Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (27 page)

Two weeks after stopping the pill, Laurie was sitting with a group of women and relating the events of the past two years. She noted, “Suddenly, I was in tears and I could hardly speak. I remember thinking, ‘Now isn’t this strange?’ ” It took her a while to realize that even though she did indeed feel sadness about the changes under way in her life, she had in fact told others about these changes and feelings before, while she was on the pill, without any emotional or physiological reaction whatsoever. She discovered that for her, ovulation was associated with an increased ability to feel and express her deepest emotions. She wrote, “I didn’t realize for two more days that the excessive cervical mucus [a very common sign of ovulation] and the sudden opening of the emotional floodgate were signs of ovulation. Even when I did put it together, I refused to trust my body. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘I’ll just wait two weeks and see.’ Two weeks later, there I was in my red dress—my first spontaneous period in over nine years, never a more welcome sight. I felt as though I had been given a wondrous gift from a long-lost friend. This body, which I had abused for so long and in so many ways, was suddenly talking to me again, giving me encouragement and reassurance. All was not lost.”

In addition to finding that her emotions were now more available to her, Laurie found that she was more in touch with anger that she would have previously denied. She related that shortly after her own periods resumed, “I found my anger. My righteous, fiery, white-hot anger. Of course, my husband was the unwitting recipient of what felt like twenty years of suppressed emotions. I don’t know if he deserved all of it—certainly not all at once. But as it came pouring out, I remember thinking, ‘This is amazing! This is really me. My hormones. My magic!’ I think now that if I had been feeling that anger as it came up all those years, I might still be married—or I would have divorced much sooner. Either way would have been better than what had happened. It was not okay that I had missed so much of myself.”

Laurie knew to honor and pay attention to what was happening to her, even though some of it was painful. She later reflected, “Since then I have learned to expect to hear regularly from my hormones. They teach me where I still need to put my attention. When I am suddenly in tears, I know to pause and consider what emotional work I still have to do in that area. When anger comes, I remind myself that being able to push it down inside myself is not a gift. Anger unexpressed produces disease. It belongs outside my body.”

The other thing that Laurie noticed was the connection between her menstrual cycle and her inherent sexuality. I have heard similar stories from many women. She told me, “There is this wild desire racing around in my brain for several days every month around ovulation. My friends told me about it, but this is amazing. And I thought all those years that the pill was helping my sex life by getting rid of all those messy barrier contraceptives!” (The pill suppresses the midcycle testosterone surge, thus decreasing sex drive in many women.)
²⁹
She had used the diaphragm only while breast-feeding, and she realized she had blamed her lack of sexual desire on the messiness of diaphragm use. But now she understood that her lack of desire was most likely related to breast-feeding hormones and energy drain, not the diaphragm. Many nursing mothers simply are not interested in sexual intercourse, for complex reasons related to lack of support and sleep as well as conventional birth practices that lower oxytocin and endorphin levels. This needn’t be the case. Sexual desire tends to resume gradually as the baby gets older, but this is not inevitable, either.
³⁰
(See
chapter 13
.)

FIGURE 5: THE FEMALE MIND-BODY CONTINUUM: INTERACTIONS BETWEEN THE BRAIN AND THE PELVIS

Laurie noted another change that is very common. After going off the pill, her body tended to make up for lost time, with ovulations coming more frequently for a while, then adjusting to approximately once per month. “When I first reclaimed my cycles,” she wrote, “they were very short, about every three weeks. Although the thought flashed through my head briefly that it would be a pain to be bleeding one week out of every three, I realized that the thought was a conditioned one. How many forty-year-old women had complained to me about the increasing frequency of their periods and begged me to ‘do something’ about it? Now I realized that I had been given a gift of short cycles to ‘catch up.’ I loved getting to cycle more often. I got to ovulate every three weeks. I got more lessons about my body. It was like a crash course in female physiology—my own. I began to celebrate getting my periods every three weeks and hoped that menopause would not come until I was sixty-five. Having given myself permission to enjoy all these new lessons, I once again learned that I was not in control—my cycles began to spread out to three and a half, then four weeks. I think it was just a test, having three-week cycles. It was to see if I really wanted this part of my body back. I do.”

Laurie’s story illustrates what reclaiming our menstrual wisdom and power feels like. Though the pill has been a boon to many women, it has also taken them out of touch with some essential parts of their female wisdom. When people are in close contact with one another, for example, one way they communicate is via pheromones. Oral con traceptives, however, have been shown to eliminate part of our pheromonal communication pathway, including our sexual communication with men. It has now been well established that women secrete pheromones around ovulation that are definitely associated with greater romantic interest from men. The birth control pill blocks these.
³¹
Women who live together often cycle together, in a process one of my friends calls “becoming ovarian sisters.” This doesn’t happen to women on the pill. Studies have shown that women who have close relationships with other people have shorter and more regular cycles, whereas women who isolate themselves are more likely to have irregular cycles.
³²

MENSTRUAL CRAMPS (DYSMENORRHEA)

As many as 60 percent of all women suffer from menstrual cramps. A smaller percentage are unable to function for one or more days each month because of the severity of their pain. The fact that the majority of women in our culture suffer from menstrual cramps is a very clear indication that we have something wrong with our relationship to our bodies. It testifies that we have lost much of our connection to our men strual wisdom. The psychological gynecological literature of the 1950s was filled with studies that suggested that menstrual cramps were mainly psychological, related to being unhappy about being a woman. Caroline Myss says that cramps and PMS are classic indications that a woman is in some kind of conflict with being a woman, with her role in the tribe, and with the tribal expectations of her. Given our current society’s traditional expectations for women, it’s amazing that 100 percent of us don’t have cramps and PMS.

