Ep 73 - Can EMDR help menopause?
 Hello, and welcome back to the EMDR I'm Dr. Caroline Lloyd, And if you are new to this channel, you are welcome here, and please don't forget to like and subscribe because it really does make the podcast a little bit easier for other people to find it.
So today I'm gonna have a little quick chat about menopause, which seems to be the hot topic of the month. Excuse me for that little pun. I hope you see what I did there. , Anyway, menopause is the topic that everybody is talking about, especially if you're a woman in your 50s, you really can't get away from it. All of your social media will be pointing towards the topic. And it's a question that I got asked the other day. So as you probably know, I work at Cabrini Women's Mental Health, and a great proportion of our clients are women in their late 40s and early 50s because it seems to be that that is the time as the estrogen declines and stops supporting the brain in, , , the great way that it does, as the estrogen declines, all the mental health problems seem to sometimes become a little bit more apparent. So it kind of unmasks some of the CPTSD that may well have been there for many, many years, but, uh, the woman has just been coping with it and doing their best job and, and just, um, existing in the world and, and doing a great job raising kids, being at work, being part of the community, all of the jobs that we do. But as the estrogen declines, all of that becomes just that little bit harder, and the wheels can fall off. So I see women who come in with burnout, who are completely exhausted, who are not sleeping well, plagued by aches and pains, and have that lower mood that is, , part of the menopause picture. And people ask me, "Can EMDR help with menopause?" So I did a little bit of a Google. I did a little bit of a literature search And the answer to that question is we don't know because there is absolutely no research on it, which is a sad state of affairs because we know that research into women's health is grossly underfunded. Don't get me on that soapbox. Um, but there is no research to support either that EMDR helps or does not help the symptoms of menopause. There is a little bit of research about CBT, and yes, CBT can be helpful for some of the symptoms of menopause, for example, the anxiety, , the lower mood, and the sleep issues, So CBT helps sleep issues by mainly decreasing anxiety around sleep, helping sleep hygiene, sleep routines, and that sort of thing. But what about EMDR? So what I imagine, I have not tried it, but if I tried it, I would do EMDR on the distress associated with the hot flushes. And we know that EMDR is very, very helpful in reducing distress associated with memories. It can be really helpful in decreasing the distress associated with pain, for example, and we know that distress causes an increase in cortisol, and an increase in cortisol makes most things worse, like sleep, like mood, like anxiety. So the more EMDR we can do on either the distressing memories that are causing that overall picture of CPTSD that becomes unmasked during menopause, so if we resolve the memories that cause the CPTSD that causes the symptoms in menopause, then that is really a helpful thing. And I have many women who go home after an EMDR intensive with me at Cabrini as an inpatient. They've had their six sessions with me, five sessions of EMDR processing. , They go home with a much greater sense of self-confidence, self-awareness, , they understand themselves better. They have all of these beautiful positive beliefs about themselves, having resolved the trauma from either their childhood, their youth, their early adulthood, and so they feel much more empowered, much more able to take on the challenges that are there in their daily lives as a middle-aged, I hate to say that word, especially, like, in regard to myself, because, yes, I am middle-aged, I am definitely past menopause. Um, so we have certain challenges in our lives, and they may be, , challenges to do with the workforce, the different role that we are playing in our children's lives. Our children may be young adults themselves. Maybe we are grandparents, and that involves a change in role. And, um, maybe we are looking after aged parents, and that can also be a change in role. So some women, some women at my age are going through a divorce, and that can be a really big upheaval after, you know, 30 or 40 years of being the same person. So menopause comes with all of the challenges of midlife, not just the challenges of changing hormones. So a change in identity, a change in role, a change in function, um, and all of these things can only be enhanced by feeling better about our past. So if we can resolve the trauma of the past, we feel better about the present and the future, we know that But maybe we can focus on menopause for a moment. So one of the big challenges of menopause is sleep. So for somebody who has slept well their whole life, they come to that period of time where the estrogen is dropping, and that no longer supports the brain function and sleep changes. So a lot of women do report that suddenly out of the blue, they start waking up at 2 or 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. They lie there for three hours until it's - time to get out of bed, and they just simply find it impossible to get back to sleep, and they are tired, and with tiredness comes grumpiness. We know about that from our children, right? So what can EMDR do for sleep? So it can resolve the anxieties, the things that we latch onto in the middle of the night when we're lying in bed, staring out into the blackness, or looking at the ceiling. , So EMDR can help a lot of that anxiety because a lot of anxiety has its roots in the past. We may have had a difficult childhood. Maybe the parenting that we received was not very reassuring, so we never learned to reassure ourselves. Um, maybe we had specific memories, incidences of the big T trauma, not just the small T trauma that cause anxiety. So we can definitely resolve the anxiety related to the past, and that will help us feel more calm. And when we wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep, and sleep is not easy, and we feel fretful, at least we don't have the anxiety of the past. Personally, I have tried doing EMDR on myself in the middle of the night, lying there looking at the ceiling, and it is really helpful. So those things that come up to us in the night, even if it's not anxiety of the past, even if it's just those daily pressures and things that we worry about, we can resolve them. I might be lying in bed, looking at the ceiling, thinking about bills to pay or interpersonal problems that I, that I have, or Or clients that I'm worried about, and I'll do a little bit of self EMDR. So I'll be tapping on myself or in the dark, looking from one corner of the room to another like this. And I'll set up the EMDR session as we do for a normal standard protocol with the image of the difficulty, the negative self-belief, the emotion. I'll rate that emotion and where it's sitting in my body, and then I'll just lie in bed doing a little bit of self EMDR, and I often get to the stage where I'm a little bit bored with thinking about that particular problem, which indicates to me that there is very little distress associated with it at that time. Or I will fall back to sleep, and that's, you know, the, the beautiful result of that. So I no longer have those ruminating thoughts kind of going around and around in my mind. They have been resolved through the EMDR process, and then my brain is in a much better state to receive sleep So that's one of the major problems that menopause brings that could be resolved with EMDR. Haven't done a trial on that yet. I probably should. Another one would be hot flushes. So hot flushes are caused by vasomotor instability that is a result of that dropping level of estrogen. So we suddenly, out of the blue, we are sitting there, we might be feeling perfectly normal, but suddenly, out of the blue, our bodies are just awash with this feeling of heat. It's like a sensation of having walked into a furnace, and we find that suddenly our face becomes red hot. We start sweating, we peel off a few layers, , and we're sitting in a room where everyone's got their... everyone else has their coat on, and we've just got a singlet T-shirt on. , And that's fine for a minute. A few minutes later, we start to get cold again, put the layers back on. So one important part of the hot flash is the embarrassment and the self-consciousness that comes with that. So whilst EMDR, I don't think would actually help the vasomotor instability, it wouldn't help the sudden onset of heat. If we take away the distress associated with that sensation, then the hot flash is a m- is much easier to bear, and then we don't have the distress that's associated with the embarrassment or maybe the shame or the self-consciousness, and certainly we know that shame and self-consciousness and embarrassment can cause further flushing. And so that hot flash that was initiated by the vasomotor instability is no longer accentuated by the embarrassment. So that's my theory. I'm keen to try it. If you are a woman who is experiencing difficult issues with, , menopause, chat to me about it, and, , maybe we should get a trial going. Anyway, I hope this has been interesting for you and helpful in some way. Feel free to reach out to me. As always, I love to hear feedback about the podcast, and if you'd like to, , comment in the, , comment section, please feel free to do so. I will speak to you again soon. In the meantime, take good care. Bye for now.
