176 Understanding Hormonal Sensitivity in Women with Paula Rastrick

Join me and Paula Rastrick in our candid conversation about understanding hormonal sensitivity in women. You may know Paula from the recent Panorama documentary, The Menopause Industry Uncovered. Well, today she shares the FULL story plus why she is passionate about people in the menopause profession becoming more trauma-informed.

We talk about:

🌱 Personal Experience with Menopause, HRT and Hormonal Sensitivity

🌱 The Impact of Hormonal Treatments

🌱 Navigating Depression and Recovery

🌱 Understanding the Limitations of Biomedical Models

🌱 The Impact of Early Life Experiences on Neurodevelopment

🌱 The Connection Between Stress and Health

🌱 Exploring Hormonal Sensitivity and Its Implications

🌱 Understanding Inflammation and Its Impact on Health

🌱 The Role of Early Interventions in Mental Health

🌱 Nervous System Dysregulation and Women's Health

🌱 The Importance of Understanding Reproductive Phases and How Trauma Affect Them. 

🌱 Processing Trauma and Healing Modalities

🌱 Creating a Trauma-Informed Community for Women

So if you’re ready to go deep, tune in now.

Paula’s Links:

Website: www.thebrainbodymethod.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mrspaularastrick/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paula-rastrick-026a0b9b/

Sally's Links:

[Free Guide] Healing The Trauma Underlying Your Menopause Symptom Severity:  https://www.sallygarozzo.com/healingtraumatheguide 

Menopause Wellbeing Practitioner [£127] https://www.sallygarozzo.com/meno

Cold Water Therapy Practitioner [£127] https://www.sallygarozzo.com/cold

Transformational 30 Day Rewire (Includes RTT) [£447]: https://www.sallygarozzo.com/rapid-transformational-therapist

Transformational Trauma Informed Coaching [From £247]:  https://www.sallygarozzo.com/transformational-coaching 

Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/sallygarozzomindmentor

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallygarozzo/

Send me a voice clip via What’s App - https://wa.me/message/FTARBMO7CRLEL1

Transcript

Sally (00:01.102)
So my guest today is Paula Rastrick. Paula is a trauma therapist, an EMDR therapist, and she has a postgraduate certificate in psychological trauma. She's also a complex trauma survivor herself. She's neurodivergent and a highly sensitive person with a special interest in hormonal sensitivity, including the menopause transition. Now you might know Paula from the recent Panorama documentary, The Menopause Industry Uncovered.

where certain clients of the Newsome Health Clinic came out about the harm that was done to them from the overprescribing of estrogen without informed consent. Paula was one of those people and has been incredibly vocal since the documentary about what happened to her. Many people have been calling it a witch hunt without fully taking the time to understand the victims' perspectives. Well, today Paula is here with us and she's going to be sharing her story.

And also she's going to be sharing why some women are more hormonally sensitive so that we the listeners can get a better understanding of this issue. So Paula, what a pleasure it is to have you on the podcast today. How are you doing?

Paula Rasrick (01:11.353)
Good, thank you for having me and letting me share my story. Thank you.

Sally (01:17.392)
I'm so pleased. And I do want to say thank you to you because all of the insights that you have and how you've synergized all of these different areas really is, I think, quite cutting edge, actually, especially for women's health. And I do think that the people listening to this are going to get a very, very different insight into the menopause transition after hearing what you've got to say. So.

Without further ado, I would like to invite you to start with your story of your own personal menopause transition and how it has led to these deeper understandings that you have about menopause trauma and these sensitivities.

Paula Rasrick (01:46.959)
Hmm.

Good.

Paula Rasrick (01:57.315)
Yeah, okay. So my story started back in 2017. So it started because at the time I was running a business with my husband, there was a lot of stress, there was a lot of things going on. We'd just left careers in professional football and we'd started a business together. things were very successful, but extremely busy. And then I started to feel, you know, that I wasn't coping.

I was starting to feel that my anxiety was becoming heightened. I wasn't sleeping. back in 2017, the menopause was not mainstream. So I'd like to just kind of point that out. And then one of my friends said to me, do know, you could be perimenopausal. So I was 45 and I just said, don't, whatever, you know, I just need to keep going. We've got this business. Things are, I'm drowning. That's how, and that is exactly how I would describe it. I am drowning. It felt like I was going under, coming back up for air.

Sally (02:33.582)
Mm.

Paula Rasrick (02:53.061)
Coping, coping, because I've always been a high functioning, high masking, kind of high achieving type of female. And I think that's one of the things that I'm gonna be talking about because I firmly believe that a lot of us have been high masking for a number of years. We're now starting to understand the brain and the nervous system in terms of females' mental health. So my friend said to me, you might be perimenopausal. And I just said, just whatever, I need to fix.

it. So she said to me there's a local specialist who is working at Spire Hospital and there's no point in not being transparent it was Louise Newson. So I went to see her she was on her own at that point as she before Newson Health and she prescribed me HRT and what happened was she started the prescription was for 100 mcg estrogen patch okay and then I was put on cyclical progesterone

Sally (03:23.374)
Yeah.

Sally (03:52.782)
Okay.

Paula Rasrick (03:53.185)
So the progesterone ratio was just cyclical and off I trotted. To cut a very, very long story short, in the three months I started to spiral, things became worse, not better. So I went back after the three months and I said, I'm not, my anxiety was increasing. In fact, I was starting to have rage. I was starting to get that hyper arousal, like a trauma response that's being pushed down, your nervous system's kind of like erupting.

Sally (04:04.534)
Okay.

Sally (04:17.272)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (04:21.571)
And instead of being able to control it and actually mask it and push it down, it's now becoming so kind of frequent that you're kind of living in a high state of, I would say, hyper arousal. Does that make sense? Yeah. And I've always been hyper vigilant because of my background.

Sally (04:33.644)
Like high alert, yeah, yeah. Right, so the estrogen was making you more hypervigilant basically, like putting you into that fight flight mode. Okay. No.

Paula Rasrick (04:42.917)
Yeah, 100%, 100%. But I didn't know that at the time because I didn't know anything about this. So after three months went back, I said, I'm not feeling good. I'm not feeling good. And things were deteriorating. At this point, I was then prescribed double. So my estrogen was doubled. So it went from 100 to 200. And then testosterone was added in.

Sally (05:11.415)
Okay.

Paula Rasrick (05:12.047)
But my progesterone stayed the same. And this is the point that really is the concerns that are being raised is about the ratios of higher estrogen to lower progesterone. Okay. So I want to make that clear because some people are saying, well, I need higher estrogen. That's not what the safety issues are about. They're about the unopposed levels of estrogen and the potential risks to that type of prescribing because we don't have safety data for that.

Sally (05:25.55)
Mm.

Sally (05:41.838)
Okay. Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (05:42.981)
Does that make sense? We don't have the safety data. So you're going into an area that is unresearched. So we don't know.

Sally (05:50.656)
No, and it's kind of guesswork and it's, you're claiming that it's some women are not absorbing estrogen, okay? So I've heard this a lot. Some women don't absorb estrogen well enough through the skin. And I'm like, how can you even tell? How can you tell?

Paula Rasrick (05:59.332)
Right.

Paula Rasrick (06:02.789)
Well, okay, so there is an issue with that and I wasn't going to sort of, well, you can't, you can't tell. So there are no blood tests to tell you how well you are absorbing estrogen because we don't know how much of it's in the tissues. We don't know how much gets stored in the tissues. There's no blood test to tell you how much crosses the blood brain barrier either. So you don't know how much you're putting into the nervous system. So in actual fact,

Sally (06:13.55)
Okay.

Sally (06:19.82)
Mm-hmm.

