Speaker 1 (00:20):
PMDD shaped my life for 17 years before I could 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, board 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.
(01:18):
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, 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, hello and welcome back to the PMDD Pep Talk podcast. Before we get started, I wanted to just share that I started this podcast and recording these episodes with such gusto, with such enthusiasm. I cranked out 19 episodes and then in pure neurodivergent fashion, I disappeared for months now, two months I think have gone by and I have not recorded an episode.
(02:37):
I've been just allowing that, working with my energy more. We have been hiring a team finally here at her mood mentor, and as I brought that team in, it gave me some space to collapse into them and rest and do some recovery that much needed. So I really work to walk the walk and walk the talk that I guide my clients through. We work through so much in building compassion, building patience, building understanding and awareness around our patterns and around our thoughts. And I embodied that during this break that we've had from producing episodes. And that feels like a big win because just like my clients and students, I seem to attract women similar to me without perfectionism, that type A, it needs to be this certain way. There's a right and wrong way. I can have a rigidity around that and I'm guiding my clients through letting that go and I'm guiding myself daily through letting that go.
(03:55):
So here I am showing up on a Saturday recording this episode in between client calls because I'm simply feeling inspired by something that came up in an earlier session. I have day three hair, my cat Tink is here with us. If you're watching on YouTube, you'll probably get to see her beautiful face. So we are just removing the standards and the expectations that I hold for myself that none of you are holding for me. And we're going to have this conversation today, and I'm so excited to have this conversation because it also reveals a shift in thinking patterns. And I'm going to start the episode here and getting into our topic with a Shakespeare quote. If you've been around our world for any amount of time, you've probably recognized, I love quotes, I collect client quotes, I share those with you all. I collect quotes in life, things that people say that inspire me when I'm reading through my meditation practice and my mindfulness practice.
(05:11):
I collect quotes. And so if you're looking for a quote, hit me up. I probably have one that will fit your circumstance. And I have one today for this conversation. So the Shakespeare quote that falls into what we're talking about is there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so, and I'm going to walk you through the thinking that I was attached to for 20 years, just in one specific aspect. Well, not really 20 years, I think the negativity bias and the thinking was there, but this is actually a thinking pattern that has been around for seven years as I've been building this practice. And then it does dip its toes back into the many years of undiagnosed and misdiagnosed PMDD symptoms that I was living with. So yes, I take it back. I retract my earlier retracted statement that it's been a really long time that this thinking pattern has been playing some sort of role in my life.
(06:22):
And it has shifted now facilitating healing for others, guiding them through the process of learning to reduce and manage PMDD symptoms and something that I see. And so like I said, this came up and this shift just happened. This is fresh, fresh news, hot off the press. I was speaking with a potential client in our introductory session, and these sessions are there to review their symptom assessment, to uncover underlying drivers that are potentially behind their symptoms and to talk with them about what they've been experiencing, what their goals are, and if our programs are the right fit for them or if we have any other resources or referrals that we can provide to help them on their journey of changing their symptoms, changing the way the symptoms are impacting their lives.
(07:32):
The energy in this particular call was very inspiring. The woman I was speaking to, she has been dealing with these symptoms for two decades, severe hormonal mood symptoms. Of course, many of those years she didn't have a name for it. There was a lot of confusion. Even her mother at one point was taking her to doctor's appointments, just like my story, trying to figure out where all of these episodes emotional episodes were coming from and they still didn't have a name for it. And she's in the postpartum season and she's really struggling to navigate that, maintain a marriage, maintain employment, maintain parenting, a young toddler and a recently born second child and she was sharing some of her why, of why she wants to really on a deeper level. Obviously we all want to reduce our symptoms, we all want to feel better, but layers underneath that and the layers underneath that were around how these symptoms were impacting her family, were impacting her parenting, we're impacting her relationship with her husband and ultimately impacting her marriage.
