When you’re told “it’s just hormones” yet again: How women lose trust in themselves

At some point, many women learn to pause before they speak.

You feel something strongly, clearly, viscerally. And then, almost automatically, you check yourself.

Am I overreacting?
Am I being dramatic?
Is this just hormones?
Am I imagining it?

That pause is often a learned response. And it comes from being dismissed.

This isn’t a blog about whether your hormones, pain or menstrual symptoms are real. They are. This is about what happens to your sense of self when your inner world is repeatedly questioned, minimised, or waved away.

Because when enough people doubt you, you eventually start doing it for them.

Why “it’s just your hormones” makes women doubt their own feelings

Hormones are often introduced into conversations about women’s distress as if they explain everything. And once they arrive, curiosity leaves.

You’re anxious? Hormones.
You’re angry? Hormones.
You’re overwhelmed? Hormones.
You’re falling apart? Hormones.

And the subtext is rarely kind.

It’s not curiosity about your experience. It’s a quiet suggestion that your feelings aren’t trustworthy. That if your body is involved, your perspective must be distorted. Let’s just blame it on “time of the month” and move on.

Many women experience cyclical changes in mood, energy, and emotional intensity. Some live with PMDD, endometriosis, adenomyosis, or other conditions that genuinely affect their mental and physical health. Others don’t have a diagnosis but still recognise a pattern.

The problem is not noticing that hormones matter. The problem is how quickly they are used to stop listening.

Once hormones are named, the conversation often ends. There is no follow-up. No interest in how it feels. No space for nuance. Just a shrug disguised as science.

Over time, though, that does something to you. You start pre-editing your feelings before they even leave your mouth. You downplay it, or say “I’m probably just tired” when you’re actually at the end of your tether.

Eventually, you might stop speaking up altogether.

How repeated dismissal creates chronic self-doubt in women

When dismissal happens once, it hurts. When it happens repeatedly, it starts to reshape you.

Many women I work with are not unsure by nature. They are thoughtful, perceptive, capable. They know things, they feel things deeply, and they notice patterns. But years of being subtly questioned teaches them that their inner experience is unreliable.

Self-doubt doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It develops as a survival strategy.

• If you learn that strong emotion leads to being brushed off, you learn to dampen it.

• If you learn that speaking up leads to minimisation, you learn to justify yourself in advance.

• If you learn that distress makes you inconvenient, you learn to carry it quietly.

Over time, your attention shifts away from what you feel and towards how you’re coming across:

“Am I explaining this well enough?”
”Do I sound calm enough?”
”Do I have enough evidence to back this up?”

And then, you start losing trust in your own body and your inner voice starts to feel unsafe. You don’t know whether to trust it or question it. You outsource your reality to Google, professionals, friends, or strangers online. You look everywhere for confirmation except inside yourself because you’ve been trained to doubt your own knowing.

Why women are so often dismissed in healthcare (and society)

Women are not born mistrusting themselves. They learn it in healthcare systems where pain is normalised and under-investigated, in workplaces where emotion is treated as a liability, and in a culture that praises women for being agreeable, calm, contained.

There is a narrow band of acceptable female emotion. Step outside it and you are “too much”.

Anger gets you labelled irrational.
Distress gets you labelled as someone who exaggerates.
Certainty gets you labelled arrogant.

So women learn to soften themselves, which keeps things manageable for other people. When this conditioning meets real physical or emotional pain, the damage compounds, because now you are not only suffering, you’re also doubting whether you are allowed suffer.

That’s what happens when a system repeatedly teaches you not to trust your own experience.

The link between women’s anger and being dismissed

You explain calmly. Then you try again, more carefully. Next you soften your language. Maybe add some context. And still, what you’re saying doesn’t land. You begin to question yourself.

You can see how anger doesn’t come out of nowhere. For many women, it arrives after a long stretch of not being listened to. Anger is what shows up when something true keeps being ignored.

It’s the emotional response to being repeatedly told, directly or indirectly, that your experience is unreliable. That you’re overreacting. That you’re making a fuss. That it’s probably just hormones.

So no, anger isn’t the first response. It’s often the last one. But when women finally do express anger, it’s rarely met with curiosity. It’s met with suspicion.

Anger gets you labelled irrational.
Anger gets framed as proof that you can’t be trusted.
Anger becomes evidence that everyone was right to dismiss you in the first place.

And so the story tightens its grip: You’re dismissed, you feel angry, and then that anger is used to discredit you.

That’s how anger gets turned into shame, and that’s how self-doubt grows roots.

Many women learn very early on that anger makes things worse, not better. So they swallow it.

They redirect it inward.
They tell themselves to calm down.
They wonder if they’re unstable.
They apologise for feeling too strongly.

And slowly, the anger that could have protected them becomes another reason not to trust themselves.

Letting anger become your compass

That anger is pointing at every time your experience was minimised, ignored, or questioned. Every time you were taught to shrink, apologise, or doubt yourself.

For years, you were trained to see your own feelings as inconvenient and pretend they didn’t matter. To apologise for existing fully in your body and your mind. That’s what built the self-doubt, and why your inner voice feels unsafe.

Listening to your anger differently is the first step in taking yourself seriously again. Not by sanitising it, but by letting it tell you the truth:

• This matters.

• You matter.

• You’re allowed to feel strongly.

The anger becomes a map. It shows you where your boundaries have been crossed, where your voice was ignored, and where your sense of self was chipped away. And once you start reading it that way, something shifts. You stop apologising for what you feel. You stop pre-emptively editing yourself and start trusting that your perceptions are valid.

Anger, in this sense, isn’t destructive. It’s how you get back to believing in your own knowing.

You can’t make them listen. But you can start listening to yourself.

All this anger, all this doubt… it didn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s the product of being repeatedly dismissed. Doctors, nurses, colleagues, even friends, telling you it’s “just hormones,” minimising your pain, questioning your experience. The message was clear: your body, your feelings, your knowing… none of it can be trusted.

That’s what happens when a system built to ignore women meets a person who feels so much.

Now, that same anger (you know, the thing you were trained to swallow) can guide you.

Believing yourself after being dismissed is a necessity. And sometimes it’s completely radical. It’s the act of giving weight to what the world often refuses to acknowledge: that your body, your pain, and your perspective matter.

Therapy can be a space where that shift is supported. Where the experiences minimised by healthcare and society are finally met with seriousness. Where anger is understood, not pathologised. Where self-trust can be rebuilt, piece by piece.

You don’t need permission to take yourself seriously. You just need to start.