PaulaRastrick

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PaulaRastrick

Author | Disruptor | Thought Leader in hormonal sensitivity, nervous system, trauma and neurodiversity. Post Grad Cert - Psychological Trauma.

Redefining HRT and midlife through science, soul & healing. Founder of Sensitive Women.
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linktr.ee/thebrainbodymethod I am a hormonally sensitive woman, a complex trauma survivor (C-PTSD, ADHD, Autism, HSP, AuDHD). I specialise in the science of Hormonal Sensitivity, early life stress and trauma. Trauma Therapist and Coach. My evidence based book is being published 2025. Our life stories are written into our nervous systems through genetics and epigenetics. - You cannot separate your hormones from your life story and your nervous system profile. Early life stress, adverse childhood experiences and attachment wounds are strongly associated as risk factors for a variety of women's health issues, amongst these are:

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), Postnatal Depression, Endometriosis, Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), Ehlers - Danlos Syndrome (EDS) and Auto-immune disorders. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Highly Sensitive People, Autism and multiple mental health diagnoses including Anxiety and Depression.

07/10/2025

⁉️Is it hormonal or nervous system sensitivity and dysregulation?

⚠️ I argue fiercely in my book on hormonal sensitivity - that it’s the nervous system and we have to understand genetics, early life stress and epigenetics throughout life.

⚠️If we don’t widen this lens - more young girls and women will be misunderstood, mistreated and continue to fall though multiple medical cracks!

🧠Puberty - PMDD - Pregnancy and Perimenopause and hormonal sensitivity - it’s all linked with complex trauma and neurodivergent profiles.

✔️If you would like to learn more about how to start to advocate for yourself to get better individual treatment (including HRT:MHT) then please join my newsletter.

🎯My aim is to provide a new map for women who are more sensitive, so they can start to advocate for themselves.

⬇️Comment

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✔️And the link will be sent to your inbox.

✔️We have to change this conversation so more young girls and women can be helped and understood medically and hormonally.

Paula 🫶

05/10/2025

💫If you follow me, and my content on the science of hormonal sensitivity resonates with you, I would love you to stay.

💫Equally, you are always free to leave if you wish.

💫 I put a lot of time and energy into advocacy, thought leadership and my social media education.

💫None of which I get paid for, and some of which I get personally attacked for.

💫 I don’t have any business interests in what I’m doing - apart from my book.

💫After that’s released early next year, I will continue to shine a light on the need to understand hormonal sensitivity through a trauma informed, nervous system lens

💫Because change doesn’t happen over night!

💫But privately and personally?

💫My own passions, interests and future direction will be about femine energy, female consciousness, midlife awakening, post traumatic growth, empowerment and healing.

Paula ❤️

💫

03/10/2025

Firstly - apologies for my voice in attempt to slow down I now sound very weird - you live and learn 🤪

❌My prescriber dosed me with very high oestrogen ratios and barely any progesterone in perimenopause, because they don’t understand hormonal sensitivity or bio- individuality.

📌Despite me trying again and again to explain the side effects. For my profile personally, I needed a completely different progesterone ratio.

📌Progesterone isn’t the bad guy - but individual nervous system sensitivity can be.

📌Progesterone converts into allopregnanolone, which normally calms the brain by acting on GABA receptors. But not every nervous system responds the same way.

📌Epigenetic changes from early stress, trauma, or neurodivergent biology can leave GABA receptors dysregulated or “sensitised.”

📌That can also mean (some - not all) women have lower ratios of allopregnanolone, and when hormones fluctuate, their nervous system struggles to manage both hormonal fluctuations and the stress response.

📌In perimenopause, this matters even more. Some (not all) women need higher ratios of progesterone. Others may not be able to convert progesterone efficiently.

🎯This is why one-size-fits-all HRT protocols are so dangerous.

📌My focus is online HRT or PET misinformation for sensitive women.

