AM I HAVING A MIDLIFE CRISIS?

Episode 213:
Show Notes 

In this fourth episode of the Menopause Series on the Real Health Podcast, Dr Lucy Burns interviews Kirstin Bouse, a clinical psychologist with nearly three decades of experience. Kirstin founded All About Her - The Centre for Menopause to support women through menopause and other life transitions. Her personal struggles with perimenopause, ADHD, and burnout led her to create a community of health professionals offering evidence-based care and innovative programs.

Psychological Challenges of Midlife Women:

• Both Dr Lucy and Kirstin discuss how midlife women often feel invisible and struggle with confidence due to societal and bodily changes during menopause.
• These transitions can lead to a loss of identity and self-worth, making support crucial.

Comparison with Adolescence:

• Kirstin draws a parallel between the psychological impacts of adolescence and menopause, noting that both periods involve substantial transitions and identity re-evaluation.
• This comparison highlights the emotional intensity of menopause, similar to the teenage years.

Impact on Mental Health:

• Menopause can exacerbate existing mental health issues or introduce new challenges, such as increased anxiety and depression.
• Kirstin also works with women experiencing ADHD, offering tailored assessments and interventions for those in midlife.

Stress and Lifestyle Changes:

• Stress, often exacerbated by menopause, contributes to overall health decline and burnout.
• Kirstin emphasises the importance of incremental lifestyle changes, such as improving diet and exercise, to manage stress and promote well-being.

Multidisciplinary Approach:

• A multidisciplinary approach is essential for addressing the complex needs of midlife women.
• Collaboration between various health professionals—such as psychologists, dietitians, and medical doctors—is crucial for comprehensive care.

Burnout Recognition in the Medical Community:

• Burnout is increasingly recognised in the medical field as a serious condition impacting women's health, especially during menopause.
• Kirstin shares her personal experience with burnout, emphasising its impact on her practice and the importance of addressing it.
• She discusses the need for better support systems and strategies to prevent and manage burnout, both for health professionals and patients.

Work and Personal Life Balance:

• Balancing career and personal life responsibilities can be particularly challenging during midlife, as women often juggle multiple roles.
• There is a need for societal changes to better support women in managing these responsibilities and maintaining their health.

Final Thoughts:

• Dr Lucy and Kirstin stress the importance of understanding and supporting women through menopause.
• They encourage women to seek help, utilise available resources, and prioritise their health and well-being during this transition.

Catch Kirstin on the following platforms:

• Website: www.allabouthercentre.com.au
• Instagram: @allabouthercentre and @the_midlife_psychologist
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kirstin-bouse

Link to Menopause checklist: www.rlmedicine.com/checklist

Episode 213: 
Transcript 

Dr Mary Barson (0:04) Hello, my lovely friends. I am Dr Mary Barson Barson.

Dr Lucy Burns (0:09) And I'm Dr Lucy Burns Burns Burns. We are doctors and weight management and metabolic health experts.

Both (0:16) And this is the Real Health and Weight Loss podcast!

Dr Lucy Burns (0:23)  Hello, lovelies. We are super excited to be bringing you this series in Menopause, where we're interviewing guests on their expert subjects regarding perimenopause, menopause, and beyond. As always, any information in this podcast is just considered general advice and we would urge you to seek medical attention if you have any concerns about your health. If you're interested in exploring the symptoms of menopause or perimenopause, we have a checklist that you can download at our website, www.rlmedicine.com/checklist or as always, you can click the link in the show notes. Thanks, lovelies, enjoy this series!

Dr Lucy Burns (0:58) Good morning, gorgeous ones. How are you this morning? Dr. Lucy again, continuing our menopause series and we have another super exciting guest. I'm so excited to talk to you about something that is close to my heart and close, I suspect, to many of your minds. So I am speaking today with Kristin Bouse. She's a clinical psychologist and is all about her in midlife. Kirstin, welcome to the podcast.

Kirstin Bouse (01:24) Hi, thank you for having me.