Paula Rasrick (06:31.717)
There is not one single test that will tell you about absorption. And so the only way to know or to suggest that absorption is an issue is to go by what the brain and the body is telling you, right? So the information is going to come back. Yeah, it's going to come back, isn't it? Because your brain and your body, like it did with me, is going to tell you, I don't like this or...

Sally (06:49.912)
So the symptoms, the feelings, okay.

Paula Rasrick (07:01.145)
I like this. And I think one of the things we could probably talk all day about is that estrogen is a stimulant. So it's an excitatory hormone, right? And so when it comes to women like me, hormonally sensitive, we already have higher ratios of estrogen. And this is where I've done the work tracing it back to the womb. And this is where the higher ratios of estrogen, forget HRT, in the research on hormonal sensitivity,

Sally (07:09.954)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (07:27.757)
women in their cycles in the higher estrogen phase of their cycles are more prone to addiction, more prone to binge eating, more prone to OCD, more prone to... So it's the ratios between excitatory chemicals and inhibitory chemicals, right? So ratios are like mine, I'm already here and then you say to me, let's give you more excitatory...

Sally (07:43.204)
Yeah.

Sally (07:50.146)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (07:57.165)
hormones bearing in mind that in perimenopause, estrogen can be three times higher anyway and guess what happens to progesterone? It falls off a cliff. So in my opinion based on the research that I've done, giving somebody like me of my profile supraphysiological doses of estrogen and testosterone is not scientifically correct. Does that make sense?

Sally (08:06.584)
Yeah.

Sally (08:23.182)
mmm it makes perfect sense. So what happened then after that so you felt awful you went back you got more estrogen and unopposed progesterone then what happened? You must have felt awful.

Paula Rasrick (08:34.627)
Yeah. And the testosterone. mean, the thing is it sounds ridiculous now when I look back because I think to myself, well, you know, all the information I now know of the research, but at the time I just was trying to survive, right? My marriage was falling to bits. I've got a business, you know, it's a big business. You know, we're trying to just keep going, keep going. And because I've always done that, you know, in all my trauma history of right, get back up, keep going, keep going, keep going.

Sally (09:02.038)
your pattern.

Paula Rasrick (09:03.267)
That's the pattern of behavior for a lot of high functioning, anxious women, right? That's what they do, you know, or I'll mask it with alcohol or I'll do, I mean, this is my history and my story that's in my book, you know, and substance abuse. And, you know, I've done the whole lot without realizing that that's what I've done, if that makes sense. You know, when I look back, my, everything, you know, so, so of course,

Sally (09:05.016)
Yeah.

Sally (09:10.03)
trauma survivors, yeah.

Sally (09:15.896)
Yeah.

Sally (09:21.367)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

So in a way, was like the more estrogen, was that kind of making sense to you? yeah, more, because it's more, more, more, like in your mind.

Paula Rasrick (09:35.225)
Yeah, it's like, because I'm, yeah, so used to that sort of type of like, right, okay, this isn't working, take more. So it wasn't alien to me. It wasn't like I was thinking, stop. And because I was so trying to survive, I'm in fight flight anyway. So I'm already in a state of high fight flight, which is your ADHD, which is your audit. You know, we're all in this kind of like higher state of arousal.

Sally (09:43.946)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sally (09:52.46)
Yeah.

Sally (09:57.74)
Yeah.

Sally (10:04.227)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (10:04.427)
that makes sense. We operate in that state which is why we then end up having burnout and we end up kind of going back down the ladder, back up the ladder quick, snakes and ladders. But when you get to perimenopause because of that type of pattern that you've had all your life right which you've kind of masked with lots of different things you know eating, substance abuse, anything right to keep yourself calm because that's essentially what you're trying to do you're trying to self soothe.

Sally (10:11.736)
Yeah.

Sally (10:15.116)
Yeah.

Sally (10:27.875)
Mm-hmm.

Paula Rasrick (10:33.941)
to self-regulate but you don't know that. So you know when you think about then right I've got estrogen I don't know anything about it but then I'm already in this heightened state of hyper arousal.

Sally (10:46.584)
presumably you trusted her because she's a doctor and you're... no.

Paula Rasrick (10:49.721)
I never questioned it. I didn't question it because also it was never ever discussed that it was off-license doses. So I had no idea. Now I know all about off-license doses, but I didn't then. I was just like, yeah, yeah, whatever. I just need to keep going. I'm not well. And I wasn't well. And then things really deteriorated. And it really was a sort of process rather than a

Sally (11:04.77)
Yeah.

Sally (11:12.215)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (11:19.285)
one event but a process over time. The rage, the anger, the aggression. Because bearing in mind I'm now having testosterone as well. And this is a really poorly understood, this is really poorly understood because your hormones interact with the environment you're in. So if you think about it, if we just take, you know, just basics, right? If you're a man,

Sally (11:23.63)
Yeah.

Sally (11:30.574)
Yeah, it made me really angry that...

Paula Rasrick (11:45.399)
We've all got the same hormones, males and females, right? We know that now. But say you're a man and you're watching, I don't know, England play and England are losing and you're sitting with loads of men and you're having a drink and they're losing and your testosterone is starting to get few. We know that rates of domestic violence increase, right? Because of the environmental stimulus and external environment impacting rage, anger.

Sally (12:05.581)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (12:14.237)
You know, that's what our hormones are there for they're there to survive, you know so testosterone is a hormone that is an activating hormone because On one hand you're going to need testosterone to get those muscles to contract to run away To sharpen your focus to get away from the you know, the tiger whatever on the other hand testosterone is also an inhibitory chemical because it's also prosocial so it's like testosterone for connection

Sally (12:32.579)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (12:43.393)
sexual connection. All of our hormones in our brain and nervous system are designed for connection and reproduction and behavioural outcomes in order to make sure that we survive and we reproduce. So if you add testosterone into a system that's already in fight flight and we don't know how much of that testosterone converts

Sally (12:52.43)
Hmm.

Sally (12:58.444)
sure yeah yeah that's what they're there for

Sally (13:07.747)
Mm-hmm.

Paula Rasrick (13:12.751)
to estrogen as well, because estrogen is a metabolite of testosterone. so you don't, you you're just adding more petrol into the fire. That's the best way to describe it. And things became really, really, really bad. And in the end, I had to move out of my home and I had to leave my son. And the reason I say that is because I came from a very abusive childhood.

Sally (13:14.274)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (13:18.595)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (13:23.227)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (13:41.593)
and there was no way on earth I wanted my son who was 10 to see me in the state that I was in and the arguments with my husband and the ferocious rouse and the aggression and at same time trying to keep a business going and trying to, you know, so you just have this huge melting pot of stress and then you've just poured in like a bonfire and then you've just gone, right, let's add more petrol in and set light to it.

Sally (14:01.932)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sally (14:10.626)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (14:11.181)
And then I started to bleed. And this was over a long period of time. My body was so inflamed. I've still got pictures of the inflammation all over my face because I started to bleed. And then that started to then flood. And then that started to then become, it was horrendous. It was just horrendous. It was uncontrollable. So of course then,

Sally (14:32.738)
Right.

Paula Rasrick (14:40.325)
I'm losing this blood and then I'm, and everything's, you know, I've moved out of home. I'm trying to keep surviving. The long and short of it is I ended up in a place mentally where I felt I, I, I couldn't continue. I was, I was going to end my life. Yeah. And that was a, an experience. I've had some hard times in my life, but this was an experience where I completely disassociated.

Sally (14:53.986)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (15:09.219)
I had no brain power left to actually get myself out of that hole. And because I've always done it, that feeling of not having no answers left, just nothingness was really quite alien to me and really quite, yeah, does that? Yeah, because I'm always somebody that's like, okay, let's, right.