(09:02):
And it's a pattern that I see over and over and over. And my original thought response to this reality was frustration. I have all these women, we do 200 introductory sessions a year, and I see this pattern. All of these women are coming and looking for support because their symptoms are hurting the people that they love. And that previously, I'm talking years, so I'm seven years into this practice in the seventh year. So for six and a half going on seven years, that reality has frustrated me. There's been an energy behind it where I'm just like, why does it take someone outside of ourselves to motivate us into getting the help and the support that we need? Why are we not enough to do it for ourselves? Why don't we value ourselves enough to say, this is not fun for me. These symptoms are very physically and psychologically painful, and I am enough of a reason to do the work to change it.
(10:37):
I am noticing today in the conversation when this pattern is coming up, I'm having a very different full body response to the woman in front of me telling me the same thing that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of women have told me before. And that response in my body was goosebumps all over a shift from that frustration to, wow, what a beautiful thing that you love someone so much that you care so much about someone else that you are willing to do whatever it takes, including getting on a video call with a strange stranger who's a practitioner on the internet and showing up there with your partner with your husband. Many times when we encourage this, we encourage women to bring their support system to these calls because if they enroll in our programs, their support systems are going to be a part of their success.
(11:54):
It's actually a readiness indicator for us before we invite a client into our program, we feel into what level of support do they have outside of the program because the clients that we see get the best results have support outside of this program. It's not always a husband or a partner or even a family member. Sometimes it's friends, sometimes it's their practitioner network. Sometimes it's a combination of all of those. But it was such a trippy experience to be in the work of facilitating changes in thought for others. And then to have this visceral experience of myself and in my body experiencing a change in my thought pattern in the moment, a thought pattern that I have repeated that I have adhered to, that I have perpetuated for seven years to have a completely new lens to view that through was very trippy. And I see this in other areas.
(13:01):
I've changed thought patterns before, but it hasn't quite been as embodied as it was in this interaction with this particular potential client. And when you change a thought pattern, and oftentimes I think there's a different way to talk about this because I think when we talk about changing thought patterns, there's this front loading like I'm doing all of this work in the moment to change the thought pattern. And we have tools, actually, we have an entire workbook called the Tame Your Inner Critic Workbook. We work through that kind of elbow grease of changing the thought pattern. We have tools for that, and those are valuable and important, and I think absolutely a part of the process in getting to this. But then as you start to reduce and manage your symptoms, as you start to feel safer in your body and your nervous system is more regulated and you learn how to respond rather than react, and there's a softening where that just sort of starts to happen without you muscling it into place.
(14:15):
And that is the juiciest, the most fantastic thing to witness in facilitating healing for the PMDD community and the clients that we're working with. I literally bounce and flail around in my seat here when I'm on a call with a client and they're telling me a story of a thought pattern or a behavior pattern shifting naturally, and they're recognizing it after one where they didn't muscle through it because that is a symbol of how far you've come. It's a symbol of your physiology shifting, and it's a symbol of all of the work that you've been putting in to get there. It doesn't just magically happen these things, it's like a domino starts to tip over and then all these other dominoes unpredictably start to tip over. So you can't predict when it's going to happen, but you can in retrospect see that it's happened. I just got a DM in our client portal today from one of our clients who was explaining this in detail about how she responded to a circumstance differently than she would before, and we're flushing that out with her in there about how that happened, why she think that happened, what was different, how did she feel differently in her body before and after?
(15:34):
And we're having this deep conversation about, in her case, it was more of a behavior shift, but the thoughts lead to the behaviors. So there's always thoughts underneath that. Look at me tangenting here, but I just want to celebrate that win. That was a personal win for me, but it's also a win for all of us because when we start to tip those dominoes over and we start to experience the power, the lived embodiment experience of an upward spiral after only predominantly experiencing the experience of a downward spiral for years, maybe decades, it's something that we want to shine a bright light on. We want to pop the confetti poppers. We really want to highlight that because if we just skip over that and if we just, oh, yeah, it's not really that big of a deal. We are discounting our progress. We are stealing an opportunity for celebration from ourselves, and we're also kind of interrupting the new building of a new neural pathway.
