Perimenopause is not a solo transition
Hi there, I’m Aarti, Founder and Lead Counsellor at Incontact. Hi there, I’m Aarti, Founder and Lead Counsellor at Incontact. Welcome to the 53rd edition of 1-1-Inspire! One of the things I am learning about perimenopause is how much of the work around it happens quietly. You notice that your body feels different. Sleep may become less predictable. Your emotions may surprise you. Your energy, concentration, or body may change in ways that are unfamiliar.
And then begins another kind of work.
Is this perimenopause? Is this stress? Is this simply life in my 40s? Do I need to do something differently? Is this significant enough to talk about?
Meanwhile, life around you continues.
There are relationships to nurture, families to care for, decisions to make, work to do, and responsibilities that don’t disappear simply because something within you is changing.
I have been thinking about this lately:
Perhaps that is why receiving can feel more vulnerable than giving. It doesn’t necessarily make us less independent. It asks us to loosen our grip on being self-sufficient.
She experiences it as someone’s partner. Someone’s mother. Someone’s colleague, manager, or leader.
Which makes me wonder whether we have framed perimenopause too narrowly as something women need to learn how to manage.
Perhaps the people around us need to learn too.
1 Story — When one body changes, the whole system encounters it
For many women, our 40s and 50s arrive with an interesting contradiction.
In some ways, we may know ourselves better than we ever have.
We have accumulated experience. We may be leading teams, raising teenagers, supporting ageing parents and carrying significant responsibilities. We may trust our judgement more than we did at 25.
And alongside that growing certainty about who we are, the body can introduce some uncertainty of its own.
I think this is one reason perimenopause needs to be understood beyond a list of symptoms.
A woman may be navigating changes in sleep, mood, memory, energy or her body while simultaneously trying to understand what those changes mean — and how much of them she wants or needs to explain to everyone else.
Yet we often place the responsibility for understanding all of this almost entirely on the woman experiencing it.
She is expected to:
- Notice her symptoms.
- Educate herself.
- Speak to her doctor.
- Adapt how she exercises.
- Manage her sleep.
- Explain what she needs.
- Ask for support.
All of these may be useful.
But notice how much work sits with her.
She experiences the change, and then becomes its researcher, interpreter, advocate, and educator.
What if some of that understanding already existed around her?
Imagine a partner who understands enough not to interpret every change in mood, energy, or desire as something happening between them.
Or a teenager who has some language for the fact that while their own body is going through one enormous hormonal transition, their mother’s may be going through another.
We educate young people about puberty because we know that understanding a changing body can reduce confusion and shame. I wonder why we have not extended the same thinking to the other end of the reproductive journey — particularly when these two transitions can be happening under the same roof.
And then there is work.
This matters to me because women in their 40s and 50s may also be at the height of their professional experience.
They may be leading organisations, managing teams, making complex decisions or bringing decades of expertise to their work.
Perimenopause does not take any of that away.
But a workplace with little understanding of this life stage can leave a woman feeling that any accommodation or acknowledgement of what she is experiencing risks being interpreted as reduced capability.
And so she may say nothing.
That silence creates another layer of work: managing not only what she is experiencing, but how much of it other people are allowed to see.
Perhaps vulnerability comes not only from experiencing change, but from believing we must conceal the change in order to remain credible.
This is why I don’t think the conversation belongs only to women experiencing perimenopause.
It belongs in marriages and partnerships.
It belongs around family tables.
And it belongs in workplaces.
Not because women need to be treated as fragile.
And certainly not because every difficult emotion, disagreement, or bad day in a woman’s 40s should suddenly be attributed to hormones. That would be another form of dismissal.
The goal is not to explain everything through perimenopause.
It is simply to make perimenopause one of the things we are capable of understanding.
1 Insight — Perimenopause needs shared understanding
Perimenopause may happen in one body, but it happens within a system.
If all the responsibility for recognising, researching, explaining and accommodating the transition sits with the woman experiencing it, we haven’t really normalised perimenopause. We have simply given her one more thing to manage.
Shared understanding does not mean treating women as fragile or explaining everything through hormones.
It means partners, families and workplaces knowing enough that a woman doesn’t have to translate her experience alone.
2 tools to make understanding shared
Tool 1 — Replace interpretation with curiosity
When we don’t understand a change in someone, we naturally create an explanation for it.
She’s become irritable.
She’s distracted.
She’s not herself lately.
She’s overreacting.
But interpretation can harden very quickly into judgement.
Curiosity leaves more room.
At home, it might sound like:
You haven’t been sleeping well. How is that affecting you today?
At work:
You seem to have a lot on your plate. Is there anything that would make this period easier to navigate?
And for the woman herself:
Is this evidence that I am becoming less capable — or is my body asking something different of me right now?
Naming perimenopause doesn’t mean attributing everything to it. It simply gives us another possible explanation besides personal failure.
Tool 2 — Don’t make her write the instruction manual
If someone you love is entering this stage of life, learn something about it without waiting for her to teach you.
If your mother is going through it, become curious.
If your partner is going through it, understand that you are living alongside the transition too.
If you lead people, develop enough literacy around midlife women’s health that an employee doesn’t have to disclose intimate details before she is met with empathy or reasonable flexibility.
Support becomes very different when the person struggling doesn’t first have to build the case for why support is warranted.
Perhaps this is what shared understanding really looks like.
Not hovering.
Not pathologising.
Not lowering expectations.
Simply carrying some of the work of understanding.
We often describe perimenopause as a transition in a woman’s life. This definition is too small. When one person in a family, relationship, or workplace is moving through a significant transition, the system around her has an opportunity to move too.
Not by treating her as fragile or by making hormones the explanation for everything.
But by understanding enough that she does not have to translate her experience alone.
Some transitions happen in one body. They are navigated by many.
With warmth and care,
Aarti ❤️