Sally (15:17.24)
Yeah.

Sally (15:22.147)
Yeah.

Sally (15:31.002)
That empty, empty space.

Sally (15:37.034)
The fixer. Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (15:37.349)
Come on, okay, get it together. You know, because that's what you do all your life, isn't it? And then, and then I think what, well, there's lots of scientific reasons, but you, your resilience, your window of tolerance, yeah, your resilience, your stress resilience in perimenopause. Because of that, I believe from the research I've done, the drop in progesterone first and GABA and allopregnalin is what then dysregulates your stress response even more.

Sally (15:59.555)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (16:06.508)
Yeah. Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (16:07.385)
which is why trauma comes back up. Because PTSD, because I ended up with PTSD because it re-triggered because I had to have various cancer scans and then a hysteroscopy. And I have, I had no idea what a hysteroscopy was. It was brutal. mean, yeah. And there's no anesthetic.

Sally (16:25.097)
when they put a camera inside the uterus yeah okay yeah okay

Paula Rasrick (16:32.121)
And it re-triggered because of my sexual abuse when I was younger. So it re-triggered trauma. So, you know, it was a whole cascade of events that culminated into this kind of, you know, what I would call this point of just...

Sally (16:36.355)
Yeah.

Sally (16:47.906)
Yeah. So you were deep in this void, this dark void without feeling that you had the tools or the resilience to prize yourself out. were essentially alone. Now what happened? I mean, there must've been a turning point or, you know, a very, very slow turning point.

Paula Rasrick (17:05.901)
Yeah, there was that point. So that point there, that pivotal point, is which is where I start with in my book, actually, that pivotal point of of of just nothing left, nothing, no energy, you know, just nothing left, nothing left in the tank anymore. Right. That was that was saved by my son. But then what happened after that was. I carried on, but then I went into depression.

Sally (17:23.042)
Yeah.

Sally (17:27.768)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (17:35.641)
So instead of being in the high functioning hyper aroused aroused state, because the system had burnt out, there was nothing left. The only way left to go is into depression and into that shutdown state, isn't it? Because the system will always, always shut down in order to survive energy, right? The brain is very, the brain knows, the nervous system knows, right? We're gonna close everything down. So we're gonna preserve that energy because you haven't got anything left in the tank.

Sally (17:40.93)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Sally (17:50.102)
Yeah, yeah.

Sally (17:58.636)
Yeah.

Sally (18:04.726)
Yeah, so it's preserving it for your vital, you know, your heartbeat and your brain. It's essentially all it really cares about is just, yeah.

Paula Rasrick (18:04.931)
So I then sank into depression for survival. Yeah. That's what that flat state is. that, you know, very low arousal depression is due to the fact that you're and the, you know, the receptors in the brain, that's another thing as well is if you keep putting too much estrogen or any chemical or any substance and you keep putting it into the nervous system, eventually the receptors will just switch off because they, because

Sally (18:16.238)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (18:31.241)
Okay.

Paula Rasrick (18:33.517)
the system's running on too much heat, right? So then one of my arguments about absorption is, well, actually, how do you know that the brain is saying enough, enough, and we're shutting those receptors off, right? And instead of recognising that actually it's too high, you're having to take more to get the same high, which is just the same as you do when you take cocaine, or it's the same process. that, so, you know, so the...

Sally (18:35.982)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (18:59.545)
Yeah. You get resistant to it in a way. Is that what you're saying?

Paula Rasrick (19:04.271)
Well, yeah, well, otherwise, yeah, well, I mean, it's a stimulant. what goes up must come down at some point. You can't just keep going up and up and up and up. And the brain and nervous system works on the balance of homeostasis. So you've got excitatory E-I balance. So too much E, too much excitatory chemicals and too much tone up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, the system will eventually at some point go, no, resist, resist.

Sally (19:08.594)
Mmm. Mmm, mmm.

Sally (19:15.054)
Yeah, yeah.

Sally (19:19.235)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (19:34.105)
So what are you gonna do? Are you gonna keep pushing higher? And this is where I think we're just not understanding the way the nervous system actually works with the hormones, our sex hormones. So essentially then I went into depression. So they put me on antidepressants and then they had to wean me off the estrogen. it's a stimulant, there's a withdrawal process. You can't just stop. So you have to go through withdrawal.

Sally (19:36.59)
Mmm.

Sally (19:43.95)
Yeah.

Sally (19:53.486)
Okay.

Sally (19:58.008)
You can just come off it.

Paula Rasrick (20:04.195)
And I've spoken to other women and that withdrawal process is not pleasant. And high amounts for my system, right? So this is the thing about EI balance. It's like, where's your ratios? If your ratio is estrogen, glutamate, adrenaline, cortisol, know, high, and then you're low in inhibitory tone, that depending on that window of tolerance, it's, you know, going to be individual. But for me,

Sally (20:11.354)
Especially on such high amounts as well.

Yeah.

Sally (20:31.96)
Yeah, yeah.

Paula Rasrick (20:32.867)
Yeah, way, way, way, way, you know, way too high. So I ended up then being on antidepressants and then having to come down off the estrogen. And then that's when a very long process, we're talking a long process. And then that brings me to COVID and then COVID happened and we closed our business. And that's when I started to really sort of think, what the hell?

happened there. And that, because of the way my brain is, because of that, there's a mixture of things. the kind of like, again, it's a different ADHD, autism, highly sensitive people, there's crossovers, right? You can't distinguish this. This is why, you know, when we look at kind of neuro complexity, or you can be a flavour of, that's why they're

Sally (21:04.514)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sally (21:28.43)
Mmm.

Paula Rasrick (21:31.237)
know, AUDHT, we are running on flavors and spectrums, right? Based on how your nervous system develops and your environmental influences, starting from the womb, how your nervous system, your attachment, your, you think about it. We are very complex human beings and our sex hormones are simply part of a big dynamic system.

Sally (21:36.768)
I love that.

Paula Rasrick (21:58.979)
So to kind of just isolate it and go, whoa, estrogen deficiency is really, in my opinion, just such a very narrow, narrow lens to look at a human being.

Sally (22:03.171)
Hmm.

Sally (22:12.608)
Yeah, really, it really is. It's really quite reductive, isn't it? And especially when you, when you take the time to understand fully what people's histories are. And this is why I can't get my head around why, why it's not being taken into consideration, you know, in a lot of doctors, a lot of the medical sphere, is that sort of narrow bandwidth of thinking when they themselves know that they've got a history and they respond to things differently.

I can't quite get my head around it.

Paula Rasrick (22:42.339)
Yeah, think I talk about this in the book because the book that I've written, if you're trained in the biomedical model, I mean, I go into quite a lot about the DSM and I go into quite a lot about, I mean, I am not a fan of diagnostic labelling. I think it does a great disservice to understanding, like, you know, to put someone in a box and say, you know, tick, you've got three ticks and you are bipolar.

Sally (22:52.461)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (23:01.333)
Okay.

Paula Rasrick (23:11.685)
or you when you actually look at the nervous system, which is what I've done in the book and I've Collected all of these diagnosis and said they're all representing the same thing, right? It's all but then we label somebody and we say to them, you know, especially women, you know, you're bipolar and that's a disorder and I don't like that Disorder label. It's like, you know ADHD disorder, you know

Sally (23:30.274)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (23:40.061)
I don't understand how the DSM, I know we have to categorise things and it's helpful, right, in a way to say, I'd like a diagnosis or I'd like a label or I'd like an identification. I understand that. But I think what we're going to find in years to come, bold statement, not that far, is that you're going to find that actually pretty much everyone is on spectrums of neurodiversity and there is no neurotypical brain. Because I think where we've gone wrong is we're saying there's a neurotypical brain.

