Sylvia woke up one day and decided, this is it. I’m done. I want a divorce. It
had become clear to her that her husband, Robert, was unavailable and
ungiving. She was tired of listening to his tirades and fed up with his
demands. But what really pushed her over the edge was when she found herself
in the hospital for a week for an intestinal blockage and he visited her
only twice. Both times he came to ask questions about running the house.
At least this is how Sylvia, an attractive woman with brown hair, bright blue
eyes and a spring in her step, explained it to me during a therapy session.
Since her early twenties, she felt she had spent most of her time taking
care of needy, self-absorbed people. She had fixed their problems, pulling
them out of alcoholism or abusive situations, and in return they had sucked
her emotionally dry.
At 54, she was still very attractive and felt full of energy. What astounded
her more than anything was that she felt as though a haze had lifted
recently, and she could see in a way she hadn’t been able to before. For 28
years she had chauffeured, nurtured and loved her three children, made sure
home-work was done, dinner was eaten and the house didn’t fall apart. Now,
out of nowhere, she found herself asking, why?
If we took our MRI scanner into Sylvia’s brain, we’d see a landscape quite
different from that of a few years before. A constancy in the flow of
impulses through her brain circuits has replaced the surges and plunges of
oestrogen and progesterone caused by the menstrual cycle.
Her brain is now a more certain and steady machine. We do not see the
hair-trigger circuits in the amygdala that rapidly altered her reality right
before her period, sometimes pushing her to see bleakness that wasn’t there
or to hear an insult that wasn’t intended. We would see that the brain
circuits between the amygdala (the emotional processor), and the prefrontal
cortex (the emotion assessment and judgment area) are fully functional and
consistent. They are no longer easily overamped at certain times of the
month. The amygdala still lights up more than a man’s when Sylvia sees a
threatening face or hears about a tragedy, but tears don’t flood her so
quickly any more.
Fifty-one and a half years is the average age of menopause, the moment 12
months after a woman’s last period; 12 months after the ovaries have stopped
producing the hormones that have boosted her communication circuits, emotion
circuits, the drive to tend and care and the urge to avoid conflict at all
costs. The circuits are still there but the fuel for running the highly
responsive Maserati engine for tracking the emotions of others has begun to
run dry, and this scarcity causes a major shift in how a woman perceives her
reality.
With her oestrogen down, her oxytocin is down, too. She’s less interested in
the nuances of emotions; she’s less concerned about keeping the peace; and
she’s getting less of a dopamine rush from the things she did before, even
talking with her friends. She’s not getting the calming oxytocin reward of
tending and caring for little children, so she’s less inclined to be as
attentive to others’ personal needs.
This can happen precipitously and the problem is that Sylvia’s family can’t
see from the outside how her internal rules are being rewritten. One day she
turned to Robert and said: “You’re a grown-up and I’m finished raising the
kids. Now it’s my turn to have a life.” Robert couldn’t believe what he was
hearing. For instance: “Make your own damn dinner or go out by yourself. For
the last time, I’m not hungry. I’m happy painting right now and I don’t feel
like stopping.”
He said she had snapped at him at a party two nights before, when she offered
a suggestion about investing in a group of stocks and he told her to stay
out of the discussion because she didn’t know what she was talking about.
After all, he was the one who read Barron’s, the investors’ guide. “Yeah,
you keep reading it and you keep losing money. Have you seen my portfolio
lately? I’ve made three times the amount you’ve made, so stop belittling
me,” she’d replied. Everything he said seemed to annoy her. She announced
that she was moving out.
When Sylvia was younger, she would do everything she could to avoid fights
with her husband, even if she was really mad. There’s a tape that gets
rolling during the teen years, when oestrogen dials up the emotions and
communication circuits and makes a woman panic about any conflict as a
threat to a relationship. That tape doesn’t stop rolling until a woman
either consciously overrides it or the supply of hormones that fuels it is
cut off, or both. A time like now.
All her life Sylvia had prided herself on being accommodating and willing to
let her husband win — especially when he came home exhausted and on-edge
from the office. Her empathy for him was real.
She kept the peace, as her Stone Age brain was compelling her to do, to keep
the family together. Having a husband is good. We’re better protected this
way. These were the messages keeping her from engaging in conflict. If
Robert forgot their anniversary, she would bite her tongue. If he was
verbally abusive after a long day at work, she stared straight into the stew
she was stirring and didn’t respond.
But as Sylvia hit menopause, the filters came off, her irritability increased
and her anger wasn’t headed for that extra “stomach” any more, to be chewed
over before it came out. Her ratio of testosterone to oestrogen was
shifting, and her anger pathways were becoming more like a man’s. The
calming effects of progesterone and oxytocin weren’t there to cool off the
anger either. The couple had never learnt to process and resolve their
disagreements. Now Sylvia confronted Robert with regularity, venting decades
of pent-up rage. The children were also affected. Sylvia had reported that
her daughter had said: “Mom, you’re acting weird and dad is getting scared.
He’s afraid you’ll do something crazy — like take all the money and run
away.” Sylvia wasn’t crazy but she wasn’t the same woman. She told me that
her husband had once screamed at her: “What have you done with my wife?”
Sylvia had changed the rules of the relationship and no one had told Robert.
It is commonly believed that men leave their ageing, chubby, postmenopausal
wives for fertile, younger, thin women. This couldn’t be further from the
truth. Statistics indicate that more than 65 per cent of divorces after the
age of 50 are initiated by women. My suspicion is that much of this
female-initiated divorce is rooted in the drastically altered reality of
postmenopausal women. (But as I have seen in my practice, it could also be
because they are tired of putting up with difficult or cheating husbands and
have just been waiting for the day when the children leave home.) What had
been important to women — connection, approval, children and making sure the
family stayed together — is no longer the first thing on their minds.
When Sylvia found out that she was accepted into a master’s programme in
social work, it was one of the happiest days of her life. She hadn’t had
such a feeling of accomplishment since she graduated from college, got
married or had children. As a matter of fact, many women’s lives are just
hitting their peak. This can be an exciting intellectual time now that the
burden of rearing children has decreased and the preoccupation of the mummy
brain is lessened.
The contribution of work to a woman’s personality, identity and fulfilment
once again becomes as important as it may have been before the mummy brain
took over. Women with high career momentum in their fifties and sixties
scored better on measures of self-acceptance, independence and effective functioning,
and rated physical health higher than did other women. There’s a lot of life
left after menopause, and embracing work passionately allows a woman to feel
regenerated. Two years after their separation, Sylvia realised that she
missed Robert. He was the only one she could talk to about certain things,
including their children. One day he invited her to dinner and she decided
to accept. They met, talked calmly about what had gone wrong and ended up
apologising for the unhappiness they had caused each other. They also had
new experiences to share and over time they rediscovered their friendship
and respect for each other and realised that they had already found their
soul mates. They just needed to rewrite the contract.
The mature female brain is still relatively unknown territory, but it’s a wide
open place for women to discover, create, contribute and lead in positive
ways for future generations. And maybe even have the most fun years of their
lives. ©Dr Louann Brizendine 2007.
The Female Brain will be published by Bantam Press on April 2 for
£10.99. It’s available for £9.89 (incl P&P) from Times
BooksFirst (0870 1608080 or timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy)
