I used to run into roadblocks in treatment with my clients in midlife and beyond because I wasn’t menopause‑informed.
The irritability, anxiety, brain fog, sleeplessness – it all looked like stress to me. And midlife is full of stress: caregiving, career pivots, divorce, reinvention.
But something deeper was happening.
My clients weren’t just overwhelmed. They were changing – physically, emotionally, hormonally – and they felt unmoored.
And there I was, recommending breathing techniques to manage stress, or offering time management strategies to create space for self-care.
These techniques collapsed quickly and, looking back now … I can see I was missing something important.
I wasn’t addressing the grief over shifting identity … the hormone-based emotion dysregulation … the body image distress and related health risks from disordered eating to “fix” it …
Or the reality of hot flashes, night sweats, and disrupted sleep that no amount of sleep hygiene could settle.
No more.
Now, I work from a menopause-informed lens – one that sees the whole person and the full hormonal story. And my clients go deeper. Heal more.
In just one day, I’ll show you how to recognize the impact of menopause and what you can do about it. Grounded in science, empathy, and real-world clinical insight, this training will help you:
- Reduce anxiety, mood swings, and depression tied to hormonal changes
- Teach clients how to build new, kinder relationships with their changing bodies
- Address identity shifts and relationship strain with confidence
- Support better sleep, even with night sweats or early waking
- Empower clients to move through this transition with meaning and self-compassion
Whether you work in private practice, community care, or any setting where women seek support – or you’re a woman navigating this stage yourself – this training gives you the language and tools you need to show up for your clients with expertise and understanding.
Women deserve better care at midlife. Menopause has been overlooked for too long. Let’s change that – together.
Reserve your seat today.
Downers Grove, IL
Arlington Heights, IL
Live Stream
“Every therapist should take this training!”
What you'll cover — session by session
- Historical neglect of women’s health
- Basics of menopause
- Relationship between hormones and mental & physical health
- Top mental health concerns
- Hot flashes, joint pain, and more
- Potential body image issues
- Importance of a weight-inclusive approach
- What your client has probably heard from their doctor about treatment options
- Psychoeducation
- Top questions to find out if menopause is influencing symptoms
- Assess depression and anxiety in midlife
- Track body dissatisfaction
- Understand your clients’ use of exercise
- Screen for eating disorders
- Food recall to understand eating patterns
- Risks related to dieting and weight-cycling
- Questions for sleep disruption
- Normalize mental health challenges in midlife
- Thought records for anxiety & depression
- Behavior chain analysis for problematic patterns
- DBT distress tolerance techniques to soothe intense emotions
- Emotion mind, reasonable mind, and wise mind
- Identify and act in accordance with values
- Dispel clients’ fears about brain fog
- Constructive worry intervention for sleep
- Sleep hygiene tips at midlife
- CBT for hot flashes and night sweats
- Intuitive eating and gentle nutrition
- Cope Ahead technique to build self-trust with food
- Tap into reward circuitry with exercise
- Tools to combat unidimensional identity centered on body image
- Cognitive reframing to reshape unhelpful body image thoughts
- Personal photos exercise
- Micro goals to improve body image
- Grief work for body dissatisfaction
- Help clients cultivate friendship with food
- Relational concerns: intimacy, caretaking, bereavement
- Strategies to increase social support
- Collaborate with medical and other professionals
- Scope of practice issues
- When to refer to a menopause practitioner
- Special considerations for early and medically-induced menopause
- Affirming care for transgender clients
- Menopause symptoms in the workplace
- Research limitations and potential risks
Six things you'll be able to do by the end.
Become menopause-informed in a single day.
Spend one day with Signe Darpinian, LMFT, CEDS and walk away with clinical tools you can use Monday morning — live in the Chicago area, online, or on-demand.
Signe Darpinian, LMFT, CEDS, has been treating disordered eating, eating disorders, and body image across the lifespan for over 25 years. A few years ago, she did what most clinicians eventually wish they'd done sooner — she started studying menopause.
