Grief, Rage, and the Rituals of Transition

Hi. This is a short episode about something the book names but doesn't get to walk through slowly: how to grieve the version of yourself you were before perimenopause, what to do with rage that has no specific target, and why your psyche needs a ritual when the world isn't going to offer you one.

I've worked with women in perimenopause for twenty years. I've heard the phrase "I grieve my younger self" literally hundreds of times. Often whispered. Often said out loud for the first time — and almost always with an apologetic look, as if grieving for yourself were somehow inappropriate.

So the first thing I want to say out loud is this: grieving for yourself is not narcissism. It's an adequate reaction of the psyche to an adequate loss. And if no one around you legitimizes that — I'm doing it now. What you're feeling is real. It has a name. And you can work with it.

Now — three things I want to walk through more carefully. Grief. Rage. And rituals. For each one — what I see often in my practice but that rarely gets talked about openly.

One — grief is not linear

In 1969, the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described five stages that dying people move through: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Later, this model was carried over onto people who were grieving losses — and is often drawn as a staircase you walk down step by step.

Kübler-Ross herself explained many times that she never meant it as a staircase. And for grief over loss — not over your own death — the model works even less linearly than for the dying patients she observed.

In perimenopausal grief over the version of yourself that's leaving, this is especially visible. You can write a letter to that earlier you on a Tuesday, do the ritual, cry, feel that something has loosened. And on Saturday wake up, look in the mirror, and find you're back at the very beginning. You don't recognize your face again. You don't believe again that this is you. And you're angry, again, that this is happening.

This isn't a backslide. It doesn't mean the letter didn't work. It means that grief moves in a spiral, not in a straight line.

And something especially important — in that spiral there's often one stage that frightens women more than any other. Anger at your own body. At the fact that it's changing without your permission. At the fact that it's doing things you didn't tell it to do. At the fact that now it's letting you down.

This anger is normal. It's psychologically natural. If you spent forty years negotiating with your body and your body agreed — and then one fine morning it stopped — of course you'll be angry at it. It's like the anger that comes up when something familiar and beloved suddenly changes the rules without asking.

What do you do with this anger at your body? You don't suppress it. You name it and let yourself feel it. Say out loud, or write it down: "I'm angry at my body. I don't understand why it's changing like this. I want it back the way it was." And then — this matters — add a second sentence: "and it's still the body that carries me. It's still here. We're still in this together."

This isn't an affirmation. It's reconciliation work that does roughly the same thing as the letter to the version of you that's leaving — only it's addressed not to identity, but to the body. And by the way, you can do it in parallel with the letter. They work together.

Two — rage and your relationships

Rage in perimenopause is a signal, not a defect of character. And one of the most useful tools to learn to recognize the signal better is a rage journal. Briefly: the same evening rage flares, you write down in two columns — what happened, and what crack is underneath it. The book covers this in more detail in chapter twelve.

But between "I heard my signal" and "the people close to me see all of this too" there's a gap, and a lot of relationships fall into that gap. I want to talk about that gap out loud.

When you have a rage flare in perimenopause — especially if you were a "good girl" for forty years before that — the people close to you get scared. Often more than you do. They don't understand what's happening. It may seem to them that you've suddenly become a different person. That someone has taken over. That they did something wrong.

And here's what matters: your rage is real, and it has a right to exist. But if the people close to you get scared and shut down, you have one less source of support. And you need support right now.

So — a short conversation with the people close to you is worth having. Not an apologetic one, but an explaining one.

It sounds something like this. Not word for word — but in this register:

"I want you to know — I'm going through hormonal changes right now, and they're really affecting how I react. I might flare up where I never would have before. I haven't gone crazy. I haven't stopped loving you. I'm not angry at you as a person. When it happens, I need you to do two things. Don't respond with anger. Let me leave the room. And an hour later, ask me what was going on, so we can talk about it calmly."

You don't have to say it word for word. The main thing — three elements. I haven't gone crazy. This is chemistry. And here's what I need from you when it happens.

And the second thing about rage and relationships. There's rage-as-signal — the one I was just talking about, that flares on a specific trigger and has a specific story underneath it. And there's another kind. Rage that's become a way of not feeling everything else.

It sounds paradoxical, but I see this often. Rage is the easiest of the hard emotions. It fills you with energy, it points outward, it gives you a sense that you're in motion. So when the psyche runs into grief, fear, sadness, or confusion, it can sometimes choose rage — as a way of not sitting with the heavier feelings.

How do you tell the two apart? I distinguish two forms for myself. One I call rage-as-signal — it has a beginning, a peak, and a release. After it, you usually feel tired and a kind of clarity — "oh, so that's what I was angry about."

The second form — I call it rage-as-loop — has no beginning and no end. It runs in the background. You live in it. You're irritated in the morning, and by evening you don't remember what specifically set you off today — because everything did. And when the rage settles, there's no clarity underneath — underneath is an emptiness, or sadness, or fear.