Sally (23:50.317)
Yeah.

Sally (24:03.767)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (24:09.827)
And anyone outside of that framework, whatever that is, has a disorder. It's not, and unfortunately the kind of medical, the biomedical model of disease and illness, that's how it works. It's very much like, well, you, like a car, you know, your engine is not working. We have to give you something. We're going to label you this and here is the meds. And I think that psychiatry,

Sally (24:15.542)
Yeah, it just doesn't seem right, does it?

Paula Rasrick (24:38.873)
I'm not dissing psychiatry, but I'm just saying that because it's very medical label, you know, it's very medical based instead of actually thinking, well, why is this person's nervous system and their behaviour dysregulated? And I think you'll find it's due to either psychological trauma, things that have happened, particularly in childhood, which sets that foundation of behaviour.

and neuropsychology. I think we need to change our focus. Well, one, in my opinion, we need to make things trauma informed because I think really and truly, I know I'm biased, but if you look and you think, right, where does this person's stress response come from? It's come from events that have happened to that person, right? It's not just because, it's not because, I'm estrogen deficient, for example.

Sally (25:31.395)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (25:36.029)
Do you see what I mean? Like it's far too, it's too complex. And I think that the more trauma informed we become and the less we focus on negative labeling, really, especially with women, know, she's nuts and it's bipolar. And actually I'm crossing bipolar ADHD. When you look at it all, they're all crossing over. So you could be a flavor of ADHD, a flavor of autistic, a flavor because of the way that

Sally (25:55.82)
Yeah, yeah, they're all in and out.

Paula Rasrick (26:04.395)
the neurotransmitters and the nervous system starts in fetal development.

Sally (26:09.782)
Mm, that's so interesting. And I hadn't heard of that really, about this, this in utero hormonal profile starting in you, you know, in the, as an embryo really. How, how does that, like, is that to do with what the, I guess it is like the mother stress level. Yeah, it must be.

Paula Rasrick (26:28.837)
There's multiple things because you could consider, okay, well, and there's lots of trains of thought. So I'm only doing this based on my story. So what I've done is I've taken my story and then put science to the story so that women can identify and say, that, know, but for example, if I give you an example, I mean, you can have trauma that's passed down now. We've seen that with the Holocaust. We've seen that with, so we'll leave that one.

Sally (26:42.37)
Yeah.

Sally (26:46.21)
That's me.

Sally (26:54.648)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (26:58.339)
Say my mum, right. So my mum, I had no relationship with my mum, no attachment bond, but I was the first born and my mum is married to my dad and my dad, I've gone backwards with this now, is ADHD, right? But we don't know it's ADHD at this point or his nervous system is, because I've done all the work of looking at, that pattern fits, right? But my dad's narcissistic. So my dad,

Sally (27:11.992)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (27:24.108)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (27:27.829)
all the patterns of behaviour that have gone back over of narcissism and understanding the crossovers that you can have. mean, we've got research that says all of these comorbidities can happen. You can be ADHD and highly sensitive. You can be ADHD and narcissistic. You know, they're all crossing over and that's what I've made a point of trying say. Yeah, because essentially it's all about self-survival. It's all about protection and survival. So

Sally (27:44.865)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (27:48.61)
Yeah, it's blended. It's like a blended profile, isn't it?

Sally (27:56.504)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (27:57.709)
If my dad, I didn't understand at the time, right? But my dad is psychologically and physically abusive and there's a comorbidity, co-concurring of alcoholism. Because substance abuse then comes in as well. So we're not realizing, you know, where does substance or alcoholism come from? It doesn't, it starts with, in my opinion, trauma. It starts, it's a masking, it's a survival strategy to either block out what you don't want to feel.

Sally (28:10.52)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (28:20.844)
Yes, the behavior.

Paula Rasrick (28:27.833)
right? Or you need to cope and these types of things so that's why there's these crossovers. So my dad is yeah abusive and has beaten my mum and I don't know if I don't know if I if my mum was beaten when I was in the womb but

Sally (28:30.114)
Mm-hmm.

Paula Rasrick (28:47.791)
Her stress and her psychological profile, let's just say that, is being fed through to me. So before I even enter the world through fetal programming, I'm receiving hormonal changes coming through from my mum. And it's fascinating really when you actually understand it because when you look at the research in fetal programming,

Sally (28:51.608)
Yeah.

Sally (29:07.81)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sally (29:12.683)
and

Paula Rasrick (29:17.059)
you start to understand, wow, now, then you can start to look at, okay, so how do those hereditary genes then switch on? So for example, I come out of the womb and I'm having a difficult birth. I was a four steps delivery, right? This is what my argument is about. We should be looking after mothers now in terms of understanding this, right? Because my mom's on her own. She's 21. My dad's out drinking. Her parents have disowned her.

because of the relationship with my dad, right? She has her first born, which is me, and it's a forceps. It's a difficult delivery, right? And I only know that because my mum and I didn't go on, but she did say to me, you're a very difficult, you know, I was always difficult. I still am. Right, basically, right, where my psyche comes in. I am then delivered and we've now got research that says that forceps delivery, early life stress, is called. So once you come out the womb, right,

depending on how you come into the world, right? Emergency cesarean, forceps, that is now also being linked to autism, ADHD. We're not understanding, because it's the nervous system, it's how that nervous system is starting to be shaped, And then depending on what happens after that, so maternal separation. You know, my mum, if your mum's depressed.

Sally (30:27.438)
Mmm.

Sally (30:36.45)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (30:44.963)
Like I had postnatal depression, I talk about that and my bond with my son and all of that. But if you're already depressed and then you're not bonding with your baby and you're not holding them and you're not giving them that co-regulation, that's not a blame thing. I'm just saying that because it happened to me. Then that nervous system is being starting to be shaped, that stress sensitivity, that and then it starts to chart all the way through. Does that make sense?

Sally (31:08.844)
Yeah, it's impossible to self-regulate, isn't it? When you haven't been co-regulated with properly from a very early age, you know, haven't had that skin-to-skin contact, that bond, you don't know what that warmth and that nurture...

Paula Rasrick (31:22.777)
warmth. Yeah, that warmth. always say that my mum and I never had an attachment bond. We never recovered from that. mean, throughout my whole life, both my parents died 59. So they both died aged 59. They were divorced by that point. And I don't want to kind of scare people, but one of the things I've looked at as well in my own life is my dad died of motor neurons disease.

Sally (31:36.351)
you

Paula Rasrick (31:48.534)
my granddad, his dad died of motor neurons disease. And so I've been looking at charting. what you've got to, we've got to start looking at is it starts with neurodevelopment. Then we've got the middle bit and then it ends with neurodegeneration.

Sally (31:58.724)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (32:03.274)
Mmm, mmm, mmm. Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (32:06.041)
Do you see what I mean? But it starts at the beginning. It doesn't start at, it's like my argument about menopause. It's like they've opened up the book and they've said, we're starting in the middle without understanding the story. We've got about 50 million chapters here and we've missed them out. We've gone straight into this bit. So when we actually start to look at it from a very early stage and then trace it through, you're starting to see how the nervous system and the stress sensitivity

Sally (32:15.459)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (32:34.691)
Because what we do know, right, is that stress sensitive, stress sensitivity, stress is the highest risk for any disease, anything.

Sally (32:46.636)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Sensitivity distress. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (32:49.827)
It's stress, right? And yet we're not understanding how the nervous system works to understand, well, what could I do to actually manage that stress? Because that's ultimately, the research tells us, that's why women with adverse childhood experiences, the research is there to say they have worse experience in perimenopathy, but it's all connected because

Sally (33:03.768)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (33:19.129)
You've got PMS, PMDD. I've charted all of this. PMS, PMDD, pregnancy. And then you've got perimenopause. And there is an underlying, if you go through all the stages of the same nervous system dysregulation, and you can see how our epigenetic changes happen. And then you arrive at perimenopause like I did, well, crashed into perimenopause, right? With a whole history.

