Speaker 1 (00:00):
PMDD shaped my life for 17 years before I can name it. I spent those years searching for answers, questioning my sanity, and desperately seeking treatments that actually worked. My painful journey had an unexpected twist. Helping others heal from PMDD became my life's purpose. Hi, I'm Jess Hagan, a bore certified nutritional therapist coach, the founder of her mood mentor, and your host. This is PMDD PEP Talk, A weekly reminder that your suffering is real, your experience is valid, and your future is brighter than your symptoms suggest. Each week, we're going to explore the truths about PMDD that nobody talks about, the kind of truths that shift something deep inside you and make you think maybe there's more possible than I imagined. Whether you're in the depths of luteal darkness or riding the clarity of your follicular phase, you're exactly where you need to be because here's what I know for sure. Healing PMDD isn't just about managing symptoms, it's about transforming your life. This challenge, as brutal as it can be, is an invitation to know yourself more deeply and live a more joyful purpose-filled life. PMDD might feel like your whole story, but it's just a chapter and you get to write what comes next. Welcome to PMDD, pep Talk,
(01:40):
Quick pep talk, pause. Remember that everything we talk about here is meant to educate and inspire. Always team up with your healthcare provider for personal medical advice. All right, now, let's get into it. Hello, and thanks for joining me. Today, I'm going to be diving into my personal PMDD story, which is really more like a saga. So thanks in advance for sitting through this with me. This isn't comfortable or fun to share, but I do feel that it's important for me to share what I went through because I really hope that it can inspire some of you. I know that some of you are going to be in various places similar to the points on the journey that I'm going to share with you, and I want you to see that it's possible to move out and through and past some of the darkest, most challenging pains of our lives.
(02:44):
With purpose, your trauma can become your teacher. Your wound can become your wisdom, which are all very annoying and kind of kitschy things to say to someone who's suffering badly. So I see you, I acknowledge you, and I can understand that coming to PMDD with any ray of light can feel offensive when we're really struggling with our symptoms and we're not feeling like we have a way out. So I get it. I've been there, but this is called PM MDD, pep talk after all. So we're going to be seeing the light that has come through the experience, and I want to share a quote to get started. I love quotes, and this one really stood beside me as I continue, have and continue to you experience the BMDD journey, if that's what you want to call it, and I think it's a quote that can help you as well.
(04:02):
It's a Victor Frankl quote, and it says, what is to give light must endure burning. And with that, we'll get into my story. So I wanted to get my period so badly. When I was 10, 11, all of my girlfriends started talking about that, getting their period. People had different feelings. Some people were scared, some people were really nervous that it would come during school time and they would be embarrassed. There's so much unknown that comes with that life transition. But I was thrilled my whole childhood. I just wanted to grow up. I wanted to be a woman. I wanted to do my own thing. And getting my period was a symbol of moving towards that independence, that autonomy. So I was hyped. I was just chomping out the bit to bleed, and all my friends around me were getting their periods, and I was just waiting and waiting and waiting like a kid on Christmas.
(05:14):
Okay? Little did I know what was coming for me, and the way it played out is quite hilarious and very memorable. So of course, my period waited to come until my mother and father left on a cruise. They were gone on a trip for a week. My mother and I were very close, so I imagined her being a part of this process, and she was sailing away on an ocean liner, and I was with my grandmother for the week, and things were just kind of progressing as normal until one day my grandmother came to me with my underwear in her hand and said, now I know why you've been so mean to your brother.
(06:09):
So when we first get our period, it doesn't always look like what we imagine just red blood flowing out of us. Our hormones are coming to, and they're not fully developed. And so a lot of times our first menstrual cycle, men arc is brown bleeding or spotting so little so that you might not even know what it is if you're expecting to see and have a period like we were taught about. So here's my grandmother with my underwear in her hand saying this to me about how she knows why I've been so mean to my brother, not what I imagined. This pinnacle moment of me emerging into womanhood to not look like this, but it gets worse. My grandmother had a hysterectomy because of what we now think was PMDD and endometriosis. So she did not have pads, tampons, anything in her home. So she asked my grandfather to go to the store to get me pads, which was extremely embarrassing as a young 13-year-old. And in the meantime, she set me up. She took real good care of me by pinning a sock to my underwear with a safety pen. So I want you to just think about this, a sharp, stabbing object near your vulva, holding a sock into place for your first period experience, memorable. It was memorable, laughing about it now, but it was not great at the time. And those words just have resonated in my head throughout my PMDD journey. Now, I know why you were so mean to your brother.
