Hot flashes aren’t the problem—gaslighting is. Hilary takes aim at the menopause conversation and asks the question no one else is asking: What if this isn’t your downfall, but your awakening? In this episode, she breaks down the cultural scripts, conditioning, and quiet misogyny wrapped in every “crazy menopausal woman” meme, and replaces it with truth, clarity, and power. This is not a hormonal crisis. This is your moment. Episode Highlights: Why blaming hormones keeps women stuck The myth of the “crazy menopausal woman” What really causes women to question their marriage at midlife Why losing your cool isn’t the issue—losing yourself is The gift of finally putting yourself first (and meaning it) Episode Breakdown: [00:00] Challenging the Menopause Narrative [01:05] The Gaslighting of Women's Health [02:10] Menopause and Divorce: What’s Really Going On [05:05] Midlife Awakening vs. Hormonal Blame [07:04] Cultural Conditioning and Losing Ourselves [08:06] Why the “Crazy Menopausal Woman” Trope is So Dangerous [11:11] Menopause Isn’t a Crisis—It’s a Revolution [12:32] Reclaiming Your Power in Midlife 💥 Midlife isn’t the end. It’s the turning point. Ready to stop tolerating and start owning it? Hit play. 💫 Subscribe to Hilary's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@HilarySilver?sub_confirmation=1 🔥 Grab Hilary’s FREE training, This Changes Everything (and other free resources!): https://hilarysilver.com/guides/ 👉 Follow Hilary on Instagram: @hilarysilver 🚀 What’s been your biggest midlife realization? Drop it in the comments!
Chapter 1: Why is menopause more than just hormones?
So if you haven't already figured this out about me, I can be a little contrarian. This isn't something that I do on purpose, like, ooh, let me be edgy just for the sake of it. I'm not interested in being provocative for shock value. I'm just interested in telling the truth, the kind of truth that most people don't want to talk about.
And quite honestly, the kind of truth that can sometimes make people a little uncomfortable at first. But wildly excited and hopeful once they hear it. I question everything. And today, I am questioning the entire menopause media machine. Right now, menopause is having a moment. Everyone's talking about it. There are new products, new drugs, new experts popping up like daisies.
And of course, now even celebrities are entering the conversation. Here's the thing. Don't get me wrong. I'm glad that women's health is finally being acknowledged. It is way overdue. Think about it. Viagra came to market in 1998 because of course, all hail the penis. And meanwhile, women have been suffering through hormonal shifts and perimenopause and
Chapter 2: How does society gaslight women's health issues?
and chronic conditions with little to no support for decades. The world sees men's pain as urgent and real, while women's pain is brushed off, minimized, dismissed, and ignored because of our hormones or our cycles or our moods. We're emotional, hysterical, dramatic, and overreacting. You've all heard it. How many times have you heard it? You must be PMSing. Is it your time of the month?
You must be hormonal. as a way to dismiss our experiences, our very reality, and rendering our perspectives or experiences invalid. That is just a part of the gaslighting of women that we have been experiencing for generations. We've been left to just deal with symptoms and pain. as if it doesn't matter, as if we don't matter. If you've ever had an IUD put in, you know what I'm talking about.
It is painful. It is literally a medical procedure. And we are having this done with no pain medication. It's assumed we can just tolerate the pain. So I'm glad we are finally talking about menopause and other women's health issues without shame. But I don't like some of what I'm hearing.
Menopause has now become the latest playground for dismissing women's experiences, our voices, and even the patriarchal conditioning that we've been subjected to and is so deeply entrenched that we can often miss it. We don't even notice it. And even women are perpetuating it without realizing it.
So today I'm sharing three of the questionable themes so that you too can begin to detect the subtle BS that contributes to dismissing our experiences. You have to let me know if you agree with these or not. Hi, it's Hillary. Welcome to the Hillary Silver Podcast. Thanks for tuning into the conversation today.
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So one of the most misguided and harmful conversations that I'm hearing is that menopause increases your chance of divorce. That literally women are getting divorced in midlife because of menopause. Literally, let's keep blaming women for all the problems. So to be exact, This is a quote.
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Chapter 3: Are menopause and divorce really connected?
When you're in your reproductive years, so premenopause, you've got different levels of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone every day. And it makes you accommodate, makes you kind of roll with the punches. And it sets up this level of flexibility that starts to disappear when you go through perimenopause and menopause. The hormonal veil is lifted and you start to speak your truth
and not accommodate. You speak your truth maybe for the first time about the state of your marriage, about the things that you're happy about, the things that you're not happy about, and it does lead to an increased rate of divorce. Can you see what I'm talking about? I want you to really be able to read between the lines here.