Sally (33:34.786)
Yeah.

Sally (33:41.634)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (33:45.881)
Hahaha

Paula Rasrick (33:49.157)
of ADHD, which is what I've been diagnosed with and labelled with, is it complex trauma? I think my dad was ADHD just based on the research I've done. just what I mean, like what, where do you just meant all of these crossovers? And when you hit perimenopause, it's almost like the last junction. It's like, it's like the road goes very, very sort of like, right, this way. What are you doing about this?

Sally (34:02.093)
Yeah.

Sally (34:19.338)
Mm-hmm.

Paula Rasrick (34:19.491)
Yeah, or this way I'm staying in that lane and because of the way that the hormones interact with the brain and the neuro protection when that layering gets stripped away because that's what happens you're almost left with this kind of This is my words, right this kind of psyche. That's kind of like Who am I? Who am I like I've been masking I've been I've been shit, you know

Sally (34:40.396)
Yes.

Paula Rasrick (34:46.539)
shaping myself to society, I've been not saying things I don't, you know, I've been, and then you reach that point, I think, where you kind of go, no, this is not, it's a little bit of a spiritual me. And I don't mean that in a, there's the science side, which I'm very heavily focused on, but then there's this kind of like, what am I doing? You know, who am I? Who are the people I want to spend my time with? Who?

Sally (34:54.625)
Mmm.

Sally (34:59.51)
Yeah.

Sally (35:08.226)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (35:13.251)
What floats my boat? Like I love intelligent, kind of like deep, meaningful conversations. I'm not very good with small talk. And so I've made decisions. It's like, I don't do those things anymore. But I'd always done that before. I'd always be like, yeah, yeah, I'll come and then think, I don't, you know, it's this kind of, I think it's a huge stage of post-traumatic growth. There you go. Carry menopause.

Sally (35:19.116)
Hmm.

Sally (35:23.374)
I mean... Yeah.

Sally (35:35.478)
Yeah, I really do. Yeah, post-traumatic growth. Wow, that is, yeah, beautiful, beautifully articulated, all of it, really, you know, I'm right there with you. I'm like, yes, I can feel it in my body. I can feel my neurons are firing, going yes, yes, yes. Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (35:50.693)
This is the thing about connection because this is what I'm saying is about the nervous system, right? We're doing this on Zoom and our nervous systems are regulating with each other, right? And you're getting energy from me and I'm getting energy from you, right? And that is making us feel good, isn't it? Right? And so this kind of co-regulation and this understanding of environments and who are you spending time with? Who's nourishing your brain and your nervous system?

Sally (35:58.936)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yes, yeah.

Paula Rasrick (36:19.551)
Even that, that's why it's important to find those people. That's why my book is called Sensitive Women. It's because I know that I identify with a certain type of woman and my audience is only that type of woman.

Sally (36:35.982)
Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about hormonal sensitivity actually. So for people that are not sure, because you've said hormonally sensitive quite a lot, if people are not sure what exactly hormonal sensitivity is, can you explain that a little bit more? Like this HSP thing as well, I am a HSP and I'm sure a lot of my listeners will be as well, but I'd love to get your take on it.

Paula Rasrick (36:51.428)
Mm.

Paula Rasrick (36:57.509)
So I've looked at, I started with, so I've now blended the whole lot and kind of, this is why I did the book, because I thought there's no way I can explain this in one single sentence, right? I started off with thinking to myself, I'm a highly sensitive person. So I started to look at the research around highly sensitive people and I started to look at the work of Elaine Aron, who's the kind of pioneer within that field, right? And at first, this was in my investigations as I was doing it, right?

And at first I was like, right, that's yeah, that's me. I'm highly sensitive. You know, I have high empathy. I can read a room. I pick up energy. can. So I started doing all that. But then I've started to look at the crossovers between autism and ADHD and highly sensitive because highly they're all crossing over. Right. So now there's research I've found that says you can be ADHD and highly sensitive.

So this is what I'm saying. It's like, and a lot of people argue that highly sensitive people are actually autistic people, right? But you could also put this in the mix. So if I'm able to read a room in so I can read people's language without them speaking and I can get an environmental cue as to how things are going, that could be my hypervigilance because when I was younger, my dad and my mum, because I didn't have any...

Sally (38:00.363)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Paula Rasrick (38:23.343)
co-regulation between the two of them. Unfortunately, it wasn't just one parent, it was both. became, as the eldest, two younger brothers, I became the one that's like the survivor of reading the situation. Right, stay back. This is gonna explode. Guys, stay in your room. Protecting my brothers. So I took on that role, right? So how do we know that that kind of high, what you call empathy or high hasn't come from

Sally (38:41.56)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (38:51.703)
your childhood where you've been learning to read a situation, you become very perceptive about body language. Is it going to kick off? Is he drinking? Is he going to go into a narcissistic rage? You know, well, of course, your your senses in your sensory processing and your your nervous system is is queuing towards safety. Right. So you're going so you develop higher.

Sally (38:59.576)
Yeah.

Sally (39:03.137)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (39:17.935)
higher ability and perceptions of being able to read people and then goes with that depth of processing of, know, highly high empathy, right? So I can feel...

Sally (39:19.758)
Mm.

Paula Rasrick (39:35.905)
somebody's, I have a strong sense of somebody's pain, if that makes sense. But I don't know if that's because of my own pain, that I'm able to then mirror that more because I know my own pain. And so that kind of brings me back to the whole point of a lot of people that are more women that are more sensitive have what's called heightened justice sensitivity. Have you heard of that? Well now.

Sally (39:41.793)
Hmm.

Sally (39:58.86)
Yeah. No, I haven't heard of it, but as you're mentioning it, I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. It fits.

Paula Rasrick (40:06.959)
So that would make sense in terms of where I've gone with the way I've gone and the direction I've gone, right? Is that heightened sense of, no, this is not right. Women are being, yes. And then combined probably with my trauma background of having things happen to me that I didn't consent to. So informed consent is a huge issue for me. It's like, is, I need to, I have to stand, I have to stand.

Sally (40:11.554)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sally (40:18.52)
Like fighting for fairness. Yeah.

Sally (40:36.11)
Take a stand, yeah.

Paula Rasrick (40:36.697)
combined with my feeling of other people's pain. So that makes the kind of the ball of,

Sally (40:47.948)
Yeah, the whole ball of it. That's kind of like almost like why you've taken on this role for yourself in a way. I mean, I know obviously it was.

Paula Rasrick (40:54.947)
Yeah, and I always have. When I was younger, I took on as the eldest and you'll find that where you sit in the family, the family dynamics, you'll see where you sit and how that relates to your psyche, how that relates. And again, you know, I could, we could talk all day, but what happened at school? You know, when you go through your sensitive teenage years, so I was bullied at school because I ended up being in Scotland and that's whole different story. And I was the only English person. So then there was bullying. See, when you start to look at the research around, right,

Sally (41:17.644)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (41:23.941)
Prior to puberty, in fetal programming, we'll go back, your sex hormones, we'll just say estrogen, testosterone and progesterone and right, they are involved in what's called organisational. They have an act, an organisational role, right? So they help organise the brain, right? And yeah. But then when you are born, shortly after that, they then go very,

Sally (41:46.253)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (41:53.337)
they go relatively quiet because they're not there. They're not needed at this point. They're going to come back at puberty. They're sex hormones, right? Because so then you've got at least what 10 years, 11 years say of neuro development. And this is where you're going to have your complex trauma, adverse, your ADHD, autism, highly sensitive people.

