Grief and Loss During Perimenopause: Processing the Emotions This Transition Stirs Up
Perimenopause often brings unexpected grief. Learn why this transition triggers deep feelings of loss and how to process them with compassion and support.
The grief that catches you off guard
Nobody tells you that perimenopause can feel like a grief process. You might be grieving your fertility, even if you never wanted more children. You might be mourning the body you had, or a sense of yourself that now feels further away. You might find old losses resurfacing, a relationship, a dream, a version of your life that did not happen. These feelings are not signs that something has gone wrong. They are a completely understandable human response to a significant life transition.
Why perimenopause unlocks grief
Estrogen plays a role in emotional processing and memory. As it fluctuates during perimenopause, emotions that were previously compartmentalised can become more accessible, sometimes overwhelmingly so. The transition itself also carries symbolic weight. It marks an end to a chapter of life, regardless of whether that chapter was chosen or celebrated. Biological closure, even when intellectually accepted, can carry emotional weight that takes time to move through. Many women also experience perimenopause alongside other significant losses: ageing parents, changes in relationships, shifts in role and identity.
Types of grief in perimenopause
Grief in perimenopause is rarely simple. It often involves multiple layers at once. There is grief for the body as it was. Grief for fertility, which may have ended years ago but becomes more concretely final now. Grief for youth, not as vanity but as the loss of a sense of possibility and time. There is also anticipatory grief, anxiety about what is still to come in terms of ageing and health. And there is the grief of unfinished emotional business, old wounds that the hormonal shifts of perimenopause can bring closer to the surface after years of being managed. Acknowledging the full complexity of what you are grieving, rather than trying to reduce it to one clear loss, tends to make the process more honest and ultimately more effective.
What grief actually needs
Grief does not follow a neat sequence of stages, and it cannot be hurried or bypassed. What it tends to need is acknowledgement, time, and the experience of being witnessed. This might mean talking to a trusted friend, a therapist, or a support group. It might mean allowing yourself to cry without immediately trying to feel better. Writing can be a powerful way to process grief, especially the kind of complicated, layered grief that perimenopause tends to bring up. Journalling without editing or goal-setting lets emotions move through rather than accumulate.
Distinguishing grief from depression
Grief and depression share some features but they are not the same thing. Grief tends to come in waves, with periods of relative stability between them. Depression is more pervasive, affecting your ability to experience pleasure, your motivation, and your sense of a future. Both can be present at the same time, and perimenopause raises the risk of clinical depression through its direct effects on brain chemistry. If your low mood has been consistent for more than two weeks, is affecting your ability to function, or comes with feelings of hopelessness, please speak to your GP.
Rituals and practices that support grief
Grief benefits from rhythm and ritual. Simple practices like setting aside time to journal, spending time in nature, marking significant dates, or creating small ceremonies of acknowledgement can give grief a container. Movement, particularly outdoors walking, supports emotional processing in ways that are well-documented. Connection with other women navigating perimenopause can reduce the isolation that grief compounds. You do not have to intellectualise or resolve your grief. You only have to make space for it to move. Even ten minutes a day of unstructured reflection, without trying to fix or analyse, can create enough breathing room for grief to process rather than accumulate into something heavier.
This transition also carries forward something real
Grief and growth are not opposites. Many women describe perimenopause, even with all its difficulty, as a time when they became clearer about what matters to them and more willing to act on that clarity. The process of losing some things makes space for others. This is not toxic positivity or silver-lining pressure. It is an observation that grief, when it is allowed to be what it is, tends to eventually make way for something new. You are not just losing a chapter. You are entering the next one.
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