Session 318: Demystifying Menopause, Part I

Published Aug 2, 2023, 7:00 AM

The Therapy for Black Girls Podcast is a weekly conversation with Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed Psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, about all things mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves.

Simply uttering the word “menopause” can result in feelings of dread for anyone born with a pair of ovaries. Hot flashes, sleepless nights, and painful sex are some of the many transitions that we associate with getting older and experiencing menopause. But menopause doesn’t have to be the secretive, painful experience that so many of us were raised to view it as, and today’s guest is one of the many Black women working to erase its stigma.

Omisade Burney-Scott is a seventh-generation Black Southern feminist, storyteller, and social justice advocate. She is also the creator and curator of The Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause. During our conversation, Omisade and I discuss how to navigate the transition into menopause, dealing with feelings of grief as a result of experiencing menopause, and how to start intergenerational conversations around the menopausal experience. 

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Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast, a weekly conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, Doctor Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information or to find a therapist in your area, visit our website at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com. While I hope you love listening to and learning from the podcast, it is not meant to be a substitute for a relationship with a licensed mental health professional. Hey, y'all, thanks so much for joining me for session three eighteen of the Therapy for a Black Girls Podcast. We'll get right into our conversation after a word from our sponsors. Which friend are you? And your sister circle? Are you the wallflower, the peacemaker, the firecracker or the leader? Take the quiz at Sisterhoodhels dot com slash quiz to find out, and then make sure to grab your copy of Sisterhood Heels to find out more about how you can be a better friend and how your circle can do a better job of supporting you. Order yours today at Sisterhoodheels dot com. Simply uttering the word menopause can result in feelings of dread for anyone born with a pair of ovaries. Hot flashes, sleepless nights, and painful sex are some of the many transitions that we associate with getting older and experiencing menopause. But minopause doesn't have to be the secretive, painful experience that so many of us were raised to view it as, and today Guest is one of the many Black women working to erase its stigma. Omi Shade Bernie Scott is a seventh generation Black Southern feminist, storyteller and social justice advocate. She is also the creator and curator of The Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause, a multi media project focused on normalizing menopause and aging through the centering of the stories of Black women, women identified, and gender expansive people. During our conversation, Omishada and I discuss how to navigate the transition into menopause, dealing with feelings of grief as a result of experiencing menopause, and how to start intergenerational conversations around the menopausal experience. If something resonates with you while enjoying our conversation, please share it with us on social media using the hashtag TBG in session, or join us over in the Sister Circle to talk more about the episode. You can join us at community dot Therapy for Black Girls dot com. Here's our conversation. But thank you so much for joining us today on with Shaddy.

Thank you for having me. I'm really glad to be here. You know, I'm a huge fan of you and an extraordinarily huge fan of Therapy for Black Girls. I'm always sharing your information with folks.

Well, we are honored to have you chatting with us today, so we are going to be talking about all things menopause.

Let's do it. Let's do it. You could right, Let's.

Just dive right in. So if you could just get us started with a definition like what is menopause and who is impacted by menopause?

