🌕 Where nervous system wisdom rewrites the menopause playbook—part of The Reckoning Years series.
Rachel, 58, arrived with a quiet kind of exhaustion — the kind you only see in women who’ve been dismissed too many times.
Burning vulvar pain. Sitting hurt. Sex felt like sandpaper on a nerve ending. She’d tried lidocaine, amitriptyline suppositories, diazepam compounds, months of pelvic floor PT. The PT helped a little, then plateaued. Every test was “normal.”
Which is clinician code for: we can’t measure the thing that hurts.
Two years of chronic yeast infections before this started. A history of infertility. Autoimmune patterns running through her family. Tissue normal. Labs normal. Experience absolutely not.
At the end of our intake, after we’d covered the medical timeline, she paused.
“My first pelvic exam — I was eighteen. No one asked permission before going deep. It was just… expected.”
That sentence changed everything.
The Reframe
This wasn’t a vagina problem. It was a sensory gain problem.
Rachel’s pelvic floor was bracing like it expected an attack — because at some point, her nervous system had learned that it should. The chronic yeast infections had sensitized her tissue. The early invasive exam had taught her body that this area wasn’t safe. Years of pain had trained her brain to amplify every signal.
Pain like this is rarely about tissue damage. It’s about miscalibrated threat perception at the periphery: nociceptors on high alert, spinal cord amplification, and a brain that learned the pattern too well. Like a fire alarm that can’t forget the smell of smoke.
🌟 How Rachel’s System Reorganized (Through the Vital Clarity Code Lens)
🌱 Regulate
The first shift wasn’t more creams; it was downshifting the signal intensity.
We removed every irritant we could: fragranced products, synthetic underwear, the friction sources she hadn’t even registered anymore. Then we started breath-paced pelvic floor unbracing — not Kegels, which would have made things worse, but conscious release. Longer exhales. Teaching her body it could let go.
Within four weeks, the baseline burn decreased from constant to intermittent.
🌀 Rewire
Once the alarm wasn’t blaring constantly, we could start repatterning what “safe touch” meant.
We introduced graded desensitization — warm to cool to feather-light touch, working up from her thighs toward her vulva over weeks. Not forcing. Not gritting through. Dilator work paired with parasympathetic breath, used only when her system was already calm.
Her pelvic floor PT shifted from strengthening to melting. Her gut, which had been reactive since the yeast infections, started calming with vaginal microbiome support and anti-inflammatory nutrition.
The nervous system was learning that this part of her body could receive input without bracing for assault.
🔥 Reclaim
Rachel stopped apologizing for having boundaries.
For years, she’d felt broken — unable to be intimate without paying for it in pain, unable to explain to partners or doctors why everything looked fine but felt like fire. Now she understood: her body had been protecting her. That wasn’t dysfunction. That was a system doing its job too well.
She started speaking up about what she needed. She stopped performing okayness.
✨ Resonate
Four months in, the pain moved from identity to inconvenience.
Six months in, intimacy didn’t require pre-planned bravery.
Not because the pain vanished instantly, but because the gain turned down. Her body learned it could be touched without preparing for threat. The fire alarm stopped going off every time someone walked past the kitchen.
She trusted her pelvis again. Not because it never spoke up, but because it no longer had to shout.
🪶 Micropractice: Sensory Reset
Sit or lie somewhere comfortable.
Place your hand on your lower belly — not your vulva, just nearby.
Breathe slowly. Let your exhale be longer than your inhale.
Notice: warmth, fabric texture, the weight of your hand. Nothing more.
This isn’t about “fixing” anything.
It’s about teaching your nervous system that presence doesn’t require vigilance.
Rachel’s pain was never “all in her head.”
It was in her wiring — and wiring can be rewritten.
Ready to decode your own patterns?
Curious what signal your body might be expressing?
Start with a Vital Signal Check →
This case story is part of the Menopause Hub, where we decode how hormonal shifts reshape nervous system capacity, pelvic terrain, and sensory processing in midlife.