Sail Smoothly Through Your Perimenopause Journey

Mindy Pelz, DC

Okay. So I just want to start by welcoming you to the Fast Like A Girl  Summit the first ever. Thank you so much for being here, Dr. Sonya.

Sonya Jensen, ND

Oh, thank you. I was so excited when I got the email about this. I’m like, Of course there has to be a summit for fast like a girl and just so excited to be part of it. So thank you.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yeah. No. And what, what our listeners don’t know is that the depth that you and I think about hormones may be unusual, but I don’t know if women think about hormones to this degree. So I’m really excited to dove into this and specifically what you and I have been talking about, which is where do we where does the feminine body fit into this chaotic overproduction world? So I really want to address this because I’m really seeing so many sick women and I’m starting to feel that at the root of so many illnesses for women right now is that we’re just a mismatch for this patriarchal, overscheduled, overcommitted lifestyle and that we’ve got to take a stand and start to do things differently. So can we start this conversation with what is it about our biology that is different than a man’s, and how would we need to look at like a work week or daily schedule different than a man and why?

Sonya Jensen, ND

Yeah. And there’s so many layers to that answer. So I think starting with the physiology sometimes can simplify what we need to access to feel successful versus our counterparts. And we know in terms of our hormonal body. So just starting there as our, you know, as we’re stepping into puberty, for example, estrogen is rising, progesterone is rising. Even testosterone is one of our key hormones as well. But in order for them to thrive, it has to come from this place of safety. It has to come from this place of this capacity for them to thrive so that it can combat the stressors that a woman feels as she’s growing up. And our feel good hormone, one that we often talk about is oxytocin. It’s the one that actually helps us really feel connected and makes us feel like we can get the job done. But what we’ve related to getting the job done is accessing that male hormone, which is testosterone. And so when we’re trying to behave the same way as our counterparts, we’re taking away from our estrogen, we’re taking away from our progesterone because now we’re accessing our stress hormones and this other level of testosterone that is not natural in our physiology. And so when we get stuck in that state, we are now stuck in a state of survival. And when we’re stuck in a state of survival, we’re now vigilant. And now we’re doing life through this space or this lens of not enough because we have to keep up. So when we’re constantly feeling like we’re not enough and we’re constantly comparing to that world, to that patriarchy, to that desire to keep up, we’re always going to be running on empty because we’re constantly depleting ourselves from these nurturing hormones that are telling us, Hey, if you just access us in a different way and if you can access your yin and yang and know how to utilize it with its power, you can do all of that, but not from a place of depletion. I think that’s where the issue is.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yeah. And I want to hone in on this word safety because I see this so much in the women that are building a fasting lifestyle to lose weight and they tell me they’re doing everything and I believe them. And I think it really comes down to the body of female body can’t release weight if it doesn’t feel safe. And that’s very different than a man’s body. And I’m curious what your thoughts are on the primal years. So if we go back to the cave and I’ve thought a lot about this as far as was in the cave person’s day, was the male body more equipped to go hunt and the female body more equipped to create a home base? And I know that sounds so sexist, but what happened back in that primal day that is still in us today and we’re a mismatch to it.

Sonya Jensen, ND

Yeah, yeah, I you know, we have to assume what was going on at that time because we don’t know. But I think what would have happened is as women, they would have witnessed that their bellies all of a sudden are swelling up after certain interactions with their partners. And in that swelling, we realize there’s so much change happening in the body that I can’t move a certain way. And there’s a rhythm to which we connected with the earth, with our surroundings, with the moon. So we were so in sync with our environment that it was natural to be a bit slower, to feel more connected to the Mother Earth, whereas for men in that testosterone driven cycle that happens every 24 hours, they were given this other capacity to do to access that testosterone, to be able to go do the hunt or whatever that was that they were accessing, not to say there probably weren’t a lot of women warriors. I mean, I read a lot of like history and I know there are a lot of women warriors out there, but I think they were able to access that from a different place from which were accessing that same energy. I think they were so connected. And again, these are all assumptions, right? Maybe it’s a dream role that I have in my mind that I’ve created, you know, seeing like the Wonder Woman clan and like seeing how they were operating. But I think because we were so connected to each other and because we were so connected to the Earth and just the cycles and the rhythms that we were able to do probably similar things to what men were doing. But we were able to see what works in a society and what works for us instead of trying to again keep up, compete and all of that. It was more collaborative. I think that’s the key thing that’s missing today.

Mindy Pelz, DC

And do you think they took more like they could be a warrior three time, three weeks out of the year? Now, they probably didn’t have any kind of timing like that, but for part of the month, let’s use the lunar calendar. So maybe they were a warrior during the new moon all the way to like, you know, the what? The full moon. And then in the waxing moon, maybe there was more downtime. Do we have any historical evidence that women could have that extroversion warrior attitude and then followed it up with more interviews and nurturing type of.