(17:03):
So changing behavior patterns and changing thought patterns, we can use a metaphor. It's kind of like if you have a yard and you want to put in a new pathway. I don't know if you've ever done this before, but I have. If you've gardened and you need to put in a new garden bed, anything like that, you have to break up the sod. You have to get in there and you have to work really hard and you have to use all of your muscles and you have to jump all of your weight on top of the spade shovel and you have to dig deep and you have to get all of that sod layers of just thick grass out all along that path. And then your work is not done yet. You then lay your path. Maybe you're laying stones, maybe you're going to plant a garden in that garden bed, and you have a barrier around it, maybe some wood, same kind of thing.
(18:00):
Once it's in place, you then fight against that grass growing back up over that pathway forever because that grass has always been there and it's a lot easier for that grass to be there than it is for your new pretty laid pathway. So you can think of neuro biological rewiring in the same way. You have so many reps of so many thought repetitions of thinking a certain way. And with PMDD, there's lots of research on negativity bias in PMDD. And so women feel like I am a negative person because I have all of these negative thoughts and negative symptoms. And that's another thing I want to highlight in this thought pattern behavior pattern conversation, because it's a lot easier to have a shoulder injury or even have a physical PMDD symptom. Maybe your breasts are really swollen into nerve. Maybe you're having cramps, maybe you're bloating.
(19:04):
It's a lot different to have a physical symptom and just the way that your mind processes that is like, I have a physical symptom and it's uncomfortable and I don't like it. But you're not going down this path of I am swollen and tender breasts. I am a bloated person. I'm just a person who's bloated. I am acne. In the same way that you adhere your identity to irritability, anger, and rage to negative thinking biases to automatic negative thought patterns, it's different. The psychological symptoms can get integrated into your sense of being a lot deeper for a lot longer before you build the awareness and the understanding and then are equipped with the awareness and understanding to then take action to change it. Then the way the physical symptoms impact us. So when you are changing thought patterns and behavior, I just want to be your hype girl in the corner being like, keep going.
(20:14):
Keep with the repetition and keep with the celebration of any progress and any direction because you're fighting against a lifetime of grass, green grass growing in that spot and you're trying to lay your path to a different place. And to come back to the Shakespeare quote that is starting us out in this episode, there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. And I perpetuated the thought for almost a decade that wanting to heal, wanting to reduce, wanting to better manage severe premenstrual symptoms because they're impacting the people that you love because they're holding you back from your goals, was a frustration, was just something to be irked about because why are we not good enough? And just by experiencing and checking out a different lens to put over a woman, sharing that reality and me viewing it in a different way, me thinking about it in a different way, full body embodiment, full tingling, full goosebumps all over my body, was able for the first time to see that as such a beautiful gift and motivator, and also to heal a little part inside of me and accept that the reason that I did this work and the reason that I ever received a cycle that was symptom free because of the work that I put in was because of how brutally I hurt the people that I love the most.
(22:17):
It was the same story for me. So there was a block in there where all of these women coming to me and telling me that story was, and this is coming to my awareness now, right? I couldn't see this before, but it was triggering something in me that frustrated me that I didn't value myself enough before to do it for myself and to let that be enough, I needed to heal something through that. And I've been doing a lot of deep work. It's part of the reason I've disappeared from Instagram stories from this podcast. I've just had my head down, been working through a new layer of trauma work, been integrating all sorts of new somatic practices, and it's unlocking another level of healing for myself that I'm starting to now see play out in the work that I'm doing with clients. And this is an example of that work playing out of that, another domino tipping over and me experiencing a shift in thought and behavior patterns because of that.
