EVOLVE BLOG
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Symptoms Are Not Failure.
But They Mean Something.
Menopause and The Matriarch Phase
There's a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from feeling like you're doing everything right and still not feeling like yourself. You're not burned out in the way people talk about burnout. You're not falling apart. But something is off. And the part that messes with you is that you cannot figure out why, because by every measure you should be fine.
And when the symptoms show up, the hot flashes, the brain fog, the joints, the sleep, the weight, that voice kicks in. The one that makes you question yourself and wonder if maybe you just can't hack it anymore.
That voice is wrong. But that also doesn't mean you just have to suck it up and pretend like it's not happening. There is a way through this phase that doesn't require you to fight it or fake it. That's what this is about.
The Pattern That Brought Her Back
A client reached out to me a few weeks ago. I had worked with her years earlier when she first came to me struggling in her life, her business, and her health. Over time, we found the right diet for her. We helped her release identity blocks that no longer served her through somatic work. She got to a place where she regularly felt energetic, empowered, and like herself again.
Then life happened the way it does. Her business got more demanding. Her four kids and her husband began needing more of her. She slid back into some old patterns and relaxed some boundaries. Before she knew it, she had moved herself all the way to the bottom of the list. She was pushing through the day.
She kind of saw it happening. But she thought she could handle it. This time would be different. She would push beyond her limits, telling herself it was just this once. Or just until her daughter's graduation was over. Or just during her launch. Or until her husband was settled into his new job. Just once became twice, became a pattern that took control.
And somewhere in that slide, her old identity of internalizing the struggle took over. She kept thinking she could handle things on her own. She knew what to do. She just had to do them when she had time.
Then perimenopause started showing up, and it exacerbated everything. The little slides turned into avalanches. Her hormone production had slowed. She needed to tap into reserves. But she had depleted those reserves by going back to the pushing, the grinding, the putting herself last. The things that had kept her regulated and resourced had disappeared one temporary exception at a time. So when her hormones started shifting and her body needed flexibility, there was nothing left to draw on.
When she came back to me, she had two beliefs running through her at the same time. First, that this was just how bad perimenopause was supposed to be, that this level of chaos was normal and she just needed to accept it. Second, that she was failing. That a woman with her background and her intelligence should not be this symptomatic. And the fact that she was meant something was fundamentally wrong with her.
Neither of those beliefs were true.
What was true was that she didn't fully appreciate how important it was to make sure her needs were met during this phase, and that the old way of pushing and forcing herself through was no longer an option, not even for a little bit. The version of her who learned to strive and achieve no matter what was in conflict with what her body needed now.
She is not an outlier. She is the common pattern.
What the Matriarch Phase Is
No one gets through the Matriarch Phase without some symptoms. And the symptoms are not a verdict on who you are, how strong you are, or how smart you are. They are information about where your reserves are and the belief system running your decisions.
Most of us grew up with some version of the three-phase archetype: maiden, mother, crone. The woman who is becoming, the woman who is building, and the elder who has crossed through and holds the wisdom of everything that came before.
The transition between the mother phase and the crone is not typically seen as a specific phase. But after working with hundreds of high-performing women, the need for a transition phase was obvious. Because as perimenopause begins, which can be as early as your 30s but typically hits in your 40s, you are leaving the mother phase of building and grinding. Your body is changing in ways you can feel, even if you can't fully describe it, even if it's not showing up on a lab result. But even though the mother phase no longer fits you, you're definitely not ready for the crone phase. You're not done. You're not ready to retire. You've got 10, 20, maybe even 30 more years of leading ahead of you. But your priorities are changing along with your body, and you need something different.
I call this the Matriarch Phase.
This is where you step into your authority and create your legacy. It's the kind of wisdom and power that does not come from pushing harder, but from having built something real and knowing what it cost you to build it.
The Matriarch Phase is the crossover from being the woman who's building from that masculine energy of action, to becoming the woman who leads with feminine authority. The strategies that worked in the building years no longer serve you, because you're emerging as a different woman.