Well, let me start with who is impacted by menopause. If you were born with a uterus and ovaries, you will be impacted by menopause at some point in your natural life. So that's a really important thing for all folks to know. And being born with a uterus and ovaries doesn't necessarily mean that you identify as a woman and so there will be people who are women, people who are trans, people who are gender queer, people who are gender expansive non binary, who will experience menopause because they have uterus and ovaries. What menopause is simply when you have not had a menstrual cycle for one full calendar year, so twelve months, three hundred and sixty five full days consecutively. This hurts people's feelings when I say this, doctor Joy, and I don't want to hurt any of the listener or the watcher's feelings when I say, if you get to day three sixty and your period starts again, you got to start all the way over. So if you get to month eleven, day twenty nine and your period starts, you got to start all the way back over. So it is the ceasing of your menstrual cycle. And it is also the diminishing of your levels of hormones or estrogen and progesterone. So it is a combination of things. And your hormones are always shifting and changing as you grow and age throughout your lifetime. And so even as a postmenopausal person, which I am, I'm postmenopausal now ten years, my hormone levels are still changing and adjusting. And so while I don't experience hot flashes or what people would call vaso motor symptoms which include hot flashes, night sweats, insomnia, brain fog, things like that, I do sometimes have other issues because there are about eighty physical manifestations of menopause and it's on a range. And that's the other thing. I feel like it's really important for folks to understand that menopause is on a spectrum. There are a lot of assumptions about what menopause is, but it really is a physical, cultural, and political experience that we all should be prepared for and should be talking about. And I think culturally it is a liminal experience like any other experience you have, where your identity that you were moving with previously is shifting and changing, which then means that all your relationships are changing, not just you, but all of your relationships with your family and your friends and your colleagues and all of those things. And so it is quite the cultural phenomenon in my opinion.

Thank you for sharing that you know, and I'm aware as you were talking a lot of the symptoms that you're talking about, I don't know that I knew they were connected to menopause or perimenopause, any of that. And I think it just speaks to like the secrecy that it often feels like happens related to menopause. So can you say a little bit about why it exists in such secrecy and how that might contribute to the misinformation we get about menopause.

Well, the first time the terminology of menopause was actually used publicly was around eighteen twenty one by a French physician, and it was not in service to providing better care for women. It was actually in service to reinforce the patriarchal views of the fragility of women and to pathologize our health. If you look globally at the experiences that people were having with menopause, there are rights of passages that most Indigenous communities would have for women or girls as they are navigating different life changes movement from being a child to an adult, for folks who are going to have children, if you're a woman or a birth in person, they would be a rights of passage for that. And there were certainly rights of passages where you were moving into what people would call your chrone phase. Right, but as colonialism and slavery took hold a lot of the ways in which we understand the feminine form. And to be sure, black women, there were all these reasons why our humanity was always brought into question. The feminine form, the form of being a woman is already pathologized. And then you layer into that the growing racism that was happening upon our arrival here in this country, and that we've been navigating and disrupting and fighting and pushing back against. Always returns to, well, they're not really women anyway, they're not really human anyway, they're not really in pain anyway, So what does it even matter? So we live in Western civilization, We live in a society that centers youthfulness, centers whiteness thanness straightness, and so it makes sense that the conversations around our bodies, our gender identities, our sexuality, our reproductive health would be challenging and oftentimes being dictated and directed by people who don't have uteruses and ovaries. So I think that's the why.

So you said a little bit about this kind of like focus in our culture on like youth and youthfulness and all of that stuff. Can you say a little bit more about that and talk about how your work really makes space for black women of older ages to kind of really bee.

