I Spoke Up… and My Ovaries Restarted

scottie  0:00  
Scott, welcome to the momplex Podcast. I am your host. Scotty Durrett, my passion and purpose is to help other moms just like me rediscover their joy and step into their confidence as their kids grow up, join me as I share my own experiences, my own mistakes and aha moments as I navigate this incredible journey of motherhood while trying not to lose my identity. If you are a modern day mama who is ready to live for herself, not just for her kids, and knows

Speaker 1  0:34  
that is the best possible gift you could give, then you are in the right place. This is momplex. You okay, moms, I need to tell you something slightly insane that just happened to me. And I swear this episode is going somewhere very, very important, but first I have to tell you a story, because honestly, it shocked the ever living hell out of me. So here's what happened. For almost two years, 24 months, I have not had my period, nothing, nada, gone. I thought I was officially in menopause. Like, cool. We are done here. Tampons. Haven't bought those in forever. I mean, I have mentally moved on into this next phase of womanhood. I've been talking about it on the podcast. I dropped an episode two weeks ago about the 12 sneaky signs of perimenopause. I have been talking about it on the gram. I have taken supplements. I mean, I have a hormone replacement patch on my frickin stomach right now. I have literally stepped across the I'm towing the line of menopause. Okay? And then recently, I had what I can only describe as a full blown come to Jesus conversation with my mom, and when I say I spoke up, I mean, I said everything, 49 years of feelings, the things I have only said in the shower, the things I Have rage yelled into my pillow, the conversations I have had facing my steering wheel while driving right, like the things I have said to her, but I've been looking in the mirror like the things I thought I would never, ever be able to say to her face. Well, I said them all of it, no holding back, no editing. I said it with love. I said it beautifully. I was not charged when I said it, but I said the truth. I said all of it, everything. And let me tell you, if you have ever been The good daughter, the one who keeps the peace, the one who doesn't want to hurt anyone's feelings, you know how hard that is. You have had those same conversations with the in the shower, with the water pouring down when you had literally said everything, like clenching your fists, saying everything to that person that you wish you could say to their face, but you're like, I'll never be able to say this. I'm going to have to take this to you know, beyond this life, I'll never be able to say this to this their face. Well, I said it. You know how hard that is, and I did it, and guess what happened? The very next week, I got my period for a full week. Not like cute little spotting, I mean, full period tampons. Needed multiple changes a day. I literally had to go rummaging through my teenager's bathroom cabinets looking for supplies because I hadn't bought tampons in two freaking years. And I'm sitting here thinking, Wait a second, did my uterus just throw a Freedom party like did my ovaries hear me finally speak up and have this conversation with my mom and go, Oh my gosh, Scotty, thank God we are finally saying the truth. Now, did my ovaries restart when I finally said everything that I've been wanting to say because I swear to you, the timing was almost comical. Now, look, I'm not saying that this is like some magical, spiritual fairy dust moment, but it did make me stop and think about something really important, because the reality is, and I've talked about this tons and tons on this podcast, our bodies and our emotions and our souls, they're not separate systems. They are deeply, deeply connected. And your menstrual cycle. If we're getting sciency for a second, it is absolutely controlled by our hormones and our bodies, right? It's controlled by something. It's controlled by the HPO axis. I'm going to try and not butcher this, the hypothalamic pituitary, OVW. Ovarian access, see if I can get that right. Basically, your brain and your ovaries are constantly communicating with each other. The hypothalamus in your brain so important it's sending signal. It's sending signals that regulate your hormones. Right? The catch is that some part of your brain is extremely sensitive to your stress, your emotional stress, your psychological stress, your long term pressure. We are learning this more and more and more that it's not just about our physical health. There's so much about our body. It's like, how are we living our life? What's going on with our stress, right? Like, what's going on with how we are treating ourselves, the thoughts that are going on in our brains, how we're taking care of ourselves, emotionally and psychologically. It's not just about our physical health. So when we are carrying heavy emotional weight, like decades. I mean, 49 years of complicated feelings with a parent like I was walking around with the body can stay in a kind of chronic stress response. I was living in a chronic stress response, and that can wreak havoc on our physical