Empowering Women and Relationships Through Menstrual Mental Health Awareness - Samantha Crocker

Samantha Crocker, a pioneering menstrual mental health specialist, joins us to shed light on a subject too often shrouded in misunderstanding and stigma. Sharing her own journey, Samantha unravels the complex web of hormonal changes that affect mental health, identity, and relationships. Together, we confront the societal tendencies to dismiss these experiences as trivial PMS jokes. Our conversation reveals the critical need for both cultural and medical systems to acknowledge these challenges, advocating for open dialogues that empower women and foster empathy across different cultures.

We delve into how a lack of awareness surrounding menstrual mental health can lead to feelings of being misunderstood, impacting personal and interpersonal dynamics significantly. Through personal anecdotes and insights from focused group discussions, we explore the emotional rollercoaster of the luteal phase, which can manifest as insecurities or fears. The episode envisions a future where increased understanding of these cycles improves mental well-being and enhances relationships. By educating everyone about the dynamics of menstrual mental health, we aim to transform how people perceive and interact, empowering them to manage their well-being with greater compassion and awareness.

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Chapters

• 0:11 Menstrual Mental Health Stigma Discussion
• 10:08 Exploring Menstrual Mental Health Dynamics
• 23:46 Enhancing Menstrual Mental Health Awareness

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:11

Hey everyone, welcome back to Pleasure Principles, the podcast where we dive deep into the art and science of what brings us joy, fulfillment and a deeper understanding of ourselves. Joy, fulfillment and a deeper understanding of ourselves. I'm your host, avik, and here to explore the uncharted territories of human experience with curiosity, candor and wonder. Today we are tackling a topic that is often misunderstood, dismissed or you can say even stigmatized, but it's a connoisseur of women's mental and emotional health Menstrual mental health. Yes, you heard it correct Menstrual mental health. And I couldn't ask for a better guide than my extraordinary guest, samantha Crocker. Welcome to the show, samantha.

Speaker 2: 1:03

Hi, thank you so much for welcoming me. Thank you, I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 1:08

Lovely, lovely. Thank you so much for joining us today and taking your time from your busy schedule. So, before we start our conversation, I'd quickly love to introduce you to all of our listeners. Dear listeners, samantha is a menstrual mental health specialist, a trailblazer who's transforming how we think about the mind-body connection and the intricacies of the female cycle. So she is not only on a mission to empower women but also, at the same time, to educate the medical community, bridging the gaps that live so many, feeling isolated and misunderstood. So, samantha, it's really an honor to have you here today and thank you so much for joining the show.

Speaker 2: 1:58

Oh my gosh. Thank you so much. This is one of those topics, like you said, that doesn't necessarily garner a lot of attention. So anybody who believes in what I have to say and allows me to talk about it more, I have the utmost respect for. So thank you so much.

Speaker 1: 2:12

Lovely, lovely and dear listeners, let's dive in and let's buckle up, because this episode promises to be as enlightening as it is empowering, because let's uncover the hidden truths about menstrual mental health and how it influences the identity, relationships and pleasure itself. So, samantha, like uh, how do you define the menstrual mental health and and why do you think that it's still such a taboo topic in many circles?

Speaker 2: 2:50

Well, I'm sure, as you know, you and I are from completely different cultures, so as you go around the entire world, the stigma changes depending on where you are and what the culture has been around it. Right Now, for me I'm from the United States the culture around menstrual mental health is mostly a joke, right, there's tons of PMS jokes and making fun of women and how we feel at that time, and that we're just unagreeable, right, and that's pretty much a joke. And beyond that, it is just let go that poor guys who have to deal with women at this particular part of their cycle Right, and we just can't wait for the women to get finished with that. True, and so I just, I just remember for me, thinking, okay, there's way more to it than that, and that was years ago, that was before I even knew more about it, right?