Dr Lucy Burns (01:27) Well, I think it's so important because, you know, we've had a number of our guests who have spoken about, you know, the medical side of things in particular, you know, around MHT and HRT, which is great. And people need to know that it's an option, but menopause is not a one-trick pony. And I thought we need to be looking at all the options and all the things that we can discuss to support ourselves in this transition. And so who better to talk to you than you?

Kirstin Bouse (01:56) Thank you. Well, I feel lucky because I just get to talk about a topic that I love talking about and reading about and learning about. So, yeah, the bonus is mine.

Dr Lucy Burns (02:07) Haha Wonderful. Yeah. Excellent. So can you introduce yourself to our listeners and just tell us a bit about you? 

Kirstin Bouse (02:14) Yes, so I am coming up to three decades as a psychologist, a clinical psychologist, and I've had a really unusual career in that probably the first decade was spent in maximum security men's prisons. So when you kind of hear that, it's like, how on earth did I land in this particular space working with midlife women? And it's a little too long a story, I think, for this podcast, but it does actually make a fair amount of sense for those who, I guess, get the chance to hear me bang on about it. But certainly, for the last 15 years, my focus has definitely been working with women who are going through transitions and typically the transition into motherhood and then the transition into perimenopause and menopause. And for me, I do have a group practice here in Perth and my team all have their kind of niche areas. So we do a wide range of work in that particular space. But about 18 months, I started to, I guess this idea was kind of percolating in my mind around how I could make menopause-informed health practitioners more findable, a very great word.

Dr Lucy Burns (02:37) I love that. I love a good word. Yes. 

Kirstin Bouse (02:39) more findable to women out there. And that really was something I guess the thought came about because I would want to refer some of my clients or my friends to other health practitioners in other disciplines for their perimenopausal symptoms. And it just was really, really difficult to find those health disciplines who had that extra bit of knowledge and that extra kind of interest and commitment to working with midlife women. And I thought it can't, it just can't be this difficult. It's ridiculous. You know, I'm persistent and I was finding it hard to find these kinds of, you know, experts, I guess. And so that's really where I thought, no, I'm going to do something about this and I'm going to create a platform where it becomes easier to find them. And it took, quite some time and we're definitely still growing. So, you know, this is a call out for any health practitioners with the interest to speak to me, but we launched in early February and, you know, we're busy and it's really great to be able to work in this space. And that's the thing, the health practitioners that I'm talking to that come on board have an absolute heart-driven, you know, desire to be working with midlife women which is super cool. And we have great kind of case consultations about that we learn from each other. It's awesome. So I feel very, very fortunate.

Dr Lucy Burns (05:10) That sounds wonderful and it's interesting, isn't it? The midlife woman for so long has been like invisible. You know, she was a commodity when she was young and live and could sell, you know, red sports cars and you know, and she was the the fertile goddess producing children. And then she just sort of developed into some shrivelled-up, dried-up prune discarded on the side. And I have a little hashtag, which every now and then I pop out called we are glorious because I know, well, I think that women, you know, women in this mid to later life are, you know, we're the wise women, you know, we've lived. And I look now at sometimes that, you know, what 22-year-old Lucy did compared to 55-year-old Lucy and there's a bit of me that shudders with, you know, just my absolute naivety and sometimes my arrogance at thinking I knew everything when I really knew nothing. So yeah, celebrating women at this age. But it's interesting because lots of us are not feeling like the glorious woman. We're feeling we lose our confidence, we lose our place. And so I guess this is partly where you step in, yeah.