health, wreak havoc on below the surface. Actually, if you go to my podcast and you scroll down, scroll, scroll, scroll down, I mean all the way I you know what. I'll do this for you. I will actually link these two episodes in the show notes, but I did a series on the stress responses. They There are now five, but I did it on the four stress responses, an episode on fight or flight, and then I did a second episode on freeze or fawn, and I talk about these innate stress responses that our bodies go into. I explain what they are. I talk about what is actually going on inside of our body hormonally. I talk about the amygdala. I talk about the hypothalamus, the hot lalena in our brain. But I also talk about what it's doing to our body, physically, and what it's doing to our body emotionally. Because I know a lot of times when we think about stress, we try and just think about it as a two dimensional thing in our body, like, if I can just put the phone down, then it's gone, or if I can just go for a run, then the stress is gone. Sure, yeah, it's nice to get that out. But do we complete it as a cycle. We have to think about it as almost like a roller coaster, right? Like there's a starting point, there's a peak, but there has to be a completion to it. Right? When I was holding these emotions, these feelings that were I was holding towards my mom, I was at the peak all the time. I was like at the top of the Ferris wheel, but I was never letting them come through and go all the way down and out. I was not completing the cycle. Well, when I finally had the come to Jesus conversation, I completed the cycle. And guess what? I finally turned off that stress response, and then it was like my body could finally function. So I will link those two episodes, because it is such a beautiful understanding when we can really grasp how we have so much power over how our body is working from the inside out. Anyway, I'll link those. It's I'm fascinated by it. I'm fascinated by our beautiful, complicated, incredible body. So, yeah, I had a conversation with my mom, and I'm literally like, did my ovaries restart? You know, because our body, our brain and our ovaries, they're constantly communicating with each other, right? The hypothalamus and our brain is sending signals to regulate our hormones, and that part of our brain, like I said, it's extremely sensitive to our stress, and when we're walking around with chronic stress that I believe a lot of us can become very, very numb to very, very acclimated to very, very comfortable. It becomes our norm. You know, I was living in chronic stress with my relationship with my mom, and it became my normal. And so staying in chronic stress response became my normal, and it really started to impact all sorts of things. It disrupted my ovulation. It obviously suppressed my menstrual cycle. I believe it changed my hormonal patterns, and it sometimes was, I think, affecting my decision making. It was really impacting my sleep, and it was impacting my joy of being around her. When I saw text messages pop up, emails, pop up, phone calls pop up, my nervous system was almost already in fight or flight. It almost went into even like bracing for impact. It was already. Already exhausted, to the point where it almost couldn't even handle being around her. And I was honest with her, she knows this, so I can say all of this in truth.

Speaker 1  10:11  
And when the nervous system finally releases something big and it can finally exhale, the hormonal system can shift too Now again, I'm not going into the lab, so I'm not proving that this is what happened here. This is my own hypothesis, but I will tell you this, something in my body shifted after that conversation, and because emotional release can obviously absolutely change our physiology, I was honestly shocked, and I've noticed a real shift in my physical and emotional state. And when I started thinking about it more, it actually really started to make sense. Because, you know, the bigger truth of it is, I think a lot of us daughters and a lot of us moms listening right here, we carry an enormous emotional load when it comes to our caregivers, our mothers, our parents. I you know, I believe we grow up feeling responsible for their happiness. We grow up trying to keep the peace. We're very good at it. We grow up being the emotional caretaker. We grow up feeling like we owe them, like we have to please them, never disappoint them. Hold it all together. We are the glue. We are the bridge, we are the balance, and sometimes we don't even realize we've taken on that role. In my case, I was the baby of the family, the only daughter, and I got parentified pretty early. No one set out to hurt me. No one sat down and said, Hey, Scotty, this is your job to manage everybody's emotions. But that's the role that I stepped into. And once you step into that role, it becomes really hard to step out of it, and you start to believe things like, you know, gosh, if my parent is upset, I It must be my job to fix it, you know, if my mom's unhappy, I must have done something wrong. And if I say the truth, if I ruffle the feathers, then I might hurt her. You know, if I'm happy, my happiness might make her unhappy. And