I’ve been listening to the stories of women’s lives with migraine for years now
Sometimes the little details stand out to me – details that are seemingly not so related to the woman’s migraines, but are actually SO VERY RELATED. Usually there is a key indicator for me that an issue in a woman’s life is contributing to her migraines because I will hear a tremor in her voice.
The tremor is sometimes communicated with a feeling of shame or anger, or of hesitation in revealing the detail that causes it. The tremor is a vulnerable place and a place of tension, regret, or of not measuring up. Sometimes it reveals unresolved violence or trauma. It’s a place that – despite the procedures put in place to make that issue go away – a sadness exists that very much keeps the emotion of stress embedded in the body and revealed through the voice.
Clues to women’s stress patterns
I’d like to share some of the tremors. In doing so I hope it’s clear I’m not criticizing the sentiments of vulnerability or emotion expressed by my clients. But I do think the emotions listed below are clues. Many of the points below are highlighted here because they’ve been expressed by multiple clients.
- Her voice quivered as she shared her regret at getting liposuction.
- During the intake, her voice cracked while mentioning not performing well enough in sales for the large defense contractor to get her yearly bonus.
- Her voice was hushed and muted as she shared that repeated sexual abuse was part of her childhood experience.
- She shared her anger at the medical profession for how they manipulated the birth process in her vulnerable state.
- Her voice was hardened when speaking of how hormonal birth control interventions in her life led to her hormonal imbalances.
- She eventually revealed that she was afraid of doing near infrared sauna therapy because of the silicon implant in her chin.
- She laughed with an angry resentment that her primary care doctor just wanted to prescribe more pain meds.
- She explained to me that no, getting better sleep was not possible due to having small children who still woke during the night.
- She marveled that her migraines seemed to go away when she travelled and was on vacation, but immediately returned when she returned to her life.
Recurring themes of stress in women’s lives with migraine
I share this list because I want to reveal that there are recurrent themes of stress in women’s lives that DIRECTLY play a role in their migraine pattern – and leave them feeling sad, angry, overwhelmed, or regretful. The incidences above are representative of what I am starting to see as key patterns that many women with migraine share:
- Heightened sense of pressure and need to perform, conform, or produce expected results
- An intense need to improve physical appearance through surgery or other means
- Trauma and unresolved emotions from medical surgeries and interventions, including from hormonal birth control
- Feeling of mistrust with some medical professionals
- Feeling overwhelmed by the demands of motherhood and the limitations it can place on the woman’s ability to heal
- In some cases, unresolved trauma from childhood
I realize that most women in our culture (especially those who are mothers) experience stress and tension in the areas listed above. But for some women, it seems that there’s a level of sensitivity and heightened performance anxiety that leads them to becoming more prone to migraine in the face of them. So we need to observe the patterns of tension in women’s lives and how these patterns, left to reinforce themselves, lead more women than men to get migraine.
It goes like this: once a woman’s body has experienced a threshold in the amount of surgeries, medications, hormonal birth control, and stress, she will more easily be prone to migraine. If her migraines are then not adequately addressed by medical professionals, she will fall deeper into a pattern of depletion and chronic migraine. As she does so, the stress of dealing with the original pressures alongside her migraines will throw her into a dysregulated state that, due to her compromised health, makes it even harder to perform at the level she was having a hard time performing at to begin with.
Because most women become mothers, and most migraineurs are women, we need to ask ourselves what role motherhood is playing in many women’s migraine patterns.
In a recent Medicine Stories podcast, midwife Rachelle Garcia Seliga states that:
We cannot talk about collective health, planetary health, or the health of future generations, without talking about the health of mothers. The dysfunction and disharmony within our human environments is manifesting through the vulnerable bodies of postpartum women. In fact it is through the bodies of mothers that humanity is being alerted to the urgency of our collective need for change.
Getting back to Nourishment with a big “N”
As I go further down the road of coaching and research and into my own healing journey, I see that what really keeps my interest in studying migraine is this overarching question of what truly serves as nourishment for women – but I mean Nourishment with a big “N”.
Since so many women suffer from migraine, and I’m a woman who experienced chronic migraine first-hand for a decade, for me the topic of migraine is interesting because it constantly prompts me to explore how womanhood, physical health, selfhood, and nourishment relate – and what happens to a woman’s spirit, body, and mind when she is not nourished in spirit, body, and mind.
When looked at this way, healing migraine is a journey of coming into alignment with our inner authenticity as we shed the programming and beliefs that cause us stress by pressuring us to be what we are not, or to handle a role (like motherhood) in a setting we did not evolve in (ie, devoid of village).
While nutritional balancing can go a long way to help quell the inflammation in the body and support a woman’s physiology to handle stress better, it’s time we recognized that women’s health and ability to heal migraine comes from addressing many of the cultural factors, environmental inputs (from makeup to hair dye to pharmaceuticals and birth control), and internal belief systems driving women to be so hard on themselves and to end up sick despite their best efforts to keep their fertility under control, stay beautiful, and be on top of everything.
I’ve written about some of these societal, structural, and cultural influences that challenge women to heal from migraine here and here and here.
Since society is not going to change over night, we need concrete stress reduction practices that go beyond reminding women they need to stop stressing so much. We need these stress reduction practices to be tailored to helping women to repattern the internal beliefs that are driving them to be so hard on themselves. Without this holistic approach, overcoming migraine is more difficult, because purely physical and nutritional approaches ignore many of women’s causes of overwhelm.
I’m currently creating coursework with an amazing collaborator on this exact topic. Stay tuned!