(23:25):
And it's such a gift to see it like that. So I hope when you're thinking about why do you really want to reduce and manage your symptoms, there's this surface level, well, duh, Jess, I want to feel better because this is not fun. It is not fun to have two weeks of irritability, anger, and rage to be bloated, to have breast tenderness and swelling, to have acne, to be so fatigued. I can't get out of bed to be really sensitive to rejection, to be driving isolation patterns because I don't feel like it's safe for me to be around other people, on and on and on. Obviously that's the surface level. You want to feel better, but when you ask yourself why underneath that, what would feeling better do for your quality of life? How would your day to day life be different if you were dealing with these symptoms in a mild to moderate way for three to five days in the pm s category, verse 10 to 14 days, five to seven days of moderate to severe symptoms, what would that really change in your life?
(24:42):
It's hypothetical, we can't really know, but I can tell you what, it's changed in some of my other clients' lives. One of my clients had so much time. She started canning. She started canning applesauce, and she loves canning. She mailed me applesauce. It was delicious. That was the first iteration of her being like, I don't really know what to do now because I have so much time that I was navigating these symptoms before that took up so much space. Now I have time to start learning how to can and can canning things. Another client opened after not being able to work for a very long time over a year because her symptoms were so severe. She opened a yoga studio and is now training yoga teachers and has a yoga studio in Germany, like when she couldn't work before that. Many of our clients go on, they get engaged, they get married.
(25:38):
When that wasn't an option before a client, just recently two clients actually. One is opening up to the adoption process when she didn't feel like she would be able to grow her family because her symptoms were so severe and they're moving through the stages of that. Another client is trying for a baby again, a second child, when she and her husband felt like that was not on the table because of how unmanageable her symptoms are. Another client really had this dream of homeschooling her children. That was something, an experience she wanted for them, and that wasn't going to be accessible to her because of how severe her symptoms were. It didn't feel safe for their family to make that choice. And she sent me a picture a few months ago of her homeschooling her beautiful children. So we can't know what's going to come out of it for you, but I just want to say from the perspective of me holding that belief that you should just do it for yourself, that you know what?
(26:39):
It's okay, and it's actually beautiful. If you have someone in your life that you want to heal for and you want to be the best version of yourself, yes, allow that to motivate you. Whatever it takes to motivate you to become the best version of yourself, to escape the suffering that is PMDD, to whatever degree that you get that escape. Let's allow whatever it is that motivates you, and let's celebrate whatever that is, because ultimately, there's no right or wrong despite my limiting belief there that I've held for a long time. And that rigidity, there is no right or wrong way to get into the healing process or shift into a different layer, a different flavor of healing process that I would say we offer here at Herman Mentor, and keeping in mind that quote that there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so our minds are so powerful.
(27:47):
I don't need to tell you that if you're living with PMDD because you live it every day in the most negative of ways, most likely, but it's really the thinking patterns that drive this. And we did a podcast episode on suicidal ideation around PMDD, the statistics and research tied to that and what I think the main precursors are to that. So if you haven't listened to this episode, it's a good, it plays into what we're talking about here, but the thinking patterns are very powerful. Again, we could do an episode just on the research around the negativity bias and thinking that we find in the research with dysphoria. And just to wrap the episode up here, I love to ramble, but just a reminder that PMDD, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, dysphoric, if you don't know what that is yet, welcome to the party. It is the opposite of euphoria, so it is a complete disdain, distaste, just lack of interest, just nothingness for life, for yourself, for your future, where euphoria is that high, that manic, more like state of everything's great, everything's wonderful, this is all joy and pleasure and two different polarities, but it is called premenstrual dysphoric disorder for a reason.
(29:22):
And along with that, dysphoria comes the negativity bias, the automatic negative thinking. And that is not a part of your personality. That is a symptom of this condition. And you can change it. You can change your story, you can change your thoughts. You can't change how you're perceiving something. And I hope this example of me living through that full body today just gives you more hope for the fact that you can do this yourself and then gives you more awareness and understanding of where to look out for those little shifts happening. That's all for today's V-M-D-D-U PEP Talk. Thanks for being here, and I will see you next time.