Speaker 2: 3:48

So once you go into other cultures, you have the stigma of whether it is something that you even can talk about, right, whether it is something that is brought up and, depending on the culture, whether it is something that is completely hushed about or something that is talked about. And then, if it is talked about, completely hushed about or something that is talked about. And then, if it is talked about, how is it talked about? Right, and so that's where I really think to myself okay, we have stigma that varies around the world, and so how do you break through that, right? And so that's what I'm learning right now is how do I break through that and how do I make this more of an open topic, which again is why I just thank you so much for having me on the show with the ability to possibly gain some attention, to understanding how much more is than just a stigma or a joke.

Speaker 1: 4:42

I'm really happy that, and like experts like you, you are trying to break this stigma and create this awareness. I'm really happy I'm also doing the same thing, like it's very important to create the awareness. So also, like I mean, what do you think that needs to change in our culture or the medical systems to break the stigma?

Speaker 2: 5:06

When it comes to the medical system, it almost goes back to sharing a little bit of my story. Do you mind if I do that?

Speaker 1: 5:13

Sure please.

Speaker 2: 5:14

Okay, awesome, thank you so much. When I was younger I lived kind of a wild life and I noticed that, you know, at certain times, looking back now, I can see where, as a teenager right, I became for lack of better wording, maybe unruly. Life gets chaotic and for most people maybe you start getting older, you go to school, you have jobs, you have this and you have that and you just feel so overwhelmed. Sometimes Then you move into possibly having a family, and obviously this is not the case for everybody. But I just noticed that as I got older and I had my child, I started feeling as though I was watching a train go down the track that I just couldn't stop going faster and faster and faster and derailing. And this would have been coinciding with the time that everybody jokes about, that PMS. But at the time I didn't even know that because I wasn't fully in understanding of what was going on. Right, even though PMS is a joke and sometimes we're aware of it, I wasn't aware of how much it was affecting me and I would watch the train fall off the track and I would watch myself sabotage my relationship with my spouse at the time or my child at the time. We could sabotage our relationship with our jobs. Our jobs. We don't fully understand what we're feeling, why we're feeling it, and things that can happen because of our own reactions and actions can be pretty severe that we end up spending other time trying to make up for it and never really feeling okay.

Speaker 2: 6:58

So this time I took it to this is many years ago I took it to my gynecologist and I said I think that I don't fully understand myself, Like I think I'm having some more severe reactions to PMS than I should. And she said oh my gosh, honey, you want to know what we all get like. That it's just a girl thing. Please feel free to take your. She asked if I had a spouse. I said yes.

Speaker 2: 7:22

She said take his credit card, go shopping for a couple of days when you feel your worst and you'll be fine. Just distract yourself from those thoughts. And I thought, geez, that can't be the answer, right, I can't just go. So it wasn't very much longer. After that I went to a therapist and I said, hey, I think like I'm feeling these things. And again it was oh well, you know, maybe we just need to talk about your childhood. And she did this big thing and it was like no, no, that's not, that's not feeling right. I went back to the OBGYN and I said I really think that this is an issue that a credit card is not going to fix.

Speaker 2: 8:02

I just just feel so out of whack and I feel like nobody's hearing me. And so she said well, you know what, sam, I can prescribe you some Prozac and you take this Prozac five days out of the month when you're feeling your most crazy, and that'll be it, and then you don't have to take it the rest of the time. And I brought the Prozac home and I put it in my drawer and essentially what they're saying is we're unhinged in an uneducated or uneducationable way a few days out of this month and our solution is to shop or take pills, Right? And I said have you ever dealt with women's issues? Because at this point now I started digging into it myself. And she said oh no, I said so. You prescribe women with depression medication, anxiety medication, bipolar medication and BPD medication, and you do this without ever asking a female how she feels about her cycle or how she understands her cycle. And she said yeah. And I said okay, have you ever heard of pmdd, which is women who are experiencing symptoms of extreme pmf? And she said no. I thought, my goodness, like there's an entire community out here that's doing this. Um, and I went to another therapist who said she was diagnosed with PMDD.

