It wasn’t until I was plunged into the depths of menopause that I realised I’d lost my voice.
In fact I lost it when I was 8 years old. It was 1974. Going into my first French class. Without a care in the world.
The little girl who came out of that class was not the same as the one that walked in.
She came out squashed down, embarrassed, and very silent for the next 50+ years.
I see her now…in all her innocence. In the largeness of life with the ability to clown around and have fun, without any fear.
And I’ve shed a tear more than once when I’ve thought about the impact of that class.
You see… whilst it was my first French lesson (as I’d just joined the school), my classmates had been doing it for several weeks already. I was going in blind.
So when the teacher asked a question, I was mortified when she picked on me to answer…
“Comment tu t’appelles?”
I immediately froze. I remember thinking… surely she must know this is my first class? Sadly not.
“This is my first class, Miss”, I replied in English, hoping she would move on to another person.
“That’s no excuse! You should have caught up on what the others have learnt so far!”
Ouch, that stung deeply. I could literally feel the eyes of every other child in that class staring at me. For all I knew they were probably just glad they hadn’t been picked on, but it didn’t feel like it. I felt judged right in that moment, and I wanted the world to swallow me up.
That has stayed within me for years. I even forgot about it and got on with my life. And I never knew just how much impact it had until I recalled it decades later.
Back in 2023 I was given the opportunity to take part in some online hypnotherapy sessions. And there she was…my 8 year old inner child. Traumatised by that experience.
But not only that incident came flooding back to me. I’d already remembered a couple of years previously the bullying I endured at school for living on the ‘posh’ estate in our village (something which made me wary of standing out over the years), but also I recalled sitting an extra exam when I was about 17 at school. By this point in my education I’d been studying French, German, Latin and Russian, and sitting oral exams in all of them bar Latin (being a dead language), so volunteering to take an English oral exam was a no-brainer. Or so I thought.
It was just me walking into a room and talking to a stranger… actually I vaguely remember donkeys being discussed!!
But the results dropped a week or so later and I saw my name listed with FAIL next to it. How ironic that of all the languages I’ve studied, my own is the one that lets me down. And there was another rubber stamp on the story I’d created in my mind that I should never speak.
It’s taken me over 2 years to sit with what happened and start to unpick the layers. And whilst I instantly knew at the time of recall that these incidents had affected me, I hadn’t realised to what depth.
It was in 2025 that I started to understand this was the reason I hated public speaking. I’d always wanted to hide from being seen. I avoided networking like the plague. I reluctantly entered spaces online with other women, always thinking they were better than me. I worried that I wouldn’t know what to say. That I wasn’t interesting enough. That I wasn’t worthy of attention.
In reality I was recoiling from being seen because I didn’t feel safe in my own body. I was contracting. Hiding myself.
Has this affected my decisions in life? Absolutely!
Do I regret it? Absolutely not!
It’s part of my journey.
And I can say this because I am exactly where I need to be right now, and all of my life experiences both good and tough have brought me to now, this point I’m at. I’ve always known that the grass isn’t necessarily greener on the other side of the decisions I’ve made. So don’t ever think you should have changed what decisions you made. Had you done anything differently, you might be dead now. You’ll never know because you didn’t take the other decisions. And those tough times? They were put before you to show you something, for you to learn something. They are life’s beautiful lessons, all of them.
Fast forward to summer 2025 and I’m working on my big idea… the thing that my business is about. Since trying to get my menopause coaching business up and running, I never seemed to get clarity on this. I felt like one of those inflatable tube men you often see on garage forecourts… flailing around not knowing which way to go.
Until I met Claire Sewell… a beautiful kindred soul… who taught me about energetics.
She helped me dig really deep into what was coming up for me and then it all started to emerge. Not just the helping women with the physical and emotional side of menopause, but the deep stuff that I had just gone through which I found really hard to talk about at the time, but which I knew was why I am here.
I’m talking about the psychological side of menopause, the deep soul work that gets touched by this time of life. And I finally accepted that I could help women walk the path that I had: The Body – The Mind – The Soul. It took a lot for me to accept. Yet it felt good.
But wait a minute. That wasn’t the end. It was never going to be that easy.
I still felt a niggle… something bubbling under the surface, just making me dig a little deeper and I had to sit with it for a couple of weeks before I saw it.
What was the one thing I’d been hiding all my life that this huge shift in menopause has shown me?
My voice.
And that was my missing piece. Reclaiming my voice. Helping women reclaim theirs. Unveiling where they’ve felt the pressure to fit into society, silencing their voices, keeping themselves small.
And it’s only since I’ve acknowledged my own journey through life with dimming my voice and staying small, trying to fit in, that I’ve emerged feeling able to step into my own power, fully embracing the impact I can have and the huge legacy I get to leave here.
It seems until we face our fears, not in a way that feels forced, because it can be done gently and in our own time, we risk holding ourselves back, not being able to fully embrace what’s meant for us, how we can help so many others who walk the same path after us.
It would be a shame to not shine our lights as brightly as we can.
With love 💫
Caroline x
The Menopause Alchemist®
[Photo is of pre 8 year old me which I keep near me these days to remind me how much fun life gets to be]
🔮 If my blog has stirred something deep within you, maybe you’ve been hiding your voice too… check out all the ways I can support you… https://linktr.ee/revive_intuitive
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