Why We Need More Perimenopause Professionals in Mental Health with Julie Cardoza, MS, LMFT and IWHI Graduate

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:00:03 Hi and welcome to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, Doctor Jessica Drummond, and I am so thrilled to have you here. As we dive into today’s episode, as always innovating and integrating in the world of women’s health. And just as a reminder, the content in this podcast episode is no substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment from your medical or licensed healthcare team. While myself and many of my guests are licensed healthcare professionals, we are not your licensed healthcare professionals, so you want to get advice on your unique circumstances. Diagnostic recommendations treatment recommendations from your home medical team. Enjoy the episode. Let’s innovate and integrate together. Hi everyone. Welcome, especially today to our mental health professionals, coaches, licensed marriage and family therapists, mental health therapists of any kind, social workers. This episode is for you. I want us to be welcoming even more mental health professionals into our community at the Integrative Women’s Health Institute. Today, you get to meet Julie Cardoza, and we’re going to dive into the work that she does in just a second.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:01:35 But we’ve been training and educating mental health professionals in women’s health for almost 20 years now. And I really want to welcome you into our community. If you’ve been thinking about doing this program and your focus is primarily mental health, you are going to learn some very specific things about why our perimenopause and menopause training is so important for you as a mental health professional. But first, let me introduce Julie Cardoza. She is one of our perimenopause and menopause training graduates. She is a really important member of our community, and she brings such a peaceful energy to her work and to our community. And in collaboration with the other health and wellness professionals she works with. She is such a masterful coach because she has really dedicated herself to this practice and to learning the material and really understanding the mind body connection, particularly in perimenopause and menopause. So Julie Cardoza is a licensed marriage and family therapist in the state of California. She’s an eMDR approved consultant and a polyphagous theory specialist. We talk a lot about poly vagal theory in our program as well, and trauma and maintaining a trauma informed environment and communication.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:03:00 Her clinical practice focuses on trauma recovery, chronic stress, and mind body mental health, with an emphasis on eMDR and nervous system informed care. Her website, Julia Cardoza, is a wealth of information on all of these topics, and we will also put in the show notes. Other ways to connect with Julie on social media and through her coaching practice. She’s the founder of Heart Scapes, which is her holistic wellness coaching practice supporting midlife women through the menopause transition, through burnout recovery, and to really focus on identity renewal. And we talk about that a bit in this episode as well. So what I want you to think about, if you are a mental health professional and you’re thinking about learning the skill set of coaching in perimenopause and menopause is that you have the opportunity to be the one person in your community, particularly in your local mental health community, who asks her clients or her potential clients whether or not they’re in perimenopause or menopause. How that journey has been for them, if they even understand or know if they’re in perimenopause or menopause, and how that might be directly related to their mental health symptoms.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:04:28 Additionally, we talk about how so many women in the perimenopause and menopause transition. The data is 85%, but I’m sure that’s underreported. Also have other chronic conditions, whether it’s chronic pain, chronic fatigue, dysautonomia, histamine issues, allergies to various things, gut microbiome challenges, digestive issues, these conditions that we think of as being physical are directly related to, and sometimes triggers for or causes of mental health symptoms, and vice versa. Right. How the brain is functioning. How the nervous system is functioning. Impacts physical symptoms as well. And one of the things we talk a lot about in this episode is how the lives of women in their 40s to late 50s are really challenging. There is so much that can be going on in any woman’s life at this time that your mental health training and identity and the psychosocial aspects of, you know, transitioning to being an empty nester or having a new toddler in your mid-forties or being at the peak of your career, or wanting to go higher in your career and feeling maybe stuck by your perimenopause and menopause symptoms.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:05:50 So we’re going to get into all of this juiciness, and I want you to listen carefully and just write down one thing that you’re inspired by as a mental health professional, or as a physical health professional who wants to start collaborating even more with your mental health colleagues. There’s so much synergy there, so much connection. And we’ll chat for a minute on the other side of our conversation. I can’t wait for you to meet Julie. She is amazing. Welcome back, everyone to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, Doctor Jessica Drummond, and I’m thrilled to be here with Julie Cardoza. And we are going to dig deep into the intersection between physiologic health of the, quote unquote, body versus health of the mind, particularly for women in perimenopause. We’re going to break down some of those distinctions. So welcome, Julie, and please share with our listeners the kind of work that you do.

Julie Cardoza 00:07:02 Hi Jessica. I am a licensed marriage family therapist and I practice from a holistic, integrative perspective. I also am a specialist in trauma in working with the nervous system.