There's always been a part of our culture where people have been chasing the fountain of use, and part of that is attached to our relationship with death and dying and the fear of death and dying. I don't think that there has been a lot of conversation or work or understanding around our understanding of death and dying as a society. And I'm speaking specifically about Western culture the United States. Now, certainly inside of the United States, we are not a monolith, and we know that there are a lot of different ways that people understand this journey we have as human beings. But to be sure, like generally speaking, there is a fear of getting older because there is some confusion and sometimes fear around our own mortality. And so when you're talking about getting older, that's one thing. But when it becomes a parent that you're getting older, that's another thing. And I think that what that does is that elicits concern, It elicits confusion if there if a person is not culturally grounded, and inside of that culturally grounding, that can be cultural norms they can be spiritual norms or religious norms that helps them make sense of their own mortality that they believe in or lean on that. It could be a really tricky kind of situation. And then we also live in a capitalistic society, and capitalism is always looking for an opportunity to create the supplied demand. Right, So if the larger question is how do I stave off death, how do I disrupt aging? Anti aging? What do I do to do that, they're happy to oblige. Capitalism is happy to applies you, and it will oblige you with creams and elixirs and all manner of things that you can put in your body or up your butt that will help you feel better. But the fact of the matter is there needs to be a cultural and narrative shift to help people understand that all of them, not one person, is going to get out of this thing alive, and that every step of the way you're going to have different experiences and you deserve to be supported every step of the way. And there should be opportunities to have conversation and to have a deeper understanding for yourself around this journey of your life and what the black Girl's guide really focuses on through a reproductive justice lens is body sovereignty. We're trying to help people interrogate, understand, be curious about how are you at home inside your own body? Right? And how are you at home inside of a body that's aging? Because from the moment you take your first breath to you take your last, your body's aging. And so there are all the markers you're looking at me, and I've got this gray hair, and there are things that I look at physically that we're not there last year, five years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago, right. And so every day I I'm not only making peace with where I am in my life, I'm also committed to finding ways to be at home and loving the body that I'm in as it continues to evolve and change. And that's not the conversation that is being held widely in the media. You know, we're in a kind of a menopause, not only moment, but movement because of Generation X, which is the generation I'm a part of. In two years, we're going to have over a billion people around the world who will be menopausal two years twenty twenty five. I have not seen anything from the un the who or NIH. There's not been any larger multidisciplinary conversation around menopause and aging. It tends to be compartmentalized to either folks who are physicians, obgins, researchers. And then you now have the onslot of semtech companies, lifestyle companies that are offering all manner of products, which is fine, and also these virtual communities that tend to be for white, CIS, hetero affluent women, and so people who already exist at the margins are being pushed further to the margins. And that's why The Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause is so critical, because we center folk at the margins, and we are intentional about doing culture and narrative shift work through storytelling. And we're also clear that any policy work that's going to happen, any advocacy work that's going to happen, has to be humanized and it has to be inclusive. And so we want to be a part of those conversations. And we have over four years of qualitative data from all the storytelling that we've been doing that we can offer as information data reality.

So can you share a little bit about your own transition into menopause. What were the first signs that you knew you were even entering menopause.

I actually began my journey with menopause probably in my late thirties. In retrospect, it wasn't obvious to me I did have these kind of shifts and changes in my minstral cycle. Where I started my period October thirty first, nineteen seventy nine. In my period had been pretty much right as rain except for the time that I was pregnant and I had my first time when I was twenty five. I was pregnant again at forty and that's when the language of menopause was introduced to me because I had a pregnancy loss. I had a miscarriage, and so my obg y N said to me, this is not uncommon for periodmenopausal people to have a pregnancy loss because you're born with your full complement of eggs, right, So all the eggs you will ever have, you're born with, which actually is really cool because that means that you've never not existed because all the eggs that your mother ever had you were there, your grandmother were there, So we've always been there in some way, shape or form, which I think is beautiful, but the egg's also age, and so I tease, I say, I have a twenty five year old egg and my thirty one year old son, and I have a forty one year old egg and I seem to be fifteen year old son. But I wasn't clear at all about the whole Perry piece, like that was completely new to me. I was like, wait, there's a pregame. What are you talking about. And then after I had the miscarriage, I got pregnant again at forty one and I have my youngest son. And then maybe two years three years after that, that's when I actually started having hot flashes. And I had hot flashes for probably about a year, maybe eighteen months, and then I had my last period in twenty thirteen. And so everybody's experience is really, really, really individualized. I cannot express that enough. There's so much about who you are are that will dictate your menopause experience, So like who you are physically, your family of origin, who you are culturally, where you live, how you are navigating in the world. In terms of the things that we might experience because of racism or patriarchy, massaging, like all of those things play a direct role in how you are going to experience menopause, and so there's not a one size fits all and it's definitely not cookie cutter.

More from our conversation after the break, so you talked about the experience of menopause being at thisliminal space right, like when we are transitioning from one identity to another. Can you say a little bit about what that transition has been like for you, Like, have there been any experiences of grief or loss or other things and how have you navigated that.