(08:26):
That was the beginning of what PMDD would look like for me. Every month I would crumble into a pile on my bed. I would cry uncontrollably as if someone had died or had been grieving a loss. Of course, there were things going on in my life, but nothing to warrant the amount of despair and hopelessness that overcame me. The only emotion that was matched to that hopelessness was rage and anger, and I would oscillate between the two. Of course, my mother had a menstrual cycle. So early on, I had my first period at 13, at 14, she was taking me to her gynecologist, throwing her hands up in the air saying, I've had a period for years. This is not normal. Can't handle the door slamming anymore. What are you going to do with her? And so I was placed on birth control at a very young age in hopes of regulating my hormones, which is something to think about now when I know well, that hormonal contraceptives, taking a synthetic hormone cannot regulate your hormones.
(09:52):
It replaces your hormones, but we're not here to talk about that today. So as a young child, I was put on a strong medication to change and replace my natural hormone production with synthetic estrogens and progestins, but it didn't make it better. It increasingly got worse. And by the age of 17, I was continuing to deteriorate. I was on the dance team in high school, and I would alternate between, again, these two versions of myself, this very social, outgoing, adventurous, happy, playful person, and the stark opposite, an unrecognizable version of myself consumed with self-loathing and hate and confusion and despair. And so at the age of 17, after losing all of my childhood friends, quitting the dance team, quitting, going to school, high school full time, I was taken. My mother tried to trick me into going to lunch. Well, she was like, we're going to go to lunch.
(11:16):
And she actually took me to a facility and an in-person patient facility for young teenage girls, essentially that had such a reputation in our area. I can't think of the name of it, the place now, but it was well known to have an evaluation with as a psychiatrist, psychologist. And I was then diagnosed with an eating disorder and bipolar disorder, and I was put on anti-psychotics, and they tried to admit me, but my parents chose not to admit me, but I did take the anti-psychotics. And from there, my life continued to deteriorate. I began self-harming and increasingly using substances to cope, being very impulsive and escapist, and using my body and sexuality as a escape from the pain that I was suffering through and the loss that I had experienced over the previous years. So really, it just got darker and darker. And when we think of mood disorders and hormonal mood disorders like PMDD, we don't really think about what that looks like in a social relational way, but it's very painful for those around us. There's a lot of abuse that can come from those of us who are experiencing PMDD, yelling, screaming, throwing things, cheating, lying, all sorts of erratic behaviors. And what can be most stressful about it is that the behaviors that you're acting out when you're in luteal and you're symptomatic with PMDD, do not line up with your other personality. And so it's very jarring to move between the two, which is why PMDD is so commonly misdiagnosed as bipolar disorder and sometimes borderline personality disorder.
(13:53):
So really, things just continued to deteriorate. I moved states, I moved countries in IT trying to escape the symptoms. It took me five years to finish my undergraduate degree because I was not emotionally stable enough. And then after that, it was just a continual drive to survive. And a lot of that for me looked like circulating between relationships and just leaving a wrath of drama everywhere I went. And so I was moving once. I moved nine times in one year just trying to escape the chaos that I created everywhere and really trying to escape myself.
(14:46):
I wasn't on the antipsychotics for long because it was obvious that those were worsening my symptoms. But I did continue to take hormonal contraceptives for over 10 years without any education or understanding that that medication and those medications, different forms of them, can worsen PMDD symptoms, although I know they help a lot of people. That wasn't the case for me. Now looking back. And then with my continued attempts, which I'll get to next. So I made it through college somehow, and I was moving around to all these different states. Like I said, I eventually ended up in Wyoming and was trying to rectify a relationship that I had been sabotaging for years, five years on and off, just very traumatizing relationship because of my behavior. But my partner, he decided to move to Wyoming and we were going to give it a go. So I was really scared.
