Menopause Didn’t Make Me Crazy. It Exposed What I Was Already Carrying. Solo Episode with Lisa Lacy

Notes from the Edge

Lisa Lacey shares her raw, personal journey through surgical menopause, revealing how it exposed decades of trauma, emotional suppression, and

Key takeaways

• Menopause didn't cause Lisa's emotional turmoil—it exposed what she had been carrying for decades through trauma, hypervigilance, and performance-based survival strategies.
• Emotional volatility during menopause is not necessarily pathology; it can be a signal of underlying unresolved trauma or physiological change.

Main topics

• Menopause as a catalyst for trauma exposure
• Emotional volatility and mental health in midlife women

Notable quotes

Menopause didn't make me crazy. It exposed what I was already carrying.

I could perform competence at an extraordinarily high level and then go home and emotionally unravel.

Conclusion

Lisa Lacey concludes that menopause may be the moment when performance becomes too expensive—when the body

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:03) Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have been having all along. We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir, Notes from a Certified Madwoman. Welcome to the Edge. Menopause didn't make me crazy. It exposed what I was already carrying. Speaker 1 (0:40) This episode includes discussions of depression, suicidal ideation, trauma, addiction, medical trauma, and mental health diagnoses. This is my lived experience. This is not medical advice. There is a particular kind of terror that comes with waking up one day and realizing you do not recognize yourself. Not your body, your emotions, the way your brain works. Speaker 1 (1:13) The way you react to people you love, the way you sleep and think. You don't even recognize the sound of your own thoughts. And when you are a woman in midlife, there is a pretty decent chance somebody will look at all that and say, well, you're just going through menopause. Just. I would like to have a conversation about the word just. Speaker 1 (1:47) Because menopause does not feel like just anything to me. It feels like somebody walked into the control room of my brain, flipped half the breakers off, turned the fire alarm on, and then handed me a pamphlet about hot flashes. And here's the part we do not talk about enough. Menopause did make me crazy. Speaker 1 (2:19) It exposed everything I had spent a lifetime learning how to carry. The trauma, hypervigilance, attachment wounds, addiction, grief, rage, fear, the need to perform and achieve, the desire to control enough variables around me that I could convince myself I was finally safe. And when my hormones changed, A whole lot of the machinery I had unknowingly been using to keep that system operational changed with them. Suddenly, survival strategies that had worked for decades stopped working, and I didn't know what the hell was happening. Welcome to Notes from the Edge. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey. And today we're talking about menopause, trauma, mental health, and what happens when a body that has survived decades of shit suddenly loses some of the scaffolding that had helped hold it all together. And yes, that is a scientific terminology, decades of shit. Write that down. Now, I've been called crazy before. Speaker 1 (3:50) The reason this subject matter so deeply to me is because menopause was not the first time I had been afraid of my own mind. I have lived under a lot of labels. A lot of disordered. Borderline personality disorder. Bipolar disorder. Anxiety, depression. Alcohol use disorder. Codependency. Trauma bonding. Complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Speaker 1 (4:25) And for years, those diagnoses became part of the story I told myself about who I was. Something was definitely wrong with me. I was defective and disordered. Too much. Unstable. Difficult. Broken. Psychotic. Needing to be controlled. But meanwhile... How I could run a business or businesses. I could lead people. I spent almost three decades in corporate education. And I built a company that served more than thousands of facilities. I could walk into a boardroom and handle stuff most people would have needed three Xanaxes and a hostage negotiator to get through. Speaker 1 (5:22) I could perform competence at an extraordinarily high level and then go home and emotionally unravel. You see, that contradiction confuses people. We think dysfunction always looks dysfunctional. We think traumatized people are incapable and depressed people cannot be productive. Speaker 1 (5:54) So somebody who is running a company, raising families, I did raise a few, achieving things, speaking intelligently, and taking care of everybody else, well, she must be okay. No. Some of us become extraordinarily competent because being competent is how we survive. My nervous system learned a long time ago. When I was very, very young, my violation story started at four years old. Stay alert. Read the room. Know what everybody is feeling. Anticipate danger. Fix the problem. Perform. Achieve. Don't need too much. But don't stop moving long enough to feel anything that's underneath all of that. Speaker 1 (7:01) That can look an awful lot like success until the machinery starts breaking down. Then came surgical menopause. A few years ago, I had a hysterectomy and unexpectedly my ovaries were removed too. Speaker 1 (7:22) I was still fairly young. That distinction matters. Because I didn't gradually stroll into menopause, my body got thrown through a door and it felt like a glass door. One day, my ovaries were producing hormones. Then the next day, they weren't. And suddenly, I was living in a body whose chemistry had fundamentally changed top to bottom. Speaker 1 (7:50) I want all of us to understand how profound that can be. Because what followed wasn't simply, oh, look, I'm hot today. Speaker 1 (8:05) I experienced painful neuropathy that felt like electrical shocks that were closely related to what it feels like to have my pulmonary embolisms that are a side effect of my congenital blood disease. I experienced joint pain, insomnia, fatigue, a lot of weight gain very quickly, loss of