Kirstin Bouse (06:31) Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think our 40s, most women are kind of hitting perimenopause in the early 40s. Certainly for some women, perimenopause and or menopause occurs much earlier. And as a result, there are many more layers for them to kind of wrap their heads around for sure. But, you know, 40 to the early 50s, you know, the average age of the menopause or woman or woman reaching menopause is I think 51, 52 in Australia. And they're really significant years where we actually, I think undergo quite a transformation in so many ways. Now there's this really kind of, there's this paradoxical way of looking at it. And psychologists tend to hear this and say this in the sense that people are inherently the same, but at the same time, they change quite significantly. And I think that's essentially kind of where we end up as we navigate what's a really tricky decade. Even if your perimenopause doesn't quite last the whole decade, it's a really significant shift. Unfortunately, much to my disappointment, my profession hasn't done anywhere near as much research on the experience of midlife women as I would like. But when I look to the qualitative research that is available, and also when you kind of read, I guess, books that are written by anthropologists and sociologists, and as well, a lot of journalists and writers are writing in this space, and they're interviewing women during midlife. And all of that information, so when I read all of that, what I hear are themes, that are pretty consistent for this decade of life. And the first one is wrestling with an identity. So we often kind of feel like we don't really fit the identity we've held on to and had for however many decades beforehand. So there's this shifting kind of sands there, our values, our beliefs change. We have a really significant drive to orient our time, our energy, and our money towards ourselves more than the people who we've been typically kind of directing that towards. We have to renegotiate our relationship with our bodies as well because there's so much change and we need to really be around peers. And by peers, I mean, you know, women who are going through the same thing as us. And the interesting thing is that they're the themes that come out of this research that are really common for us to wrestle with. And the interesting thing is they also reflect the developmental tasks of adolescents. And I know from a hormone perspective, perimenopause has often been referred to as reverse puberty. And for me, when I bring my psychological mind to this process, I'm like, yes, and so is the psychology of midlife. It is so much of a parallel between the transition into and the developmental kind of focus and tasks of adolescence. So yeah, that intrigues me.

Dr Lucy Burns (10:00) Yep. absolutely. It is. And I think the interesting thing for the women who are the current cohort, if you like, of perimenopause menopause, even post-menopause women, is that we were going through when feelings weren't spoken about emotions. Nobody, nobody knew what emotions really were. We were just told to, you know, boy, yeah, get on with it. Yeah. Yeah. Don't, you know, don't be pathetic and sort of don't be too loud. And don't make a fuss and all of that. Boys were told, you know, don't be weak, don't cry, don't be, you know, a sook. And so you've got this current generation who have got no idea about their emotions and then you throw us into a 40 plus, 45 year old plus body and mind and you don't know what the hell's going on.

Kirstin Bouse (10:59) and that's the most common phrase is, I don't feel like myself, I'm all over the shop. I can't juggle and cope like I used to. I'm overwhelmed. I think I'm losing my mind. All of those are the most common phrases for this period of time. And, you know, it is a really, really difficult time. And I mean, the whole kind of concept or definition of transition is that we haven't landed anywhere. We're not where we used to be, but we're also not kind of in this new version space of ourselves. We're in limbo and nobody likes, no human likes this process. And we're in it for a really long time. You know, even women who are going, you know, at the lower end of the perimenopausal years, perhaps a couple of years or five years versus the 10, 11, 12 that some women sit in. It's a really long time to feel unanchored, ungrounded. And this is where some of the difficulties come in for us. It's enough for us to be in limbo and then how we are in our relationships also then is in flux too in our workplace and all of those things, all the things.

Dr Lucy Burns (12:07) Yeah, all the things, absolutely. And it seems tricky, you know, often you've got women who, who perhaps, you know, maybe their kids are a bit older now and they're, you know, they're going back to work and they're getting hitting their stride at work and, you know, really sort of feeling like they're, you know, that they matter and they're important, that their job's important, they've got a good role, they're getting a lot of feedback and then they, then menopause comes along and they suddenly feel like they, they lose their confidence, they're not competent, they're crying, they don't know what to do and, you know, it's like, what? I just thought I had sorted and now the rug's been pulled out.