(16:01):
I had come off birth control when I was 24. I was 27 at this time. And so things were better in some ways and worse than others. Again, I didn't have the context. I didn't know what PMDD was. So this whole 17 years that I'm living undiagnosed with PMDD and misdiagnosed with PMDD, I have no framework of understanding of what's going on. So many times I am falling apart, calling my mother. Literally, she's talking me off Ledges, just wait a little longer. You're going to get your period. You're going to get your period. It's going to get better. It didn't matter how many times I went through this, I could not connect the self-awareness that these extreme psychological episodes that I was facing month after month after month were related to my menstrual cycle. I just couldn't put it together. It was like every time it happened, I was so sucked in that I just couldn't do anything but be in it. And yet, my mother had been taking me to gynecologist since the age of 14, trying to figure this out, knowing that it was linked to my menstrual cycle, but I just could not piece it together.
(17:18):
So in 2017, when I'm getting back into this relationship, I say, I go to my gynecologist and I say, I really don't want to mess this up. This has been years of me messing this up. Can you help me? And they put me back on the birth control that I had been on for 10 years. And within three months, I systematically destroyed every good thing in my life. I lost that partner. I lost my housing, I lost my job. I lost my best friend at the time who had been my best friend for about five years. At that time, she was fed up with the drama. She couldn't hold space for it anymore. And this was a real rock bottom point. I felt like I had hit rock bottoms before, but this was a new level because I so intentionally advocated for myself. I was crying in the doctor's office saying, I have really bad PMS, I'm going to ruin this relationship.
(18:22):
And I took something that I thought would help me, and they just kept saying, just stay on this medication. You need to be on it for three to four months. But instead of my symptoms lasting around 14 days, I was now actively symptomatic for the entire month. And those symptoms were things like extreme breast swelling and tenderness, rage, irritability, emotional sensitivity, suicidal ideation, brain fog, headaches, just on and on with the symptom list, the automatic negative thoughts. I mean, it just was relentless. So I was at a breaking point. I felt like if I don't do something, I'm going to lose my life to whatever this is, this whatever I'm doing now, whatever I've been doing for the last 17 years, this is not living, and I cannot and will not continue this way. I drew a line in the sand after that rock bottom moment, and it was, I had two choices.
(19:35):
I end it here or I find another way forward. And every day, I am so grateful that I tried again, because soon after the slow point in 2017, I discovered what PMDD was. It had been added to the DSM in 2013. So why, when I went to my gynecologist and said, I'm experiencing severe PMS symptoms, and they didn't tell me it was PMDD, not that anything would've changed, I still would've been given the same medication most likely, or some form of it that most likely would've had a similar effect. I would've had a name to something because while I was crumbling and my life was falling apart in 2017, I was going to a different psychologist looking for a diagnosis of a personality disorder. I knew something was wrong. I just couldn't figure out what it was. And again, I was not so self-aware to tie it to my menstrual cycle, which is just the most crazy part of this whole story.
(20:43):
But once I found out what PMDD was and I learned, oh, this is a mood disorder, duh. I started to realize I don't know anything about my menstrual cycle. I don't know anything about hormones. So I started my path down the integrative menstrual health route, and luckily this was 2017. So this was a big women's health movement period of time, pun intended. It was really the period revolution. A lot of books and a lot of the OGs in the Women's Health Menstrual Health field even today started their careers and launched their careers during that time. Not started their careers, but became known during that time. So there was more and more information out there. And I started learning about the four phases of my menstrual cycle, and I started understanding what hormones were. And then I started to learn what I could do to improve my hormonal health and my menstrual health. And within three months of trying and introducing integrative menstrual health protocols, I experienced my first symptom free period.
(22:09):
This was in 2018 after 17 years of wanting to die for up to two weeks every month. So this was a beautiful and painful experience because when my period came without warning, I didn't quit my job, I didn't move to a new state. I didn't break up with my partner arch cheat on my partner or do something crazy or legal. My period just came. And that was the day I viscerally remember sitting there thinking, this is how people my age are married and have doctorate degrees and own homes and so on, because their periods just come and their whole lives don't fall apart for two weeks before. Because when you're living with PMDD, it's not just the time that you're symptomatic that is affected. There's a damage and a damage control cycle. The damage is happening when you're symptomatic and then you feel better and you kind of come to literal and figurative disasters in your life. You have to apologize to people. You have to mend relationships, have to clean up your life.