so you stay quiet, you try to be nice, you try, try to, you know, adjust yourself, to keep the peace, to manage the energy in the house. You don't want to ruffle the feathers, even when you're almost 50 years old, I still felt like such a child, you know. And let me tell you something, this kind of emotional pressure doesn't just live in your thoughts. It lives in your body. Stress shows up physically. It can look like sleep issues, anxiety, digestive problems, exhaustion, hormonal changes, brain fog, tight, shoulders, jaw clenching, waking up at 3am and disconnection, pulling away, not wanting to be with that person, frustration, anger and something I want to talk about just a really quick sidebar with frustration and anger. I think a lot of us are taught early on that frustration and anger and sadness are considered, quote, bad emotions. But they're not actually, they're informative emotions. They're trying to let you know something about yourself that you have learned, that there is a boundary and that there is something that you it's feedback. It's feedback that's teaching you about yourself, if you were, if you are feeling frustrated or angry, that's letting you know that there is an adjustment that you can make so that you can find peace. And so for us to realize that we're feeling something that's there's no failure in that. That's feedback, but unaddressed stress. It'll also affect how you make decisions for yourself and your family. Because when you're living in fight or flight, freeze or fawn, and the new the new one is called flop, when you're living in fight, flight, freeze, fawn or flop, you are actually operating your life from a state of stress, and when you're making decisions from that stress state, you don't actually have full access to your prefrontal cortex, that part of your brain responsible For clear thinking, reasoning and wise decision making. So instead of responding thoughtfully, you're just reacting. And our nervous systems are basically walking around carrying the history of our lives. Your nervous system, it's essentially your body's self protection system. It's constantly scanning every micro moment that you're looking at everything that you're going through. It's scanning for danger. And there's that part of your brain called the amygdala. It's your threat detector, and it's one job is to ask, well, it's one job is to make sure that you're safe. And it's asking constantly, Is this safe? And here's the wild part. It's not evaluating what's happening. Right now, it's evaluating your present through the lens of your past, every experience you've had, every stressful moment, every painful memory, every time you felt scared, rejected, overwhelmed, your brain remembers it, and it uses this history to decide how you move through life today. So your current choices, your reactions, the way you show up in relationships, are often filtered through experiences that happened years or even decades ago. Because none of us, not one of us. I don't care how picture perfect your life has been, not one of us is going to make it through life unscathed, it's it's just impossible, because we're human, and we're living in a human experience, and there's always going to be something that leaves a little mark on us. We've all had hard moments, we've all had stressful moments, moments that have shaped and dinged our nervous systems, and you can think about these moments. You can talk about these moments. You can read about these moments. You can analyze these moments till the cows come home. You can read all the books in the world about these moments, about trying to heal. You can listen to podcasts. You can analyze them. You can intellectualize these moments. You can literally understand these moments perfectly, but the only way to actually heal these moments is to experience a positive, safe counter to these moments, right? Just like Carl Jung said, you have to feel it to heal it. Healing doesn't just happen in our heads, it happens when your body finally experiences something different. And that's what I've just been doing this whole year, feeling a lot of things, because I'm finally ready to heal a lot of things. And that conversation with my mom that was part of it. Yes, I was talking out my feelings, but what I was doing in that moment, I was showing my nervous system that it's safe to say how I feel and that I've got my own back, and that it's safe to take care of myself, that it's safe to put myself first, that it's safe to set put boundaries, that it's safe to walk away from things that I don't have to fix everything. I basically turned in my pink notice for the job of being responsible for my mom's feelings, the job of managing her feelings, for a job I've been doing my whole life, and I did it in a way that was really loving. I said, Mom, I love you, but I'm not responsible for your happiness anymore. I'm not responsible for fixing things. And at the same time I was doing this, I was feeling the pain of a child, but I was feeling that I could take care of myself and that it was safe for me to talk, to speak up for myself, you know. And when I did that, something in my body, literally, I could feel my nervous system exhale, and