My relationship with grief is really dynamic. There are times is where I feel like it's soft but present, melancholic but do and then there are times where it kind of takes me by surprise, and I want to be more mindful and thoughtful about those times where it feels like grief is sitting on my chest and just like smothering me, and so I just let it be what it's going to be. And the most important thing for me around my relationship with grief is being honest about when I'm grieving. And I think it's very healthy to be able to not see grief as something that you get to tie with a nice neat bow. And be done with it and it's good, like it's a one and done, because it's not. And I think that for this menopause journey, there is a really interesting dynamic and way in which grief and rage show up. We have a really good conversation with sister Jennifer Mullen from Decolonizing Therapy and she said that grief and rage are siblings, and I had never heard that before, and I was like, that makes sense to me, because I think as Black people, we have not always been afforded the ability to be emotionally present to all of our emotions. Certain ones, yes, and so we mask. And so sometimes the way we mask grief is by rage or being detached or whatever. And I was like, oh, this makes a lot of sense. And so if you've not been supported as a person with your own agency with your body, or maybe you have, and you just for the first time are encountering I realize my body is changing. I'm going through a really intense time and a different type of grief is showing up for you. That's illegible, right, Like, it's not the grief you felt when a parent transitioned or a partner or a friend. You are in a transformation that might bring up grief for you in a way that doesn't make sense. So here's an example. We interview this really beautiful young person named Austin. Austin is genderqueer, transmasculine person who had gender affirming surgery when they were I think twenty eight, and they had complications from the surgery. They had a full hysterectomy and they had complications, and they also went immediately into menopause, so there were two things going on at the same time. And they also were feeling these really deep feelings of grief and they were trying to make sense of it. It was their therapist that helped them realize, you know, you're menopausal, right, And Austin was like, no, no one said anything to me about the fact that once I had this shysterrected me, I would be menopausal immediately. And two, they had this really beautiful conversation about disenfranchised grief and how as a black Southern trans masculine person, what they were also experiencing was disenfranchised grief, Like, how dare you grieve this transition you are going through? This is something want it wasn't it? So how dare you. It's like when you get that amazing job and then you get on the job and my progressions are choking you out every day and people being like, you better go to work and shut your mouth. That's a good job. You able to pay your bills and you could pay your mortgage. What you angry about. So I can't grieve. I cannot grieve how I'm being treated with my experience is. And so liminality is a really fascinating anthropological phenomenon that happens inside of our cultures where you find yourself coming to the end of a journey of a period of your life where you had a particular role, a particular function, particular relationships, some level of power or maybe not, and then you move into this liminal space. It's just like that in between this that can be really really disconcerting, that in between space. It's like walking in a cricket room. It's like sometimes you can't make out where you're going, and so you need journey mats. You need people who walk with you. You need people who can say stand up, like the rumors crooked, you're not it's okay, Like take my hand, or here's a lantern, here's a light, I'll walk with you, so people who've journeyed the path before you, people who are coming behind you. I think that's part of the work that we are very committed to as well, is that we want to illuminate the path so when people find themselves in that liminal space, they're not reaching around in the dark, trying to find their way and just feeling really disoriented.

I love that. I feel like you're painting such a beautiful picture. And one of the things I love about what you said today and the work that you're doing is a real focus on intergenerational conversations and like, how do we pass these messages on. I wonder if you can share something that you heard or learned about mental pause when you were younger that you have since learned was not correct.