(23:50):
You're not just suffering for two weeks of the month. It is a everyday thing because even when you're feeling good, if you're not in denial, which that's a place that people go, if you're not in denial, you're fearing the next cycle and you're bracing for it. So it's no way to live your life. And I'm not telling you anything you don't know. If you're here at PMD Pep talk, listening to my story, you've experienced some version of this. But in that moment of discovering what a symptom-free cycle felt like, I also knew that this now would be my life's purpose. Because if I could help one person find that relief, find that understanding, not have to continue to suffer like I did for 17 years, and believe that that was it, there was nothing else for me. This was just how my life was going to be.
(25:00):
I was really called to help others like yourself move through this experience in a different way. And while note, there's no cure for PMDD, there are ways to reduce and manage your symptoms. And there are ways to live a fuller, more purposeful and meaningful life despite symptoms. It requires learning. It requires tools and protocols for reducing your symptoms, which we have to dive into the root cause there. It requires symptom management skills. It's not the easy way, but it's the difference between feeling like you can move towards your dreams and your goals, feeling like you can have a life and not so a lot's at stake there. PMDD, it erodes your sense of self. It erodes your self-esteem, your connection to your intuition, your trust in yourself because of the way that you behave when you're symptomatic, you're suffering, you're reacting, you're acting out of the pain that you're going through, and those actions reinforce the beliefs about yourself. And so it's this revolving damage and damage control cycle that you can't get out of. It's very hard to get out of on your own without support, without education because it's this repetitive thing. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy and something that I realized and something that I have compassion for my past self. Now, when I think about, oh, how did I not connect this to my menstrual cycle, right? When our emotions are high, which they are with PM dd, our intelligence is low.
(26:59):
That's what I remind myself. When our emotions are high, our intelligence is low. And that helps me forgive myself. For all of the years of pain and all of the people that I hurt, it's one thing to have suffered myself, but to have to sit with and acknowledge and hold the space for the reality of the pain that I caused others, my parents, my extended family, many friends, many people, many partners, many intimate partners that I love to dearly, that is the hardest part. And that is the thing now in my work, working with thousands of others going through PMDD, that is the motivating factor that tips them into taking this type of approach. We will endure an incredible amount of suffering within ourselves, but when that suffering starts to hurt our children and impact our parenting start to crumble, our marriage and our relationships with our partners starts to get in the way of us being able to achieve our goals or complete our degrees or wherever our purpose is aligned at that time.
(28:30):
That is when people show up at my computer screen ready to take the steps ready to take this approach for true healing. And we're going to talk about, I know healing can be a triggering term, and people have a lot of different feelings about what does healing mean when I say healing. I'm not meaning during BMDD. I'm have, I'm going to do a whole podcast about what healing PM MDD means, but that's not what it means in simple terms. It means getting your life back, reclaiming a day, two days. Many of my clients are reclaiming seven to 10 to 13 days of their lives from severe symptoms. That's the difference that we're talking about here. It's not about never having a hard cycle or never having a bad day again, or reacting instead of responding like we wanted to. It's about improving the quality of your life.
(29:39):
So to finish out my story leading up to where we are today, the 2017 rock bottom became my trampoline. And in 2018, I discovered what PMDD was. I took the integrative menstrual health approach. I experienced my first symptom free. I was changed forever, and I wanted to help others so they didn't have to suffer through what I had just gone through. So initially I started doing peer support with I-A-P-M-D, but I quickly realized that I couldn't have the impact I wanted. So my partner at the time, who's now my husband, spoiler alert, he was encouraging me to share my story to go back to school and get the credentials to do something more than peer support, since I've really recognized I just couldn't have the impact that I wanted there. So I did. I started that process and it started with me getting board certified in health coaching, and I started building out her mood mentor in 2020.
(31:00):
I launched her mood mentor after years already of doing peer support and being on the journey to building her mood mentor. There was so much behind the scenes that needed to happen, including the education. And then I started working one-to-one with clients, and I launched my program PMDD Rehab, which walks you step by step through how to reduce and manage your symptoms. And then I realized I wanted to do more in the nutrition realm. So I became a nutritional therapist, a board certified nutritional therapist, and started integrating that into my work at her mood mentor. And it has been a continue to evolution. It's continuing to evolve today, but I've now been working with A-P-M-D-D community for six years, helping others change their PMDD story and reclaim their lives from these symptoms. So thank you for being here. Thank you for sticking with me through the saga. That was my PMDD and is my PMDD journey. Continue today and I'll see you next time.
