Unburied
Perimenopause can bring buried trauma flooding back, even the trauma you were sure you'd healed. Here's why, and what it's for.
Before we begin: I'm holding a free live gathering, Wild Knowing: The Hidden Initiation of Midlife, on July 8 at 12pm PT on Zoom. The first session, Primal Awakening, maps peri/menopause as a rite of passage, not a thing to Google at 3am with an ice pack on your neck. [Save your seat here →]
I have spent my whole life trying to get out from under my mother’s illness.
She was so ill, for so long, that she could not raise me. I grew up under the long shadow of it, in a house that held the void of her presence as well as sickness, carrying a terror I had no words for. It is the terror of a kid who learns very early that the person she loves most is suffering, and might be taken at any moment, and that there is nothing, nothing at all, she can do about it.
I tried to outrun it. Of course I did. That is what you do. But the running did not work. It never does. By my twenties I was having panic attacks, the kind that fold you in half in the supermarket and convince you that you are dying by the tinned tomatoes. I cracked, more than once.
So I did the only other thing I could think of. If I could not outrun the terror, I would turn around and walk straight at it, and make it my life’s work.
I trained as a therapist. I made trauma my whole study, in the early days, when we were only just beginning to understand that you did not have to have come back from a war to be carrying one. I dived as far as the understanding went, and then further. I sat with the abandonment, the mother too ill to hold me. I sat with the emotional neglect and rage of that house. I worked it, and worked it, and a great deal of it I genuinely healed.
I had, as they say, done the work. I had built an entire life out of doing the work.
So you can imagine my position, in my mid-forties, when perimenopause arrived and my own body began, for the first time in years, to let me down. And something came up the stairs in the dark and sat down on the end of my bed.
The terror.
Not a memory of it. The thing itself, live, as though no time had passed. My heart going like a trapped bird. My whole nervous system standing to attention at three in the morning, certain that something was terribly, irreversibly wrong with me.
And I lay there and thought the most frightening thought I have ever had.
I thought: it has all come to nothing. The therapy, the spiritual training, the whole life’s work. The thing I had given my life to mastering had got up and walked back into the room, and I was as helpless before it as I had been at five years old.
I had it completely wrong. But it took me a while to see how.
I would love to have you join me for: Wild Knowing: The Hidden Initiation of Midlife, on July 8 at 12pm PT on Zoom. The first session, Primal Awakening, maps peri/menopause as a rite of passage and gives you back a story of this part of your life that is empowering and filled with miracles. [Save your seat here →]
What Actually Came for Me
What had come back was not what I thought.
It was not the abandonment. I had met the abandonment. It was not the emotional turbulence of my childhood home. I had met that too, named it, felt it, set it down with the help of people far wiser than me.
And it was not even that the fear underneath it all was new to me. This is the part I most need to have you get, in case you are sitting there certain that you, at least, have already dealt with yours.
With utmost clarity what I can tell you now, is that the deepest fear I carried, was the fear of becoming her, becoming my mun. Of ending up in the bed. Of inheriting the suffering I watched her live inside for her whole life. And I had touched that fear before. I had named it out loud, in therapy rooms, for years, as a client and, heaven knows, as a clinician. I thought I had met it.
But I had not met the fear, not really, not like this. Not the way it came for me at perimenopause.
What came then was the same fear, stripped of every comfort and cushion and clever coping I had ever built around it. It came at a depth I did not know was there. Sheer, total, blood-and-bone terror, the kind that does not negotiate and could not care in the slightest how many books you have read about it. I had studied this exact terror for a living. And nothing, nothing, could have prepared me for meeting it in the full.
That is the thing about this peri/menopausal passage that I cannot say loudly enough. You can have done years of real and honest deep work, and still be taken somewhere by it that no work could have readied you for. Because the depth that opens here was simply not available to you before. Something had been keeping the very floor of it out of reach your whole life. And I want to share with you what has now become clear tome, in the hopes that it might help you or someone that you know.
And Then I Found Out Why
So what was it, this something that had been holding the very floor of my deepest fear out of reach my entire life?
The answer came to me in two parts. One I had carried all along, in my body. The other I had to be shown.
The part I had carried all along, I had known in my body and my heart for years, the way I have come to know most true things, long before I could prove a word of it. My body was not betraying me. My body was finishing something it had begun a very long time ago. The terror had not come back because my healing had failed. It had come because, for the first time in my life, there was nothing left to hold the floor of it down.