Kirstin Bouse (12:40) Yeah, it's, I mean, it's bad timing, isn't it really? We've got these many, many decades of life experience and work experience, whether it's in something we would call a job or whether it's we would call it a career. Either way, we've got all this experience and we really should be coming into our own in that kind of way. But yes, we start to have brain fog. We have word-finding difficulties and other kinds of memory challenges as well. We have a dysregulated mood, sometimes anxiety for the very first time in our lives. And all of that is just so confronting to us, particularly if we've kind of arrived just before perimenopause at this place where we're feeling quite solid in ourselves. And then that's just, we don't recognise ourselves. And that's so, so difficult for us. And I guess that's one of the things that for me, I really want to, I want as many women to know how normal this is. Now it doesn't make it any, you know, it doesn't change, it doesn't change it, it doesn't fix it, but it can reduce the what the hell is going on with me, which just adds that layer of anxiety, you know, to it. And I, and you know, I think as well if we can also give the message that for the most part, we come out the other side, which I've said to some people and they're like, I don't care, I'm still in the thick of it. And I remember feeling that myself, like, I don't care that you're telling me there's a light at the end of the tunnel, I'm struggling. But at the same time, I think it can be really important for women to know that this doesn't last forever. It feels like it, but it doesn't last forever, yeah.

Dr Lucy Burns (14:34) Yep. Absolutely. So from a psychological point of view, what sort of things do you offer your clients?

Kirstin Bouse (14:41) Yeah, I mean, like, I guess any intervention, any kind of treatment from any health practitioner, you're always assessing like what's going on, what are their needs. So, you know, perimenopause in particular is a time when women who've had prior mental health issues can really flare up. So, you know, my professional background, I have a long, long background in working with trauma And certainly anyone who's experienced trauma, who's done, even if they've done heck of a lot of work and kind of laid it to rest at other periods in their life, it can kind of come back to bite them on the bum as can depression and anxiety and those kinds of things. So, you know, I work with women who are experiencing kind of recurrences, relapses and things. I also work with women who are experiencing these issues and challenges for the first time. Right through, I guess, to women who I mentioned before, you know, that subclinical presentation. So they're not actually reaching diagnostic criteria for a mental health disorder, but they aren't feeling good. Like they're really confused and stressed and worried and the mood's up and down, but maybe, as I said, not to the extreme of getting a diagnosis. The other area that I work in, and this is kind of a real personal interest, I mean, The whole shebang is really a personal interest to be honest. But for me, I really enjoy working with the perimenopausal and the ADHD kind of interface and things. As a late-diagnosed ADHDer, all my sons were diagnosed. I was the last one and my eldest has a different dad, so I'm the common thread. And that's a really, that's a big area of interest of mine. So I do offer ADHD assessments only for midlife women, because they're who I like to work with and also work, you know, kind of provide intervention and therapy and resources and stuff for women who are ADHD-impaired menopausal. But, you know, everything kind of is up for grabs. I just love working with midlife women. Seriously, they, as you kind of said, what was your hashtag? It was glorious. Like,

Dr Lucy Burns (16:58) Yeah, hashtag we are glorious. Yeah.

Kirstin Bouse (17:02) What floats my boat is to be able to help women get to that point where they know that. Like that's what I'm all about. I get goosebumps, I've got them now actually. Because it's the most beautiful thing to witness and enjoyable work. It doesn't often feel like work, it just feels like a really cool thing to support women through.

Dr Lucy Burns (17:25) Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think it's interesting, isn't it? Because you know, that uncoupling or unmasking is probably the word I'm looking for when you know, the oestrogen declines or fluctuates in particular, things that that women have been able to mask or hold together or manage or cope with suddenly it's again back to that rug pulled out and then they struggle. So, It's so interesting. And I know, you know, I've got this, the concept of the metabolic triad, which is really what I love working with. So women who have over time just developed insulin resistance, which increases then in that menopausal period. So even if they weren't insulin resistant, throw in a bit of it or take away the oestrogen and they tip into it. But the oestrogen-cortisol link is super fascinating. And I love looking at that and seeing how, yes, you take away some oestrogen and anxiety symptoms come. But by the same token, when people are running, like that little mouse on the treadmill, then their oestrogen production in the adrenal is diverted to cortisol. So you get that cortisol steal. So you're actually decreasing, further decreasing your own endogenous production of oestrogen by constantly running.