Speaker 2: 9:32

She did have an extreme form of PMS and I said, okay, so you've been in practice for 20 years. What do you do with your clients about it? And she said, well, I've never actually brought it up even once to my clients, because we're taught not to. I said so you have something that changes who you are. You believe that it changes who you are at different times of the month, and yet you've never brought it up even once, even though you know it to be true for yourself, to any client you've ever had. And she said, no. And that's when I decided, okay, that's enough of this. Like this is just absolute crazy.

Speaker 2: 10:08

And I kind of took matters into my own hands and I started my own focus group and I brought a whole bunch of women in and I interviewed them and I discussed things with them and we charted and I compiled data and I was just like, oh my gosh, I came out with these Securities that are just you couldn't ignore them. And that's when I realized I needed to start changing the industry, like the industry just needs to change. I went and asked for help and wasn't able to get it. And the amount of women who do the same thing and feel unheard and they just don't understand, and the amount of women that end up self-harming or committing suicide because they don't understand themselves and they don't understand the depth, how they can feel at these times.

Speaker 2: 10:56

You believe what you feel, right. So that's where I just need to step in and I need to start changing the dynamic around feeling like we are needing five days of medicine because we're crazy, when the truth is we're not crazy. We have different thoughts and feelings and this and that, and we have to start embracing some of them. So that's kind of where it goes into why I want to change the industry and how I got about, just not from just helping women on a personal level, but really wanting to change it at that professional level.

Speaker 1: 11:40

Wow, you know, it's really, really fascinating and I'd say, infuriating, like something so integral to half the population that is brushed aside. So, listeners, think about it. How often have you felt dismissed for something that's deeply real for you? So, and how do you feel menstrual mental health ties into our broader relationship with the pleasure, whether it's emotional or it's sexual, or maybe even intellectual pressure.

Speaker 2: 12:26

Absolutely intellectual pressure, absolutely. So when we talk about the fact that it's a cycle right yeah, we understand that normally in a cycle, one thing leads to the next, and one thing leads to the next, and one thing leads to the next. And when we're talking about the female cycle, the only part of the female cycle that gets talked about, if it is talked about at all, is what we call the luteal phase. The luteal phase is typically rebranded as PMS, right, pre menstrual syndrome, because it's premenstrual. It comes right before you're going to get your period, right. So from the time of ovulation until the time that you actually menstruate, you're in the luteal phase. The luteal phase is a deep feeling phase, right? So the things that we feel during that phase are going to come out really deeply. The things that we think about during that phase come from our conscious and subconscious, things that we have been carrying almost since birth, and so there are things that can come up for us that we then manifest into current thoughts, emotions and actions. So, for example, during that phase, if, by chance, as a child, we felt as though we can't trust our closest people, maybe during our luteal phase as an adult, it's going to consistently come out to our spouses, husbands or people that are really close to us, where we're consistently.

Speaker 2: 14:00

I've had a lot of clients. They're always worried Am I pretty enough? Is my husband going to cheat on me? Is this going to happen? And if you're consistently acting on those things in luteal phase, right, you're consistently changing who you are because your fears are coming out and you're feeling all that emotion. And so now you're asking your spouse are you cheating on me? Am I good enough in this and that? Right, that's going to spill over. That doesn't stay in luteal phase with him, right? So, if you're creating arguments, if you are, whatever and I'm using the spouse thing as an example but it's all of the emotional things, right, that come up during that time that make us really deeply think, really deeply feel and really deeply worry. Well, that spills out and it spills out to an entire relationship. Three. Well, that spills out and it spills out to an entire relationship. It spills out to our children. Let's say we've asked our child to be friendly or to clean the room or whatever it is. Well, during luteal phase, maybe, instead of just realizing a child doesn't always listen, right, during that phase we're thinking of it like I can't do anything right, my children aren't listening to me. What is wrong with me that I can't parent properly? I thought I was doing a good job.

