Grounding in groundlessness, being the change: an existential phenomenological exploration into the embodied experience of postmenopause

What is it like to be being postmenopausal? Menopause is a signifier of ageing, a wake-up call to mortality. Given the physical elements of the transition, including the reversion to infertility, postmenopause is a dynamic, embodied experience that is harder to ignore than many signs of ageing.

While contemporary research largely focuses on perimenopausal and menopausal symptomology, postmenopause receives less attention, despite lasting around a third of our lives for most women and some gender-expansive people. The menopause transition is a bio-psycho-socio-cultural phenomenon, yet the prevailing narrative follows a biomedical model which understands the ageing body as a failing organism.
Using the definition of standard menopause as a common ground, this qualitative study explores the embodied experience of postmenopause among diverse UK-based participants aged 55-69. Unstructured interviews allowed the participants to lead the conversation, revealing what mattered to them in postmenopause. The findings report personal and social difficulties, problematic symptomology, external and internalized ageism and misogyny.

Simultaneously, they also experienced postmenopause as the beginning of a release from socio-cultural strictures, a clearing space from which to move forward on their own terms. This thesis shares their postmenopausal experience in both formal analysis and found poetry, consistent with hermeneutic phenomenological methodology. Three overall themes are explored: the shock of change, living with change, making meaning in ongoing change. These themes highlight the existential elements of involuntary transition, embodied experience, loss of control, groundlessness – and the possibility of making meaning within what is.

This study confirms our embodiment as the site where experience and understanding connect. It delves into postmenopause as emergence – a physically and emotionally experienced dynamic transition in which living-towards-death is highlighted in embodied experience. Whatever our gender or age, there is existential awareness, untapped knowledge, and possibility in exploring the holistic experience of postmenopause as it is lived.