No one gets to skip it. There is no hall pass. No matter how much money you've made, how smart you are, how much you've sacrificed. No matter how much inner work you've done, how well you eat, or how much you've squatted at the gym. You still have to go through this phase.
What makes this phase harder for high-achieving women is that they're often using old strategies and old beliefs to try to get through the hard parts faster. Because the identity attachments that made us successful in the mother phase are the very ones that crush us in the Matriarch Phase. Those identities trigger a high cortisol response that no longer serves us as hormone production goes down. And the behaviors we were getting away with in our 20s and 30s create a fear pattern as we get older, which causes havoc in our bodies, our brains, and our businesses.
The belief many of us locked into when we were younger, especially those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s: we have to achieve and figure it out alone. Because achieving is what got us seen and heard, and asking for help or expressing our needs is what got us labeled as difficult or sensitive.
I learned quickly to suck it up and walk it off because I never wanted to be labeled as too much. I would much rather be seen as accomplished and strong, even if I was suffering to do it.
So when things aren't going the way we plan, high-achieving women internalize the struggle. We do everything we can to course correct before anyone else figures out there's a problem. And as our bodies begin the hormonal transition to menopause, many women will try to silently figure out their symptoms on their own, or beat themselves up for having them at all. That reaction is what makes this transition even more difficult and compounds the symptoms.
I know this personally. I've been a business consultant for more than 30 years and a natural health practitioner for more than 15. I was forced to become a practitioner to figure out what was wrong with my own body. I spent decades being failed by the conventional healthcare system and eventually found the right strategy to reverse two autoimmune conditions. Then I helped hundreds of other women do the same thing. I did the work to release the "grind and achieve it all cost" identity that built my earlier businesses, and I wrecked my health at the same time. I know more about hormones and the physiology and psychology of this transition than most women at my age will ever have access to.
And I still wake up with hot flashes from time to time. I still lose a word here and there and find myself playing an impromptu game of charades trying to remember it. I have mornings where my joints are stiff. It's not because I'm failing or don't know what I'm doing. It's because I'm in the messy transition to a new version of me, right alongside you.
The expectation of zero symptoms is a false belief tied to conditioning that made us feel seen when we achieved and problematic when we asked for help. Letting go of that belief is critical during any phase, but especially this one. Because our hormones are changing. And that belief can quickly turn into fear, guilt, and shame. Shame will trigger the fight-or-flight response, which spikes cortisol, which makes every single thing during perimenopause worse. Every one of them.
Three Shifts Happening at the Same Time
Right now, three shifts are occurring simultaneously.
1. The Hormonal Shift.
Estrogen and progesterone are declining, which impacts pretty much every system in your body. Sleep, temperature regulation, mood stability. It's why you can feel hot and cold at the same time, hungry but disinterested in eating, or suddenly want to murder your spouse for breathing too loudly. It also impacts information retrieval, inflammatory response, and metabolic efficiency. Which is why you can lose a common word mid-sentence, or gain what feels like 10 pounds after one light salad, or get up from the sofa with pain in every joint even though you felt fine 30 minutes ago when you sat down.
For women who came into this transition feeling healthy, that redistribution can feel unexpectedly hard. For women who spent their mother phase years running on cortisol and caffeine, pushing through, shorting themselves on sleep and nutrition, and treating recovery as optional, this transition can feel crushing to a system that's already depleted.
2. The Identity Shift.
The version of you who built your business, the one who ran on drive and a particular kind of hunger, she's being renegotiated. What mattered to you three years ago may not have the same priority level it once did. Your tolerance is shifting in two directions at once. The low-stakes friction that used to eat up your attention is easier to release. And the things that are genuinely important to you, your core values and standards and the real vision for what you're building, those become less negotiable.
You're not losing your edge. You're getting clearer about what matters and dropping what doesn't. But that process of getting clear can be misinterpreted as falling apart, which causes confusion and, again, fear.