Julie Cardoza 00:07:17 I am what’s called an eMDR therapist and an eMDR consultant. And if you’re not familiar. eMDR is a mouthful. It’s eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. And it’s really a specialization within working with trauma. So I work a lot at the intersection of trauma and health and women and midlife. And now also offering the coaching.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:07:45 Yeah. Thank you. So Julie’s a graduate of our perimenopause and menopause training, and a lot of what we teach really overlaps with this idea that we have to have a regulated nervous system, that we have to have physical tools, which the eMDR is sort of a physiologic tool to help access calming and learning to regulate the nervous system. So what got you really curious and interested in joining our perimenopause training?

Julie Cardoza 00:08:17 Yeah. It’s interesting as I started to hear more of menopause education really coming into the forefront this year, I had already been studying it a lot, related to my own journey, which was related to surgical menopause. And so there’s a whole other kind of link there. And in really working with understanding trauma and the trauma that happens within that.

Julie Cardoza 00:08:45 But as menopause started to kind of get more attention this year. And as we’ve kind of had more media coverage, I started to dig in a little bit more in what’s out there on holistic integrative mental health and trauma. And I did not find a lot of quality education or training that really came from a more holistic perspective, whole body perspective. And I was really surprised how little conversation there has been within the mental health field. So when I couldn’t find it in the mental health field, I thought, well, hey, let’s do this program. And that’s what led me into doing the Integrative Health Coaching program.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:09:32 Yeah. And I think what you probably found is that from my perspective in our whole communities perspective, mental health and physical health can’t be so abruptly separated. You know, your story really aligns with that, right? You had a surgical physiologic menopause, which is a fairly abrupt experience. And you didn’t just have physical symptoms. You probably could notice, especially given your background and even mild shifts in your mental health.

Julie Cardoza 00:10:05 Yes. And, you know, it just is really, again, surprising because we don’t talk about it in mental health. And we know you cannot separate physical and mental health, but we aren’t really educated to think about it.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:10:19 Yeah, well that’s what we’re here for. So if you’re if you’re a practitioner in mental health and you’re listening to this interview, we’re going to help you make those connections. And I think everything you bring from your background, it’s still wildly valuable and your own personal experience. In fact, many, many of our students do come to this through their own personal experience, whether they’re, you know, Most bothersome symptoms are mental health, physical health, both somewhere in between. You know, that’s the thing about perimenopause and menopause. One of the things that we really emphasize is that almost no one the data is about 85%, but I think that’s even kind of an undercount. Almost no one shows up at perimenopause somewhere in there, you know, late 30s to mid to late 40s with absolutely no underlying health stressors.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:11:18 Right. So we see that in the world of mental health that even, for example, postpartum depression, if it was ten years ago, can sort of be shaken up again, or issues that maybe originally presented in puberty can be shaken up again in hormonal shifts of perimenopause. Is that something you see in your practice?

Julie Cardoza 00:11:42 Absolutely. Again, really unnamed. And as I’ve been digging in more and starting to look at the intersect of Ace scores and how that impacts menopause, transition and midlife and like you’re naming as far as when we’ve also come through these other major life transitions, how the stress shows up in our body, how the HPA axis, the stress access, and the nervous system has already been primed to already run so high in stress, in sympathetic mobilization. And really is, as we all know as well as women, we also push through and perform and perform and have really no idea both how the psychological changes of midlife as we’re forming new identities and this kind of primed nervous system towards sympathetic activation or mobilization and how old traumas are going to surface.

Julie Cardoza 00:12:47 Grief is going to surface. And the stress of that identity transition and threshold is also going to surface.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:12:57 Yes. And I think women are starting to have these conversations, whether it’s in their own lives or on social media, that there’s this almost like a caricature of a woman in her late 40s who’s like, I’m done. Don’t ask me to do anything anymore. I don’t care about anything anymore. You know, women are getting divorced in droves. They’re just like, you’re a teenager, you’re on your own or you’re, you know, they’re kind of like throwing their hands up in this almost caricature type way. And I think it’s really just because so many things come together at that time. Like you’re saying, the psychological shifts, the identity shifts. And if you’ve been really kind of doing all the things to manage both your stress but also your metabolic health. Like you’ve been exercising, you’ve been trying to eat well. You’ve been getting a decent amount of sleep. Some of that scaffolding starts to physically fall apart when the estrogen levels generally decline, but they’re kind of all over the place in the short term.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:14:02 So you lose the little bit of like support physiologically that you had. So if a woman shows up in your practice and she’s like, okay, Julie, things are on fire, I’m a mess. I just don’t care anymore. I’m just enraged. Where do you begin?

