Playfulness seems to run through everything that author, theatremaker and psychotherapist Stella Duffy puts her hand to. And the psychotherapy doctorate that she has embarked on, exploring the embodied experience of postmenopause from an existential perspective, is no exception. Her joy is palpable as she talks about the poems that she is creating from her first research participant鈥檚 experiences.
鈥業鈥檓 trying to write a thesis in as accessible a language as possible,鈥� she said.
The 59-year-old attributes this dedication to creative play to the fact that she was the first in her family to finish secondary school, let alone get to university: 鈥楢cademia simply wasn鈥檛 in our conversation.鈥�
As the youngest of seven siblings, Stella was the first to be able to stay in school long enough to complete the exams that would get her into university. Life was not easy for Stella鈥檚 working-class parents in their late teens. Her mother had a stillbirth during the war. Her听
father was taken prisoner.
鈥楾hey were amazing in that, given their backgrounds, given their own lack of opportunity, they didn鈥檛 believe that I therefore had to go and get an amazing job. They were just excited for me to have the opportunity.鈥�
And, so, she went off to learn how to write plays and read books.
鈥榃hat that meant is that I played for a very long time,鈥� she added.
And that was hugely productive: Stella is the award-winning writer of 17 novels, over 70 short stories and 14 plays and has performed in shows off Broadway and at the National Theatre. She also teaches yoga to writers and facilitates writing workshops.
Yet, in her mid 20s, Stella would have trained as a therapist had she not discovered that this avenue was closed to her.
鈥業 find it so disheartening that I had to be in my late 50s and fortunately mortgage free to be able to afford this, because I could never have afforded it at any other point.鈥�
Next in this issue
What鈥檚 more, as a queer person, she discovered that the main听 therapeutic organisations were not accepting: 鈥楾hey still did not believe that we were of as much value as heterosexual people. It鈥檚 within my living memory that the APA (American Psychological Association) decided that being gay was OK. As a young, out person, I was encouraged to deal with my 鈥渃omplex鈥�, which was why they said I was gay.鈥�
She looks back with some incredulity at how the world has changed: 鈥業 think of my young trans, non-binary and gender-queer clients, and how open I choose to be to their self-defining, to their understanding of themselves, the self they bring to the room, and I understand that with the best will in the world, that was not what psychotherapy was offering in my teens and 20s.鈥�
In terms of faith, too, Stella, who was brought up Catholic, sought out a place where a queer woman would be welcomed.
鈥業 knew, probably from my early teens onwards, that Catholicism wasn鈥檛 going to keep cutting it for me,鈥� she said. She spent a lot of time searching and settled on the Soka Gakkai organisation, who share a form of Japanese chanting Buddhism, which she has been practising for more than 30 years. It appealed, she explained, because it was one of the very few forms of the faith in which it was categorically stated that women can be as enlightened as men.
When Stella did come to train as a therapist, existentialism was the natural choice, because, like Buddhism, it respects and acknowledges that the one constant in life is change.
鈥楨xistential work takes groundlessness as a given. It says: 鈥淭hose moments where you feel safe and stable? Sure, enjoy them, but don鈥檛 think they last.鈥濃��
The yoga teacher in her stresses that this is true at the most embodied level too: 鈥榃hen I teach tadasana, mountain pose, I always say: 鈥淧eople talk about mountain pose being still, but we can鈥檛 be still.鈥�
鈥極ur blood is moving. Our hearts are beating. Our synapses are firing. We are only still after that last breath out, and very quickly deterioration sets in and it鈥檚 no longer still. It begins to crumble anyway. Stillness is not of the earth. The biggest, strongest mountains are moving beneath the core.鈥�
The thought of constant change evokes emotion: 鈥楴othing stays the same. It can鈥檛. And there鈥檚 an inherent groundlessness to life, to any human life, that our culture just hates.鈥�
Nowhere, she says, is this clearer than in society鈥檚 attitude towards menopausal women: 鈥業鈥檝e been menopausal since my first cancer in my mid 30s. In terms of the menopause transition itself, there are plenty of cultures in the world which do not have the difficulties with it that we do.