I don't know if I heard or learned something that wasn't correct, but I was very observed. I don't know about you, but I grew up both in Maryland and North Carolina, and my mama did not have sisters. She had chosen SYS, so my aunties were her best girlfriends, and my sister and I were proficient at ear hustling. This is the seventies. We had a skill set. And when my mom's best girlfriends would come into town, they were like in their mid to late forties, early fifties. You could ear hustle, which I know now. The frequency of their conversation were these menopausal conversations. And I would see, like my aunt Emma, which was my dad's sister, she would have this like ubiquitous washcloth on her shoulder, so when she would have a hot flash, she would take the washcloth off her shoulder and pat her face. And I always thought she was being very dramatic. I was like, it coundnot possibly be that bad. And she also was a bit tyrannical about the thermostat. If you wanted to get in trouble, go ahead and stop playing around touching people's thermostats. She's not allowed, not allowed. And it moved from being frigid cold to being hell hot when she got older. It was really interesting. I was like, twenty years ago, you were freezing us out. Now I'm about to melt in your house. But it was this very interesting observation. And because my mom transitioned when I was a young woman and a young mom, I didn't get to have a lot of the conversations that I think we would have had. My mom was a registered nurse and she was not a boomer. My mother was born in nineteen thirty and I definitely feel confident that a lot of the ways that she talked to us about our bodies, if she were using the language we use now, it would be like consent. My mom was just like, look, that's your body. Nobody can touch your body without your permission, not even me or Daddy. And we were like, okay. And I know now that that would be that consent conversation that we're having with young people. And so I felt prepared for my first cycle. And there was actually really sweet ritual that happened with my first cycle. My Auntie's sent me a package of seven day a week panties. Do you remember these? Underway? There were these cotton on granny panty cotton panties came all the way up to your sternum, and then they had the days of the week written on them, and there were all these really pretty pastel colors like blue and pink and lilac, and two girdles sanitary napkins. A sanitary are like a strap because back then you get pennant. They had just started using ahesive, so you could pin it. There was like kind of sort of new ahesive, or you could wear a belt. They sent me this whole package, and we don't get packages when you're going into menopause. It's almost like you're being outed if you say it's to someone, I'm going through menopause. There are all of these projections and assumptions that people will make about you. And if you're not sharing that you're going through menopause, there are all these projections and assumptions that people might make about you.

You unlocked the memory for me because now I did come from a family with a lot of women. My mom actually has six sisters, and so these conversations. I'm also a very proficient ear hustler, because you gotta be got it right to got to be listening around the corners. And I now remember my mom having all these conversations about chaleurs. So you know, I'm from Louisiana, so I imagine that this is some like interpretation of some French word that means cold, but it was for hot flashes right now, So she would talk about like these chaleurs that she was experiencing and I didn't know until later like what that meant, but that it was a hot flash that she was talking about.

That makes so much sense, and also so much of your menopause experience if it happens chronologically what happened with other life changes. I realized that when I started my period, my mother was either periodmenopause or menopausal. My parents were going through a divorce, and so there are just different things that happen in this time period of people's lives that is mid life, that now in retrospect, I can look back on and recognize. And I do think that if my mom were alive, we would be having like all kinds of conversations of a wine around, like, oh my goodness, I get it now. And I do remember my mother saying to me when I went out to college, keep living, daughter, keep living right, and as you keep living, you look back on those things you're like, gosh, I get it now, Oh my goodness, I understand better, and I have so much more compassion. And I still have a very beautiful, deep relationship with her and my aunties who are all ancestors now as well. And so I do believe that the work that we are doing in twenty twenty three that we started in twenty nineteen is healing for them too. I think that there's a really beautiful, energetic way that the conversations we're having and the way that we are pushing through some of these taboos and stereotypes has the ability to time been and heal them too. That's my hope, at least.

I love that from our conversation after the break. So, what advice would you give to people who want to maybe start some of these intergenerational conversations with their elders or you know, even with the younger people in their life without making people feel uncomfortable.