If you recognized the second form — that's a signal to work with a therapist. Not because something is wrong with you. Because rage-as-loop usually covers something that's hard to see on your own. And a therapist here isn't a luxury, it's a tool that speeds the process up by orders of magnitude.

And one more thing — for those who are listening and didn't recognize themselves in the loop, or in anything else, but whose rage is daily, damaging relationships, and frightening to you. Please don't wait. That isn't a transition process anymore, that's a signal that your brain needs more direct help. Hormone therapy, antidepressants, CBT, or a combination — these are tools that work. Chapter nine of the book covers this in detail.

Three — why ritual works

I get asked this often: "does it actually work? Just writing a letter to yourself — and something will change?"

I'll answer — yes. And this isn't magic, this is neurobiology, and I want to walk through it briefly.

In the brain, there are two systems that fire up when you're going through something hard. One is the limbic system, the emotional one. It's responsible for the feelings themselves and for their intensity. The other is the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain we talked about in the chapter. It's responsible for giving the feeling a name, a place, and a frame.

When a hard experience stays unnamed, the limbic system works on its own. The feeling is there, but there's no language or frame for it. So it cycles in loops: it comes back into the body, into dreams, into random triggers. It doesn't leave.

When you write about the experience — especially by hand, especially in detail — you force the prefrontal cortex to engage with the limbic system. The experience stops being just a feeling — it becomes a story. It has a beginning, a middle, an end. Characters. What happened. What I'm feeling. What I'm doing about it.

This is called narrative integration. The original research by James Pennebaker, starting in 1986, showed: students who wrote about traumatic experiences for 20 minutes a day, four days in a row, went to the doctor less often six months later than students who wrote about neutral topics. Over the nearly forty years since, the data has been mixed. The effects on physical health are more convincing than the effects on emotional health. Some studies show mood improvement weeks after a series of writing sessions; others show short-term mood worsening in the first few days. But the literature converges on one thing: an experience that's found a told form stops working as a background stressor.

Not because writing heals trauma. Because an untold experience wears the body down, while a told one lets you move forward.

A letter to the version of you that's leaving is a micro-form of the same process.

Writing isn't for everyone. Some people sit in front of a blank page and just sit. Some start, and after two sentences feel this isn't it. Some are people who never naturally lived in words — for whom writing on paper has always felt like foreign territory. That's normal. If writing doesn't work — there are other forms of ritual. Let me name a few that work for my clients.

A voice note. Not text, but a recording of your own voice. Open your phone's voice recorder, talk for five or seven minutes to that earlier version of yourself. Then delete the recording. Or save it in a folder you don't open. Voice is a different channel for working with the same material, and for many women, it's closer than writing.

A walking conversation. One person in my practice told me she couldn't write — but talking out loud to herself on a walk worked. An hour and a half in the woods — she came out a different person. That's also a ritual. Just without paper.

An object as a bridge. If there's something that belonged to the "earlier" you — a piece of jewelry, an item of clothing, a photograph — you can do a ritual with it. Hold it. Tell it what you're feeling right now. And then either put it somewhere safe, or give it to someone, or place it where it's near you but not on display. An object has memory, and it helps anchor the transition.

A bath or a steam room. Not as a beauty routine, but deliberately as a transition ritual. In many cultures, water is an ancient tool for closing one chapter and starting another. If you can go to a steam room or just spend an hour in a bath with a specific intention — "I'm saying goodbye right now" — that works.

What do all of these forms have in common? Three things. Intention — you know what you're doing and why. Time — set aside, protected from interruption. Completion — an action that marks the end of the ritual. It doesn't dissolve back into ordinary life.

One last thing — what doesn't fit inside a ritual

Sometimes — especially if perimenopause has landed at the same time as other major losses, like losing a parent, or kids leaving for independent lives, or a divorce — grief is too big to be closed by a letter or a ritual.

If you recognized yourself, that's normal, and it doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. It means you need more help than one page of a book can offer. A therapist who understands perimenopause and grief work is a concrete, working tool. Not the last resort — an accelerator.

Below this episode there's a link to a directory of therapists and support groups in your country. And online options, if your city doesn't have anyone suitable.

And here's what I want to say at the end.

What's happening to you is real. There's a name for it. You're not alone. Perimenopause isn't a malfunction. It's a transition with its own rules, its own neurobiology, its own tools. And you can work with it. And — this matters — on the other side, there really is life. I've been working with women in postmenopause for twenty years, and I've seen this many, many times. This isn't marketing. It's observation from practice.

If something in this episode caught you — try the letter. If the letter doesn't come — try a voice note. If you're sitting with rage that has no address — try the rage journal from chapter twelve. If something in this still feels too heavy — find a therapist.

And if at any moment in this episode you caught yourself thinking not "I'm sad" but "I don't want to be alive" — please pause the podcast and call. 988 in the US and Canada. Samaritans 116 123 in the UK. Lifeline 13 11 14 in Australia. 0800 543 354 in New Zealand. Twenty-four hours. Free. The podcast can wait.

And be as kind to yourself as the moment allows. This isn't weakness. This is work very few people are taught to do in advance.

Take care.