That was the knowing. Then came the second part. The science. And it did not argue with the knowing. It corroborated it. It handed my body’s quiet certainty a second witness, a language the knowing could finally be spoken in.
It was the oestrogen.
Deep in the brain sits the amygdala, the small structure whose whole job is to scan for threat. Your smoke alarm. And for most of your life, oestrogen has been resting a quiet hand on it, steadying it, softening it. You never knew. You never had to. It had been doing a great deal of unpaid emotional labour on your behalf for thirty years. Quietly. Without thanks. Rather on brand, when you think about it.
And there is a second piece. Rebecca Thurston, at Pittsburgh, has shown that in women who carry trauma, the nervous system’s brake, the part meant to bring you home to calm after a fright, is worn thin. The body cannot come down so easily once it has spiked. So the alarm is louder, and the brake is weaker, at the precise moment the chemical that managed both is walking out of the door.
For thirty years that chemistry had not only steadied the alarm. It had held the very floor of my deepest fear out of reach, beneath even my best work. And now, in perimenopause, the oestrogen was falling away, and the floor it had held down simply, quietly, dropped open. And I fell all the way to the bottom of a thing I had only ever stood at the top of.
I was not becoming my mother.
I was being dismantled, all the way down.
And, my love, if some version of this is happening to you, then so are you. And I am here with you. You are not alone.
What Almost No One Is Telling Women
This is not rare. It is one of the most common and least spoken things in the whole peri/menopausal passage, and it was only named properly in 2023, in the journal Menopause, by the Grady Trauma Project team at Emory. We had known for twenty years that trauma makes the physical passage harder. Two thousand and twenty-three before anyone turned it around and said out loud that the peri/menopausal passage also wakes the trauma.
And, here’s the kicker, it happens even to women who did the work. Who healed everything they could reach, and felt genuinely free. And then perimenopause arrives and the old wounds come back at a depth they were never met at before, and every one of them is convinced, as I was, that it means that somehow we didnt do enough…
But that is not really the truth. What we all did reached as far as anything could reach while the chemistry was still holding the floor down. This depth was simply not available to you before. Now it is. That is not collapse. That is the next gate.
A word of honesty, because I would rather be honest than have everything all tidy.
You might think the answer is simply to put the oestrogen back. For many women hormone support genuinely helps, and it is worth a real conversation with a good doctor. But a second study, from the same Emory team in late 2025, found that in women with trauma histories, extra oestrogen did not calm the fear the way it did in women without it. So if the quiet does not come on schedule, do not pick up the cruellest stick available and beat yourself with it, love. You are not behind. You are not failing the initiation. You are walking a longer road, and the length of it is only the measure of how much you carried, and how young you were when they handed it to you. And guess what I am walking it with you , even now.
What They Call Her Instead
I have walked you down through Inanna’s gates in this series, where everything you came in wearing is stripped from you, one threshold at a time. This is the gate behind the gate. This is what the stripping was always for. To bring you down to the thing you buried deepest, so it can finally be carried back up into the light and set down.
Now here is what the culture calls it instead.
It calls us mad.
It always has. A woman of forty-four whose oldest terror floods back is told she is anxious. Hormonal. Depressed. Difficult. Too sensitive. Too much. She is handed a prescription to take the edge off the very thing clawing its way up, after thirty years, to finally be healed. They called it hysteria once. They built asylums for it. The vocabulary is tidier now, but the instinct has not shifted an inch. See the woman come undone. Name the undoing a malfunction. Medicate the messenger. Send her home with no deeper support.
And a word I will not leave out. Black women and Native women carry trauma at far higher rates, which makes them among the hardest hit by this collision, and the least likely to be seen in it. If that is you, what you feel is not weakness and it is not too much. You deserve the most tender holding in the room, and you have most often been given the least.
The undoing is not the malfunction. The undoing is the healing, arriving at last, in the only form it had left.
What Helps, and Why You Cannot Do It Alone
So what do you do with this, when it comes.
The first thing, gentler and more powerful than it sounds, is understanding. Knowing this is real, that it has a name and a mechanism, that it is not a verdict on you. The body settles the instant the story changes from something is wrong with me to this is a known thing, and it is not just me.
Beyond that the supports are specific. Trauma-focused therapy, and because the deepest of this lives below language, the approaches that reach the body, EMDR among them, matter enormously.Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia for the sleep, asked for by name. And the plain, underrated work of bringing the body down before bed. None of it is nothing.
