Ms Kirstin Bouse1
1All About Her the Centre for Menopause, Perth, Australia
Biography:
Kirstin Bouse is a Clinical and Forensic Psychologist with nearly 30 years’ experience and a deep commitment to evidence-based, clinically rigorous care. She is the founder of All About Her – The Centre for Menopause, a national platform offering healthcare, education, and professional development for women and practitioners navigating midlife. With extensive expertise in psychological assessment and psychotherapy, Kirstin specialises in the intersection of identity, mental health, and hormonal change. Her work is informed by both professional and lived experience, and she is a sought-after speaker and educator in women’s mental health and the psychology of menopause.
Abstract:
Menopause is understood as a biological event defined by hormonal changes and symptoms. However, emerging interdisciplinary perspectives and clinical insights suggest this view is incomplete. This presentation reframes menopause as a psychologically and developmentally significant stage, akin not only to adolescence but also to matrescence, with all three marked by profound hormonal shifts and psychological ‘tensions’.
Menopause involves deep identity work, cognitive reappraisal, emotional recalibration, and a reassessment of values, relationships, roles, and purpose. Drawing on the limited but growing body of research, and two decades of clinical experience with midlife women, this presentation argues that menopause is not merely a crisis to manage, but a developmental process necessary for psychological growth and wellbeing in the next stage of life.
The decline in estrogen appears to lift a longstanding ‘socialisation veil’, reducing the drive to accommodate and increasing the impulse toward authenticity, autonomy, and self-definition. Rather than pathologising the psychological disruption that often arises, we can understand it as an adaptive and necessary, if uncomfortable, reconfiguration of self.
This session explores the psychological tensions and developmental tasks of menopause, its parallels with other life stages, and how psychological frameworks can support the successful navigation of the ‘developmental tasks’ of menopause.