Julie Cardoza 00:14:21 I like to talk about the menopause and the physical component, and I educate women so much because we don’t feel empowered. We’re isolated in so many different directions. And again, thinking of kind of what’s happening on that physiological level. How are your periods? What symptoms are you starting to see? Do you even know their symptoms around perimenopause? When I had my surgery several years ago, we still weren’t even really using the term perimenopause. Still, I think we’re primed towards identifying, oh, if my periods are really intermittent, maybe then I might have some of these big symptoms and we’ve really got to back it up quite a bit more into that transition. Even around 40 and starting to be able to have the conversations in identifying.

Julie Cardoza 00:15:13 Do you know how to track your period in some new ways? Also looking at mood, also looking at energy. Also looking at sleep. Also looking at what are yours. What are areas of your body that are beginning to show pain? What is going on with your metabolic health? All of those are messengers about starting to understand what is my body, letting me know, which is really challenging. By the time people come into mental health, they’re usually pretty desperate to be heard. It still has a level of stigma, and if we don’t understand what’s going on in our bodies, of course we’re going to just try to get rid of the marriage, get rid of this, get rid of that. Like, what is this stressor? I don’t know what’s going on. Like, I must need some major change. We look very external. Instead of understanding what is my body, letting me know what’s my body actually telling me? What are those signals? How is this impacting those relationships? And now where do I need to make some adjustments? So I actually am one of the few clinicians that will ask about menopause and perimenopause and hysterectomy and what type, etc..

Julie Cardoza 00:16:29 So a lot of times that’s where I start.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:16:32 Yeah, I think that’s so valuable. And I really do think we need a much larger sort of army of practitioners in the mental health space, because I think what you said there is so important that what women do is they really just wait till they’re desperate, and then they hit the wall and then they make a big change. They quit their job, they get divorced, they blow up at their family and their loved ones. And sometimes because they haven’t slowed down and really examined. Now, yes, usually there are other problems, you know, there are problems in those relationships. There are problems with that work experience. There are problems with their relationships with their family members that do need some work. And sometimes making a job change. Getting a divorce is the right next step. But I think when it’s done from a place of desperation, it actually if we circle back to what we were talking about in the beginning, it adds a layer of stress.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:17:31 It doesn’t just take it away.

Julie Cardoza 00:17:33 Right. And it’s really the nervous system communicating flight pattern. right? It’s really in more sympathetic activation. And, you know, you said something in there. That’s the biggest challenge for women. If we slow down and to listen. And in midlife, that’s hard. We’re busy. We’re raising kids. We’ve got maybe a teenager, maybe one in college, maybe one still, even in middle school, we’re all over the place. We’re starting to see our parents age. Or maybe we’ve already lost our parents. You know, we’re working with career dynamics and often at the peak of our careers, we don’t want to slow down.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:18:19 Yeah. And sometimes, not even that. We don’t want to. We can’t, you know, whether it’s financially or, you know, we now even have more women having babies in their 40s than their 20s, at least in the United States, but I think in the EU as well. So you might be literally having a toddler.

Julie Cardoza 00:18:40 Exactly.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:18:41 Yeah. And not to say teenagers are necessarily easier than toddlers, you know. So having had both. And even people who don’t have children, I think like you said, you’re kind of at the peak of your career, but you also might be taking care of a lot of other people, animals. You know, you’re the caregiver at work, your caregiver at home. And the data is such that a lot of women don’t have a lot of financial flexibility at this point, because they have kind of stacked, even if they have a good income and they’re at the peak of their careers, they have a lot of responsibilities, whether it’s school debt or family caregiving. So I think putting it into context and working with someone like you that can help them navigate this over time, rather than making a desperate choice that actually adds another plate to their spinning plates is, I think, really where it starts because you’re 100% right. This is exactly what I see in my practice as well. It’s like if I could give 100% of my clients the prescription of just rest for one month, and then we’ll see.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:20:02 There are occasions where I’ve actually done that, because the situation was so physiologically problematic that we had to really get to that level of radical rest, if you will. But yeah, that’s so hard. So talk about in your practice, like give me kind of a case example or a amalgam of cases of what that looks like. How do you start?