Kirstin Bouse (18:54) Yeah. And I mean, for me, I've always been fascinated by health in general. So I mean, there is no way I can have the knowledge base that you have or, you know, anyone definitely outside of my own discipline. But there is so much gold in the different health disciplines that can support women through this time. And, you know, I mean, stress is a killer for all of us, but particularly at this time. And it's something, you know, I'm quite happy to share that I started perimenopause. I came into this period of time burnt out, like diagnostically burnt out. I really fell to my knees and needed to spend, it took me a couple of years to really get my health back on track. Significant lifestyle changes. And, you know, and I thought I was living pretty healthily. And I was, except for the stress that was well and truly something that was way too dominant in my life. And it's not an easy thing to change. Lifestyle changes are really difficult to make, but the proof is in the pudding when we can just kind of incrementally make these changes in a really slow, patient manner, not in an all or nothing, because then we'll feel like we're hopeless and can't do it. All of this stuff is so important and it is one of the reasons why I didn't want all about her just to be a psychologist. I wanted to have multidisciplinary people represented because everyone has something really useful to offer women depending on where they're at and what they need at that time. Yeah.

Dr Lucy Burns (20:38) Yeah, absolutely. It's really interesting. I think, you know, you on burnout and burnout is fortunately now being recognised, particularly say, you know, within the medical profession where it was, it wasn't. I think that maybe some alternate health practices have often referred to it as adrenal fatigue. And I just look and go adrenal fatigue, translate that's burnout. It makes complete sense. We, you know, very traditional medicine, poo-pooed it, it's ridiculous. If you look at the actual letter of the law, yes, your adrenals don't fatigue, but the symptoms are what they're describing, and it describes it perfectly. And yeah, you can no longer, you just literally can't keep going.

Kirstin Bouse (21:35) Yeah, no, you can't. And I think it also creates quite a confusing picture, which may I mean, I never really teased out what's what, but you know, what's what is burnout? What is perimenopause for me? What is ADHD? You know, all of those kinds of factors. It becomes difficult. But at the end of the day, you really just need to start with the basics of looking after yourself and everything that that means, which I know you're completely across. It's simple, but not easy. That's the thing. And then, as you get well, you can kind of tackle some of the other things that you want to address and stuff. But I remember my doctor saying, burnout, and I was like, is that a real thing? And she goes, yeah, it's now a diagnosis. And I'm like, okay, you guys have come a long way. Because I couldn't, it was something psychs recommend, and recognise, but I didn't think the medical community had.

Dr Lucy Burns (22:24) Correct. Absolutely. Do you know, medicine's a funny old beast. Like there was a time when risk factors for cardiovascular disease, type A personality was considered a risk factor. And then it got taken off and suddenly no one talks about it anymore. And it's like, well, actually if we sort of drill back down, what is type A personality? It's, you know, the goers, the high achievers, the people that just keep taking stuff on, the people that work themselves to death. Why would we take that off the risk factor? We might want to rename it, but why would we get rid of it? So annoying, but.

Kirstin Bouse (22:56) Well, exactly. And the funny thing is, like, you know, I don't know, do you know any midlife woman who isn't on the go? I mean, perhaps you hopefully, you know, patients that have made changes in their life and their cortisol and all the rest is, is, you know, right down and things. But prior to that, it's just, it's just symptomatic, I think, of the midlife woman's role, demands, responsibilities. you know, we're really taught we can have it all, but never taught about what the cost of that is. And yeah, I'm yet to meet a midlife woman who, you know, isn't just go, go, go and, you know, tight A, shall we say. Yeah, it's amazing.

