Chapter 2 - You’re Not Broken

Perimenopause can make even the most capable woman feel like she’s losing the plot, and that’s exactly why we start with the truth most people never say out loud: you’re not broken. When mood, sleep, weight, and energy shift all at once, it’s easy to blame yourself. We take a different route, one that treats symptoms as signals and puts your story back where it belongs: at the centre of your health.

We explore a trauma-informed view of women’s health, including ACE scores (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and the “tap on the shoulder” that can show up when midlife hormones start to change. If your nervous system has lived in high alert for years, perimenopause can amplify anxiety, inflammation, fatigue, and even autoimmune risk. We talk through what sympathetic dominance looks like in real life, why cortisol dysregulation matters, and how nervous system regulation connects to hormone balance.

You’ll also hear why the standard “calories in, calories out” advice often fails, and why the combined oral contraceptive pill isn’t always the best first-line answer, especially when progesterone support and individual risk factors are ignored. Drawing on traditional Chinese medicine, functional medicine, and whole-person care, we cover insulin resistance, PCOS patterns, Hashimoto’s, gut health repair, plant-based medicine, acupuncture, and practical steps that aim for root-cause change rather than symptom whack-a-mole.

If you want a path that’s structured but still lets you live, this one’s for you. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs to hear “you’re not broken”, and leave a review telling us what landed for you.

Transcript

You’re Not Broken

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Chapter 2. You're not broken. Age is simply the number of years the world has been enjoying you. Author unknown.

Why Your Story Matters

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When a woman walks into my clinic, one of the first things I tell her is, Your story is important. Then I ask these women to share their story with me as much as they are comfortable sharing. Why? Simply said, the body and the mind are inseparable, and the state of one directly affects the other. I strongly believe that the psyche and the soma cannot be separated. When I hear a woman's story, I begin to understand what's been going on in her body, and in some cases the health challenges she's faced for decades. Not only physically but also socially and emotionally, which then makes it easier for me to get to the root cause of her issues. But the other story that is important to address is the one every woman tells herself during what is so often this stormy season of perimenopause. For example, she might be thinking, it's my fault, there's something wrong with me. When this isn't what is actually happening at all. When I work with each woman in my clinic, I believe her healing to be bio-psychosocial. It requires working with her biochemistry, her psychology, and her social experience holistically. This belief was instilled in me during my training as a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and as a trauma-informed coach. My diverse studies shaped my approach to healing to be a blend of Eastern and Western medicine, treating the body as made up of complex systems that are interconnected, requiring that they play nicely together to maintain balance and harmony. As you learn more about my story and my journey of learning, you will understand why I believe that for women, our health goes beyond the physical. It is intrinsically linked with our own experiences and trauma. The tap on your shoulder. In fact,

ACE Scores And The Trauma Tap

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I believe this interconnection between your health and unresolved trauma to be so strong that I chose this topic for the final chapter of the book. In chapter 13, I will speak in depth about trauma and a high ACE score on the adverse childhood experiences, ACE assessment, and the role I believe they can play during perimenopause. The ACE assessment measures early life stress by identifying traumatic experiences in childhood that may impact long-term physical and mental health. Often, for a woman who has experienced trauma and has a high ACE score, during perimenopause, when every system in her body is undergoing a reboot, that unresolved trauma and ACE score can tap her on the shoulder, asking to be finally addressed. You need to pay attention to me too. Studies have shown that the higher your ACE score, the higher your risk for later health problems. As I will explain, with a high ACE score, you were perhaps confused as a young girl by all that was happening to you and often by what was beyond your control. That little girl then put this trauma somewhere because you didn't know what else to do with it at the time, which then put your sympathetic nervous system on constant high alert and can affect your biochemistry and increase your risk of developing autoimmune conditions. I share this because I know this tap on the shoulder, because my own ACE score played a big part in my story. Knowing and understanding my own story was a critical step in my healing. During my childhood and into my adulthood, I lived with a dysregulated nervous system. I lived in a sympathetic dominant nervous system state from a very young age. I see now, looking back, that it is no accident that I work with perimenopausal women who, for so many, are in this same state with a highly sensitized nervous system. I feel that I have the innate ability to recognize it in them. I understand it, I know it. I can connect with each woman who experiences it. I'm nearly fifty as I write these words, and if I'm honest, I can say for the first time, I know what it feels like to live in a peaceful nervous system state. That's why my work and this book have become both my mission and my passion to share with every woman that this kind of life is possible. A life that feels more peaceful, more vibrant, and more full of grace, even during the upheaval of perimenopause. As I put my story into words, I realized I haven't shared it in its entirety with many people before. But after nearly 30 years as a clinician, I can say with full confidence that the treatment I offered a woman in my clinic truly works. It's taken me a long time to embrace that truth because I was raised in an environment where my confidence was severely injured. My voice had been oppressed in many ways because in my household it was dangerous to express one's thoughts. It was dangerous to share how you felt. It was dangerous to question or ask why. Today, as a clinician, I have the courage to use my voice, and you're damn right I question. I ask why and I challenge. What if there is an alternative solution for healing? Similar to what I'm doing in the pages of this book. But it wasn't always this way.