Speaker 2: 15:15

And so it manifests differently inside of a woman as she's going through this phase and maybe it comes out as this PMS joke, but the truth is is inside it's all of our worries, fears and insecurities. And when you take that and you think about who somebody is as a person, it's going to come out for each person differently. So if said person has slightly more aggressive tendencies, might it come out? You know people call women, you know names during that time, you know what I mean. And they'll be like oh my God, why are you being such a B or whatever? And they'll be like oh my God, why are you being such a B or whatever? Because when you are frustrated, upset, worried and scared, those feelings come out differently. And so if it's manifesting as anger, or if it's manifesting as worry, or if it's manifesting as sadness, right, or internal hate or external hate that is a mix of everything, right. That's all going to be dependent on the person, their coping strategies, what they've learned as they grew up, and do they even understand where this is coming from and can they identify it right? So if you're learning about menstrual mental health and you know that that's the way that our brain is interpreting things at the moment, rather than just be angry at the child and starting a huge fight over whether the child cleaned the room or not, you can actually talk to yourself like, hey, how can I actually just make this about cleaning the room rather than everything else that might be going through. The reason I'm freaking out right now and that changes the dynamic.

Speaker 2: 16:50

Well now, if you didn't get in that fight whether the room gets cleaned or not, right is almost a byproduct of did I allow my extreme feel phase? Take those thoughts, emotions and actions and turn them into a huge thing where I just got in a huge argument, maybe I argued with my child. Maybe then I argued with my husband who said whoa, you're being a little bit too much right now, and I don't want to hear that I'm too much because I'm angry, right, and as soon as you tell me too much, you're invalidating my anger. Now this whole thing has turned into a snowball that you can't get out of. So just because maybe you get your period and you're not in luteal phase anymore.

Speaker 2: 17:39

You've still gotten in that fight, you've still created strife in the relationship. You've still done all these things, and it's not because what you were feeling was completely invalid. It's because you don't fully understand the depth of who we are in luteal phase and why these things come out the way they do. So eventually, might you get to a point where you're feeling no pleasure, right? Might you get to a point where you've created so many arguments and you feel so unheard because now, not only did your child not clean the room, but your husband backed up your child. Do you think you're feeling heard? No, eventually this leads to arguments within the household, divorce, all of those things. Is that pleasurable? Yeah, it's not. Do you want to be with people who are not hearing you? No, exactly, it's just such a deeper thing. And the cyclical part is you get out of that phase and you get into your follicular phase, which is what you get as soon as you start menstruating.

Speaker 2: 18:43

When you're in your follicular phase, it's more of a do. Sometimes you release all of those deep feelings and it's more of a do right, and get this energy inside of us to even I mean and so on, a good part of follicular energy that could make us start businesses or start working out or doing things or wondering about the world. But let's just pretend we're not in a good follicular because we're not in a good luteal and we're so angry at our kid and we're so angry at our spouse that as soon as we move into that do we're like you know, what I'm going to do is get a divorce. What I'm going to do is pull from these feelings that I was having and now that I have the energy to do them, I'm going to throw everything out of my son-drome. It's all going on the lawn right and this cyclical negativity ends up following us throughout the entire cycle. There's so many more nuances to it than that yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2: 19:45

I mean, it's so deep that, once you really realize follicular is your do, luteal is your feel, ovulation is your cloud nine. There's just so many nuances to it, though, that it's hard to break it down in one area. But that's just one example of how we can cyclically be sabotaging our entire life. And what would happen if we had the education to say, okay, listen, during follicular you're going to pick up some habits and you're going to want to do. We have to make sure that those do's aren't based on any negativity that we felt in luteal. Let's actually examine what we really want to do and is it good for us over the long run. So let's save our energy for those do's that we get in follicular to do the things that are good for us, that are good for our family, that are good for business, that are good for our bodies. Let's take that and make pleasure choices Right. Yeah, really interesting, but it's also easy to sabotage if you don't know what you're doing and you could just take it all the wrong way exactly lovely.

