Pathologising our Cycles

I have never been particularly comfortable with the idea of pre-menstrual syndrome. I believe this stems from a message that was repeated to me at a vulnerable stage of young womanhood: when I was emotional, struggling to find a place for my anger or sadness or turmoil, my mother would ask me “Are you getting your period?”

So I took on an attitude to my own emotionality, wherein I invalidated the emotional material that arose in the days before menstruation. I put it down to hormones, rode it out, and left this material (and myself) unacknowledged, and worse, denigrated it as not speaking my truth.

It wasn’t until this cycle that I have come to see this in full clarity. For a number of reasons, I had many emotional blocks to unravel in my early adulthood, and to some extent, this process is still ongoing.

Allowing my emotions to flow was the first step, a process that took many years, as on some level I have come to believe that controlling (read, stifling) my emotions, meant to me, control over my environment- a somewhat futile exercise in the tumultuousness of adolescence in any case!

It has only been in the last few years that I have been able to understand the role that emotions can play as a guide, however. Emotions become, to the self-aware individual, not only the “barometer of the soul”, but a source of learning and insight about world and self. In this way it becomes a beautiful spiral of self awareness.

And for me, there is no time that is more conducive to this integrative learning and understanding than the pre-menstrual time. The hormonal orchestration of this time has gifted us an intensity of emotion that is not usually present at other times of our cycles, and this intensity demands attention! Just like labour pain, we can resist it, ultimately making the process harder, or we can willingly surrender and go into it, and take both the positives and negatives it presents us.

Menstruation was traditionally a time of seeking solitude, and the reason for this was the unique placement of the woman to connect with inner wisdom and universal wisdom for  the benefit of both herself, and the whole tribe. The word taboo is said to come from the Polynesian word tupau, meaning “magical” or “sacred” and was often used in reference to menstruation.

Over the centuries of patriarchy, societal attitudes towards menstruation have gone from being a positive reverence of the abilities and qualities of women during this time; to queasiness and repulsion of the menstrual act itself, and all it entails.

Similarly, we have taken on an attitude that pre-menstrual emotionality is a sign of feminine weakness, or even craziness. So much so, that we have medicalised this emotionality, and labeled it as “pre-menstrual syndrome”. Instead of being a potential source of wisdom, growth, and guidance, it has become a weakness enmeshed in gender and a hindrance to our lives.

This is not to say that some women do experience truly problematic pre-menstrual symptoms. However, I do believe our lifestyle- having constantly task focused lives that do not allow for slowing down when the cycle needs it; poor nutrition and sedentary lifestyles; and living too much “in our heads” and not enough in the heart and body- does play a large part in the development of problematic symptoms in this way. Could it be that ignoring our bodies in their human form, and ignoring our natural cycles of rest, emotionality and the way we connect and communicate over the cycle, be a big reason why our bodies and emotions cry out so loudly at this time?