Sonya Jensen, ND

Yeah, I mean, that’s such a good question. Some of the mystics that I’ve studied from like a yoga perspective in India, there is one in dead and she was a poet in her time. And this was in the Omega, the strong like 17, 1800s and she would kind of walk around naked, singing her hymns and her poetry. And she really changed a lot of what was going on in the world around her by just being her and following her rhythm in a lot of her poetry kind of sings to that. How women have been treated a certain way and how women have to access their softness at certain times of their moon so that they can be connected to the moon, the earth, and to all people. And like that is the energy that she brought into the world. So speaking at it from that perspective, I mean, I don’t know historically if it was ever written down that this is what women were doing. Maybe it is out there and I would love to access that information. But I think if we go to art, even to day world and we look at ourselves, as soon as we tune in to our bodies, as soon as we tune in to our rhythm, you start to see that, you know, when I’m bleeding, I feel a certain way. I feel like connecting to other women. I feel like being in that connective piece. And then all of a sudden from that access, this energy that’s not coming from a place of emptiness, but from this place of like I can do things like I can be out in the world. And then as soon as there is this full moon that I’m connecting to, it’s letting me know the next few weeks we’re going to be slowing down that you have permission to go in, tune in to yourself and what you need. And I find I would assume that naturally we would have followed that rhythm because again, we didn’t have all the environmental toxicities, we didn’t have all these things that would have impacted our rhythm with each other as women and also with the moon. So we would be in sync with our cycles and doing this together and learning together, whereas now there’s just so much mismatch because of the environment that we’re in.

Mindy Pelz, DC

And we’re so disconnected from our natural rhythm. I mean, if you even just look at birth control and so many of the well A, the pill will synthetically change it. But then if you look at IUDs like you’re looking at a lot of shutting down of a natural rhythm inside a female body mixed with this crazy, overstimulated, physical, emotional, chemical stressor world. I just feel like we have completely lost in our intuition and our center as women. And one of the things that I’m really thinking through is how can we live in this modern world in a way that honors the rhythms of our feminine body? I think it’s a really interesting thought. And before you comment on that, the other thought that I’ve been thinking a lot about is if women are meant to cycle with the moon, do we think that back in the cave person days that because there was no blue light, there was only the opportunity to get up with the sunrise, down with the sunset? Do we think that every woman cycled at the same time? Because I have some I’ve heard some conflicting ideas on that.

Sonya Jensen, ND

Okay. Yeah, I’d be curious to hear those ideas, but I would assume so because of that interconnection between the light and our hormones. I mean, melatonin and progesterone we know are connected. So being able to access that light in the morning and then go move with that rhythm. And I imagine, yes, we assume that the stressors were not there, but there were different stressors. There were stressors of survival. So I would also assume at that time, if, you know, if you’re having to move from this place to the next place for safety, I mean, our biochemistry is the same from that time. They too would have had to access that cortisol, those survival hormones, to get them through. And what I think is different in our world, in that world, is, I’m assuming they would come down from that more quickly, whereas we compile, we already don’t feel safe because of our stories and maybe things that we’ve been through in our lifetime. And then we throw in the expectations of the modern world, of the modern woman, of being mom’s CEO, plus this, plus that, plus the soccer mom, all of it. So all these expectations. So then we don’t come down from that height of cortisol or those survival instincts, whereas I feel like in the past that would have been different. So then we would have been in more rhythm. And if we were in rhythm together, I don’t know, it’s assumption of mine, but I think one assumption that we’ve been basing so much of our identity on and this label that we’ve been living with is that women are too emotional. So we numb those emotions with birth control. We numb those emotions through a lot of the decisions that we make because we do have ups and downs throughout the month. And when we feel like we’re going to be labeled as that emotional women, we are then distracting ourselves from those emotions. We are then pushing them aside instead of really tapping into the different ups and downs that we go through them, using them as information. And so I think that in itself is the thing that takes the safety away to fully express and fully be connected. Because as soon as we connect and I’d be curious your thoughts on this, too, of when you really started connecting to your hormones. You start to realize, okay, I am feeling irritable right now. Yeah. The way he choose, not cool nails on a chalkboard again.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Imagine you on a kitchen table, right?

Sonya Jensen, ND

These things start, these thoughts show up. But then like it’s an opportunity to be like, Oh, I wonder why irritability is showing up. Okay, my hormones are changing, but I wonder if there is a pattern of thought that’s showing up that I’m not healing. And yeah, I’m going to feel emotional, but maybe I can communicate this to my family. I’m going to be emotional this week because I’m feeling everything that’s happening in the world because I’m so open and sensitive right now. So I know I kind of took us on this other.

Mindy Pelz, DC

No, no. Here’s my question on that is, do you think that when you look at us through the hormonal lens, that we actually have access to more of an emotional spectrum than our male counterparts? Yes, yeah, yeah.