Julie Cardoza 00:20:27 I’m a little newer in kind of taking the perspective, but I would say a lot of times I’m exploring is that burnout, what it’s going on and looking for. Is there burnout happening? Right. Is that exhaustion starting to set in? Is it a recent trauma? It’s so rarely a recent trauma. I was just listening to another podcast this week about just how rare a single event, you know, post-traumatic stress disorder is coming from a more somatic point of view. I’m just starting to look at what’s activating the nervous system. So I don’t really want to take a deep dive into the trauma immediately. I just kind of want to know a name.

Julie Cardoza 00:21:09 I’m always curious what’s been going on health wise, and we were just talking about this before we started the podcast, because I’m really listening for all the fragments and piecing them together. And so often it’s the I’m also busy because I’m going to this doctor for this issue. I’m going to this doctor for this issue. I have chronic pain, and I’m in exercise programs and therapy to really sit down and look at the whole picture and feel heard. That’s the number one to reduce the isolation, because the isolation is so activating to the nervous system. And we know that number one healing component is being able to start to be heard and to be implicitly accepted no matter what it is you’re dealing with. So that’s where we start.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:22:05 I love that it’s exactly in alignment with what we teach, because we’re always optimizing this program and and our programs in general, because we hear from both practitioners and also people living with these challenges. And one of the biggest things that our clients ask, who have a lot of complex challenges, is exactly what you said.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:22:27 They have depression, anxiety, but they also have chronic pain, autoimmune issues, chronic fatigue, dysautonomia, whatever it is. And what they’re asking for often in their coaches is, can you be the person to help me organize all of this and maybe take a few things off my plate, because sometimes they can get to that point where they’re actually almost afraid to go to their primary care doctor because they’re just going to recommend, like another thing to do, another specialist. They have to see when actually we can often sort of strip things down when we slow down and listen. I love that as a place to start. Yeah.

Julie Cardoza 00:23:16 And I get so many referrals that are from primary care physicians. And I’ve gone through this myself. A lot of this has been a part of my own journey and things that I am now dealing with because I had no idea. And, you know, doctors don’t take a holistic point of view, but so many people come to me in the sense of, well, my doctor says this must be all in my head, right? And I’m like, yes and no.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:23:43 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you’re kind of in your head.

Julie Cardoza 00:23:46 Yeah, it is.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:23:46 Sort of all in your brain. Absolutely. Yeah.

Julie Cardoza 00:23:50 The brain is the control center, and it is like reading all the messages of the body. But that does not mean it’s not real. And that does not mean there is not real physiological, systemic issues going on. And so often it’s that place to be, you know, where it’s like, can I sit and be heard? Can I listen to myself? Can I start to have some of those moments that you’re like, oh, now I’m piecing this together and can hear even just the cohesive thread. So when I hear that cohesive thread. I’m empowered. I’m empowered to start to take care of myself, rather than maybe feeling more shut down or embarrassed or uncertain. Confused. Which we know confusion is so much of the trauma marker. That’s when the nervous system is overwhelmed. And, you know, it’s really coming from a perspective that trauma is not about an event.

Julie Cardoza 00:24:51 Trauma is about when there’s too much going on too fast for us to be able to integrate the information. And so it’s really about that integrative aspect of things.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:25:07 Yes. And I love that so much because I think that is really the beauty of the coaching piece of it. You know, a lot of times when people just start our perimenopause and menopause trainings, they’re like, I want to know all about how to test hormones and what foods I need to eat and things like that, but Really, once you get into it, that skill set of learning to hold space without burning yourself out as a practitioner really helps lighten the load of doing your work, because you’re helping your client actually realize there’s a whole lot of things that she’s worried about that she’s doing, that she’s emphasizing that we can now maybe let go or do less of. So talk about that a little bit. When you came into the program, what were you thinking you needed versus maybe what you learned? Like by the end of it you were like, oh, this is really the secret sauce.

Julie Cardoza 00:26:09 When I came into the program, like I said, I was kind of still really intimidated and I still am in I don’t read labs, I don’t read the Dutch test. I’m not trained in that type of physiological approach. I’m really trained in the nervous system. I’m really trained in understanding foundations of health. I can pick up all the information related to what are the hormones doing, and the shifts and changes in the neurotransmitters and how those impact the body. And I was really intimidated because I still can sit in on some of the complex cases calls and go, I don’t know. I’m not going to be able to prescribe that test, but I’ll keep learning, like I’ll keep learning and I’ll build people that I can refer and build collaborations with so well.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:26:57 And I think that’s an important point really quick, that you don’t have to have the scope of practice to do 100% of what you learn. Sometimes the trick is, you know, even in my physical therapy training, we learned all about pharmacology.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:27:13 We had a whole pharmacology course. I’ve never once prescribed a medication. It’s not in my scope of practice as either a physical therapist, nutritionist, or health coach. And yet having that understanding Standing is so important because you are the path. You’re the one person on the team, as the coach who’s slowing down and really helping your client. Make sure when she goes into her three minute appointment with her gynecologist, she asks the right questions.

