What Your Daughter Needs To Know

How every girl loses True North and how to help her find it again

Originally published on Medium on Feb 19th, 2025. Shared here to support the women and daughters finding their way back to truth.

Photo by Haley Phelps on Unsplash

“Oh shit. Here it is.”

My heart is thumping so hard I can feel it against my ribs.

“Oh, man. Wow, ok.”

I am 12 years old standing in the upstairs bathroom of my childhood home realizing I got my first period. It is not news to me that it was coming.

I am still shocked that it is here.

Realizing what I know now, my reaction feels congruent.

For women, menstruation signifies a biological programming to begin conforming to society’s expectations and a departure from experiencing the truth of what she likes or doesn’t like through her physical senses.

Everything I knew and experienced as my truth to that point was about to become drastically distorted and I would not realize this or reconnect with it intentionally until 30 years later.

Losing “True North”

The science behind menstruation is complex and fascinating.

Changes are not limited to but include:

• The physical brain shrinks. It prunes away 50% of the neurons and connections that existed before puberty.

• The parts of the brain responsible for mood, emotion, and memory, the hippocampus and amygdala kick into high gear.

• The prefrontal cortex, responsible for managing impulses and assessing risks, develops more slowly than the amygdala and hippocampus, meaning that the early puberty experience is driven largely by emotion without reason.

• As the teenage brain develops, it gains the ability to discern what other people want — their intentions and beliefs, giving insight into how to fit into culture and society.

These changes are not without implications.

Carol Gilligan found that by age 11, girls are highly likely to respond with uncertainty in response to direct questions.

Put another way:

I start as an infant who uses their senses and knows what feels good and what feels bad. This directs what I do.

As a child, I am blissfully ignorant of (or don’t care) what others perceive of my likes or dislikes.

Then, hormones come raging in, change my brain and all of a sudden I am painfully aware of what others think of me and want from me.

To conform to this, I start to disconnect from what feels good and bad informed by my senses, and instead act based on what my brain interprets those around me want me to be and do.

This means I stop listening to my body through my senses and what I know as truth becomes distorted.

Essentially, I lose my truth and, “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” becomes my default way of living.

Sound familiar?

Implications

For me, this meant decades of doing things to conform that didn’t feel good to my body including:

• bleaching my hair

• shaving my legs, armpits, and groin

• cutting calories to get thin

• squeezing into tight clothing and shoes

• burning my skin with acids to make it clear and smooth

• burning my skin with the sun to make it look tan

• burning my armpits with chemicals to make them stop sweating

• plucking hair out of my eyebrows and face

• pushing my body to exercise despite exhaustion or pain

And this is just the beginning.

There are many more, worse and drastic things I did that didn’t feel good, to fit what my brain told me other people wanted.

Scary.

At the end of the day, it is no one’s fault nor is it necessarily wrong.

What is important is understanding that it is a biological process that happens to every person with a female brain and a menstrual cycle.

It starts in puberty and is documented and understood by science.

This is not an argument that societal expectations are bad or wrong. Nor is it a diatribe of what needs to change.

What it is, is an insight into, despite or regardless of all this bleaching, squeezing, shaving, burning, and plucking, how women can maintain some connection with what feels good and bad to their bodies — their ultimate truth.

Reconnecting

For me, it took another drastic hormonal upheaval and brain pruning to realize that I had lost connection to my body and that I might want to get it back: pregnancy.

The science behind this stage is equally as drastic and fascinating.

Again, the brain experiences another major pruning of neurons and connections that are no longer relevant.

The resulting “Mom Brain” acquires new superpowers, again induced by surging hormones, including:

• hyperawareness of the needs of others and specifically their baby

• hyperacute sense of smell including the ability to pick out their baby by smell alone

• enhanced, almost superhuman ability to anticipate the needs and reactions of others

• hormonally induced love for their baby and aggression towards anything threatening

For me, this new brain came with an unexpected gift: the ability to prioritize what my baby needed over what society thought I should do.

I am not saying I didn’t feel pressure to “be a good mom,” because I certainly did.

What I am saying is that through the haze of change that became my life, focusing on what my baby needed unexpectedly led me to nature — and as a result, back to my senses.

What this looked like for me, was quitting an all-encompassing career, focusing all of my time and attention on my baby, and researching what would be the best environment for his physical and mental development.

When I learned that spending time in nature was an excellent, science-backed way of providing an optimal environment for his developing mind and body, I devoted myself to getting us outside.

What happened next was an unexpected reunion with myself.

Being outside I could feel the world with my senses again, deeply knowing what feels good and what doesn’t, and ultimately, connect to myself in a way I lost at twelve years old.

What I want to share, wish my younger self had known, and will ensure my daughter understands, is that keeping the connection to the body through the senses, feeling and knowing what feels good and what doesn’t, is key to finding your truth — and to never losing it in the first place.

Finding Truth

What I discovered, and what Mary Oliver put so simply and eloquently, is that to know what feels good and what doesn’t, all you have to do is, “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Essentially, does hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, or touching something feel good or not?

If yes, do more. If not, stop doing it.

Easy, right?

It’s amazing how hard it is to slow down enough to recognize and feel the senses.

For me, immersing myself in nature was how I started, including spending time doing things such as:

• looking at the leaves on trees and noticing how the branches reach to the sky

• bending down and feeling the coldness of the running river on my hand

• lifting my face and feeling the warmth of the sun on my skin

• stopping to listen to bird song

  
  

Connecting to my senses in this way enabled me to hear the truth of what felt good and what didn’t and as a result I started responding more to my body’s needs including:

• taking a nap when I feel tired

• drinking water when I feel thirsty

• eating food that feels good in my body

• stopping eating when I feel full

This started a positive feedback loop where not only do I feel less stressed overall, but when I do these things — even at the expense of doing what other people think I should — I feel a profound sense of freedom and peace.

My truth.

For the first time, I am intentionally listening to my body and acting on what I want to do and don’t want to do.

Now, when I feel tired and decide to nap, instead of guilty, I enjoy the delicious feeling of my body fully relaxing into sleep.

What I wish I could go back and tell my twelve-year-old self, will emphatically help my daughter to understand, and what I hope others might learn from this experience, is that losing connection with what you truly like and don’t like, want or don’t want is a completely normal and dangerous result of a natural process every woman experiences.

At the same time, it is not wrong to want to fit into society and fulfil various roles of your choosing.

What will help is understanding what is happening in your brain and knowing that True North is always available to you in the same way it was when you were a child.

And that sometimes, when the world feels a mess of confusion and you don’t know what you want to do, to feel better, all you need to do is channel your body’s animal and let her truly love what she loves.

For those who are interested in a specific process to get in touch with your senses, I have written a step-by-step guide here.