Sonya Jensen, ND

Yeah, yeah. I think we I mean, I think emotions across the board, it’s the human experience. It’s what makes the human experience really beautiful. I think because of how our brains are also wired differently, whereas we access our left and right hemispheres very quickly together, whereas they’re in one and then they’re in the other. So it’s more linear. And because they’re hormone, is that testosterone driven? It’s very point A to point B to see things more logically. Whereas we, because of the yin energy, if we’re in more of that yin energy, we’re accessing information from our intuition, from the heart space. And the heart space communicates to us through the emotions. And so I, I think emotions are I mean, this may be sound woo woo, but emotions are a connection to our to the divine and then hormones kind of give us access to that as well. So because our hormone is oxytocin, it’s the one that’s more widespread. It’s more about connection. So when we feel an emotion, we’re feeling so many layers of it, whereas for men they feel that. And then they can go to that logical brain right away and be like, Okay, well, how can I fix this? Because it’s a problem. Unless that male counterpart, maybe their yin is more activated, more so than their yang. So because we have both those in us and we’ve talked about this over the last week or so too, that we have the yin and yang, but there are some women that access their yang more than the yin, so that then they’re not as in touch with those emotions. They’re able to block them a little bit more quickly. And then there’s some men that are very anchored in their yin and sometimes have a challenge there too, because then they can access that testosterone and that drive and that motivation that they need.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, again, where my brain goes with this conversation is if you just look at the male body versus the female body. And this actually came up when I went to go titled the book Fast Like a Girl, because there was some concern that it would appear to be on feminist and that there would be many. And I still see it to this day. I see a lot of women say I’m not a girl, but when I dove into the concept and some old phrasing, like throw like a girl, run like a girl, but there’s actually a feminist philosopher back in the 1980s who wrote a whole essay on what it means to throw like a girl. And her whole premise is that our bodies are different. If you just break down, are hip to shoulder ratio, that ratio and the length of our arms actually makes it so that we’re supposed to throw different. And once I broke that down, I was like, Oh my gosh, that is the concept of fast like a girl. Like our bodies are demanding that we do something different. Yeah. So if we go back to these primal days and I know this sounds like so, you know, sexist, but do you think the male body was programmed to be able to go hunt more than the female body?

Sonya Jensen, ND

I would think so, because we’re we were designed to birth and you can’t hunt at the same time. Now, in saying that again, we don’t know what life was like then and I don’t know if you watch The New Avatar by.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Abby, but my family is like, why are you watching it?

Sonya Jensen, ND

So yeah, there is a scene of one of the women in the, the, the group that was in the water. She, she was pregnant and she was going to she was going to fight for her people. And it was the most like beautiful scene that I have witnessed in a long time, because when we’re pregnant and you could probably speak to this to say you feel this other sense of power because you’re so grounded and connected in you, you are also because your belly again has swelled up. It’s open. It’s open and it’s intuition and it’s accessibility of like energy and all of that. And you can access that Mama Bear warrior essence, which is that yang element of you and use that power when needed. So I would think in that times, if she was needed, she would step up. But we are designed though the way our hips are designed, the way our hormones are designed, is to create life and what a privilege to be able to move the generation forward. 

And it took me a long time to get to that place because I grew up in a culture where as soon as you’re a young girl or born a girl into this world, you’re a burden. Like gets very instant. There’s tears everywhere in your face. Oh, like instead of joy, sadness everywhere. And so you carry that burden or that knowing that you weren’t wanted from day one. So I remember growing up and people would ask me, or your next life because we believe in several lives, what do you want to be? I’m like a man, of course. Like, I want that power. I want to be seen. I want to be heard. I want all of that. But then as I grew up and started to witness the power that we have in our feminine, feminine being, in our emotional body, in our mental body, in our spiritual body, all of that, especially when I became pregnant, I’m like, I wouldn’t trade this for the world, but I get to move the generation forward. I am the first relationship to these young little beings, and I get that privilege. And how amazing is that?

Mindy Pelz, DC

You know, I will say that I’ve never felt more feminine than when I was pregnant and then had little, little babies. Like there was like there was like this emergence as a woman who’s been a tomboy her whole life. There was like this feminine emergence that came out in those early years mixed with a lot of maternal instinct. And I’ve always wondered, like, was that hormonal? Was that my biology? Like, what was that? And, you know, the further I get away from parenting now, the more disconnected I feel from that. And even menopause has left me without, you know, when you don’t have a cycle, there’s like a whole new emergence of you that comes through. And we forget how these moments of hormonal transition really dictate how we feel from the inside.

Sonya Jensen, ND

Yeah, yeah. And there’s so much in those transition periods when we’re stepping into puberty in the beginning, there’s so much discomfort, right? Like there’s so much the unknown. It’s very awkward, like we don’t know and we’re trying to figure ourselves out and all of that. So it’s hard to feel that feminine power because of one of the messaging that we’re getting. Oh, you got your period here. Let’s shut it down. It’s going to be an inconvenience, especially if you’re playing sports or any of that. Now you’re going to be really emotional or you’re getting angry or now you’re irritable. All these things that we’re hearing, and it’s an inconvenient to life. And so we disconnect ourselves from that feminine power, from that bully that we have every single month. And we don’t really start to question that until if we decide to have a family, until we start to think about, oh, wait, maybe I do want to be pregnant one day or, you know, there’s something going on in my body that doesn’t feel right. And usually later on in our later twenties and then we’re in our reproductive years trying to figure it all out, still. And now we’re having kids and we’re nurturing outside of ourselves. 