A Dysregulated Beginning In Africa

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My dysregulated beginning. My childhood was anything but ordinary. I was born in the early hours of the morning in Umtata, the deepest, darkest place in Africa in a quiet nunnery, the only safe place nearby. At the time, my mum and dad were travelling across the continent in a converted ambulance, which meant hospitals weren't always close. From that moment on my upbringing was shaped by adventure, wild and beautiful, but often shadowed by fear. I would describe my father as an enigma. He was a striking blend of amazing and intense. He served in the Special Forces in the British Army during the Cyprus War, and when he returned, I'm quite certain he carried the weight of PTSD. But as a child, I believed my father could do anything. He could hunt, deep sea dive, and build houses and yachts. I watched him reset people's shoulders in the middle of the bush. He was brilliant, impossibly handsome and utterly unpredictable. I knew he had a life before ours in Africa, and one we didn't fully understand. In many ways, he was an incredible father, but one thing he was not was a good partner to my mum. There's no delicate way to say it. My mother experienced violence while I was in utero. It's why I believe I entered this world with a dysregulated nervous system. As a result, I learned coping skills to navigate my unpredictable environment from early on, to read the emotional level in any room. I often spent dinner crouched beneath the table, hiding from my father's anger as he yelled and threw things. He could be tender, even heroic, but his moods could turn instantly and without warning. I never knew whether he would pull me into a hug or explode in anger. Then there was the accident, an event that irreparably left its mark. It happened when I was eighteen months old. My mother was driving with me in the back seat when we were hit head on by a truck. I flew through the windscreen and landed on the road. My mother suffered a broken collarbone and arm, and my leg was severely injured. We were both taken to hospital. When my father finally arrived he was frantic, asking anyone who would listen if they'd seen a little girl. Eventually he found my mother lying in her hospital bed, battered and bruised. She pulled back the sheets, and there I was beside her. I've been told that in that moment I opened my tiny hands filled with shards of glass, and I said, Look, Daddy, diamonds. Not long after I was left alone with my leg in traction in an African hospital for six months. A toddler in pain and surrounded by strangers. No mother, no father. Alone, just trying to heal. When I finally did return home, my father decided that the best treatment for my trauma was water therapy. At age two, he taught me to deep sea dive with heavy tanks strapped to my small back. Shortly after, my father put a rifle in my hands. By age five, I could shoot the head off a protea flower from 500 meters away. Protea, one of the oldest flowering plants on earth, symbolizes resilience and rare beauty. Looking back, perhaps it would become a metaphor for the life that lay ahead of me. One that has held so much beauty and yet asked of me much strength and endurance. My father trained me like I was in the special forces. It's no wonder that, as a child, my nervous system was constantly on high alert, flooded with cortisol. I loved my father. I admired him, but I was also terrified of him. That push-pull, that contradiction, lived in my body. It shaped how I saw the world and how I would later come to deeply understand the women I would ultimately treat in my clinic as a practitioner. And yes, as a young girl, my nervous system was trained to live in a state of high alert. But something else began to happen. I found peace in nature, walking along the garden hedge with a chameleon on my shoulder and a Bok Makiri bird nearby, collecting dragonfly wings, bones, and leaves to study in my little apothecary under the floorboards. I didn't know it then, but these rituals were my first lessons in calming my nervous system. Perhaps now you can better understand why I believe I was born with a dysregulated nervous system. The unpredictability of the circumstances in my life maintained it for many years. But it is also the reason why I can recognize it in others. I see now my dysregulated beginning as a sort of gift, allowing me the innate ability to see this state in the beautiful women I treat in my clinic, and the reason why it is my life's passion and work to help them. To help women like you. Before I go on, I want you to know that I forgave my parents long ago. I understand now, especially as a single mum for twenty years, as all parents do, that my parents did the best they knew how, given the realities they were born into, the stories they told themselves about what normal looked like, and the unresolved trauma they each carried from their own childhoods. But here's what I also know. We all have the opportunity to reject and not repeat the cycle of dysfunction in our own lives and with our children. This is what I have chosen to do, and you can too.