Now a member of The Menopause Society (the preeminent resource for high-quality menopause research), Signe lives in the overlap between two fields that desperately need each other — eating disorders and menopause-informed mental health care. Her caseload reflects it: she treats women in the menopause transition every day, and she brings real cases (with permission) into every training she runs.
She's the author of A Woman's Guide to Menopause, Body Image, and Emotional Well-Being at Midlife (Routledge), along with two earlier books on body image — one for teens, one for parents. She's known for being warm, direct, and willing to use her own symptomatic experience to make the work less taboo. You'll laugh. You'll cringe in recognition. You'll leave able to do something new on Monday.
You're doing competent therapy.
For the wrong problem.
If you’re a therapist who treats women over 35 — and statistically you are — this is happening on your caseload right now. You just don’t have the language for it. We weren’t taught it. Almost none of us were.
What you’ve been seeing on your caseload:
- Anxiety that broke through medication — a client who’d been stable for years suddenly isn’t, and you can’t find a precipitating event.
- “Depression” that doesn’t match her life — she has no reason to be depressed, but she is. CBT isn’t moving the needle.
- Body image distress in a client who never had it — a competent, grounded woman suddenly hates her body and is considering things she’d never have considered before.
- Sleep complaints no protocol fixes — sleep hygiene is dialed in, sleep is still wrecked. Now her mood is wrecked too.
Walk out with the tools, not just the theory.
A clinical lens for recognizing perimenopause and menopause across symptoms
Specific intake questions to identify menopause-driven concerns
Evidence-based interventions for anxiety, mood, and sleep tied to hormonal change
A weight-inclusive, intuitive eating approach to body image distress
Tools for grief work around identity shifts and body changes
Clear scope-of-practice boundaries and when to refer to a menopause practitioner
A referral list and resource hub you can use Monday morning
Confidence to talk about hormones, not just stress
Don’t take it from us. Hear from your peers.
"I have a much better understanding of how to recognize and address the needs of those in menopause, as well as an array of referral resources."
"The CBT methods for reframing beliefs around menopause symptoms and insomnia will be very helpful. This will help me acknowledge and inform my female clients — and my male clients with female partners."
"The knowledge gained in this seminar informs the work with women and allows for a unique lens on the aging process."
"This was more than I expected. It was not hard to stay engaged for the whole day — Signe is passionate about her topic, which helps so much!"
"More insight around when to refer to specialty care, as well as what interventions to use with clients."
"Important information to use to counsel my patients on the menopause transition."
Bringing your team? Save more.
Built for the clinician. Adopted by the integrated care team.
Family Therapists
Professionals
Before you register.
Downers Grove, IL — February 4, 2027
DoubleTree Suites by Hilton Hotel & Conference Center Chicago-Downers Grove
2111 Butterfield Rd, Downers Grove, IL
Arlington Heights, IL — February 5, 2027
DoubleTree Hotel Chicago Arlington Heights
75 West Algonquin Rd, Arlington Heights, IL
Daily schedule (Central Time):
7:30 AM — Registration & check-in
8:00 AM — Program begins
11:50 AM – 1:00 PM — Lunch
4:00 PM — Adjourn
Two 15-minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
Please note: You will have access for 90 days after the program for review. For live CE credit, you must watch the live presentation in its entirety at its scheduled time and complete the CE quiz and evaluation within one week. Please note that this requirement may vary by credit type. Please see detailed credit information for specific requirements for each credit type.
Yes — and this is the point. The training is built for general clinicians who treat women over 35, not menopause specialists. If you have any midlife women on your caseload, this closes a real gap. Past attendees include counselors, MFTs, social workers, psychologists, APNs, OTs, and integrated care clinicians.
Yes — group discounts are available based on team size. Enter the code at checkout and adjust the quantity to match your group: GROUP10 for 10% off (2–4 attendees), GROUP15 for 15% off (5–9 attendees), or GROUP20 for 20% off (10+ attendees).
Menopause has been an unnecessarily taboo topic for too long.
Let's talk about it.
100% Satisfaction Guarantee
Register for this intensive training course without risk. If you’re not completely satisfied, give us a call at 800-844-8260.
We’re that confident you’ll find this learning experience to be all that’s promised and more than you expected.