something in my body went, Oh, wait, we're not carrying that anymore. That's not ours. We can put that down. I actually went for a walk with a really good friend of mine, and it was so interesting, because I think I did this com the one of the main conversations took place at the beginning of March on March 3, and she said that was literally the second Eclipse, and that Eclipse was the day that we were supposed to put down things that we were just not meant to hold on to anymore, just the synchronicity of that. Now, look, we love our parents, and none of us. These conversations are hard. They are hard, you know, and it's it's hard to speak up. You know, it's hard to speak up for ourselves. But I will tell you from experience that you know, loving yourself doesn't mean you don't love your parents. You know, having a hard conversation and taking care of yourself doesn't mean that the love for the other person actually lessens. It's like, if you can, if you have multiple kids,

Speaker 1  19:01  
you when you're worried about that second baby coming, and you think, gosh, I love my first kid so much I worry. Am I going to have enough love in my heart to actually love both kids and the second kid comes around, and you're like, oh my gosh, my heart just actually grew like the Grinches. It grew three sizes. I can't believe it. Not only do I love my first kid even more I have more love in my heart to love my second kid, my heart just grew. That's what's happened to my heart by speaking up and having this conversation with my mom, not only did my heart grow and I have more love for myself, I have more love for her because of how beautifully she received the conversation, and now our relationship has a better chance of being stronger because I spoke up for myself. I was honest about how I feel, and now I can be my authentic self with her than me not telling her the truth. If I was going to lie to her and say I was fine when I wasn't, our relationship would have just. Yes, it would have disintegrated. It was in a house. It was standing on a house of cards. It would have absolutely crumbled because I felt my feelings, and I stood up for myself, and I was honest about how I felt, and I finally faced my truth and spoke up for myself. I'm now speaking from a place of truth. She now knows who I really am, and now we can actually bond from authenticity. So there's a chance that our love could be even greater, and now my heart has actually grown. Look, everybody is doing the best that we can with the tools we have at this moment, but that doesn't mean that we have to keep carrying the roles that don't belong to us anymore, especially as grown women, especially as moms ourselves, especially if we don't want to pass down these roles that don't fit us. We don't want to pass pass these down to our own kids, right? We want to cut that generational gap, right? And here's the thing that I want you to think about today. What are you carrying in your body that doesn't fit you anymore? What do you what are you holding on to that was never actually yours in the first place? Because sometimes the most healing thing you can do for your body, for your heart, for your physical health, for your emotional health is to finally tell the truth, not aggressively, not cruelly, but honestly and with love, because when you stop suppressing the truth, your nervous system finally gets the message that it's safe to let go and you get to be you, and the people in Your life get to finally meet the real you. Now I don't know if my period coming back had anything to do with that conversation. Maybe it did. Maybe it didn't, but what it reminded me of is this, our bodies are always listening, they're always responding, and they're always affected. They're always keeping track of the emotional weight that we carry. And sometimes, when we finally are able to put that weight down, our bodies are able to say thank you. And apparently, in my case, it said it with a freaking tampon. So if this episode resonated with you, please share it with another, mom, woman, friend who could use it and might need to hear it, because I have a feeling I'm not the only one who's been carrying some heavy stuff for a very long time, and maybe today is the day that you start putting some of that stuff down. All right, my friend, I love you and I will see you next week on momplex. Have a wonderful day. Hey, Mama, thank you so much for listening before you dive back into the beautiful chaos of your life, please take this with you. You're doing better than you think. You are not alone, and you do not have to do this on autopilot. If this episode helped you in any way, please share it with a mom who needs to hear it, because we grow faster when we do it together, and if you have a second, leaving a five star review helps momplex reach more mamas who need this kind of real talk and support. If you want more support and guidance or just someone in your corner, be sure to visit scottyderette.com to learn more. Get in touch with me or dive deeper into this work until next time mom Trust yourself, trust your gut, you already know what to do, and you are exactly the mama your kids need. I love you. I'll see you next time you.