Boarding School, Food, And PCOS

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A different kind of education. Inside my childhood home we spoke three languages, as I was born in Umtata. My first language was Isitgosa, an Unguni language spoken in South Africa's Eastern Cape. My African name is actually Vuiswa. We also spoke English as my father was Scottish and Dutch because of my mum. In school I learned Afrikaans, similar to Flemish. However, when I was fifteen, my parents decided boarding school would be best for me. They dropped me off at a prominent girls' school in Stalambosch, South Africa, and just like that it felt very much like my childhood was over. I wouldn't see my mother again until I was in my twenties. In one day my home was gone, my mum, my dad, my sister, gone. I was alone again. So I did what many of us do. I navigated my circumstances, calling on the coping mechanisms I had. At school, I developed a form of disordered eating, not the kind where you fade away, losing too many kilos, but the kind where you try to disappear inside the comfort of food. I remember sitting cross-legged with my hand deep in a raisin brand box, trying to soothe the ache inside. At the same time, my body was going through puberty, and I was suffering from what I would later learn was polycystic ovarian syndrome, PICOS. My body was in an insulin-resistant state, and my unhealthy food choices only exacerbated my symptoms. So by 18, I was severely overweight. I had irregular menstrual cycles, cystic acne, and severely poor gut health. In many ways, I was living every teenage girl's nightmare. Why do the health issues I experienced as a young girl matter? Because those are some of the same symptoms POS, weight gain, irregular periods, and insulin resistance that many women experience in perimenopause, and I was living with these issues before I even knew what they meant. The issues I suffered and the diagnoses the GP'd missed fast became the origin point of my lifetime search for answers, which were different answers that lay beyond what the traditional medical model could offer me at the time. The keys to the art room. However, at this point in time, my quest for knowledge was hindered by the fact that I was a broke South African schoolgirl with no pathway to university, until a kind teacher gave me the keys to the art room. On weekends I began to create textile designs. I would sew them into curtains and cushions with the help of a friend's mum. We then took these goods to sell at the local market. These creations gave me that little spark of hope I needed and earned me just enough money to make my way to America as an au pair. Those keys to the art room gave me something I hadn't had in a long time. Freedom. And so my quest for answers began. My twenties were a messy, beautiful search for meaning. After my time as an au pair, I studied briefly in Miami and then moved to the UK using my British passport. I felt happier, but I was still quite physically unwell. My health challenges continued. I

Finding TCM After Medical Dead Ends

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met my partner at the time who would later become the father of my beautiful son, and I shared a house with sixteen other people, eating whatever we could afford. We traveled across Europe, Nepal, India, and Thailand. We did as people do in their twenties. We were chasing experiences and simply trying to make ends meet. However, when our travels took us to India and Nepal, I discovered Ayurvedic medicine. I couldn't get enough. I devoured texts. I asked questions. I had an insatiable hunger to understand what was happening in my body, and why nothing I did seemed to help to resolve my symptoms. When my partner and I finally landed in Australia, I enrolled in university to study traditional Chinese medicine, TCM, where I began to explore the relationship between soma and psyche. As I studied, it was the first time I could name what I had experienced as a child. The trauma, the disordered eating, the unresolved grief. At one point I went to a doctor for help. She looked at me and said, You have polycystic ovarian syndrome, you're obese, and you'll never fall pregnant. Her solution? The contraceptive pill to regulate my cycle and a weight loss medication. Looking back, I now understand that as a practitioner, her prescriptions were all she had in her toolbox. I do want to pause here in my story to note that, like me, many women in perimenopause are still offered the combined oral contraceptive pill as a first-line treatment. In my clinical view, this is rarely the best approach because the pill suppresses your natural hormone production, including the progesterone support your body actually needs during this transition. But we'll talk more about this later. At age 24 and after that GP's diagnosis, I didn't know it, but I was already dealing with symptoms of progesterone deficiency. So the weight loss medication she prescribed to me made me dizzy and violently ill. When I went home and read the leaflet for the contraceptive pill, I saw its risk for thromboembolism or blood clots. I remembered my family history. All of my relatives on my mother's side had died from strokes or heart attacks, and my mum suffered from varicus veins. Even at that young age I remember thinking that there was no way I would risk those complications. I couldn't believe the doctor hadn't asked about my family history. That's the moment I truly hit rock bottom. I was twenty-four, overweight, infertile apparently, but hopeless. Through a different medical lens. Then, one day, I walked into the university clinic. An older professor was supervising a student and looked over at me. She simply said, It's just a bit of damp heat in the lower jowl. She didn't diagnose. She didn't label because she was looking through a different medical lens, one that was grounded in Chinese medicine, where the body is understood as a network of dynamic, interconnected systems. In this model, symptoms aren't treated in isolation. They're seen as signals, clues pointing to deeper imbalances in how the body's systems are communicating and functioning together. She wasn't just looking at my skin or weight. She was tracing the root causes and how my hormones, digestion, inflammation, and emotional stress were all woven together. She treated me as a whole person, with the belief that balance could be restored. She will never know it, but that moment changed the trajectory of my life. As you will learn, this professor's lens is the same one through which I view a woman's health. I look for the root causes beneath the symptoms you might be suffering. I work with the psyche, the soma, and your gut health.

