New Zealand. She's amazing. Period Repair Manual and Hormone Repair Manual are her books. So that Hormone Repair Manual came out last year or the year before. It's very good. Aviva Rom is a doctor in the US. She's written a really good book on hormones.

There's a couple of really good podcasts that I can give you the link to. We can put in the notes. We have some fantastic doctors in Australia and there's a couple of the leading medical professors who are also clinicians globally happen to be in Melbourne. So we're a little bit lucky, but Martha Hickey and Susan Davis. Susan's an endocrinologist and Martha Hickey is a OBGYN and a psychologist.

They do a lot of research. They work in multidisciplinary teams around women's health through the life cycles. They've got a couple of good podcasts that are worth listening to. I think they're both really good. I think this is worth mentioning. So there's a bit of hoo-ha at the moment and you see it on social media where particularly in regard to HRT. So there's a whole lot of doctors, a group of them who are looking at a whole lot of research, basically observational data. So the research might be about cardiovascular health or thyroid or something else. And then HRTs have been applied noticing some outcomes. And so they're saying, you know, can take it for dementia and you can take it for this and take it for that. Whereas...particularly these two that I mentioned and a whole lot of other doctors around the world are like, no, we know it works for vasomotor symptoms, we know it works for sleep, and we know it helps some people with mood, sort of depression or anxiety, but not everyone. So my advice is, this is why I think it's important for you to educate yourself, is be discerning.

There's also a lot of products like wellness and lifestyle products coming out because it's becoming a thing. People are talking about it more, which is great. You know, the shape shifting is happening. Be discerning. You know, if something looks too good to be true, it usually is. Reading about it, listening to podcasts, understanding diet and how it impacts on your body. Your body is processing the excess hormones that you experience during this transition through your liver and your gut. And if you put pressure on your body by eating rubbish or drinking a lot of alcohol, your liver has to work really, really hard. And then it can't do the refining, do its refinery job, basically. Same with your gut.

And the skin is your third line. So when we start having issues it impacts our sleep because your liver does its best work between one and three at night. So when we're waking up at that time, it's often our liver. And then we can't sleep. And then we get into a really bad pattern of sleep. Like I said, everything's connected. S

o learn and see how all of this works. Learn about your hormones. And those people I think are really good, really good sources of information.

Thank you for the resources, because I think one of the things that I find challenging or that I see my clients and my peers and my colleagues and my friends is now there is an influx of information and there's also an influx of people making money off the menopausal market. There are studies emerging that we've never had before, which on the one hand is amazing, but on the other hand, we haven't seen 10 year, 20 year, 30 years down the line and how has that impacted? There's a lot of pushing of one magic thing is going to fix it, one magic thing is going to make you feel better or there's one solution or it's one gel or it's one cream. And I think what I'm hearing you say is depending on the person that you are, depending on your background, depending on your lifestyle, depending on your trauma or relationships or needs, that might look different and really taking time to inform yourself from those different perspectives.

Absolutely, people often ask me like, what do you think about HRT? I don't have any judgment about it. Do you know? If you need it, you need it. I I personally don't take it. I take vaginal estrogen for my vaginal dryness. I had to after I'd been through chemotherapy. But there are a whole lot of other benefits for me. I've got pretty unstable pelvis due to a whole lot of surgery. So it has great benefit for me. And it's very low dose. In conjunction with my doctor, we had a good chat about it. And I have a lot of friends who take HRT. If you need it, you need it. There's no reason to suffer, but then it comes in different delivery forms. And so you got to work out what's the best thing for you. Cause your body and my body are completely different.

Some people gel is good for them. Some people tablet form works good. Some people have patch works good. Some people it's not.

I'm gonna step back for a bit. Do you wanna have an informed and collaborative relationship with your doctor and feel empowered in your health choices? No one wants to feel like stuff's being done to them. And you don’t wanna be afraid of it either. So learning about it, you can have some really good discussions. And I actually think doctors love it when people do their research and come in and they want to have a more patient-centred relationship with you rather than them being the expert. Well, that's been my experience of all the doctors I've come across just professionally that I've coached and worked with is they love that. And I do think you have to be discerning around all the wellness and lifestyle stuff. But again, it's such a unique transition and that's what makes it so hard because there's no one right answer.