They tend to be cultures where older women are respected and where ageing is respected. We cannot separate the biomedical menopausal experience from our sociocultural experience that tells us ageing is wrong, that old women are irrelevant, and that we need to be stopping our ageing if at all humanly possible.
鈥楢nd we鈥檙e still not including trans men or gender non-binary people in the menopause discussion.鈥�
Stella has pushed to make her own research, which she describes as 鈥榓 drop in the ocean鈥�, as inclusive as possible: 鈥楾he menopause stories I primarily hear in the press are white, heterosexual middle-class mothers. There鈥檚 very little research on the bodies of those of us who are not mothers in menopause. There鈥檚 a dearth of research on queer menopause, on bodies that are not white.鈥�
She also finds the current narrative that 鈥榗onveys menopause as the end鈥� disturbing, imagining instead existing in a culture in which it was 鈥榝ine and ordinary鈥� to have a hot flush in a meeting, or in a client session.
鈥楤ecause we live in a culture that has told us to hide every evidence of our periods, every evidence of our leaking, messy, human, dripping-wet inside and outside bodies, and which finds that human animal side of us disturbing, the things over which we have no control in menopause become way more problematic,鈥� she said.
And, she adds, there is something we can learn from Buddhism and existentialism here too. She uses the example of her experience of living with chronic pain, brought on, in part, by having had chemotherapy: 鈥楳y attachment to being pain free is enormous and it gets in the way of me experiencing less pain. The more I concentrate on my pain, the more I feel my pain.
鈥榃e know the neuroscience behind this, and yet, being as human as the next person, no amount of my neuroscience knowledge, my Buddhist knowledge and my embrace of existentialism has yet enabled me to go: 鈥淥h, OK. Well, I鈥檒l just stop feeling it!鈥濃��
In her postmenopause research, Stella is keen to highlight the peace to be found in embracing transition: 鈥極ne participant uses a beautiful phrase, something like 鈥溾�ut of the stillness of menopause, I am able to give my becoming-adult children a different and currently more useful version of myself.鈥� They needed her to be like a rock, and postmenopause has given her that.鈥�
But Stella also acknowledges the grief inherent in menopause: 鈥楾here are of course losses and gains, and my concern with the current menopause narrative, which I absolutely appreciate needed to swing this way, is that it is so profoundly negative at the moment.
鈥業 worry that we are telling people that menopause must be medicated away, that it is too difficult, and we have to all perceive it as a huge problem. In the same way that I worry that we are telling teenagers that anxiety is wrong. No, it鈥檚 not. It鈥檚 a signal that something鈥檚 up. Change is happening. There鈥檚 something that we need to pay attention to.
鈥業 worry that we see it as a first resort rather than finding out what else is going on,鈥� she added. 鈥榃e live in a culture that tells us that all ageing is terrible, all anxiety is terrible and that we need to medicate or 鈥渢herapy鈥� it out of the way. We can鈥檛. Human beings feel these things. Let鈥檚 play with what we feel.鈥�
It鈥檚 clear that creativity, and storytelling, will continue to inform Stella鈥檚 way of working: 鈥業鈥檓 very much enjoying that I can bring these decades of work in creativity to a psychotherapeutic practice,鈥� she said.
鈥業 really believe that the storytelling we do in psychotherapy, our supporting our clients to find new stories about themselves, to shake up their old stories, to question the stories they have been telling themselves and that others have told them, are all tied up with the storytelling I do as a novelist anyway, and particularly as a facilitator and workshop leader. I help people write their stories. This is just another way of supporting people to tell their stories.鈥�
She does talk about recently having known a 鈥榮mall sadness鈥�, which she terms 鈥榚xistential guilt鈥� at the thought that she is running out of time to be the therapist she wants to be: 鈥業 can鈥檛 live another 40 years, which might just be long enough for me to fully embrace all the possibilities I might want to bring to therapy, all the things I care about, all the movement and the physicality, the play and the creativity.鈥�
But, in considering it in her own therapy, she came to realise that in discounting the amazing things she鈥檇 done before this, she was denying the versions that led to this one: 鈥榃hen we change, I think we can choose to bring along the threads of our past that are valuable. We can also choose to leave behind the ones that have been less valuable, but I suspect that all of them are valuable somehow.鈥