Sally (41:54.59)
Okay, okay.

Sally (42:01.091)
Yeah.

Sally (42:08.366)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sally (42:20.098)
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (42:22.757)
It's all mixing into the mix, isn't it, right? And then when you get to puberty, your existing brain circuitry and your wiring and your organizing, that then your sex hormones join in that profile. Does that, do you what I'm So then you've got them, they're joining in. They're not, so this is why I'm arguing that oestrogen, because it's not, is not the master regulator of the female brain.

Sally (42:38.068)
Okay, okay, right, yep.

Paula Rasrick (42:52.227)
If it was, it would be there all the way through. It's a sec-

Sally (42:54.412)
I see. The whole way through. Yeah. But it's not the master regulator is the experience, the environment.

Paula Rasrick (43:02.009)
And the master regulators of the brain and nervous system, which is what my book is about, is GABA and glutamate and the research between those two primary neurotransmitters. They are the major players. So what neuroscience is now telling us is that these two are the yin and yang of the brain and everything is based on homeostasis, the research I've like of

Sally (43:08.801)
Okay.

Paula Rasrick (43:29.845)
EI balance. So your sex hormones are part of that, right? But they're part of it. No, they're not the whole story at all.

Sally (43:33.225)
Mm-hmm.

They're not the whole story. No. And so how does the nervous system affect GABA and was it glutamate? Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (43:44.921)
Glutamate. So, okay, this is the research to make it really kind of like bring it into women, ADHD women. This is where I found the commonalities, you see, I've spent years cross-referencing it. Women, ADHD, autism, PTSD. So I'll use the diagnostic labels because it's easier, because I've had to do that through research. Or share.

Sally (43:58.766)
Mm.

Sally (44:09.496)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (44:14.361)
the same feature, which is lower GABA, lower allopregnanolone, which is a metabolite of progesterone and lower progesterone, higher glutamate, estrogen, adrenaline of excite histamine, which is why you'll get histamine problems, right? They're all shaped. So when you understand which

Sally (44:22.071)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (44:35.778)
Yep. Yeah, yeah.

Paula Rasrick (44:42.767)
chemicals sit within the nervous system. And then you understand as I've done, charted it through my own profile, you can start to see a much bigger, wider picture of the nervous system, as opposed to us looking at this kind of like we arrive at midlife and we've got, one of my, sorry, sometimes my brain flips. One of my bug bears is the ADHD narrative, is, ADHD is low dopamine and estrogen,

Sally (44:50.4)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (44:54.062)
you

Sally (45:03.65)
You

Paula Rasrick (45:11.845)
increases dopamine, which is kind of this like, well, you should take estrogen because you need more dopamine because you've got low dopamine. It is really not that simple, right? Because you don't want too much dopamine, same as you don't want too much estrogen. And you definitely don't want too much glutamate because too much glutamate is Alzheimer's. Right. And this is what I'm saying. If you go to the other end, this is where I charged it from motor neurons disease, because I've got motor neurons disease in my family.

Sally (45:19.785)
No, didn't. Yeah.

Sally (45:29.472)
excitatory. Okay.

Sally (45:39.522)
Mm-hmm. Mmm.

Paula Rasrick (45:43.607)
It's too much excitation and too little inhibition.

Sally (45:46.755)
Yeah.

down regulation, yeah. And of course they play into the nervous system because all those excitory hormones are going to activate the sympathetic nervous system, accelerate the heart rate, you're going to fight flight mode, you'll feel anxious, and then with not enough ability to down regulate and calm everything down because low GABA, yeah, creates more inflammation, yeah.

Paula Rasrick (45:59.951)
Yeah, fight flight. Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (46:08.099)
Yep, it's inflammation isn't it? It's inflammation. So it's inflammation and if we know one thing, inflammation is really our static load. Inflammation underpins every disease.

Sally (46:21.196)
Yeah.

Sally (46:26.796)
Yes it does, yeah.

Paula Rasrick (46:28.705)
every single disease. Right? So by charting it from the beginning, which is why I think what we should really be doing is understanding this from the womb so that we know we can put those interventions in, in those younger years, that's those sensitive, because the brain is wiring, the stress sensitivity of the brain goes from, you know, fetal development all the way through to about 25, right? The brain remains plastic after that, which is why it reacts to hormones, but that's a whole different thing.

Sally (46:54.338)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Paula Rasrick (46:58.149)
But if you think about it, if you were to take a child like me, and we knew that we would put in the nervous system regulation, that we'd understand it, we'd bring their stress levels down, we'd try to manage that more because it's still very highly plastic, the brain at that, which is why...

Sally (47:25.229)
at that time.

Paula Rasrick (47:26.745)
there's detrimental effects because of that high plasticity and that HPA axis. Because going back to fetal programming, if my mum's nervous system and her stress is being passed to me, my stress sensitivity, my HPA axis is already starting to become more sensitive. And then it depends on what happens then after I come out, which in my story is multiple, I mean,

Sally (47:30.018)
Yeah.

Sally (47:47.042)
Hmm. Hmm.

Paula Rasrick (47:56.121)
You know, I have a high amount of aces. And then probably, you know, all the coping strategies that I've put in. I'm not shy about talking about that in my book. And, you know, my attachment relationships with men and my attachment relationships with myself and, you know, all of that stuff, because you. One of the things that we tend to do is we women are that, it's anxiety, it's depression, it's it's actually nervous system and.

Sally (47:58.38)
Mmm.

Paula Rasrick (48:25.133)
A lot of women like me have ended up living in our heads. We're very busy in our heads. You know, it's very sort of like, you know, up in our heads, up in our heads and very disattached from the body. And we know now from the science, don't we, that the body keeps the score. I knew you were going to mirror me then. And then the bottom up processes are what we need to look at, not the top down processes.

Sally (48:28.568)
Yeah.

Sally (48:35.032)
Yeah.

Sally (48:39.352)
keeps the score.

Sally (48:52.759)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (48:53.709)
And so it's going back into that body, isn't it? And so you'll tend to find that the women that I'm talking to, hormonally sensitive women, are women with nervous system dysregulation, women with higher sensory processing, women that have lived their lives with perhaps anxiety, OCD, binge eating, their cycles will reflect. I never knew any of this, right? So my OCD, when I was...

You know, did I know that my binge eating and my OCD was connected to my cycle phases? So when my estrogen goes up, do I know I'm going to be more addicted at this point and I'm taking drugs because that's what I've done. Okay. And I'm not going to shy away from that, but I'm becoming more addicted on the higher estrogen phases. And then you've got the down to inhibition, which is your flat state, your flat. So what do you want? You want more stimulants to get back up.

Sally (49:33.976)
Yeah.

Sally (49:43.99)
Yeah, yeah, because it's a feeling that you're used to and a feeling that you're comfortable with.

Paula Rasrick (49:47.917)
If you're chaotic-y and your brain and nervous system is brought up in an environment that was chaotic, then you will learn to survive. I've looked at my attachment relationships. Why did I have that relationship? I they love them. like, what was going on there? Now I see the patterns because I've looked back and I've gone, now I can see the trauma bonding.

Sally (50:03.405)
No.

Yeah.

Sally (50:11.51)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paula Rasrick (50:12.591)
through the relationship with my dad. Now I can see the narcissistic abuse. Now I can see why I've become attached to this person because I'm used to those highs and lows, right? I, you know, yes.

Sally (50:22.392)
Yeah, yeah, it feels familiar. It's like, this feels like home. Even though it's...