It's complex, it's multilayered. But you've got to get the foundational stuff right. If you're not sleeping, my god, life is hell, isn't it?

One of the things that we talked about a little bit via email is the, the judgments that we might have over doing it one way or the other way. And we have this so often, right? In women's health of natural childbirth or not, or breastfeeding or bottle feeding or HRT or no HRT. It's good this way. It's not good that way. This is the way that we should be doing it.

I was raised in a kind of more hippie background, right? Natural is best and vegetarian diet and no TV and all of that. So, you know, I'm looking at the research and thinking, I'm noticing I've got some beliefs or thoughts about what my body should be doing and how I should be able to do things naturally or not.

There can be a little bit of shame around taking HRT or sometimes not taking HRT, when all of our friends are like, well, just take this, just take this hormone. It's going to make your life so much easier. And you're the person who's not wanting to do that. There's such a feeling of wanting to belong in that too. And how we're looking after our health.

And I love this question that you talked about of how am I setting myself up for the second half of my life or how am I setting up the basic foundations of my health to support myself going forward? Because on the one hand, we're talking about longevity and health span and people working for longer and living to 100 and blue zones. And on the other hand, we're still carrying on with our junk food and white wine in the evening and whatever, as if these two things can live in parallel and actually having this time to question and think about what supports the me of now, the me in my 40s to go forward is different to what the me of my 20s could tolerate and what does she need and what does 60 year old me need? What does her muscle look like? What does her bone density look like? How am I supporting her right now?

And so useful to say that out loud, right? To be in your 50s and to say, I feel good. I feel good in myself. I feel better than I have before. And for us to be able to see that and think, cause we've got such a cultural narrative around, downhill from here or, you know, steady decline, or as you say, we don't have space in our current role modelling for wise women that are leading, that are expansive, that are venerated and that are honoured.

We have lost such a lot in our kind of Western ways around that and so to be the shapeshifters of moving forward in in who we are

This generation of women aging and aging with knowledge, aging information, aging with resources, aging with access, aging with conversations, aging with more openness and more flexibility and more acceptance.

Yeah, and coming back to that permission of feeling, and getting curious about what's underneath, right? Because sometimes it almost becomes our default, right? I'm just a bit irritated all the time, or I'm a bit frustrated all the time versus stopping and thinking what's actually underneath that, what's underneath that is actually this desire for change or something different or something bigger or something smaller or a different way.

If you would give one piece of advice for women maybe in their mid to late thirties who starting to notice some changes in their body or changes in their mood, changes in their life, what would that be?

Two things that I think are so useful there. Number one is being proactive about seeking support and including that in what you give yourself. And that's the second piece of permission for support. Cause I see so many women driving themselves harder and not giving themselves time to think, let alone seek out different avenues of, well, maybe I want to change my diet or how do I support my skin? Or who do I want to talk to? Is there a coach or a counselor or a therapist of thinking that I'm worth this level of support and that can be so edgy in and of itself. So thinking about being proactive with getting support for myself and then giving myself the permission to have that over this time.

I feel like that should be on a t -shirt for all of us to repeat ourselves on a daily basis. Slow is more. a good one.

Thank you so much for your time. I will put your links down below if people want to connect with you. So thank you so much for that. And you've given a couple of resources, podcasts and books that I'll also link to in the show notes below. So thank you for those. Appreciate your time so much.

Here are some of Kellie’s favourite resources:

Should we all be on HRT - Prof. Susan Davis and Simon HIll on the The Proof podcast

Demystifying HRT - Kellie Stirling and Dr Fatima Khan, Talkin about Midlife podcast

- Hormone Repair Manual - Lara Briden

- Menopause Brain - Dr Lisa Mosconi

- Menopause the wise woman way - Susan Weed 

- The Wisdom of Menopause - Christiane Northrup 

Download these 3 resources to support you:

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Maude Burger-Smith