📌Some (not all) Prescribers label women as hormonally “imbalanced” and medicate them according to rigid prescribing ideologies, instead of recognising that sensitivity and conversion pathways differ from woman to woman.

📌This isn’t “hormone “deficiency” or “imbalance.” - It’s nervous system individuality.

📌Until we acknowledge this complexity online HRT marketing will continue to confuse and we won’t be able to move fowards with a wider conversation due to being drowned out.

⚠️In the online menopause space particularly- the loudest voices and biggest accounts are not always the wisest.

📌This is just one reason - I go into more in my book because each woman will need to understand their own nervous system profile whether they take HRT or not.

Paula

29/09/2025

✨ I have been through huge healing and transformational shifts the past two years, since I withdrew from the world and cacooned myself with writing.

✨I have embraced my own company, sat with my darker shadows, travelled multiple times on solo adventures which have all helped me to turn inwards and reflect, learn, grow and evolve spiritually.

✨ For sensitive women, perimenopause can feel brutal because old wounds resurface, the nervous system feels fragile, raw and vulnerable.

✨Trauma we thought we had buried comes rising back up to the surface with force and demands to be seen and dealt with.

✨Relationships with both yourself and others can change dramatically and destabilise you because the body and the psyche are asking us to finally integrate what was never healed.

✨This is why perimenopause can feel so disorienting. It strips away the masks, the survival strategies, the way we have coped since childhood.

✨Suddenly, the shadows that were once hidden are laid bare and asking to be seen.

✨Jung called this the process of individuation - the movement towards wholeness.

✨ Midlife isn’t the end - it’s the beginning of finally becoming more fully your true, authentic, raw and unapologetic self.

✨Perimenopause is not an ending - it’s an awakening.

✨ Female consciousness and feminine energy is rising collectively and this will be the focus of my work and my life moving forwards.

💫Paula

27/09/2025

💫At what point does your silent compliance also become complicit in covering up harm?

💫I would like others to also please think about that.

💫Many others that know of harm and removed themselves silently to protect themselves and their interests.

💫I understand why - we are all human and it’s really difficult speaking up.

💫But abandoning innocent women to hold the line and then take the fall no longer sits well with my own soul.

💫Too often, too many many hope someone else will speak, that someone else will act so they don’t have too.

💫But if we all choose to stay silent - who will?

Paula 🫶

27/09/2025

ADHD + Perimenopause HRT Myths

❌MYTH
“ADHD is a dopamine deficiency” - Oestrogen boosts dopamine.
So HRT is the “fix.”

✅TRUTH
That’s been debunked and we need to really widen this conversation. ADHD isn’t caused by low dopamine - it’s a whole nervous system dysregulation.

❌MYTH 2
“Perimenopause is an oestrogen deficiency state.”

✅TRUTH
It isn’t. Oestrogen fluctuates wildly in perimenopause - sometimes very high, sometimes lower.

Marketing it as an incorrect hormone“deficiency” confuses women and blurs perimenopause with menopause - this is a real problem.

✅WHY IT MATTERS

When HRT prescribers reduce ADHD to “dopamine + oestrogen” and perimenopause to “low oestrogen,” women are sold false promises, misrepresentations and marketing online.

Sensitive, neurodivergent and trauma-affected women need better information than this.

✅That’s why I wrote my book to reframe and widen the conversation on hormonal sensitivity and the nervous system through a trauma-informed lens.

📩 Join my newsletter for early access + to transform your understanding of ADHD, perimenopause, your symptoms, solutions and HRT.

Paula

27/09/2025

👯At 19, I thought I was just a bit of a party girl.

⚠️But now looking back and extensively researching and writing my book. I can now see I was self-medicating an already hormonally sensitive, dysregulated nervous system - I didn’t even know existed as unrecognised PMDD, complex trauma and neurodivergence!

⚠️My drinking patterns weren’t random!

🧠They peaked around certain times of my cycle. When oestrogen was rising, GABA was dropping and my system felt wired, restless, overstimulated.