So I think in menopause, what is happening in that transition of perimenopause to menopause, we’re kind of letting that element of ourselves go that was built for something else or someone else. We now get to reclaim our body and build this new relationship with our feminine energy in a different way. Because ovaries are shrinking, they’re retiring. And we’ve identified so much of our feminine power with these aspects of ourselves, with being able to give birth and our uterus and having a period. So it’s like now we’re redefining what feminist or feminism feels like in our body, in perimenopause and menopause. And I think it takes away that part of us so that we can start to connect to our spirit more deeply in the stage. And it opens us up to this new wisdom that we get to access now from our ancestors. We get those downloads at this stage of, you know, like what is life actually about? Like, what was all of that for? And how can we as a world right? Like, how can we as a community, because we’re going to be leaving this world behind and what are we leaving behind and how do we come together to create this world that people can get more connected in?

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yeah. You know, I, I’ve been doing some research on how different cultures handle menopause, and I’ve been just sort of looking at my own journey through this experience. And there’s a phrase that I keep putting in the new book that I’m writing that menopause is really an opportunity to get to know ourselves again, to actually get to it through a different lens. And it comes from the depletion of hormones, but it also comes from the depletion of response abilities in your family, because most kids are growing up and there’s just this incredible opportunity that we don’t talk about enough. We only talk about how horrible menopause is and all the symptoms. But if you quiet your mind and you ask enough questions, you will be shocked at how answers will come to you that will lead you to a new version of yourself. And you’ve watched me over the last couple of years. I really feel like I am a completely new version of myself. Then even a year ago and it’s menopause feels like it’s accelerating that opportunity and maybe it was supposed to be that way.

Sonya Jensen, ND

Yeah, I think it’s by design. I mean, if you think of it, even from a hormonal perspective, we start to lose our hormones at 25 and the rate at which we’re losing them, I think is happening faster than it should because of our stressors, our environment and food and and all of that. And so this transition, I think that’s what creates that negative relationship to it. But if we didn’t have all of that, we would see that, you know, there’s a real gift in losing some of those hormones, you know, even talking about libido, for example, and the connection with our partner. I used to think it was strange that my grandparents had separate bedrooms and but then as I started to like tap into that wisdom, I was like, it’s because they’re in that space where they get to be themselves now. I mean, I’m sure they connected when they wanted to connect, but they got to really reconnect with themselves and with spirit, and they become more spiritual at that time. And they’re just finding new ways to connect with each other. And the love is actually deeper. Like their love was so deep when I witnessed them. And so there’s so much pressure to be the same when we’re 50, 60, 70, as we were when we were 20 and 30 or even 40, that I think we have to take that pressure away because we’re not the same. Testosterone stress declining at 25. Every time we’re pregnant, we lose about 15% of it by design to lower our libido. Because now it’s not about I’m not saying that no one should be intimate because I get that physical piece, but energetically speaking, it is more of that primal survival instinct that gets us to meet so that we can birth and move the generation forward. When we can no longer do that, the desire does go down and that’s okay. And then we find different ways to connect with each other.

Mindy Pelz, DC

I think that is such an important comment because I will tell you that I’m feeling that and it would from a hormones lens, it makes perfect sense that as my hormones that were there to help me reproduce have gone away, I’m going to want to go within more. And whereas when those hormones were there, they made me feel more social. They made me want to connect to my partner more. And so now that they’re gone, what they are doing for me is making me want to go within, making me want to have more alone time. And, you know, so and I’ve been talking about this because I think it’s a little hard for men to understand. And yet we’ve even talked about, like I mentioned to you, that I’m going to go right by myself, by the beach for several weeks. I think in the last two decades, I’ve maybe had ten days to myself because, you know, as a parent, as a doctor, you’re just you just you never by yourself. And I’m craving like I can’t even imagine what a week by myself would feel like. And I’m absolutely craving it. We’ve even gotten we’re traveling so much together. We recently heard of a couple that when they travel, they either get a suite where they’re in separate rooms and then they come together and sleep in the same bed at night. But then they have their separate space or they get to different rooms. And I feel a little bit like that too. And it’s not a diss on my husband. It is what I feel like. My feminine body at 53 is now craving it’s craving more inside and less connection on the outside because those hormones aren’t there. Do you think that’s like that’s natural as we go through menopause?