So we start conversations with the individual and giving them space to just talk about themselves, how they're feeling inside of their bodies, how they feel about their bodies, their relationship, are understanding to pleasure their relationship, or understanding of grief their relationship, or understanding of creativity, how they've changed over time. One of our favorite questions we asked in this first iteration that we were doing conversations in twenty nineteen was like, how different are you from ten years ago? It doesn't matter if you were twenty eight, forty eight or seventy eight in the group, everybody could think back. It's like, gosh, where was I ten years ago? And that's a very easy on ramp to a conversation, right, and you just keep that conversation going. You just keep grounding that conversation again, like we also do activities where we give people an opportunity they want to write a letter to their future self and not in the where do you want to be in five years? But what are some things that you want to speak over your future self? How do you want to give your future self some love or a letter to the ancestor that you will be. How do you want people to remember you? What kind of legacy do you want to leave for yourself, your family and your community. And so when you start at a very personal level, you learn all these different storytelling tools that help people connect with each other. But I think that the easiest thing for a person to do is just to start over some really good food, you know, whether that's a pot of pinto beans or some collars or a sandwich or some croakers. Like if you fry some fish, we're gonna have a good conversation. I can tell you that right now. And you just asked me, like, what were you like when you were sixteen? That's a really really good place to start and just start the conversation and invite everybody to be a part of the conversation. I also partnered with a business called Kendra last year and we released a deck called Seymour. The deck has one hundred discussion cards and they're broken up into elements and we talk about identity, grief, mental health, sexuality, intimacy, play, pleasure, creativity, menopause, aging. It's almost like a mashup of a oracle deck meets a tarot deck meets a game deck, and you shuffle the cards and you can use them for conversation. One of my friends, Brittany, was doing it with her grandmother and her granddaddy was earhustling the conversation and that's how she found out that her grandparent are having quite the lovely sexual relationship in their seventies. She texted me she was like, why are my grandparents getting it in? And I said, wait, what, how did the same or deck take them there? She said, I wasn't even talking to my granddaddy. I was talking to my grandma and my auntie, and he chimed in. He said, what y'all talking about? He said, oh, yeah, we have an amazing sex a lot and she said, I feel like I didn't need to know that, but I'm glad I do. And then it opened up actually a conversation with the whole family. So it started off with her grandmother and her aunt that her husband chimed in, and next thing you know, there's this inner generational conversation happening with both men and women inside a black family in the South. That's perfect, That's exactly what you want, right.

I love that. That sounds like a great way to kick off the next fish fry.

Yeah.

Yeah, So tell us more about the incredible work that you do as a part of the Black Girl's Guidesving Menopause. What kinds of offerings and resources are available through the organization?