🧐 I wasn’t just drinking for fun, I was subconsciously drinking for relief. To calm my body and to try to quiet my hyperactive mind!

⚠️What I didn’t know back then.

🧠Oestrogen increases dopamine, making substances feel more rewarding (Becker & Koob, 2016)

🧠GABA drops premenstrually, reducing our natural calming mechanisms (Epperson et al., 2002)

🧠And progesterone - especially its calming metabolite, allopregnanolone can actually blunt addiction risk by supporting GABA and dulling the brain’s reward response (Evans & Foltin, 2010; Sofuoglu et al., 2002)

This wasn’t (just) rebellion! - although I am rebellious 😉

It was also an (unconscious) attempt to self regulate and calm my already sensitive nervous system.

And the more I learn, the more compassion I have for my younger self.

If this resonates, know this.

So when oestrogen is high and GABA is low, impulse control weakens.

This isn’t just a matter of willpower - it’s about biochemistry.

Research shows that ovarian hormones influence addictive behaviour in women, and progesterone may even reduce relapse risk for some substances (Moran-Santa Maria et al., 2014; Psychology Today, 2023).

We need to talk about this more - especially for sensitive women.

There’s science now to back what many of us have lived and this needs to be urgently understood through a new trauma informed nervous system sensitivity lens.

Let me know if this resonates with you 💕 we need to understand this for our daughters also.

Paula 🫶

25/09/2025

I’m so excited to be joining Pause Live 2025 - this October the UK’s largest menopause and women’s health event.

📌I am on the ADHD panel with

📌I’ll be speaking about hormonal sensitivity and how it intersects with neurodivergence and ADHD - topics that are often oversimplified or overlooked in mainstream conversations.

📌For so many women, perimenopause isn’t just about hormones - it’s about how a sensitive nervous system, trauma history, or neurodivergence changes the way we experience puberty, pregnancy and perimenopause, hormone therapy, ADHD, and mental health.

📌This is the conversation I wish I’d had years ago. And it’s the one I’m determined we start having now more openly with honestly and with nuance.

📅 Saturday 4th October 2025

📍 De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms, Covent Garden

✨ You can get 10% off tickets with the code ADHD10.

Paula

Paula

23/09/2025

For many years now I have campaigned both privately and publicly about the urgent need to have a nervous system and trauma informed framework to help more sensitive women.

During this time, I have been attacked online for taking part in Panorama - yet people don’t actually know the true story of what has been happening behind the scenes.

Many were quick to jump on the bandwagon, without understanding the true story and the harm that has come to women.

I have now reached the point after years of trying, that my silence is no longer tenable for me.

As a trauma survivor and a fierce campaigner for informed consent - my story will be now be told.

I have been consistently medically gaslighted, actively silenced, bullied, repressed, and smeared.

All in an attempt to stop me from talking about side effects of HRT and challenging the status quo so MORE women can be helped.

This type of medical gaslighting and silencing relies on women shrinking, repressing, hierarchical power plays, good girl conditioning and keeping women staying small and pushing their emotions down for fear of being called “crazy” or “hysterical”.

Yes - I have been called “mad” in attempt to discredit me.

We all have that point where we realise “enough is enough” - I have tried so hard to do this privately and I will no longer be repressed into silence through fear.

🙏🏻Book and podcast incoming 2026.

Paula

20/09/2025

❌You cannot simply seperate Progesterone, Oestrogen and Testosterone (POT! In the UK) when it comes to the brain and nervous system.

✅ As I have researched for my book on sensitivity. These reproductive hormones are neuromodulators and they influence neurotransmitter systems and how we adapt to stress, and how mood, cognition and behaviour are regulated.

❌They don’t act separately. They influence how the whole nervous system interprets both internal and external stressors.

✅ This means hormone ratios interact with each unique nervous system profile, their stress history, their receptors, trauma and neurodivergence.

