When Women’s Health Affects Mental and Emotional Wellbeing

Many women come to therapy carrying health & body-related experiences that have never been fully named, understood, or taken seriously.

Menstrual and hormonal changes, pelvic pain, fertility challenges, perimenopause, menopause, or chronic health conditions often shape daily life in profound ways — yet the emotional and psychological impact of these experiences is frequently minimised, misunderstood, or framed as something women should simply “cope with.”

My work is grounded in the understanding that these struggles are not personal failings, character flaws, or signs of psychological weakness. They are deeply human responses to living in bodies that are shaped by biology, culture, medicine, power, and inequality, and I wholeheartedly believe that all woman need & deserve emotional support with these experiences.

Beyond “Symptoms”: Listening to the Whole Experience

Women’s health concerns are often discussed in narrow medical terms: symptoms, diagnoses, treatment pathways. While medical care can be vital, it rarely tells the whole story.

Experiences such as these do not occur in isolation, but are often talked about as if they do:

• PMS or PMDD

• Endometriosis or persistent pelvic pain

• Pelvic floor symptoms

• Fertility and reproductive challenges

• Perimenopause and menopause

• Living with chronic, invisible, or poorly understood conditions

  
  

These experiences intersect with identity, relationships, work, caregiving roles, trauma histories, cultural expectations, and experiences of being believed - or dismissed - by professionals and loved ones.

Therapy can offer a space where your emotional reality matters, whether your pain has been taken seriously by the medical realm, or whether your pain has been questioned, normalised away, or left untreated for years.

This blog sets out the frameworks I most commonly use, to support women with these experiences, throughout the lifespan.

A Non-Pathologising, Compassion-Focused Approach

Many women I work with have internalised the message that they are “too sensitive,” “overreacting,” or “difficult.” Others have learned to disconnect from their bodies entirely in order to keep functioning.

My approach is not about diagnosing what is “wrong” with you. Instead, we might explore:

• How your body has learned to respond to stress, pain, and threat

• What it has cost you to keep going while unwell or unsupported

• How shame, self-blame, or self-silencing may have developed as protective strategies

• What your emotional responses are communicating about unmet needs, losses, or boundaries

From a compassion-focused perspective, distress is understood as meaningful and understandable - something that can be worked with, with compassion & curiosity - not something to be eradicated through control & treatment.

Trauma-Informed and Relational Care

For many women, encounters with healthcare systems, workplaces, or intimate relationships have been invalidating or even traumatic. Being dismissed, disbelieved, told that pain is “normal”, or even being believed but needing to wait years for medical treatemen, can all have lasting psychological effects.

Working with a therapist in a trauma-informed way means:

• Moving at a pace that feels safe for you

• Prioritising choice, collaboration, and consent

• Recognising how past experiences may shape your relationship with your body and with support

• Understanding that avoidance, numbness, or hypervigilance often develop for good reasons

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Therapy is a relational process. The quality of the therapeutic relationship itself - being listened to, respected, and taken seriously - can be deeply reparative.

An Intersectional Feminist Lens

Women’s experiences of health and healthcare are not universal. Race, class, disability, neurodivergence, sexuality, gender identity, immigration status, and body size all shape whose pain is recognised and whose is ignored.

An intersectional feminist lens acknowledges that:

• Medical knowledge has historically been built around male bodies

• Women and marginalised genders are more likely to have symptoms psychologised or minimised

• Structural inequalities influence access to diagnosis, treatment, and rest

• “Resilience” is often demanded of those who have the least support

Therapy can be a place to name anger, grief, and injustice — not as signs of pathology, but as valid responses to lived experience.

What Therapy Might Offer

People seek support for many different reasons. You might want:

• Space to process grief, loss, or identity shifts linked to health changes

• Support with anxiety, low mood, or emotional overwhelm

• Help rebuilding trust in your body after pain, medical trauma, or reproductive challenges

• A place where you don’t have to explain or justify your experience

• Support navigating relationships, work, or caregiving alongside health difficulties

There is no single “right” focus. Therapy can hold both practical coping and deeper emotional exploration, shaped around what matters to you.

Honouring Your Experience

Living with women’s health concerns can change how you see yourself, your body, your future, and your place in the world. These changes deserve attention, care, and respect.

My role is not to tell you how you should feel, but to walk alongside you as you make sense of what you have been through, and what you are going through - and how you want to move forward, on your own terms.

If you’re considering therapy, you don’t need to have everything neatly articulated. Curiosity, uncertainty, and ambivalence are all welcome starting points.

You can make the first step towards being compassionately supported, to begin to heal your relationship with your body, by clicking here.

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I'm Dr. Jenny Turner, Clinical Psychologist, Mum, late-in-life-self-identifying AuDHD human, and founder of Mind Body Soul Psychology - a specialist, trauma-informed, private psychology service for women.

I can help you at any stage of your life journey - whether you need support to enter adulthood, navigate perimenopause, heal from trauma, finally transform your relationship to your own body, anxieties, shame, guilt, rage and/or overwhelm - I can support you to enrich your life & relationships.

My services are trauma-informed, non-pathologising, compassion-focussed, neuroaffirmative, and always offered through an intersectional feminist lens - most people I work with identify as a woman, but my services are trans & non-binary inclusive.

I offer online appointments to women based all over the UK, and I offer in-person appointments in Ripon, North Yorkshire - click here to find out more: www.mindbodysoulpsychology.co.uk

You might also like to follow me on Instagram, @drjennypsychologist , or perhaps you'd like to receive regular doses of solidarity and compassion right into your inbox? If so, you can sign up here to my Substack newsletter for regular moments of solidarity in the challenges of being a woman in this patriarchal world, as well as compassion & inspirations for guilt-free self-care - so we can all stay resourced for the experiences we're navigating, and fights we're facing.