3. The Experiential Shift.
How you perceive things is changing. What used to feel urgent may not. What used to feel acceptable becomes a hard no. Your relationship to risk changes. Your relationship to the people around you changes, including yourself. Your sense of what you are here to do may get bigger or more narrow. And that can be disorienting when it challenges the identity that's been driving you for the past decade or two.
All three of these shifts are happening at the same time. And if you've been trying to deal with them one at a time, or pushing through all three while treating them as a distraction from the real work, that might be a significant part of why everything feels like too much right now.
How This Is Showing Up in Your Business
What I know about you is you're still showing up. The work is still getting done. From the outside, most people probably don't see much difference. But the internal response has changed, and it's affecting your work in ways you either don't notice or aren't ready to see yet.
Decision-making feels different. It's not as connected or fluid as it's been. Many of the women I talk to are less willing to move on instinct alone and more interested in the full picture before committing. From the outside, especially from anyone who knew you five years ago, that can look like hesitation or second-guessing. It's not. It's a shift in how the brain processes risk and reward during this transition. The prefrontal cortex works within a different hormonal environment now. Your brilliance is still there. The processing is different.
If you're feeling paralyzed in your decisions, that's a whole other signal. It may point to a loss of self-trust, which is a deeper layer and one that would benefit from specific work to rebuild that connection. Loss of trust in self is a common reason women start working with me, even though most describe it as simply not feeling like themselves.
Tolerance recalibrates during this transition. You focus less on things you realize don't matter in the grand scheme and have zero patience for things that get in the way of what really does. This is why clients who used to feel like a minor drain now feel unbearable. Or projects you used to push through no longer feel worth it. If you've been telling yourself you're just being difficult or losing your ability to handle things, you're not. You're getting clearer on where you want your energy to go. If you're paying attention and not fighting your way through the Matriarch Phase, it will produce more discernment, not less capacity.
Leadership shifts during this phase too. The version of authority that ran on doing more and doing it visibly is losing its grip on you. That is not a loss. When you're connected to the message of this transition, you will begin to lead by being, not performing. Just your presence will carry confidence. Your clients and your team will feel it.
The women who experience this transition most powerfully are the ones who no longer need to demonstrate their value through how much they do or how visibly they do it. Women who are moving into this phase are stepping into the most authentic versions of themselves they've ever connected to. Deep, authentic connection is what works for us at this stage. Not more posting. More authenticity. More powerful vulnerability. That requires trusting the version of yourself who has always been there but is no longer performing for others.
And that shift requires letting go of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that probably built everything you have. That is not a small ask.
Symptoms Are Information, Not Evidence of Failure
Let me pause here because I want to make sure this isn't being lost.
There are remedies available to women in this phase that can reduce or eliminate certain symptoms: hormone replacement therapy, medications, procedures. If you choose any of those with full information and a clear understanding of how they work, what they do, and what the side effects are, that is your choice to make, and I respect it completely. I am not here to talk you out of those choices. I've supported clients through them.
What I want to make sure is clear is what's driving the belief underneath the choice.
If you're considering intervention because you believe your symptoms mean you're failing, because you believe your body shouldn't be shifting or changing, or that your body isn't capable of making this shift without it, that's the belief I would love for you to address first.
Symptoms are not evidence of failure. They are information. They are your body in conversation with you about what it needs, what it has too much of, what it needs more of, and what has to shift so it gets the support it deserves. The challenge most women face is that they don't understand what their symptoms mean physiologically and emotionally, and they don't have the right support to make the proper adjustments at the root cause level. And they often don't know where to go to get that support.
Expecting to have no symptoms during this transition is setting yourself up to feel like you're failing.
I have hot flashes. When they come, I know they're part of the adjustment, but I also know what needs to change to support my body through them. And when I just need to let them be what they are, I watch my sleep, my nutrition, and my routine to make sure they're still supporting me and not causing me to borrow against my future health. My sleep is restorative. My workouts are weight-bearing. I actively create time to spend with the people who are important to me.