Dr Lucy Burns (23:47) Yeah, it's funny. We've been talking a lot just even within even within our business even within and it seems to be the theme at the moment of adding people add to things that they don't take away. So even when you buy clothes, you know, you add to your wardrobe, but you hardly ever take anything out. And I think for women that's been their role that added to it, you know, they got the careers they added to all of the things that they could do, but we didn't take anything away and society didn't take anything away. And so women are now doing all the things, the work and often the majority of the child-rearing, that cognitive load. And yeah, and I think it's really interesting. I have a husband who is the wife of our relationship. He's the organised one. He doesn't have ADHD. He's very logical. He's very planned. He's very systematic. And he was sick of my chaos. So he just took over, which I was very grateful for. And but he's, he's not the norm. And this idea often feels like in, you know, there's, there's two things going on. I think one is that women have somewhat enabled the men, to not pull their weight. Yeah. And that's, it's no one's fault. It's obviously no one's fault, but it's just about thinking of how can we do it differently. What was my role in allowing this situation to happen? And again, that's looking at people who are privileged, who live in a, have a relationship where there's equal respect and all of those things going on. So I'm mindful of that. But yeah, there's, I think just a societal shift isn't there that needs to happen.

Kirstin Bouse (25:50) Definitely and you're actually speaking to one of the common kind of reasons women do come and see a psychologist because we go through this time when we're completely upended, brought to our knees and in order to get ourselves out of that we have to make changes in our life. Now when I make changes in my life it has a ripple effect on the others that are kind of around me and sometimes, certainly my clients that I see, the changes they need to make aren't supported by the system. And but when I say the system, I'm talking first and foremost, like first the family system, let alone the water system. And so there's pushback, there's resistance, there's not coming on board when mum says, I'm going to stop doing that kind of stuff now, because you're all you can all kind of help me out or not help me out, but you can all contribute to the running of the household in these different ways. And that's what brings a lot of women to therapy because, I mean, there's a whole kind of, we call it schema therapy. There's a whole model of therapy where we've essentially established ways of being in the world and in our relationships that ultimately don't serve us. And we find that in midlife, we are most inclined to change those ways of relating to people. And it's all well and good for us to do that. I mean, it's hard, but we can. But then we get that pushback and it creates conflict. And we start questioning whether we're being unreasonable or selfish or any of those kinds of things that women have been taught to think about themselves if they ever actually prioritise an egalitarian kind of household and things. So that is definitely. you know, changing our patterns of being in the world and relating to others. This is a prime decade or two where we want to do that. We need to do that, but it's not easy even for our own belief systems. We come up against our messaging and our socialisation, let alone from the family around us. So yeah, you're absolutely speaking to something that I see all the time in the therapy room. Yeah.

Dr Lucy Burns (28:11) Yeah, it's interesting. What's that phrase? The people who will push back on your new boundaries are the people that were most affected. Yeah, most, yeah, benefited when you didn't have any.

Kirstin Bouse (28:3423Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a Brené Brown quote. Wise woman. Yeah.

Dr Lucy Burns (28:29) Yeah, she is. She is. And the other thing I would always say to women is that you know, again, if you're just learning to establish boundaries, whenever we're learning at anything, we're awkward, we're not very good at it, we're not sure if we're doing it right. And so it's always just, it's just practice. And you just keep practicing and over time, you get better at it. And you know, for us, we see women who. Again, this is a comment, this would have to be one of the most common things we have to troubleshoot, which is when people, don't want to eat something that someone else has prepared or brought or made or suggested they should eat. They don't want to, for whatever reason, they just don't want to. And they don't know how to say no. And it's so interesting. You know, they're worried that they'll offend the other person. So they just eat it anyway. And it's like, even if for I guess the consequence, if they had anaphylaxis, they wouldn't do it because the consequence is too great. But the other thing is just, well. And so teaching people kind assertive, kind but assertive skills. Yeah, I mean, it's a skill, isn't it? That's all it is.

