Towards Healing and Wholeness. The Menstrual Cycle: Self Regulation and Self Support for Women by Kate Merrick
Chapter 9 in Michael Clemmens - Embodied Relational Gestalt: Theory and Applications. 2020.
Around the time I began training to become a therapist, I also came off the pill. Exactly three days after stopping, I noticed a dramatic shift in my mood and sensory perception. My hearing was suddenly crystal clear and my vision much sharper. I had put my previous fogginess and flat energy down to some ongoing depressive fug but in that moment, it became apparent to me that it was actually the pill that had been dampening my vitality, my energy, and my life force.
This was the catalyst that then sharply drew my attention to my menstrual cycle and I became immersed in a journey of deep healing, of returning home to my body, to myself - as a woman, with a natural cyclical nature, one that I had denied and been taught to hate for so many years
And alongside this deep transformation, I became curious about how the menstrual cycle had never once been mentioned in my personal therapy; in my therapy training or in any of the literature I was studying. And how the menstrual cycle is rarely even considered by therapists when working with female clients, because they simply don’t know much about it. What a loss! And so, in 2014, I wrote a detailed article for a therapy journal, outlining the different phases of a woman’s menstrual cycle and how we might work with it in therapy to support our female clients to become more embodied - supporting them to work with their cyclical rhythm rather than against it. It was harshly critiqued at the time and I was given many points to reconsider and revise. I decided not to revise a thing and it served as a clear reminder as to where we are culturally in relation to women’s blood mysteries. Soon after, I was kindly invited to submit it as an article by the writer and Gestaltist, Michael Craig Clemmens, for his book, “Embodied Relational Gestalt” which has just been published, all these years later.
Thankfully, awareness around Societies pejorative and patriarchal narratives of menstruation has grown and women are getting wise to their natural rhythms and the inherent cyclical wisdom they embody. Goddess willing, this will begin to filter into our therapy rooms too.