But here is the humbling truth, and I give it to you because it is important we look at it…
I had spent my whole life understanding trauma. I could have lectured on exactly what was happening to me from my own sickbed. And when the floor dropped, the depth of it was still beyond anything I could have prepared for, and I still could not hold myself through it alone.
You cannot know in advance how far down it goes. Which is exactly why you do not go down without someone holding the rope. A rite of passage that takes you into the underworld and abandons you there is not a rite of passage. It is just an abandonment with very good lighting.
This is exactly why I built Metamorphosis: Menopause as Initiation, a nine-month journey to the Midlife Maven. The descent, done properly, with real holding around it and a floor underneath it. It begins in August. And it is held by my training as a psychotherapist, which is why I will, without a moment’s hesitation, walk a woman toward specialised trauma support whenever that is what the moment calls for. The holding is real, or it is nothing.
If any of this has landed in your body, I invite you to come deeper into the conversation. Join me for the Wild Knowing webinar series, opening on the 8th of July, where we will go deeper into everything I have written here, and where you will receive your invitation to join the full journey if you are called.
The Gift in the Rising
And now the most important thing, because without it everything I have written is only half the truth.
This is not simply a hard thing that happens to you. It is the work of the passage itself. Whatever you have not yet dealt with, whatever you have spent a lifetime shoving down and burying and building careful compensations around, this is the season it rises. Not to punish you. By design. So that it can finally be felt, and seen, and loved, and at long last dealt with.
That is the gift. It does not look like one while you are inside it. I know. But it is one.
I can tell you exactly what mine was, my loves. My whole life, I had organised myself around not becoming my mother. And that avoidance, which felt like protection, was quietly doing the opposite, because you cannot love a body you are terrified of becoming. I had been at war with my own body, low and constant and out of sight.
The terror that rose in perimenopause was the very thing I needed to face, because facing it was the only way to lay that war down. It was the gate to my own body. On the far side of it, for the first time in my life, I began to love this body. To care for it. To listen to it. Not as the enemy that might become her. As mine. As me. As the only home I will ever have.
And had I not faced it, I am quite certain I would have driven my own health to a far more precarious edge, precisely through my terror of ending up where she did. The fear of becoming her was, unfaced, the very thing most likely to make me ill. Facing it is what is keeping me well.
I am not perfect at this. There are still days I feel the old terror at the edges of things. But it is being loved into wholeness now, a little more each time. And here is the part I can still hardly believe when I say it out loud. The very thing my mother was too ill to do for me, to hold me, to tend me, to keep me safe in my own body, I have finally learned how to do for myself.
That is the miracle of it. And it is why, from the far side of the worst of it, I am grateful for this rite of passage.
The One Thing to Carry
So if she is sitting at the end of your bed tonight, an old fear come back at a depth you have never met, even one you were certain you had healed, hear this.
This is not proof that you failed. This is not your fate, arriving. This is the buried thing, come up at last to be loved into wholeness. It has waited your whole life to be met, and it has chosen this peri/menopausal passage, of all passages, because this is the one where you are finally strong enough to meet it, and finally able to be held while you do.
So meet this moment my love. With help. With people who know exactly what they are doing. Let yourself be felt and seen and loved, the way you have always needed to be. And then watch, quietly, amazed, as the very thing you were most afraid of becoming hands you back your own life.
This will not destroy you. It did not destroy me.
This, whatever demon it is, will return you to yourself.
You do not have to do it alone. You never did. You were never meant to.
in love and devotion
Elayne Kalila
If this piece stirred something in you, be gentle with yourself today. If old trauma is surfacing, please reach out to a trauma-trained therapist or your doctor. You deserve real support for this, and you do not have to carry it on your own.
And don’t forget to save your seat Wild Knowing: The Hidden Initiation of Midlife, on July 8 at 12pm PT on Zoom. [Save your seat here →]
This is extraordinary.
"The terror had not come back because my healing had failed. It had come because, for the first time in my life, there was nothing left to hold the floor of it down." ... I feel this so much...
I love how you name this without turning it into failure, pathology, or a cute little empowerment sticker. Sometimes the body doesn’t betray us. Sometimes it removes the scaffolding that helped us survive, because now the deeper thing is finally ready to be met.
Rude of the body and sacred at the same time.
👏
Thank you for this. The terror of becoming your mother....yes that resonated....the astonishment that, despite the years of healing and mining the depths, there are yet still caverns and the abyss to traverse. I have never once been tempted to pacify with hormones but, despite the inner knowing that this is my path and I will be more powerful, wise and deep because of it.....sometimes the comparison with other women's effortless shining can be so painful.