Julie Cardoza 00:27:41 Yes, and can be organized and can already have some information about herself, about what are the steps I’ve tried, what are the things I’m aware of? What are some key talking points? Because you’re right, it’s probably going to be like a 3 to 5 minute conversation. That’s really what excites me about starting to be able to do coaching. Like for me, I came up with this acronym. I’m calling it radiant, which I really like because it’s just about brilliance and light helps with everything. So it’s really about recognizing body signals, accepting what’s happening in your body, learning how to nurture your body, how to integrate it and use integrative holistic tools.

Julie Cardoza 00:28:26 And so being able to bring kind of simple principles together that are looking at all the foundations of health and to start bringing in some accountability, because that’s so much of the game. And I’ve worked with a couple of different health coaches, and that’s been very helpful for me. And in some of the health journey that I’m dealing with.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:28:46 Yeah. And this is, I think, one of the most important pieces of the work that we do as coaches. Let’s say five years in the future. And I could spit out like do this, this, this and this. Someone could give that to you. Someone could give that to me. We’re not going to do it without that support, that accountability.

Julie Cardoza 00:29:06 We need that for our feedback loops. 100%. If we don’t have a Co regulated new feedback loop, the brain’s not going to want to learn new information. What it’s going to do is go back to its autopilot pattern. Because that’s how we’re designed. We’re designed to be very efficient. So we need to have that accountability aspect, not just the informational aspect, because that’s how we make change.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:29:35 Yeah, I think that’s so important. That’s literally how we as coaches get our clients to rewire their brains, their nervous systems. And so they need a human. We’re social primates after all. Yeah. So. Oh I love that so much. So if you had a colleague in mental health, one of your colleagues in marriage and family counseling, social work, any kind of therapy, would you recommend the perimenopause and menopause training and what aspects you think are going to be most exciting for them?

Julie Cardoza 00:30:14 Oh, I would absolutely recommend it. I think he learned so much. I’ve learned so much in the program. You had so many different components. I mean, even the business piece, like because we’re never taught business. And I think you talk about this in your practice. It’s like, hey, I have this degree. Hang my shingle. You know, we’re good. So even the business, the business portion. So being able to speak to having kind of a protocol or a model, it’s not protocol like we do in MDR where it’s very stringent, but a generalized protocol that gives us a roadmap in understanding the whole arc of the transition and what’s going on, as well as looking at the rest of the body.

Julie Cardoza 00:31:04 How does this system communicate with another system, communicate with another system that makes this beautiful human? And she has a unique life. So it was an amazing program. I would love to.

Julie Cardoza 00:31:18 Have a program, you know, in mental health that’s very similar, but we’ll get there. We’re always a little behind.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:31:26 Oh, well. And we have many, many mental health professionals in our community and in our programs. And we welcome even more because the core part of it is that idea of nervous system regulation. Holding space like this is something where it’s easy for you to understand at the entry point, and then you get to go deeper into, you know, and very few mental health traditional training programs. Do you talk a lot about how there’s communication between the gut microbiome and the brain, the vagus nerve communication that’s bidirectional. You know, the immune system, communication that’s bidirectional. That’s the stuff that gets me really excited for mental health professionals, even musculoskeletal. You know, we now know that the muscles are an endocrine organ and they speak to the brain.

Julie Cardoza 00:32:14 Yep. And so the brain’s telling you so much what’s coming out and being named is sometimes telling us about a mental health or a trauma has different roots. A lot of times it’s communicating what the body we all know about that bidirectional signaling. It’s saying a lot about what’s going on in the body.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:32:34 Yeah. And the other thing I love about having so many mental health professionals in our community is that I think there’s collaboration among mental health professionals, physical health professionals, people that have more of a background in traditional and conventional medicine, such as physical therapists or dietitians with mental health professionals. With our more holistically initially trained practitioners such as the acupuncturists in our community or rural medicine practitioners. So I love to see such a diverse community that we’ve built over. You know, now, this company has been in business over nearly 20 years. So you see that collaboration. And I do think that something that’s really happened in healthcare in general in the last 15 to 20 years since we’ve been talking about this, is that people are very collaborative and they are starting to break down some of those barriers.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:33:29 Now the system makes it tricky, but I do think that many, many, many more individual practitioners are helping their clients build those teams, breaking down those kind of siloed barriers. And it sounds like you’re really doing that in your practice. Even if you’re not prescribing or recommending a Dutch test, you’re working with people who do you understand what the test is, what it’s measuring, what different practitioners could utilize that for? Oftentimes, it’s been recommended to me that I need to have like different levels of the program for different practitioners, but I actually think we all need to know it all, even if we’re not doing it all.