The Hierarchy Of Healing

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You see, I believe that each system in your body is beautifully complex and interconnected, and they need to be treated this way. Unlike the first GP I saw, this professor prescribed me plant-based medicine and body work, including acupuncture, traditional Chinese remedial massage and cupping. She helped me remove gluten and dairy from my diet, and within months, my periods normalized and my weight dropped. She then explained to me what had been happening in my body, insulin resistance, low progesterone, PICOS, and Hashimoto's thyroiditis, an autoimmune condition that slows down the thyroid function, causing possible weight gain and fatigue. But more important than her diagnosis, as I looked ahead to my future as a practitioner, she challenged me. Be the practitioner you needed in the past. I have never forgotten her words. In fact, they became my mission and my passion with every woman who walks into my clinic, who is listening right now, to be the practitioner I never had in my past. I went on to complete a double degree in acupuncture and traditional Chinese herbal medicine. I studied environmental and nutritional medicine, neitropathy, then functional medicine, person-centered counseling and trauma-informed health and wellness coaching. All of that learning, every layer, is what led me to create what I now call the hierarchy of healing. Here's what I know to be true. If you start by trying to fix your weight or your joint pain without first understanding the root cause beneath that symptom, you'll simply spin your wheels getting nowhere. To reduce weight gain, it's not just calories in and calories out, or eat less and move more. It's more likely to be more complex, like circadian rhythm disruption, cortisol dysregulation, burnout, hormonal depletion, or metabolic issues. I'm here to tell you, just like that professor told me, that you are not broken, but your body may be in a crisis. And there is a path out. This is what I teach. This is what I live. For every woman I treat, I only prescribe what I would be comfortable taking myself. If you walked into my house, you would see the same plant-based medicines I recommend to my patients. You would see my counters and refrigerator filled with the same nutrient-dense foods I will show you in repair. I know how they feel in the body. On my own health journey, I've walked through the fire, I've come out the other side. And, beautiful, my greatest wish is for you to find the other side of your health struggles, to finally feel like the vital woman you are. Perhaps the most sacred part of my journey, my story, my full circle moment in healing my body, was proving that GP wrong from so many years ago. I was not infertile. At 29, after using the same protocols I will share with you in chapter 9, how to heal, seal, and repair your gut, how to bring your hormones back into balance and how to reclaim your vitality. I fell pregnant naturally. My son grew inside a body that was nourished, rebalanced, and finely trusted. Every day since his birth I have lived what I will teach you. At nearly fifty, a single mum of twenty years, running a full and busy clinic, serving the woman I'm so passionate to help, I'm still the most vibrant version of myself. Your life's journey might differ from mine. The adversity and joys your life has shown you may look different. But I promise you that in your health journey the hierarchy of healing will provide you a path to feeling vibrant again, energized to do what you love to, and finally do the work to mitigate your symptoms and issues. This book is for any woman who wants to step into the position to impact her own health positively and take back vibrancy and control in perimenopause and in her life, in her own home and in her own kitchen. Who needs to be told you're not broken, this isn't in your head, you've done nothing wrong, and it's okay if you feel the care you've received didn't go far enough. It's not your fault, and there are ways forward when you learn how to work with your biochemistry and not against it. Who wants freedom? Who wants a protocol to follow eighty percent of the time that is customized to what her body needs? The woman who wants the other twenty per cent of the time to be able to eat whatever she wants, whenever she wants, drink a margarita on the beach with the love of her life, eat the birthday cake at the party because she can and wants to, and never be on a diet again. This book is meant to teach you to change your life, so you have access to the vitality you've deserved all along.