Paula Rasrick (50:27.619)
And over the years, know, when I had my son, had post-natal depression and that's when I changed. So one of my first big changes was then going into yoga. that was, would call, so that was my first, what I call epiphany moment after I had post-natal depression and I gave up work and then I re-studied. I've always re-studied. I've done multiple things. And then my second epiphany, I call it, is my perimenopause moment. Do you see what I'm saying?

Sally (50:33.134)
Okay.

Sally (50:37.249)
Mmm.

Sally (50:51.916)
Yeah, okay. Okay, yeah, so menopause is often that time, very invitational time, and pregnancy, having children, I think, for many women. I don't have children, but from what I've heard, again, it's that wake-up call. It's that moment of, I've got to do something. I've got to change something, or something's got to change. I'm not feeling good. That post-birth depression, what's it called? What do they call it? Postnatal, thank you.

Paula Rasrick (51:17.605)
Postnatal, postnatal, well, they call it postpartum now, but postnatal depression, yeah. And, you know, I had a traumatic birth with myself again. So I go into that because now you can see, right? Okay. I'm, unfortunately, when I was pregnant, heavily pregnant, my grandparents, it's in the book, my grandparents did a suicide pact because my granddad had motor neurons disease and they'd already seen their son. So they, yeah.

Sally (51:20.856)
postpartum.

Sally (51:39.246)
What's that?

Sally (51:44.876)
Wow.

Paula Rasrick (51:44.995)
and I was really close to my grandparents. They brought me up from the age of fit because I couldn't stay at home. And so I was heavily pregnant at this point. So now you can imagine the stress then for my son. And then we ended up, I wanted a home birth. was a bit, you know, and it ended up being an emergency C-section. you can now, this is why I'm saying women's health, right? We should be taking pregnancy and we should be making sure that these women are looked after, you know, because

Sally (51:50.029)
Yeah.

Sally (51:57.986)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (52:12.513)
actually that environment that the baby's in and then the mom, the environment the mom's in and this has a huge role, we understand, in future health.

Sally (52:21.324)
Yeah, yeah, I think so. And something that came up for me when you were talking was this idea of a nervous system centric medical industry, if you call it an industry or profession, where the nervous system is actually at the centre of the thinking around our body processes, the reproductive phases that women go through.

and the life phases and ailments that we have. Like if we think about it from a nervous system centric point of view, it completely changes the whole thing. It will change diagnostics. It will change the what, labeling.

Paula Rasrick (52:54.383)
I think so. Yeah, I think so. Labelling. I think we could start to understand if we understand the nervous system more and attachment and attachment processes. And I've charted that right through from, as I said, my own story. But if you were to understand that right, then instead of it being automatic meds, you'd be able to start working on regulation and

Sally (53:23.245)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (53:23.735)
and co-regulation and environments. that would be like my parents, I don't have any blame towards my parents. They didn't know what, you know, that's one thing I do not have. I am not somebody that's like, right, my parents, you But if my dad was ADHD and narcissistic, which is definitely the genetic, because it's...

This is another thing as well. Narcissism is there's a genetic component to that. It's not just, you know, it's more complex than people think. Well, you know, it's just from trauma. It's not this, you know, there's a genetic component. There is with everything. That's what I'm saying. It's genetics and epigenetics. So you're kind of, you know, if you've got that little seed and then you put it in a pot and the environment's right, it'll grow. You know, it's that. But, you know, my dad probably didn't get the help that he needed. Right. So he's not regulated.

Sally (53:50.37)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Sally (53:57.592)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Sally (54:06.69)
Yeah.

Sally (54:15.822)
Mm-hmm.

Paula Rasrick (54:16.036)
So because he's not regulated and my mum's not regulated and we live in an environment where both parents are not able to regulate themselves, because we all get unregulated, like that's human beings. But if you understand it and then you know, actually, then imagine how many adverse childhood experiences we wouldn't have. Because I've told you, yeah, because I mean, you look at an alcoholic parent, right?

Sally (54:38.954)
Right, well Mia, if we understand the importance of regulation.

Paula Rasrick (54:45.453)
So an alcoholic parent, there will be other comorbidities with that. So with alcoholism comes lots of other things. There can be emotional abuse, parenting, you so you end up parenting your parent. That's what happened to me. You end up being their emotional crux. You you end up having to soak up, you know, there and with narcissism, it's even worse. you know, with alcoholism just in itself, there are multiple other traumas.

Sally (55:02.776)
Yep.

Paula Rasrick (55:14.531)
that will come that will dysregulate your nervous system. So you don't know whether they're going to be in a good mood. And if they're in a good mood, what does that mean? Are you going to get a cuddle? Or if they're in a bad mood, are you going to get hit? are you? So imagine a child's nervous system dealing with that. Then you've got parents arguing constantly, which is why I move myself out of my home.

Sally (55:25.752)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (55:31.352)
dealing with all of that.

Sally (55:42.371)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (55:43.129)
when I went through what I went through. So you've got constant arguing, constant walking on eggshells. The child's not sure you've got constant, you know, then you've got domestic violence. Then you've got, well, this is your adverse childhood experiences in a nutshell.

Sally (55:58.851)
Yeah, yeah, it's huge. And I really do hope that over time we do start to see the nervous system as fundamentally affecting our health, our mental health and our physical health and literally everything, because it's so important. So we've only got a few minutes left. Couple of questions I want to ask you. First of all, when we get to perimenopause,

And if people have been inspired by you and they're like, shit, yeah, I think I've definitely got trauma that's been affecting me. you know, I feel like I've been cracked open now and HRT is not really doing very much. I feel like I want to do more to support myself. How do you recommend people start to process their trauma?

Paula Rasrick (56:42.085)
So, I mean, there's lots of different ways that you can offer. Me personally, myself personally, so I work with different modalities. I've got an integrated approach, but EMDR is one that I definitely, because it's really helped me. But the other thing that I do as a practitioner now is I've looked at the Stephen Porges, the Safe and Sound Protocol. So this is all about the vagus nerve because we know that vagal tone is low.

Sally (56:59.203)
Yeah.

Sally (57:06.584)
Mmm, lovely. Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (57:11.523)
Right. And again, if you've got low vagal tone, that is really, really important because of the relationship to HRV, which I started looking heart rate variability when I looked to work to professional football. So when I was working professional football, it was like, why does this player get injured? Then we started to look at HRV, which is heart rate variability. Then you start looking at Vegas, you know, the vagal tone. So I work a lot with the sort of brain and the body, and I introduced

Sally (57:24.088)
Bye.

Paula Rasrick (57:40.323)
parts work which I think is amazing. I'm not qualified in parts work but if you heard of parts work where you look at your I mean

Sally (57:47.618)
the part of you that does this and the part of you that does that. Yeah, I do parts work, yeah. It's phenomenal.

Paula Rasrick (57:50.661)
You know, I mean, it's just, you know, when you start to understand yourself, right, and you start to live in your authentic self, you know, I've had a lot to deal with in my life and we all have, right? But the biggest thing that I've done is to understand self. I know that sounds right. Who am I? You know, what, who am I? What is the part that drives this?

Sally (57:59.874)
Yeah.

Sally (58:13.517)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (58:16.837)
What's my core essence of me as a human being? What do I stand for? Who are my tribe? Who are the people that I want to be around? Because believe me, if you're spending time around people that you don't want to be around, that will affect your mental health. So, you know, I think we're missing the point. It's not necessarily that you need to take medication. It's now you need to start saying, who am I? How do I step into being?

Sally (58:31.33)
Yeah, it really will.

Sally (58:41.687)
Mm-hmm.

