My experience with menopause has not been an easy one. I had my first hot flush in my early 40s which was a mild one but, by the time I reached menopause, I was having the whole raft of symptoms – night sweats, hot flushes, problems with my joints, memory loss and the most awful anxiety and low mood. I had always been a very focused person who was able to multi-task at work but my mind was suddenly distracted all the time, I couldn’t stand to be in noisy places as I found it disorientating and I developed what I thought was deep social anxiety. I’ve never been a party animal, preferring quiet pastimes, but I’d always enjoyed socialising in groups where I could feel part of it without having to be the life and soul etc.
I went to see my GP and asked for a blood test to see if I was menopausal and I was refused and told that I would know. I came out with a prescription for Sertraline and took that for about six months but it didn’t help with anything and just made me not care. It took me around three months of lowering the dosage to get that out of my system and was quite unpleasant.
At that point, I started to research menopause and gave up alcohol completely and also caffeine as there was a lot of literature recommending it to help with anxiety and hot flushes.
A friend recommended HRT and said it had changed her life so I went back to the GP after months of insomnia and started the HRT. I slept well on the first day and thought I’d found the answer but then the headaches started and it felt like there was gel leaking into my brain all the time. I was sleeping well but my quality of life went rapidly downhill. Added to that the GP had given me the wrong dosage of oestrogen and I started to bleed. What followed was an extremely stressful series of hospital visits and biopsies to determine whether I had uterine cancer. After I got the all clear I contacted my GP and asked to see the “menopause specialist” but I was told I didn’t need to. They gave me a prescription for another six months of HRT but I decided to stop taking it. It took months to get it completely out of my system. HRT affected me very severely mentally. I had racing thoughts, extreme anxiety and struggled to even function in my day to day life.
During this process I was seeing a client who was autistic. At the end of the session one evening she asked me if we’d been matched up because we were both autistic. It was a life changing moment for me because everything started to make sense. Over the next few weeks I rewound the whole of my life putting everything into place and realising that not everybody felt like I did. I had an assessment a couple of months later and they told me on the of day of my second appointment that I was autistic. They also said I was showing strong signs of ADHD which was a huge shock. I did what I now know is the classic thing of writing the key points down which turned into a whole book, then there was the anger as to why a gifted child had walked into a selective grammar school and never fitted in or thrived. After that there was the grief to work through of what might have been if someone had seen my struggles and understood. I went on a deep dive of learning and then a “trial and error” journey to try and alleviate the menopause symptoms.
One major breakthrough was caffeine. I’m waiting for my ADHD diagnosis so I can try the medication but I read an article about the use of caffeine to help with ADHD and decided to make myself a strong black coffee. After 18 months of being paranoid about avoiding it, it was like someone had switched the light back on in my brain. I felt present and calm and I could focus! I am very interested in mindfulness and meditation so I bought a CBT workbook for menopause which I found to be extremely helpful. I take herbal supplements and the caffeine and my menopause symptoms are still there but they are manageable and they no longer affect my quality of life.
As I expanded my knowledge on this subject I started to question why are so many women in their 40s and 50s being diagnosed with neurodivergence. There is growing opinion that there is a strong link with the periods of a woman’s life where hormones are not stable, i.e. puberty, pregnancy, perimenopause and menopause and neurodivergent traits being exacerbated. Therefore, a woman who has masked all her life to fit in with a neurotypical world suddenly finds herself dealing with menopause symptoms and burnout from all the masking she’s done without necessarily being conscious that she’s doing it. All a recipe for disaster.
There are a lot of “experts” telling neurodivergent women that they should take HRT to deal with their menopause symptoms and help with their traits. I believe that, in order to do this safely, a woman would need to have constant blood tests to alter the dosage to match her body, however, that kind of care isn’t accessible to most women. We are all different and I know that my autism affects how my body reacts to medication including HRT and I ended up feeling suicidal at my lowest point. Once it’s in your system, it takes a long time to get all the traces of it out. I feel fortunate in that I had access to lots of information and knew where to look and I’m looking forward as a qualified counsellor to helping other women find their way and what works for them in this very important stage in their lives.