Speaker 1: 20:56

So. So one more thing is coming to my mind is like what, according to you, uh, maybe one uh myth about the menstrual mental health that you wish you could debunk forever? What's that?

Speaker 2: 21:12

okay, well, this is going to be a serious one, okay, um, for those people that actually do talk a little bit about menstrual mental health, for those people that actually do understand a little bit about it, like I said, most of them understand it from a point of luteal. Now there's a large percent of women who commit suicide when they're in luteal phase because it's a heavy do, it's a feel sorry, it's a heavy feel phase. But what they don't talk about is what I was just talking about the cyclical nature of things. Follicular and you aren't feeling like you have any do's, and not for nothing, let's say that you're maybe in an abusive relationship, or you just don't know where to go with your life, or you just don't understand what you want to do. Follicular is a do phase.

Speaker 2: 22:05

So if you don't know what to do with any of your do's, it can be just as bad feeling as luteal. It can make you just pace. It can make you feel like you have no purpose. Inal. It can make you just pace. It can make you feel like you have no purpose in life. It can make you absolutely hate everything. It can make you question every single thing when you get to ovulatory phase, which everybody has a myth that it's the best part because it's your most like, it's when you feel pretty, it's when you want to have sex, it's when, like, even the mailman looks good to you. You know what I mean.

Speaker 2: 22:33

Like it's like, oh, because we've released these hormones to make us want to do that, so that anatomically, we can reproduce, right, but what if you're somebody who has had sexual assault? Or what if you're somebody who is really uncomfortable, feeling sexy? Right, you actually have these hormones that are coming out to make you feel peaceful and sexy. But if that really is uncomfortable for you, if that brings about shame, if that brings about these feelings that are just unattainable, well, how is that going to make you feel during this thing? That's supposed to be cloud nine and that's what happens when women get put on bipolar medication and BPD medication and things like that, because the medical community will say it's not cyclical, this is only supposed to happen Like, she's only supposed to feel like this during her PMS if it's from the cycle. But it's not like that, because you could feel like this from the cycle at all the different parts of the cycle, depending on what you're struggling with.

Speaker 2: 23:46

So do most people commit suicide or do these things during luteal? Yes, but the feeling of the feel and the anxieties and the worries and the this and the that, can they happen at any time or come from those other times? Absolutely, we can ruin our pleasure or we can build our pleasure by understanding the menstrual mental health, working with ourselves, understanding that sometimes the habits that we build when we're infallicular, we're going to lose a little bit of them in luteal. It's okay, right? How do we just become more accepting of the different parts of us if we don't know what they are, if we don't understand them? We're constantly at battle.

Speaker 1: 24:28

Exactly, and I mean I, I think we are all, uh, guilty of internalizing some myths. Time to shed those old narratives. So, yeah, definitely. And also, um, I mean, how do you see this education shaping the next generation's relationship with their bodies and the minds?

Speaker 2: 24:57

So, what do you think? I mean, could you imagine a world where, even as, even as a man, you are discussing something with your woman, right, but you even know more about the cycle, so you know if you're discussing something that she is responding emotionally to? You could be like, oh my God, I know where she is in her cycle. I don't have to take this so personally, and maybe I can remind her to reflect on that, right. What if, as a woman, walked in to a therapist's office or a counselor's office, and even if she didn't know about this, the first question would be hey, do you know about your cycle and have you tracked it to see how you respond to stimuli differently during different parts of your cycle.

Speaker 2: 25:41

Can we walk through this and not give you a diagnosis at all and move towards saying, okay, let's take six months, let's learn and let's try to understand where you're coming from before we say that you have bipolar or BPD or something? That is just going to not be right and you're not going to feel good. Anyway, we're going to give you this medicine. You're going to feel like crap. So, going into the future, I feel like just doing some of this stuff, knowing, hey, listen, during my follicular, it's my build, it's my go, it's my do. What do I want to build? What do I want to go, what do I want to do? And allowing so, in luteal we don't have as many do's.