Sonya Jensen, ND

I think so, 100%. And I think the challenge happens is like what you’re saying, it’s really hard for men to understand that because their physiology is working differently, they can spread their seeds until the day they die, you know, so they’re able to still do that. So they’re kind of wired for that, whereas ours is changing. So we have to find different ways of communicating and connecting and being able to do that, I think deepens the love. It deepens the relationship. Nick and I have these conversations all the time, even on our podcast, that we have to start talking about these differences so that we can see each other for where we are, and even for women that are still menstruating that last week, the week before you cycle, that is what you’re feeling. And yet we have this pressure that why, you know, I have women coming to me like I don’t know I love my husband and the sight of him lips makes me like cringe during that week because I just don’t want to be close to him. I’m like, Of course, because your hormones are going down that week, you’re wanting to be more internal, and we have to listen to that, but we have to just communicate that to them so they understand that it’s not about them. It’s about what’s going on with us. And I think that’s where there’s so much disconnect in relationship to.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Agreed because it would be easy for a male counterpart to think that it was their issue. And I think one of my big ahas and just watching so many women, you know, in their health habits is that we just don’t understand ourselves. We don’t understand our menstruation when we’re menstruating. And we definitely don’t understand ourselves through menopause and with menopause. What’s interesting is society just pushes us aside. So it makes us feel even more useless. And that’s a large part of what I’m trying to do is help women understand what that journey looks like because it’s natural and there is an emotional change that happens just like there’s an emotional change that happens throughout the menstrual cycle. So with that in mind, walk through with me. What are the emotional shifts that are happening in a menstrual cycle? And when we can, we can go day by day, but I really want women to understand that since we’ve talked a bit about the menopausal woman.

Sonya Jensen, ND

Yeah. So if we think about it from the hormonal lens and when we know the follicular phase estrogen is raining and estrogen and serotonin work really well together. So serotonin. Yeah, right.

Mindy Pelz, DC

They’re besties. Yeah, they’re like besties, let me tell you. Because when one leaves your life so to be I exactly with that.

Sonya Jensen, ND

And there’s so many things that will impact that like how we’re eating allergies like anything, like stressors will impact anything that’s going on with your gut will impact that. And so when we know that estrogen and serotonin are connected, we know that if estrogen is nice and high, serotonin is doing what it’s supposed to do, we’re going to feel joy like we’re going to feel that motivation. We’re going to feel happy or we’re going to be able to give more during that time. That and that’s your follicular phase. And then as we go into ovulation and we’re in this like full kind of bloom, if we’re moving with the moon cycle and like full moon, we are now in this phase of creativity. And so we’re still in this like oxytocin creativity, like we’re able to create. And then, you know, she starts to leave and progesterone is coming up and progesterone and Gabbi very much besties and she helps us feel really calm. So instead of being more outward, we want to go more inward so that we can feel that essence, that intuition, that calmness, so that we can move through that phase more just with more smoothness and not feel the irritability and the anxieties and things that can come up during that phase. 

So the emotional ups and downs, if estrogen isn’t getting that height, we’re going to feel depressed because now we don’t have that hormone to give us that motivation. Testosterone rises around ovulation. Another motivator helps our brain feel really clear and motivated and ready in charge where they’re not going to feel that we’re not going be able to access that dopamine hit. Whereas in that other element, the anxiety is going to show up if progesterone is not there in that last half of our cycle. So it’s very much more prevalent in that last part of our cycle to women for women to feel more anxiety at that time. And then, as, you know, perimenopause, I mean, it’s just all over the place. We’re feeling depressed, one minute anxious, another minute rage. Rage is a big one that shows up in perimenopause and what do you think that does? Studies? I think it’s the fluctuation of the hormones. And for me, just looking at it from a trauma lens and looking at all that we have to move through during our life, I, I call it the forties, the few forties where all of a sudden, like the veil is being lifted a little bit and you’re starting to see where I have zero boundaries. I’ve been giving myself so much, I’m carrying so much resentment from not being able to be who I am and live as I need to with rhythm, with my body, that it’s all coming to surface now for a reason as an opportunity like you’re saying. Yeah. So rage is a huge one thing women talk to me about perimenopausal rage all the time. They’re like, it’s not even irritability anymore. It’s more like if he doesn’t move out of the way, I’m going to charge like a bull.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yeah. Do you think that that’s because we’re so neurochemical protected in our younger years with, you know, progesterone and stimulating GABA and estrogen stimulating serotonin, and that armor is now gone. And so the way I like to look at trauma is and this is, you know, as of sort of a new Aha is that they live in your cells and you’ve talked about this written books on it and I think you lose that neurochemical armor, those traumas, you can’t hold them back anymore. So if I look at my forties, I spent a lot of time having these moments of rage that I didn’t understand. But then I found a rhythm with, Oh my gosh, okay, I’ve got to deal with these. I’ve got to get therapy. I’ve got to do different activities to deal with the rage that’s been suppressed to within my cells. Do you feel like that is a pretty standard course for most perimenopausal women and do feel like all perimenopausal women? I almost want to put them all in like a big incubator and be like, okay, time to reinvent yourself. Like if we if we really addressed the rage, if we really ask ourselves what traumas got pushed down, do you feel like our menopausal journey and perimenopausal journey would be smoother?