This is just another way to dismiss women's experience, to blame women for the problem, And to blame our hormones, it literally cancels out our real experience, which is the reality that most women carry the emotional load, the mental load, and even the physical load in marriages, often while also working and having careers. And when kids are involved, the load is even heavier.
It's not estrogen that causes this. It is social conditioning of both boys and girls. You've heard me say this so many times. that girls are socialized to be kind and nice and agreeable and go with the flow. Be pretty, be a good girl. Do what you need to do to get the boy to pick you. We are not encouraged to find our own voice and to stand out and be strong-willed and certain of who we are.
So when we have families, we take it all on because that is what is expected of us. the good mom who does it all and looks amazing while doing it. So during those years with young children, women are in survival mode. And around the time we hit 50-ish, which happens to be our menopausal years, but it's also midlife, the kids are a little older.
we're not in survival mode, and we actually have come up for air and have woken up to just how much BS we have been tolerating and accepting. We acknowledge how exhausted we are, how utterly sick and tired we are of carrying the load. And for those marriages that do end,
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Chapter 4: How does midlife serve as an awakening for women?
It's because it's too late to make the correction, too much water under the bridge, the resentment has taken over, and it is past the point of no return. Women are not having a midlife crisis. It's actually a midlife awakening. And it is not a hormonal temper tantrum. It's clarity. We're not going crazy. We're finally getting sane. The hormonal veil isn't lifting. The social conditioning is.
And midlife, women are finally becoming... more centered in ourselves. We are never more sure of who we are and what we need and want, and we're no longer willing to settle or tolerate. We hear our own voice and are willing to speak it in a way that is unapologetic. It's not menopause that's making you question your relationship.
It's the fact that for the first time, you have the audacity to put yourself first, to consider yourself. And maybe you're realizing your marriage never really worked for you. The damage here is when all of society blames women and blames our hormones, it dismisses our reality.
This is what gaslighting is, twisting the narrative so that the person questions and even believes the altered story rather than what they know to be true for themselves. Also, When we blame something, rather than take responsibility for ourselves, we are stuck. It means we can't do anything to change the situation.
Chapter 5: Why is blaming hormones harmful?
And women are then forever fated to suffer unfulfilling marriages that end in divorce. So we can blame ourselves, unrealistically so, and we can blame hormones, and we can even blame the men. But ultimately, it is we who have done this to ourselves. Yes, it's true. That's the truth that I was talking about.
We all too eagerly step in and do it all without expectation, without boundaries, without speaking up. We allow and tolerate and accept the unacceptable. It goes way back to our childhood and how we were socialized to be. But at some point, it is up to us to take responsibility for ourselves and decide who we are and what we want and make it happen with our behavior, our choices, and our actions.
This is the bitter pill, but it's also the magic pill. We can change how we are showing up in our lives and in our relationships. And the answer is to be fully self-centered. So another conversation I'm taking aim at today is the idea that women lose themselves because of their hormones. Again, another quote.
When our hormones come in, our brains as females start working from left to right, and we become relational creatures. And everything we are doing is adapting to the relationship of another human, adapting to the relationship of a patriarchal society. We are constantly making sure everybody's okay.
This person then makes the point that it's menopause, when our hormones go away, that we finally hear our own voice again. Again, in my very strong opinion, it is not hormones that make us act this way and behave this way. It's our psychology. When you're born a female, automatically you are girl and then you're put in pink and then all the socialization begins.
The rest is history, sugar and spice and everything nice. This all happens long before we hit puberty and our hormones are even kicking in. And by the time we become mothers, we've already spent decades internalizing the idea that that our value comes from how much we give, how well we sacrifice, and how happy we keep everyone else.
So when the pressures of motherhood arrive, of course, we lose ourselves a little bit because there's just so much to do. I used to say, I love being a mom, but I hate the tasks involved in being a mom. All the things that we have to do to be a mom. It's not the hormones that have women carrying the mental load and the emotional load.
It's just who we are because of how we've been trained to be until we know better. This isn't a biological design. It's a cultural script. We didn't become selfless because of our hormones. We became selfless because that's what we were trained to be. So no, you didn't suddenly become relational and selfless because of your hormones and because your hormones told you to be this way.
You became relational and selfless because the patriarchal conditioning and socialization told you that's what makes you lovable. Again, why this angle is so much better is because if it's conditioning and not chemistry, then it's changeable. We can wake up to it, unlearn it, and reclaim our identities. We don't have to spend half of our lives a stranger to ourselves.
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