Kirstin Bouse (29:44) It's definitely a skill and the skill is born from, I guess, a belief that you matter, that you are worthy of being able to say no, thank you. And I think that's actually kind of far more the root of the problem because I do think our socialisation is around, we can only say no if it's not going to inconvenience someone else or it's not going to hurt someone else's feelings. Like our priority is to keep things smooth, that's our role. Keep them all happy. If there's a pie or a cake, we get to have a piece. If nobody else wants that last piece, then we get to have it. We're not actually taught to say, well, hang on a minute. We have as much right to a piece of that cake. So we're just gonna split it however many ways, including us in the number. I know that's a really concrete example, but I think that is the challenge. we need to really, really challenge the socialising that has occurred, the messaging that we've just kind of taken on board. And sometimes I find it's at this stage of life that women actually for the first time really realise what they've taken on board. And because they're just, this is the stuff that pisses them off to be blunt. This is stuff that suddenly they're getting a reaction to which I know can be extreme, I've got a really good family story about one of my really extreme responses during this stage, not the most ideal response. But finally, we've got some barometer within us during these years, these decades where it's like, yeah, that's not cool. And we haven't necessarily done that before. And I've heard people refer to this as the oestrogen veil being lifted though with oestrogen being our hormone of accommodation and servitude and with it declining, we're less inclined to accommodate and serve. And I think that's something we can harness in such a positive way. And this is what gives us the drive to start learning how to set boundaries and things.

Dr Lucy Burns (31:59) Yeah, absolutely. And this is often I talk about, you know, things like this is a skill shortage, stress management for a lot of people, it's just a skill shortage. They haven't learned the tools that you need to either manage the internal system that you've got your internal, you know, where you react your reactivity, or to be able to set those boundaries to therefore stop external stressors encroaching in.

Kirstin Bouse (32:27) Yeah, yeah, it needs to go in the diary and be stuck too. And I think, you know, looking after ourselves often is the afterthought. If it fits in, well, it's never gonna fit in because life is busy. And they're the kind of changes that really need to be made. And as I said, it might start tongues wagging, and it might kind of upset the apple cart a bit at home, but the cost of not doing it is very great very, very great. I kind of was interviewed by a lovely journalist who I met at a conference last year around why are separations and divorces on the rise during midlife. There were a lot of things to say about that. But one of them is that you know, if women do tend to start speaking up at this kind of stage of life and if their partners kind of can't evolve with them and accommodate that evolution, then you know, it's not necessarily a great end result. So yeah, men need to do the program.

Dr Lucy Burns (33:33) Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. And women need to stop giving themselves the drinks of the low carb coffee. It's you're allowed to have the cream on top. Absolutely. This is it. Yeah. Well, Kirstin, this has been delightful. I think that it's your passion and enthusiasm is palpable. I can, I can, you can almost come through the screen, which I love. I think that, you know, women need champions and you are clearly one of those. So. Thank you for the work that you're doing. If people want to connect with you, how do they find you?

Kirstin Bouse (34:07) Yeah, so I guess there's a number of ways. Probably the easiest would be www.allabouthercentre.com.au, the website. But then of course, Instagram, you know, we seem to all be on Instagram, you can find all about her centre on Instagram under that phrase. And you can also find me more personally under the midlife psychologist and each word has kind of underscores between them. So yeah, people can definitely reach out through those avenues. If you've got LinkedIn, fans then I'm on LinkedIn under my own name so people can find me there.

Dr Lucy Burns (34:41) Excellent. And I'll have all of those links in the show notes anyway, for anybody who wants to pop in later and connect. Wonderful. Gorgeous one. I think, look, the more conversations we have around midlife, around women, around women transitioning and stepping, I know this sounds so wanky, but stepping into their power, but really at least moving from being feeling downtrodden, the Cinderella of the world, and actually just being that powerful Wonder Woman that you will like.

Kirstin Bouse (35:13) Yeah, we are glorious. I'm going to steal the hashtag if I can. Love it.

Dr Lucy Burns (35:16) Indeed. Good. Let's make a movement. I know we are. All right darling thank you so much for your time. Gorgeous people, I will see you next week with another expert in our menopause series. Until then see you later.

Dr Lucy Burns (35:30) The information shared on the Real Health and Weight Loss Podcast, including show notes and links, provides general information only. It is not a substitute, nor is it intended to provide individualised medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, nor can it be construed as such. Please consult your doctor for any medical concerns.

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