I also get an unexpected migraine here and there. So I track them. I find the pattern so I can make the changes. And sometimes I see them as information that just needs me to take a break. So I step away from screens, resist the urge to create busy work to feel productive, take a real physical and mental break, and let my body do what it was designed to do.
My pain is low, but sometimes my joints ache. I altered my workouts and updated how I support recovery in between sessions. My body is functional and strong, and that's the main goal. There's a long history in my family of diabetes, osteoporosis, and digestive disorders. So I do what I can not to trigger those issues or slip into behaviors where they become active.
I still lose words and sometimes forget simple things. But for most high-performing women, that's because we're moving too fast and aren't slowing down to appreciate how many plates we have spinning at the same time.
Flowing with this transition is my goal. Not being at war with it.
The Foundation That Matters More Than Ever
During this phase, the foundation matters more than it ever has. The margin for ignoring it is much smaller than it ever was.
Weight-bearing exercise, because protecting muscle and bone at this stage is structural, not optional. Nutrition, because the gaps that were tolerable before compound faster now. Detox pathways, meaning your body's ability to clear, process, and regenerate. Brain health, because cognitive resilience is an active investment, not a passive inheritance. And relationships, because feeling seen, heard, and understood makes everything easier at any time, but especially now.
If you came into this transition already depleted, which is most women, if you've been running on cortisol with your reserves low, those things matter more, not less. Because the buffer that used to fill in the gaps and allowed you to get away with a lot of your choices is thinner now. Your body wants you to know that. The symptoms will feel more abrupt or bigger because you can't ignore them anymore. That is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to be more deliberate.
Women who are open and ready for growth as they enter this phase tend to have a much easier experience. Not a perfect one. An honest one. They still have symptoms. They have days that feel harder. They have moments of confusion and grief where they do not recognize themselves, which makes sense because they're changing physically, emotionally, and mentally, and that impacts identity and belief.
I am not suggesting you ignore your symptoms. I am not saying you just have to suffer. I am 100% against suffering. If you are suffering because you think you're supposed to, you are misinterpreting what this experience is supposed to be. There are so many ways to get support and help your body make this adjustment that you actually have control over. But you have to first choose not to fight your way through it.
Because the women who are fighting the transition struggle the most. They often shut down and fall back into old patterns that make everything harder, and they miss the growth opportunities that come with every new phase.
You Are Not in Crisis. You Are in Transition.
The Matriarch Phase is inevitable. It is not there to make you suffer. The difference is in how you enter it and how you choose to move through it.
There is no magic pill that makes it all better with no change in behavior, no matter what the marketing on the landing pages says, and no matter what the TikTok influencers tell you. There are interventions that make this transition easier for some women some of the time. But they all work better when your body and your mind are foundationally set up for success.
Here's what I know about the woman on the other side of this transition. She is not a lesser version of who you are right now. She is more of who you are than you've ever been.
What this phase does, if you let it, is strip away the parts of the identity you took on to protect yourself or to be who you needed to be during that time. They were never really the truest expression of who you are at your core. What is revealed is someone with clearer priorities, who makes more honest connections in her relationships, who has a pure relationship to her body, and who leads without needing to prove anything.
You will not be the same woman you were when you entered this. Which is really the whole point.
Your Next Steps
You were meant for so much. Do not allow yourself to get pulled into this transition thinking that you're failing.
You're not.
You still have so much more to give, and so much more of yourself to show.
If you want to look at this phase specifically, what your physiology, your nervous system, your business, and your energy look like together right now as a complete picture, and what you can do as you enter this phase to be the best version of yourself you can be, that is what I do with the Richly Resourced Audit.
It looks at your physiology, your nervous system, your business structure, and your energy together, as a complete picture not as separate entities.
Want support growing your aligned business so you remain energized and fully resourced?
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