Sonya Jensen, ND

Yes, yes, 100%. I think if we bring awareness to this is going to show up for you when you are in your forties and your hormones. It could start as young as 35 even before as your hormones are starting to change. All of a sudden there is like that veil that gets lifted and it can be microgram hormones. These don’t have to be big events that we had in our life. It could be the littlest thing that stayed with you, that created this identity that you start to realize, Wait, this isn’t actually who I am, but I’ve been told so much that this is who I am and these are the choices I made because of that. And then that will bring up that rage. So I think if we’re aware of it and we start to see, okay, this is an opportunity to heal that because the testosterone receptors in our nervous system, there’s so many that we lose those testosterone, that testosterone piece as we’re going into perimenopause. And all of a sudden we don’t have like using that armor and that protection that gives us that almost that false confidence and motivation that we were getting before, because that armor is gone. 

Estrogen is like, you know, the fertilizer for the brain and the neurons and making all these connections and all of a sudden that guy’s gone, too. And so when we don’t have that, it’s easier to access those memories. All of a sudden, the triggers that maybe happened before wouldn’t elicit such a response. But now they are, and it could be a small reaction. So most people that have been through trauma are really good when there’s tragedy happening, like you’ll notice and this is me. But when there’s a death in the family, someone’s in the hospital, something’s going on. I am on, I am there. But, you know, if the kids have their cleats in front of the stairs for too long and it’s not putting them away, emotions are rising and rage is showing up because we are brain’s been trained that way to be vigilant and on guard and to do what it takes to survive and feel safe in tragedy. And it’s in those little moments. So then women start to feel, you know, I was in traffic and all of a sudden this rage I never used to feel, I’m feeling it. You know, my husband in a pickup, some groceries asked him to. And all of a sudden I’m like lashing out at him. That never happened before. And it’s because your brain, when your nervous system is tired, your adrenal glands are tired, your adrenals are trying to take over for your ovaries. And so now here’s an opportunity to see all of that and receive ask for help so that you can shift at all. Yeah, yeah.

Mindy Pelz, DC

It’s so well set. And I will say that I like you. I’ve heard you say all of this before, but as I go into my menopausal years, it’s clicking with me more because it’s the way that I feel as I went through my forties, I was trying to understand myself from this new hormonal lens. And then, as you know, I’m a doer. So I’m like, Well, let me manipulate my food and let me detox and do all my supplements. And as I get into my fifties and into these post-menopausal years, what my cells are saying to me is it’s time to deal with what you haven’t dealt with. Yeah. And as I deal with that, I feel more authentically me. And I think that’s the invitation that the perimenopause menopausal journey offers women. And, and so I hear your words not from a mental level today. I really hear it from a body like I can. I feel what you’re saying. So for our audience, though, this is such a new concept. And as you know, I want to crack open the menopause conversation in as many different ways as we can. So I have two questions on what we just said. One is help our audience understand how a trauma acts 15 creates rage at at 45. And then the second question I have is there’s a resurgence of HRT. And so if we start to supplement and even bioidentical calls, are we suppressing an opportunity to release some of these traumas?

Sonya Jensen, ND

Yeah, good questions. So the trauma story that we carry and most of them probably started even in the womb, right, depending on mom’s health, stress, health. So there has been studies that have shown Rachel Yehuda, she’s a generational trauma researcher and she looked at Holocaust survivors. So I’m just kind of going back to the foundation that someone was born with. So she looked at Holocaust survivors and their offsprings, and so she saw that every single infant was born with adrenal insufficiency. And then she looked at their kids and their kids had some sort of metabolic disorder, diabetes, something like cancers, all of these other things showing up. And so depending on our foundation, what our adrenal health is like, that’s going to then fuel how much DHEA we have around age three to five. It’s then going to fuel how much estrogen and testosterone rises in those early years of age, anarchy and that laki before we actually go into puberty. So now, depending on the foundation that we move through our puberty years with will give us some resilience to the stressors that are showing up. So everyone’s going to have a different story. It could have been that maybe you were the second child who didn’t feel like get didn’t get a lot of attention.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Or you know me.

Sonya Jensen, ND

So I do know you. Yeah.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yeah, yeah. The second child didn’t get enough attention. Yeah.

Sonya Jensen, ND

So then we create an identity to help, you know, get that attention or that care or just be seen heard. And because that’s our right as a human that comes into this world to be seen. And and we know our parents are doing the best they can with their own capacity, but we carry that story and that identity. It’s very real in every cell. So now we’ve created a story. We’ve now attached an emotion to it. It doesn’t feel good. Now there’s a meaning behind that emotion. So now, as we were growing up, every time we feel that emotion, we’ve connected that memory to it. We’ve connected that meaning to it. And but our estrogen and progesterone as a rising and in our toes when we’re at our peak, you know, things are going well. Our brain is fully developed. Everything’s getting mass with birth control and all these things. There’s no space or room for any of that to show up. And it isn’t until we go through puberty in our forties or when we’re going through perimenopause where it’s like, Oh, okay, my protection’s leaving. Oh, my guard is coming down now. Oh, that feeling is still there. Okay, this is what I don’t like. And that’s where the rage comes. That’s where the anger comes. Because I’ve been carrying that for so many years in those cells and that cell danger response that we talk about, it’s the way I describe it to patients is, you know, when we’re not feeling safe, we kind of like hug ourselves a little bit. We’re going to punch over. I tell them, your cells did the same thing. They morph themselves in a way because it felt so dangerous. 