Speaker 2: 26:25

So what's really important to me and how can I take these strong emotions and use them for good? Right, because now when I'm on my luteal, knowing how I know about things, I do things that give me emotions on purpose, but the kind of emotions I want. I will stare at my dog and tell him I love him in 4,000 million ways. Pleasure to these in my life Whereas before I would look at my dog and I would say have I done good enough? Am I a good enough dog mom Right, it took me on a standing my fears, to remind myself not to go down the rabbit hole of those fears. Do I love my dog? Yes, well then, use that emotion today, not the fear.

Speaker 1: 27:09

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 27:09

Right. So it can just literally change based on what we know and what our spouses know and our children. Changing the dynamic of that maybe it can help women not commit suicide so much. Maybe it can help women understand themselves, not feel so lost, not feel like they have nobody to turn to because counselors and everybody else will understand. It just changes the world into just a better knowledge of. I mean just, for example, with the room cleaning.

Speaker 2: 27:46

When you're in follicular, as a woman, your executive functioning is naturally higher, based on the hormones that you're producing. It produces hormones that make your brain work quicker, mouth talk quicker. Your actions go from I thought this to I did it faster. So right, it's really cool the way that it all works. And then so let's say, during that time, your child, you wanted him to clean his room and you say I need you to go clean your room. It's that simple because it's a direct order, because you're in your follicular, do, right, if the child decides not to do it in follicular, you're much more minded to be like no, you're doing it, let's just go, come on, it's not a discussion, right, because you're very clear. Now get into ovulation and literally be like ovulation. Is that cloud nine feeling.

Speaker 2: 28:34

Sometimes your son might come out and say I have cleaned my room every day this week. Mom, you just asked me to do it again, can we just not? And you're in ovulation and you'd be like you know what. Okay, that's good, let's just have ice cream today. You're right, we've been working really hard. Let's look back and reflect on how good we've done.

Speaker 2: 28:51

Yeah, now the next day you get into luteal phase and you tell your son, oh hey, buddy, you need to clean your room. And he says, mom, seriously, like I just told you yesterday, I've been cleaning it all day. Now luteal, you interpret it differently and you say you know what? I never should have? Let you have ice cream yesterday. Now you're going to undermine me every single time I ask you to do something.

Speaker 2: 29:11

I let it slip once, I just wanted to have a good day and now you're ruining it and letting me know I can never have a good day again because you're going to use it against me. Right Actions to each of the exact same stimuli, based on how we're interpreting it, where we are in our cycle. So just learning that in general would let you know to look at where you're coming from. And, like I said in the beginning, make it maybe not necessarily about the room clean and ask yourself where am I coming from right now? How can I work on this differently? Does this have to matter to me in order to make me feel like I'm not listened to? Because I guarantee you, every mom feels you think differently.

Speaker 1: 30:01

To bring more pleasure, right, not have so much strife and worry exactly so, listeners, can you imagine a world where this knowledge is the norm, not the exception, right?

Speaker 2: 30:16

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 30:18

So let's dream big together, why not? Yeah, exactly so, samantha, I can't thank you enough for sharing your insights and passion today. It really, really means a lot, and this conversation has been a kind of revelation, I'd say. So, listeners, let's take this energy forward. I mean, start a conversation, track your cycle or educate yourself and the others who you know, who you love the most. Educate them, yeah, because here's the truth. Yeah, yeah, you're saying something.

Speaker 2: 30:54

Yeah, do it beyond pms, track beyond pms exactly so.

Speaker 1: 31:01

The truth is like understanding, uh, menstrual mental health isn't just about, uh, the cycles, but it's all about the empowerment cycles of empowerment, growth, connection. Uh, yeah, and then and that's a pleasure principle worth living by what do you say to the listeners? Do let me know in the comment section and in the social media or on the podcast platforms. I would love to know your thoughts. Please do share and until next time, this is your host, avik, reminding you to seek joy, impress the knowledge and always, always, honor what makes you uniquely. You so stay curious, stay kind, and I'll see you back here soon. Thank you so much, thank you.