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Paula Rastrick

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Paula Rastrick

I am a hormonally sensitive woman, a patient advocate & a campaigner for medicla change on the urgent need to recognise hormonal sensitivity.

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. Post Grad Cert - Psychological 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.

10/01/2026

🧠DARVO: From Personal Recovery to Pattern Recognition

I am a childhood trauma survivor and I am also a long-term survivor of narcissistic abuse.

Through my own recovery, experiences and extensive academic study.

I have learnt to recognise established psychological patterns - including DARVO.

DARVO describes a response pattern where concerns are Denied, the person raising them is Attacked, and the Victim and Offender are Reversed.

I first learnt this pattern in personal relationships.

Over time, I recognised that the same dynamics can also appear within systems.

Including professional and institutional environments.

This is why people who have also lived through DARVO often recognise these patterns quickly.

Not because they are projecting - but because pattern recognition is learned through experience.

Understanding DARVO is not about blame.

It is about restoring clarity, protecting one’s sense of self, and repairing the psyche through conscious awareness.

These dynamics can overlap with medical gaslighting, where lived experience is dismissed and accountability becomes obscured.

After three and a half years, and following multiple events behind the scenes -

October became my final breaking point and paradoxically, the beginning of complete psychological clarity and freedom.

Recognising patterns restores agency.

✨Conscious awareness allows you to let go, protects the psyche, increases your sense of purpose and trust in your own sense of self.

09/01/2026

❓Why is it so difficult to openly discuss HRT side effects, hormonal sensitivity?

❓OR when prescribing hasn’t gone to plan - without being either attacked online or immediately labelled “anti-HRT”?

⚠️This is not an anti-treatment position - It is a patient safety question and that is absolutely valid.

🚩When medics speak on social media in absolutes and universal benefits (often without robust data ) conversations about sensitivity, adverse effects, or complexity are shut down.

An important question has to be asked:

⁉️How does medicine learn?

❓If patients’ lived experiences are dismissed rather than documented, where does safety data come from?

❓If complaints processes are absent or informal, how are mistakes identified and corrected?

❓If women are discouraged from speaking in clinics and in comments how is informed consent truly possible?

🚩This dynamic now extends across social media spaces, where women asking reasonable questions are often silenced if they don’t fit a simplified, idealised narrative of treatment working perfectly.

⚠️That is not evidence-based medicine.

🚩It is an echo chamber.

⚠️Medicine cannot progress if it only listens to compliant stories and excludes those who are hormonally sensitive, neurodivergent, traumatised, or complex.

✅Listening to difference is not a threat to care.

✅It is how medicine learns, improves, and protects patients.

07/01/2026

📌WHY I SPEAK ABOUT NARCISSISM, NEURODIVERGENCE, HORMONES & THE NERVOUS SYSTEM

📍This work did not come from theory alone. It has all come from my own lived experience followed by years of extensive study.

📍 I grew up in an emotionally dysregulated childhood environment.

📍Over the past few years, through research and clinical literature (not pop psychology), I came to understand how emotional invalidation, chronic stress, and narcissistic family dynamics shape the early developing nervous system.

📍Because early relational and childhood environments influence:

• stress reactivity
• emotional regulation
• hormone sensitivity
• hypervigilance & threat perception

📍As I began to map my own hormonal profile through science starting from the womb - including ADHD, complex trauma and sensitivity to hormonal shifts (PMDD, Post natal depression) these connections became much clearer.

⚠️Many women I’ve spoken to privately describe similar patterns:
being dismissed as “too sensitive”,
learning to self-monitor,
growing up attuned to others’ emotions.

📍This pattern shows up repeatedly in women with:

⚠️ADHD or AuDHD
⚠️hormonal sensitivity
⚠️PMDD-type profiles
⚠️nervous system hyper-reactivity

But it’s important to say this clearly:

📍Hormonal sensitivity is not caused by trauma alone.

📍Our nervous and hormonal profiles begin before birth.

📍Heritable genetics , epigenetics, and the intrauterine environment all matter because your own life experience then interacts with that biology over time.

📍This is why women all respond differently, to stress, to hormones, and to HRT and medical treatment.

📍When I speak about narcissism on my social media - I am not diagnosing individuals.

📍I am describing researched patterns, systems, and power dynamics and how they affect sensitive nervous systems.

📍This work sits at the intersection of:

neurobiology, hormones, early life stress, childhood experiences and lived experience.

⚠️Because women deserve hormonal care that recognises complexity and not “cut and paste” - Stepford Wives medicine.

05/01/2026

There are some changes to my content this year.

My focus is on advocating for medical change through my own experience of both hormonal sensitivity and HRT.

Along with so many women who have contacted me over the past few years and shared their experiences.

If we don’t understand something - how do we change it for the better?

Paula x

adhdwomen

22/12/2025

It’s the end of 2025 and the end of a karmic completion year.

A year of shedding, dissolving and releasing painful cycles.

2026 is the year of the return home to self, to authenticity and to embodied truth.

See you on the other side.

Paula

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 🫶

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+447841029924

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