Julie Cardoza 00:34:15 Yeah. Because we learn and we learn how to hold more conversations, we expand. You know, we grow.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:34:21 Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for sharing your journey and your practice with us, Julie. You know, like I said, I encourage so many mental health professionals to join our community because you have so much to offer. And the thing about perimenopause and menopause is I really do think that for many women, the first symptom that’s bothersome enough for them to actually start taking action in their own health and self-care are often the mental health symptoms the depression, the anxiety, the sensation of rage, the burnout, the overwhelm, brain fog even.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:34:58 Yep. You know, so you guys sometimes are really the frontline first provider.

Julie Cardoza 00:35:05 And we’re not always educated in it. Just to give an example of that, last week I randomly got a call and the woman was, you know, in her mid 50s and very high functioning etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And just in that intake call, I’m like, what’s going on with your menopause? And they’re like, you were the very first person to ask me that question. And they had called around quite a few places. So we need to be talking about this, you know, and asking some of these questions. It’s so powerful for women.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:35:41 Yes. Thank you so much for everything you do. Tell us who you work with, how people can reach you. Because I certainly would love to be one of your clients. I can tell already. Your energy is so wonderful.

Julie Cardoza 00:35:56 Thank you. I love what I get to do. So as a therapist, you can find me at Julie Cardoza. Com and as a coach, you can find me at Heart Scapes, llc.com, and you can follow me on social media.

Julie Cardoza 00:36:12 I gave the links and will be in the podcast notes, and I try to talk about all kinds of things, poly bagel theory and all these integrative concepts. And I also work as a consultant. So if people are looking for either eMDR consultation or trauma informed consultation or midlife menopause consultation as a practitioner, I also offer that as well.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:36:38 Excellent. Thank you so much, Julie. We’ll definitely share all your information in the show notes so everyone can be in touch with you. Who’s interested in learning more about your work? Thank you for sharing your experience, and thank you for being such an important part of our community over here at IWC.

Julie Cardoza 00:36:55 Thank you. I really enjoyed the program, so thank you so much for all the work you’ve poured into that.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:37:02 Thank you. Thank you. That was such a good conversation. So here’s your action items. I’m sure you’re excited about this. I’m sure you have some questions. I’m sure you’re really interested in integrating perimenopause and menopause care into your mental health practice, or you’re really excited to be a coach who focuses on mental health for women in the perimenopause and menopause transition.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:37:31 I want you to go check out our perimenopause and menopause programs, reach out to our career coaches, have a conversation, see how this can really expand how you help women. I mean, listen to what Julie said this potential client called her, had called everyone in her community. She was the first and only person to ask her anything about her perimenopause and menopause journey. We might think those of us who are really interested in perimenopause and menopause and women’s health in general, that your average woman in her 40s, who was working as an attorney or in publishing or HR or anything else. Nose is immersed in perimenopause in the same way we are. They are not. And in fact, most of your mental health colleagues are not immersed in this at all. You have an important opportunity here to be that person who practices through a very holistic lens, mind and body, including the physiologic transitions that are happening in perimenopause and menopause. So if you’re a coach and or a mental health professional who wants to help women really navigate these symptoms, that can be extremely overwhelming.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:38:53 Rage. Anxiety. Stuckness. Burnout. There is a huge need. So I really strongly encourage you to go check out Julie and her practice and consider learning more about perimenopause and menopause. Through our trainings and being a part of our community. I welcome you with open arms and that’s your action step for this week. Chat with our career coaches. Learn more and go follow Julie. She’s a wealth of information on all things mental health and perimenopause. See you next week. Thank you so much for joining me today for this episode of the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. Please share this episode with a colleague and if you loved it, hit that subscribe or follow button on your favorite podcast streaming service so that we can do even more to make this podcast better for you and your clients. Let’s innovate and integrate in the world of women’s health.