But then all of a sudden you start to learn more. You’re detoxing you’re eating different, you’re learning about yourself. You’re asking them to unravel that familiar space. You’re asking yourself to heal something that soul familiar, that it’s so scary to do that. So it’s a big ask and it takes time and it takes it takes support to be able to do that. And so then to go into your second question with be HRT, I’m a fan of HRT. When you use it the right way, I think it can be a band aid. And some women come to me looking for a Band-Aid. And I think if you’re working with someone that gives you space to feel the bandaid, to feel a little bit better, but then still keep seeding the right questions, keep seeding the right inquiries, it actually gives women capacity to deal with the emotions. Yeah, because if you’re you start dealing with the trauma as you start dealing with those stressors from a depleted space, in your physiology, in your physical being, you are going to wipe out and you and you can’t because you might have young kids, you might still have your career that’s going in a certain direction. We don’t have the space to do that. But if you can physically feel good, you can have the capacity in your brain to deal with the emotions that are coming up. Then we can heal that. You know, those upstream causes, we can heal those traumas, we can have a different relationship to them. I think when we move through trauma, it does form who we are. It gives us this identity. And to lose that, we’re going to experience grief, to lose that there’s going to be some fear. But it’s how we relate to it that starts to change over time. That gives us freedom then to really express who we are.

Mindy Pelz, DC

So would you say that if you were speaking to the 43, 45, late 40 year old woman, that as she’s transitioning into this new life without hormones, if rage shows up, I paranoia showed up for me and I was like, oh, my gosh, I’ve never been paranoid before. The incredible sensitivity that these are invitations to actually heal something that’s deep within the cells that they may not even be aware of.

Sonya Jensen, ND

Yeah. Yeah. I had a teacher describe rage to me when I feeling a lot of rage around the farmers protests. And there was there was a lot of stuff going on at that time with my community. And, you know, he was like rage. Like, if you break the word down, the first two letters raw is like that, you know, that power and that connection. And he was telling a story about this woman that was grieving her husband. And there’s that Ivy who was like someone that sings hymns and he was driving by and he sat down and he just he just sat beside her as she was like in India, when somebody passes away in our community, like there’s a lot of external expression of hurt and anger and all of that. And he’s like, he just sat beside her and closed his eyes. And then others around him asked like, What were you doing in that moment? And he was like, that rage that she was feeling was her connecting to source. That was her way of communicating. So when that rage shows up, it’s our soul communicating to us that there’s something here that you’re going to access that you never could before and you are ready. So I think if we can look at it from that lens, we don’t have to feel out of control. We can feel safer. We can start to trust that these feelings that we’re feeling are there for a reason, and then we can change that relationship.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Oh, my gosh, that was so beautifully said. You better write that down so you can put that in the.

Sonya Jensen, ND

New book.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Of the new back. So, you know, one thought on all of this, that’s a newly emerging thought for me and you and I have talked offline about this is the power of women nurturing each other through this. And one of the things that I’m seeing out there in the world is we have a lot of men that, you know, want to support and help in this process. It’s not you know, they’re but they’re they don’t know quite how to do it. And I also see in my own experience where women who have rallied around me as I am allowing these traumas and emotions to come out of me and heal me. What I’m realizing is that the nurturing love of women is actually moving me through this. And then I’m able to go back and explain to the men in my life, Here’s how you can support me. So there’s a beautiful way that we can help women transition through menopause. But I believe the Dorian is around women, nurturing women and then turning to the men in the world and saying, here’s what we need from you. And I think if we all did that, there would be a quicker and, you know, this is probably a patriarchal, quicker healing that could happen. But here’s the protocol. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. There’s a gentler way for women to move through this. So talk about where women nurturing women in the perimenopause menopause years. Where does that come in and how can we support each other?

Sonya Jensen, ND

Yeah. So you and I have talked a lot about softer starts, right? And how we’ve had to lose that part of us so that we can keep up. And going back to that initial conversation we had in the beginning of the interview, that expectation to keep up that expectation to be a certain way has forced us to really push that softness aside. And then in that we received competition and in that we received that not enough feeling. So when we’re operating from that, we’re never going to be able to collaborate and actually see the other woman for who she is. And also that there’s this invisible thread that is woven between us that keeps us so connected. Like every thing you experience, I experience. And when we start to see that in each other, we then can see that even in our counterparts and we talked about how differently we operate. Men like to solve the problem. That’s just that’s their testosterone. It’s how their brain is functioning. Whereas we kind of there’s a go back to another story around the Sufi teaching. And he was this teacher was talking about how, you know, when you look at a walnut, right. Or if you have like a container, that’s the yang energy. That’s the masculine energy there. The container inside the mushiness is the the yin energy that gets to dance with the divine. 

