The story beneath the symptoms: exploring how menopause can stir attachment themes around safety, shame, identity, intimacy and the need for care.

Menopause can bring clients into therapy with anxiety, low mood, changes in confidence, relationship difficulties, sexual concerns, shame, anger, grief or a sudden sense that they no longer feel like themselves.

This one-hour online CPD workshop explores menopause through an attachment lens, helping counsellors, psychotherapists, supervisors and trainees understand the emotional story beneath the symptoms. While menopause is often spoken about in terms of hormones, hot flushes and treatment options, many clients are also navigating deeper questions around safety, identity, intimacy, ageing, visibility, sexuality and the need for care.

We will begin by considering menopause as a biopsychosocial and relational transition, not simply a physical event. We will then explore how attachment patterns may shape the way clients experience, manage and communicate what is happening to them. Some clients may become anxious, preoccupied or fearful of rejection. Others may minimise, withdraw, push through or struggle to ask for help. For clients with trauma histories, bodily change may feel especially destabilising, activating fear, shame or a loss of control.

Finally, we will think about how therapy can offer a secure base where menopause can be spoken about with curiosity, dignity and compassion.

You will leave with a clearer way of recognising how attachment fears may be stirred during menopause, and practical reflective questions to help clients make sense of this transition without reducing their experience to symptoms alone.

Led by Jo Oxley, attachment-focused psychotherapist, supervisor and trainer, this workshop offers a thoughtful and clinically useful space for practitioners who want to deepen their understanding of menopause, attachment and the changing self.

Description supplied by the event organiser.