Cramps are not the same as PMS, although women often suffer from both. Dysmenorrhea is divided into two types. Primary dysmenorrhea is cramps that are not secondary to another organic disease in the pelvis. Secondary dysmenorrhea is cramps that are caused by endometriosis or other pelvic disease. Treatments that help primary dys menorrhea usually help secondary dysmenorrhea as well.

I had primary dysmenorrhea in my teens and up until after the birth of my first child. I sometimes had to call my mother from school and leave class because of the pain. Once during my residency I even had to leave a major surgical case because of menstrual cramps. One of my fellow residents said to me, “Gee, Chris,
you
have cramps? Maybe it’s not all in women’s heads!” (Remember, I was “one of the guys” back then and was doing everything in my power to maintain that position. You can imagine what a blow it was to have to leave the operating room because of that dreaded female weakness,
cramps!

) Beginning in the late 1970s, studies showed that women with cramps have high levels of the hormone prostaglandin F2 alpha (PGF2 alpha) in their menstrual blood. When this hormone is released into the bloodstream as the endometrial lining breaks down, the uterus goes into spasm, resulting in cramping pain.
³³
(Menstrual cramps are not in the head after all—they’re in the uterus! Actually, it’s not either/or. What goes on in the head does affect what goes on in the uterus.)

When I first got my period, I was conflicted about growing up in general and growing up as a girl in particular, just as my mother had been. The increased stress of puberty produced high levels of the stress hormones cortisol and norepi nephrine and subsequently of insulin, the hormone that helps the body process glucose. High stress hormone levels, in combination with my diet of too much dairy food and too many refined carbohydrates, resulted in an overproduction of insulin, and the overproduction of the inflammatory chemical PGF2 alpha in the lining of my uterus. Bad cramps were the result! The cramps disappeared for a while after the birth of my first child, but they came back, though much milder and not with every period, when my second daughter was about five. This time of no cramps taught me that when my life was in balance, I didn’t have cramps. When I became too busy or stressed out, producing too much cortisol, norepinephrine, and insulin, my body produced too many in flammatory chemicals and I’d have a few hours of cramps on the first day of my period. They slowed me right down and were a good reminder that I needed to make some adjustments and to tune in to the wisdom of my body.

Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, such as Advil, Nuprin, Anaprox, and Motrin, block the synthesis of prostaglandin F2 alpha when taken just at the onset of periods,
before
the pain starts, or as soon after as possible. Once the endometrial lining begins to shed and prostaglandin F2 alpha (and other inflammatory chemicals) gets released into the bloodstream, it’s much harder to interrupt the resulting uterine spasms that cause the pain.

Birth control pills, which eliminate ovulation and therefore the hormonal changes associated with cramps, work well for many women who are not interested in making lifestyle or dietary changes. Some women, however, get cramps even on oral contraceptives. The newer pills can be safely used by most women over thirty-five, as long as they do not smoke.

Women’s Stories

Ann: Healing Menstrual Cramps by Going Within
Ann, a woman in her mid-twenties, had had a history of cramps, nausea, and vomiting, off and on, since she first got her period at age fourteen. She’d gone for stretches when the symptoms were very mild, and then at other times they would become severe. From time to time, she tried many of the treatments mentioned elsewhere in this chapter, and they helped to one degree or another. But nothing seemed to make a huge difference.

She had always rested during her period, she told me, but that was mostly by default or because her body was forcing her to do so. Then after reading Lara Owen’s
Her Blood Is Gold
(Archive, 2009), Ann decided to try Owen’s suggestion to consciously plan to rest, be still, and go inward during her bleeding time. Here’s what she wrote me about her experience:

The first time I did this, I let nearly everyone with whom I was in regular contact know ahead of time that I might be incommunicado for a day or two, as I was going inward for my moon time. And I didn’t even turn on my computer until about four or five in the afternoon that day, which was absolutely revelatory for me. I felt like I was walking in this magical, powerful energy within my cocoon all day. I wrote in my journal, meditated, listened to music, and rested. That month I had almost no cramping at all, and no nausea whatsoever—this after a couple of months in a row of some of my worst symptoms yet. I thought to myself,
Aha!

I can’t say that I have always succeeded in replicating that powerful cocoon/retreat day that I created for myself that first time after reading Lara’s book. But I had that experience of what it could do for me— physically
and
spiritually and emotionally. And I will always know that, in my body and in mind. So now I am on the path of doing my best to deliberately create that space for myself during my moon time—a space to go inward, to feel my feelings, to be in my creativity, to rest and be still. The difference is that I am doing my best to choose this in partnership with my body, instead of being a victim of my body forcing me to lie down because I’m in such terrible pain that I can’t function.

My period has been telling me to slow down, be still, and listen to my inner voice every month, faithfully and patiently, since I first started menstruating. She is always there, always communicating to me. And the more I listen and take the space I need for my dance with her each month, the better I feel, both physically and otherwise. I have had amazing creative ideas come through me during my moon time. Lots of emotions come through and release, and lots of clarity comes in as well, often during meditation or journaling. I also find my period to be a very grounding time. It’s such a relief when I feel tired the way I do during my period. It’s a soft, cozy kind of tired that I don’t feel the compulsion to resist. My period brings me
into
my body—an invaluable gift.