Menopause Is a Portal: Reclaiming the Body, the Story, and the Second Half with Dr. Hillary McBride

In this episode of unPAUSED, Dr. Mary Claire Haver sits down with Dr. Hillary McBride, a psychologist, researcher, and author whose work focuses on women's lived experience of embodiment across the lifespan, and particularly what happens during the perimenopausal and menopausal transition. She brings a feminist, biopsychosocial lens to the work, looking at the intersection of biology and culture and how the stories we are handed about aging as women can shape what we actually feel, right down to measurable health outcomes.

Dr. McBride opens by naming what the research literature has gotten wrong. Women's voices have been largely absent from the empirical conversation about perimenopause and menopause, and what women are actually saying when asked about their experience is strikingly different from what the medical literature reflects. They are describing not just difficulty but clarity, not just loss but a deepening sense of self, not just symptoms but a portal.

The conversation explores what Dr. McBride's research found when she asked newly postmenopausal women to reflect on the menopause transition: women describing a renewed sense of identity, freedom from roles that no longer fit, liberation from self-objectification, and a feeling that everything before this moment was a dress rehearsal. She also addresses the concept of found freedom, what women are actually freeing themselves from during the aging process, and why the challenge of the transition is not a barrier to growth but often the pathway through it.

Dr. McBride and Dr. Haver dig into the social scripts women have been handed about aging bodies, where they come from, who benefits from them, and how to begin rewriting them. They discuss why women silence themselves around thriving, the phenomenon of fat talk and its role in female social bonding, and what it would look like to build friendships that can hold both struggle and flourishing at the same time.

The episode also covers the connection between anticipating a difficult menopause and actually experiencing more symptoms including anxiety, sleep disturbances, and joint pain, the role of intergenerational connection in navigating the transition, and what it means for women's wellbeing when they are finally given permission to tell the full story of this season of life. Dr. McBride also shares findings from her group therapy research with perimenopausal women, including a medically supervised psychedelic therapy component, which showed that when women process the menopause transition in community, not only do symptoms decrease but their distress about those symptoms decreases as well.

Guest links:

• Hillary L. McBride
  
• Hillary L. McBride (Instagram)
  
• Hillary McBride (Facebook)
  
• Hillary McBride (X)
• Hillary Lianna McBride (ResearchGate)

Books:

• Hillary L. McBride
• “The New Perimenopause,” by Dr. Mary Claire Haver
  
• “The New Menopause,"⁠ by Dr. Mary Claire Haver

Articles:

• Menopause as metamorphosis : the meaning and experience for women of doing well during the menopausal transition (The University of British Colombia)
  
• Rethinking stress: the role of mindsets in determining the stress response (Behavioral Science)
  
• Category-Specific Stress Mindsets: Beliefs about the Debilitating versus Enhancing Effects of Specific Types of Stressors among Young Adults (Behavioral Science)
  
• General and specific stress mindsets: Links with college student health and academic performance (PLOS One)
  
• Antifragility analysis and measurement framework for systems of systems
  
• Fat talk: What girls and their parents say about dieting (Cambridge Press)
  
• New GEM Research: Women 47% More Likely Than Men to Close Business Due to Family or Personal Reasons (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor)
  
• Felt embodiment as a motive in flourishing (Frontiers in Psychology)
  
• Becoming an object: A review of self-objectification in girls (Body Image)

Other Resources:

• Women Have Been Misled About Menopause (The New York Times)