We like to dance. We like to experience the emotions verbally process, process with each other, say all the things that maybe we don’t even mean, but we need to say it and all this stuff. And then from that emerges the answer or we need to go within, and from that emerges the answer. And then we can clearly communicate to the container, which is them. And then that’s what creates that clear communication when we have an expectation that there are going to be in our minds in that like roller coaster that’s all over the place, they’re going to go crazy trying to figure it out. But if we can have clear communication because they’re on the outside holding the space, not really knowing what we’re experiencing during this transition, it’s the same thing I talk to my couples about when they’re pregnant. I talk to the woman like, look, he has no idea what you’re going through, how you’re changing, how you already become a mother even though the baby’s not even here. How fear is like in every cell of your body now because you’re worried all the time about this little child that’s not even here. You have to tell him these things. And so in these years of perimenopause, menopause, if we can lean on each other and know that we’re not alone, I mean, how much healing is that going to bring to us, the generation before, the generation forward and then with our men and the patriarchy?

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yeah, as so well said, if you could design a lifestyle sale or a for perimenopausal menopausal women like a transition experience and this isn’t just like a weekend, this would be like a ten year transition experience. What would that entail? What would some of the highlights of that day?

Sonya Jensen, ND

Yeah, so I would say when you start to tap into your rhythm, right, when you start to learn, learn about yourself, track your cycle, do all of that, learn what your rhythm is. Then start communicating to the people that you love around you. This is my rhythm. And then from that space, try collaborating and asking for help. How do I feel these things that are coming up for me? So the more and you probably notice what my hands are doing, she was like first were narrow and then all of a sudden were expanding out. I feel in those ten years of transition, the more permission we give ourselves to feel the discomfort of it and to know when it’s temporary. And to that, it’s a it’s an opportunity for a so I don’t want to call it a solution, but for a discovery, for self-discovery. And then there’s like a rebirthing that happens at the end of it that’s when we’re going to be able to bring in what we need. So I would say the biggest thing that’s going to allow us to do that is if we slow down, we have to slow down. We have.

Mindy Pelz, DC

To write.

Sonya Jensen, ND

Because we.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Because we can’t even hear our own voice.

Sonya Jensen, ND

No. Yeah. We’re so cerebral with everything that we do. So start to bring in things in your life that bring you back into your heart. So the one thing that I get a lot of women to do is make a joy list, make your joy list, because you’ll probably notice what’s on that list are all the things that you used to love doing. Like I’ve started teaching dance again and I used to do that when I was a lot younger and mean because it gives me joy and it helps me access that part of me. And so the more you do that, the easier it becomes to unravel the old stuff that doesn’t serve you and make room for what’s new.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Amazing. Oh, my God. Yeah. I’ve had hours and hours of conversation with you, and I still walk away with an enlightened perspective, so I just. I still greatly appreciate you. I mean, I appreciate the work that you’re doing in the world. And I know you know that I appreciate you so deeply as a friend. You are just an incredibly special human to me and have shown up for me to, you know, enlighten my thoughts around my own perimenopause and menopausal journey. And, you know, all I want to do is, is open up that love that you have given me. I want to open that up for all women, because I think every woman going through this journey needs a pack of women around them that can support them as they go through this. So I just I have to say publicly, thank you so much for that.

Sonya Jensen, ND

Oh, thank you. And thank you for holding this space. I mean, you make it so easy for us to tap into that part of us, too. And it’s easy to love on you because you are just such a light in the world and the work that you’re doing. I can feel it in every cell that there’s like, big change coming. And that doesn’t mean in a way of, like we talked about, that we’re going to fight for this change, but we’re bringing, you know, this conversation shown to the world so that we can open up that conversation and space for women to be this for each other.

Mindy Pelz, DC

You know, you know what? You just made me think of is that, you know, when you are delivering a baby and the head is like coming out the vaginal area and it’s like bursting out of the vulva and the skin that’s there and you can kind of feel the head come out. I feel like that’s where women are right now in an in understand being ourselves and what we need. I feel like it’s where that head is just coming out of the birth canal and women are starting to wake up and ask questions and gravitate to conversations like this. And I have no idea what’s going to be birthed, but I have a feeling it’s going to be amazing. Totally agree.

Sonya Jensen, ND

Yeah. So exciting.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Very exciting. That kind of people find you. You know, I love what you and Nick are doing and helping people understand the differences in a day to day between men and women. You have a great podcast. I’m excited for the book to come back out again, so talk a little bit about where everybody can find you.

Sonya Jensen, ND

Yeah. So on Instagram, Dr. Sonya Jensen and even online drsonyajensen.com and our podcast is called Health Ignited. And yeah, you can find us in those places.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Amazing. Love you, dear friend. Thank you so much. You too.