Online Therapy for Colorado & Illinois

Therapy for PMDD

What is Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD)?

Symptoms are experienced during the week before the onset of menstruation and subside a few days after your period starts. Symptoms can include:

  • Feeling like your emotions are all over the place and hard to manage

  • Anger and irritability

  • Low or depressed mood

  • Rejection sensitivity (e.g., feeling that others don’t like you)

In addition, you may experience changes to your sleep, your appetite, trouble focusing, lack of interest in doing things you’d normally like to do, and physical symptoms like bloating or breast pain.¹

Why work with a PMDD therapist?

PMDD can make you feel like an entirely different person the week before your period starts. The coping strategies you typically use for managing anxiety, anger, or low mood may feel unhelpful when you’re experiencing your PMDD symptoms. These symptoms can truly make it feel like you need two different sets of coping strategies for different times during your menstrual cycle. Therapy for PMDD can help with increasing the number of coping strategies you have that are helpful.

PMDD symptoms may also challenge your relationships. It can be extremely difficult to communicate the way that you want to when your emotions are so intense. Also, others often don’t understand what PMDD is and that these symptoms are not fully in your control. Therapy for PMDD can help you in improving your relationships and communication skills.

Our approach to PMDD therapy

As a therapist who treats PMDD, my approach includes tracking your symptoms (if you’re not doing so already) so that your symptoms don’t take you by surprise. We will also work on building strategies to help with tolerating intense emotions until they’ve passed (distress tolerance), strategies to decrease the intensity of your emotions (emotion regulation), strategies to get distance from your thoughts, and communication tools. Although therapy can’t cure PMDD, it can help you feel more in control.

Learn strategies to help you cope and feel more in control.

Mindful Health Psychology provides mindful, compassionate online therapy for people experiencing PMDD in Denver, Colorado & Chicago, Illinois

Other services offered at Mindful Health Psychology:

Mindful Health Psychology is a practice offering online therapy for Denver, CO, Chicago, IL and beyond in the states of Colorado and Illinois. We specialize in therapy for anxiety, depression, distress during pregnancy, postpartum depression and anxiety, coping with miscarriage and pregnancy loss, coping with fertility-related stressors, birth trauma, coping with a chronic medical condition, insomnia, nightmares, circadian rhythm disorders, and hypersomnia disorders. We provide online therapy, making treatment more accessible, which means you can be located in Denver, Chicago, or another city in Colorado or Illinois to receive services.

References:

  1. American Psychiatric Association. Depressive disorders. In Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.). 2022:171-175.