Menopause and TMS

[Mani]

My mom has had frozen shoulder migraines and all sorts of symptoms during menopausal years. She’s had a lot of trouble with my sister who thankfully moved out and shes doing better now. Her symptoms have always been attributed to menopause. I personally suspect that are tms but i dont want to overstep. Specifically curious to hear @JanAtheCPA but id like to hear inputs from everyone.

How do we feel about these somatic symptoms during menopause? Result of menopause or is there more to it?

Really curious. I doubt im gonna be able to get her to journal and all lol but id like to have a better grasp on her issues.

 

[Ellen]

I think, like a lot of things, it's a mix of both. There are real changes in the brain and body that occur during menopause. They can be dealt with and tolerated. But how our psyche reacts to the changes that come from aging and loss of status as a previously fertile woman, that's where TMS can hijack a normal biological process. Many women get through menopause without having TMS (frozen shoulder, migraines). It certainly can't hurt to approach it as a MindBody issue.

And just a medical aside--it used to be that MDs didn't want to prescribe hormone replacement therapy (hrt) for menopausal women because of a poorly done, small study that found a correlation with hrt and cancer. That has been disproven and so more women are taking hrt and benefiting from it. I'm one of them.

 

[JanAtheCPA]

What @Ellen says.

Menopause represents a loss, although the nature of the loss will be different for everyone, resulting in different manifestations of responses and symptoms, as well as very different timing of responses.

Pour moi, losing fertility was no big deal because I'd chosen at a young age not to have children, and I certainly didn't miss having periods. My TMS crisis came almost a decade later. Consciously I was angry at the unfairness of losing the protective hormones which keep our bones strong. But of course the anger was really covering up a much deeper existential crisis (rage) over the inevitability of age and mortality.