The Wisdom of Anxiety_How Worry and Intrusive Thoughts Are Gifts to Help You Heal by Ma Sheryl Paul

Author:Ma Sheryl Paul [Paul, Ma Sheryl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Self Help, psychology
ISBN: 9781683642503
Google: eMG5uAEACAAJ
Amazon: 1683642503
Goodreads: 40630096
Publisher: Sounds True
Published: 2019-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

Hormones

There is wisdom in hormones just as there is in anxiety, for they are messengers alerting you not only to physical imbalances, but also to areas in the realms of your emotions and soul that need attention. We live with a rampant cultural brainwashing that seeks to denigrate women and invalidate their experience during times of the month and their lives when hormones are particularly loud, most often around their period and during menopause. We have even named the week before a woman’s period as a syndrome and colloquially refer to it as PMS. Any emotions or needs a woman expresses during times of heightened hormones are often invalidated, both by herself and others around her, with the dismissive statement of “It’s just hormones.” There is the corresponding belief that hormones make women crazy and irrational. The truth is that these are times when women are stripped of certain hormones that normally create a buffer, so we’re given an opportunity to see more clearly mindsets and patterns of behavior that aren’t serving us. We aren’t irrational or crazy; we’re simply seeing what has been veiled over the rest of the month or in the decades leading up to menopause. The challenge is to learn to speak our needs clearly and kindly, but the content of what we’re seeing shouldn’t be invalidated by the sweeping statement of “It’s just hormones.”

By the way, if that last paragraph triggered anxiety because your fear-based thoughts are more intense during these times and you’re wondering now if you’re supposed to heed them as truth, call on your loving inner parent to remind you that the anxiety stories aren’t your truth but distress flares pointing to places inside that are off-kilter and need attention. If you take the thoughts at face value, you’ll fall down the rabbit hole of anxiety, but if you see them as louder messengers during these hormonal seasons of your life, you will begin to hear the deeper messages. (More on working with these thoughts in the next chapter.)

There’s no question that a hormonal imbalance can wreak havoc on well-being; hormones can cause anxiety, and anxiety in turn can exacerbate hormones. In other words, sometimes anxiety’s message is that there’s a hormonal imbalance that needs attention, while other times, when you can attend to other aspects of your four realms of self, your hormones rebalance. If you’re seeking to balance your hormones, I encourage you to be careful about how you address them. The medical culture seeks to eradicate the uncomfortable symptoms known as premenstrual syndrome, or PMS, by prescribing medication, usually the birth control pill. What is not addressed is that not only will the pill fail to address the root causes of the hormonal imbalance, but the medication itself can also cause immense anxiety. If the onset or increase of your anxiety correlated to starting the pill, as it has for many of my clients, I encourage you to consider other methods for addressing your hormonal imbalance. The most effective way is working with a skilled naturopath.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.