❌ So (in my opinion) when prescribers unilaterally rebrand HRT or MHT into neat categories it may look scientific but based on the nervous system it’s dangerously misleading.

❌ Turning complexity into three word “marketing” label risks more and more women constantly chasing doses, levels and new prescriptions.

❌ This really matters because this can lead to worse anxiety, mood instability and other mental health side affects - which are never acknowledged!

✅ This really matters because it’s psychoactive and it changes mood, cognition and behaviour and epigentics - both positively and negatively.

❌ This groups online strength isn’t rigourous debate, collaboration or woven curiosity.

❌ They block questions, remove commmets and avoid answers that do not fit their narrative or agendas.

❌ That’s not progress - it’s dangerous echo chambers where nuance and safety is lost.

❌ This is not in anyway to vilify all prescribers or any patient that finds HRT beneficial.

✅ This is about widening the lens so more women can be helped.

✅ We need transparent, open and productive debates and I welcome this because I sure do not have all the answers - no one does.

❌ But until we have this more sensitive women will suffer side effects and harm and the Menopause Mafia will continue to dominate and bully this online conversation.

Paula

17/06/2025

📍If you have ever been told you’re too much.

📍Too emotional. Too reactive. Too sensitive.

📍Let me say this clearly - you are not “too much”.

📍Your nervous system is more tuned in to your emotions, feelings, stress, your sensory world, hormones and your environment.

📍What you’re feeling isn’t a flaw - it’s a reflection of how your nervous system and hormonal profile have developed together, over time.

📍Your stress sensitivity, your emotional intensity, your hormonal shifts - they are all interconnected.

✅Shaped by your genetics.
✅Influenced by your early environment and epigenetics.

❌Amplified by a medical system that ignores nervous system sensitivity and labels it as “just hormones.” Or worse as mentally ill or “disordered”.

But some women do have more sensitive nervous systems.

And once you understand it, you begin to feel less fragile, less broken and more powerful.

If this resonates, I write a newsletter that goes deeper into these connections.

✅It’s for women who want research led education, not oversimplification. Because there is no one size fits all.

There are also multiple free resources in the link in my bio for sensitive women including my free newsletter.

Paula 🫶

16/06/2025

🧠Sensitive Women - is the term and evidence based framework I have created through writing my book and through years of integrating lived experience, research, trauma specialism, and the experiences of women in my community.

🔹This is not a diagnosis. It is not a protocol. It is a lens for understanding an often invisible population of women whose health experiences do not fit the biomedical model.

🔸The biomedical model remains too narrow and it does not explain the lived experiences of myself, or of so many of the women I speak with and work with. Sensitive Women™ has emerged to fill that gap - to name and validate what so many of us know to be true.

🔹Sensitivity is not a flaw, and it is not a weakness. It is a multifaceted, multidimensional way of being in the world - touching every layer of life: nervous system sensitivity, trauma imprinting, relational and attachment patterns, hormonal sensitivity, and traits we often currently categorise under the umbrella of ‘neurodivergence.’

🔸I am here as a change-maker and advocate — not claiming to have all the answers, but opening the space for a wider, joined-up, more compassionate conversation. Sensitive Women™ is grounded in lived experience — and in a trauma-informed, neurobiologically-informed lens.

🔹This space is not for everyone and that is intentional. It is not a space for quick HRT advice, for one research paper to ‘prove it,’ or for prescriptive medical guidance. It is a space for deeper understanding, reflection, and building a better conversation about women’s health, hormones, trauma, and sensitivity.

🔹If this resonates with you then please follow and you are welcome. If it doesn’t - that’s perfectly fine, this space may not be for you.

🔸Sensitive Women™ is my original intellectual property. Please do not copy or adapt this language or model without permission.

Paula

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Solihull
B939EB

Telephone

+447841029924

Website

https://thebrainbodymethod.com/, http://linktr.ee/thebrainbodymethod

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