Sure sure, sure, sure. So we have a podcast and we are in year five of the podcast, Season five of the podcast, and we also host these intergenerational conversations. Twenty nineteen, we did them in person and then like everybody else in the world, we move them virtual. In twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. Last year, we were able to host our first in person gathering since twenty nineteen, and we were about to hit the road. So without telling tales out of school, we are about to take it back to our roots and host some intergenerational conversations diasporically. So I actually am leaving for the UK next week and we'll be having conversations with black women who are doing menopause advocacy and black wellness work. And we will host our first intergenerational conversation in the UK in the first week in April, and then we're also going to take it to New York and we'll be in Toronto and in Puerto Rico. And then right around the time we all got the news that George Floyd had been murdered, I was trying to figure out what kind of offering we could make as a platform, and that's how our zine was born. And the zine is called Messages from the Menopausal Multiverse. It's an annual zine and it's very creative, artistic zine. It's not a zine about menopause. It's about the wisdom that comes from the menopausal multiverse that we can offer to Black folk. So the first year it really was just almost like a love letter to Black people. That was we know how to keep each other safe. You should rest, you should take care of yourself, trust yourself, be good to yourself, love each other, protect each other. And so we just went back into the podcast and excavated narratives and quotes from the podcast and then we refashioned them into this kind of afrofuture extring theory zine and offered it to the community. And then in twenty twenty one, we wanted to focus on mothering and our understanding of mothering and how mothering is not bound by age or gender or even being alive, and how much we mother each other and you don't have to physically give birth to a child to mother people. And then last year we decided to focus on folklore, and we wanted to give the narrative of four folkloric tales back to the women who were the central characters of these folkloric tales. So we pulled a folkloric tale from Senegal, went from Kenya, one Meso American, and one Slavic tale, and we basically made it like if you were telling your story, you would say, now, I know you all have heard this story about me, but let me tell you who I really am. So we took the narrative back from the narrator and gave it back to the woman and we offered that last year. We are not going to do the zine this year, and our podcast is going to look different this year because what we're going to be offering actually will be the audio diary of all of our trips, so people will get to hear the voices from folk in the UK and what's happening there, what's happening in New York, what's happening in Canada, and what's happening in Puerto Rico. And that's how we will use the audio platform that we've done. And then the last thing is we are very intentional of trying to figure out how we do advocacy work. I've done reproductive justice advocacy work for about fifteen years, and prior to launching The Black Girl's Guide as a part of a creative sabbatical, I had no intention of actually launching a project. I just wanted to do something while I was on sabbatical that would be meaningful for me. And because I love storytelling and I always feel like storytelling has a healing quality to it, I wanted to document the conversations I was having and then maybe trying to find a way to offer it back to the community. And then this thing became something else and had a life of its own, and I'm grateful for that. But there's just been this really interesting way in which people who are doing menopause work. There's a disconnect inside of the reproductive justice landscape. So there's been so much amazing work done around making sure folk have access to reproductive healthcare and abortion access and contraception and sex education and sex positivity. And it's almost like when you get to perimenopause, you fall off the cliff, as if bodily autonomy, agency and body sovereignty stops when you become a menopausal person, and it absolutely does now. So I'm being intentional about partnership and helping with some policy work to try to like expand that. And there's right now some federal legislation where they're working on some potential menopause legislation and we're hoping to be able to be involved in that as well, so we'll see what happens with that.

So many exciting things coming down the pipeline, so let us know where can we stay connected to all the incredible work that you have. What is your website as well as any social media channels you'd like to share.

Absolutely, you can find us at ww dot Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause. You can follow us on Instagram at Black Girl's Guide to Menopause, or you can follow me at Onmi Shah Dave, Bernie Scott. The podcast you can listen to it on Apple, Spotify, whatever platform that you like to listen to it. We have a really beautiful intergenerational team of black women as well, so what you see externally being offered to community also is reflected of who our team is and we range in age from thirty to fifty seven and it's just I love being able to work with this group of people who keep me honest and keep me safe beautiful.

Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

You're welcome. You're so welcome. I'm glad to be here. Y'all. Keep doing the work you do is so vitally important, and mental health is a critical part of the menopause journey as well, where people need to know that whatever they're experiencing is real and that they have support and That's why I always will point folk in your directions. So thank you for the platform that you have for us.

I'm so glad Amishade was able to share her exercise with us for this episode. To learn more about her and her work, visit the show notes at Therapy for Blackgirls dot Com slash Session three eighteen and don't forget to text two of your girls right now and encourage them to check out the episode. If you're looking for a therapist in your area, check out our therapist directory at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com slash directory. And if you want to continue digging into this topic or just be in community with other sisters, come on over and join us in the Sister Circle. It's our cozy corner of the Internet designed just for black women. You can join us at community dot Therapy for Blackgirls dot com. This episode was produced by Frida Lucas, Elise Ellis, and Zaria Taylor. Editing was done by Dennison Bradford. Thank y'all so much for joining me again this week. Look forward to continuing this conversation with you all real soon. Take good care. Which friend are you and your Sister Circle? Are you the Wallflower? The peacemaker, the firecracker, or the leader. Take the quiz at Sisterhoodheels dot com slash quiz to find out and then make sure to grab your copy of Sisterhood Heels to find out more about how you can be a better friend and how your circle can do a better job of supporting you. Order yours today at sisterhoodheels dot com.

Therapy for Black Girls

The Therapy for Black Girls podcast is a weekly conversation with Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a license 
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