Paula Rasrick (58:44.483)
that unmasking because that unmasking, the masking causes mental health problems because you're not living with who you really truly are. You're still trying to mask and that, that becomes then, you know, I'm shut down. I can't speak. Where does that go? Those emotions are being pushed down in the body and we've already said it, right? So, so there's loads of things. I mean, from a trauma perspective,

Sally (58:50.647)
Yes!

Paula Rasrick (59:13.623)
I work with, that's what I do, EMDR and parts work and more of a coaching kind of, and the Stephen Porteous work, is a safe and sound protocol, which is all around the vagus nerve, right? So vagal toning. These are my types of things, but you can go and look at the vagus nerve and do your own. It's all over social media, isn't it? The vagus nerve. You can go and do that and start to look into it. And then obviously you can look at my book, because when that book comes out, then it's going to give you your...

Sally (59:25.678)
Fakers tone.

Sally (59:35.191)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (59:42.979)
I don't mean that in a... I've done it because I think when you understand and you trace back where it started from, your relationship with your parents, the relationship with the world, the relationship with your psyche, that is creating your core self. And I think perimenopause is an opportunity to really grab hold of your core self, your being, and...

Sally (01:00:00.214)
Yes.

Sally (01:00:09.57)
Yeah. Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (01:00:12.697)
be authentic in the world because you're looking at the other side, aren't you? You're coming into that kind of midlife phase and you're thinking, yeah, I mean, if you're gonna slide that way down into the abyss or are you gonna do the work healing? Because I'm a big believer in this kind of like work on your healing, continuously work on who you are, then you're gonna find that your whole health, your nervous system is gonna thank you because you're not living in this suppressed.

Sally (01:00:18.605)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (01:00:26.541)
Mm-hmm.

Paula Rasrick (01:00:43.137)
suppressed state and that I can't live in that suppressed state anymore of that kind of you know which is why I have been as vocal as I've been yeah because of my cycling yeah because I'm being shut being pushed back and shut down in a box you know other human beings saying no you're not worthy of listening to you need to shut down just be silent because you know I'm bigger than you or better than you or whatever that is you know

Sally (01:00:51.5)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because you won't be shut down.

Paula Rasrick (01:01:12.963)
That to me is not something that I personally am going to accept.

Sally (01:01:20.13)
Yeah. Well, I honestly wish you so well on your mission. What is your mission now going forward, your personal mission and what are your hopes for the menopause space, especially around education and how we treat menopause?

Paula Rasrick (01:01:36.057)
So for me, think, so my campaign is really about first of all, trauma informed care. So understanding, first of all, understanding trauma and neuroaffirming care, understanding that our brains are all very different, right? Our nervous systems is what, in my opinion, what we should be looking at. We should have a biopsychosocial model of health across the board.

Sally (01:01:41.006)
Okay.

Paula Rasrick (01:01:59.053)
We shouldn't just be saying that it's a medical model. We should be saying, right, okay, this person here, how can we cross refer out? Right, Sally, can you help this person because you're better suited to that? Do you know what I mean? I'm just one of those that's like share the energy rather than, know, because the energy always comes back round. I know that sounds all a bit hippie, but I'm a big believer in that. It's like your energy.

Sally (01:02:10.7)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (01:02:15.361)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (01:02:23.289)
goes back round and you get the people you're meant to have and then you have these people, Sally, because these people are more suited to you. They resonate with you more. Not everyone resonates with me and I'm going to make that clear on my social media. I'm not for everyone, but my dream and my wish is to create a community, retreats, all of that based around women who want to live in their authentic self and they can deal with those traumas and they can sit

with those traumas and they can heal and then they can help others heal.

Sally (01:02:57.472)
Yeah I love that, that is so good and I love what you said about this sharing rather than thinking that you are the absolute panacea for someone which is...

Paula Rasrick (01:03:05.837)
Nobody is, nobody is, that's not how the world works. Well, I don't believe in that. think that, and I've always said that, know, and any one of my clients that works with me, if I meet you and I say to you, do you know what, don't think I'm right for you, but I tell you what, I'm gonna find you somebody who is right for you. Because that's authenticity, isn't it? That's saying, look, I'm not quite right for you, but Sally is, right?

Sally (01:03:22.712)
Yeah.

Sally (01:03:28.206)
it is.

Mm-hmm.

Paula Rasrick (01:03:32.099)
And then knowing that at some point you might say to me or somebody else might say, you know, because if you work, this is another, sorry, I'm going to go on. If you work in therapy and healing and any, anything, anything in health, right? The research will tell you the right person is what gets the results, not the medallion. It's the therapeutic alliance that gets those results.

Sally (01:03:49.932)
Yes.

Sally (01:03:54.272)
Yes. Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (01:03:56.869)
That therapeutic alliance is working with the person that you feel connected to, that you feel that is pretty much, you know, 50 % of the work, 60 % probably.

Sally (01:04:07.404)
Right? Yeah, absolutely. It's about that personal relationship. Yeah. What a lovely place to finish. So Paula, where can people find you? Where are you most active on social media?

Paula Rasrick (01:04:10.831)
So find your people.

Paula Rasrick (01:04:21.477)
Well, I've started being more active across the whole of social media now. But Instagram is probably my favourite platform in the sense of, so Instagram, Mrs. Paula Rastrick, and I'm also on YouTube now and LinkedIn. LinkedIn is something that I think I'm going to be on a little bit more now because I think the women that I resonate with are also on LinkedIn as well. think there's a, you know, because I'm looking.

Sally (01:04:24.002)
Have you?

Sally (01:04:45.378)
Yeah. There's that highly functioning person on LinkedIn actually, the professional, know, straight to the point, kind of clear thinking person on there. Yeah, yeah, me too.

Paula Rasrick (01:04:53.015)
Yeah. Yeah. So and I'm just about to, I'm doing more social media now. I'm back on social media and I've got some new resources. So I've got a resource that I'm going to talk about if you go to my website, join up to my newsletter, there's an HRT video which talks about side effects and why. So if people are interested in understanding a little bit more about why some women have side effects to HRT, right? Because trust me, there are many women having side effects to HRT. And it's almost like,

Sally (01:05:21.24)
Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (01:05:23.001)
We're not allowed to say that. But there are. There are. And also resources around the nervous system. So a lot more about the kind of nervous system. So yeah, just look me up on Instagram. Enjoy my newsletter.

Sally (01:05:26.062)
Yeah, it's like a dirty word, yeah.

Sally (01:05:36.727)
Yes, which I joined yesterday and I also downloaded your medical letter for highly sensitive people and brilliant.

Paula Rasrick (01:05:42.307)
Yes, I put that on there because I think again, I'm going to be so I'm working on my website and my resources at the moment because I'm going to do new things. I think from my own personal experience, right, I have a highly sensitive nervous system, right.

If that had been known or even asked, I would not have been whacked full of stimulating hormones with no titration. Because it just, you know, and we've got research. mean, Professor Kulkarni, who works in the hormonal world, she says women with a trauma history, women with, they have a more sensitive brain. You need to be careful.

Sally (01:06:09.462)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Sally (01:06:26.028)
Yeah. Yeah.

Paula Rasrick (01:06:27.821)
And medics need to understand that.

Sally (01:06:29.664)
Yeah they really really do. Well look thank you so much Paula for spending this part of your day with me and I hope everyone that's listened has really been inspired the way I have. I've just been glued to you, I've not written very much down to be honest. Well I have to do another one, talk about something else but

Paula Rasrick (01:06:44.549)
I will have to do it again. I'll have to do it again. I need to do it on my own. But it was lovely to speak to you. I really appreciate it. really appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

Sally (01:06:55.017)
you're so welcome.

Paula Rasrick (01:06:57.349)
and I'll speak to you soon.

Sally (01:06:58.486)
Yeah, let me just stop this. Stop the recording.