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COURSE

Understanding Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD)

With Charlotte Cooper

Trigger Warning: This course explores sensitive topics including Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), anxiety, depression, intrusive thoughts, suicidal thoughts, pregnancy and baby loss, grief, identity after illness, and other aspects of mental health. Please listen at your own pace and take breaks whenever you need to. If any part of this course feels too overwhelming, it's okay to pause and return when you feel ready. This course is intended for supportive purposes only. It is not a substitute for personalised medical, psychological or psychiatric care, and should not be used to diagnose or treat any medical or mental health condition. If you are experiencing thoughts of harming yourself, are concerned about your safety, or feel unable to cope, please seek immediate support from your healthcare provider, local crisis service or emergency services in your area. For many years I thought PMDD was something I simply had to survive. I thought if I could just get through another month, another cycle, another emotional crash, then perhaps one day things would feel easier. But what I slowly came to realise was that PMDD had become far more than a difficult illness. It had changed the way I lived, the way I saw myself, the way I experienced love, the way I understood my own thoughts and the way I moved through the world. This course was created for the women who are exhausted from carrying all of this alone. Together, we begin by telling the truth. Not the polished version, or the version that minimises pain and rushes towards solutions, but the truth about how frightening, isolating and life-altering PMDD can be. We explore what current research understands about the condition, how it affects the brain and nervous system, and why the thoughts, emotions and physical symptoms can feel so real and convincing. PMDD is not only an illness of symptoms, but also an illness of loss. The loss of connection to yourself, the loss of trust in your own mind, and the loss of feeling fully present within your own life. Throughout this course we’ll explore the grief, loneliness and invisible suffering that so many women carry in silence. We’ll look at the ways survival can slowly become an identity and how years of coping can leave you feeling as though you no longer know who you are beneath the exhaustion. Alongside that understanding, there are guided meditations woven throughout the course. Places of refuge where you can rest and soften and stop carrying everything quite so tightly. Spaces where you are invited to meet yourself not with criticism, but with compassion. We also explore the power of tracking your cycle, understanding your own patterns and begin to separate who you are from PMDD. One of the most important things I ever learned was that I was not the illness; I was the woman living through it. This course is not about becoming somebody new or fixing yourself and forcing healing. But slowly finding your way back to the woman who has been there all along beneath the fear, beneath the survival and the storm. The woman who deserves understanding and compassion, and the woman who was simply carrying far more than anyone could see.

The days you disappear and the journey back to understanding and self-compassion.

9 Days

21 students

5.0 stars

25 min / day

English

About this course

Meet your Teacher

Charlotte Cooper

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Chesterfield, UK

Charlotte spent nearly twenty years living alongside anxiety, panic, depression and PMDD, often holding herself together on the outside while feeling lost within her own life. That experience became the foundation of her work. For more than fifteen years, she has supported others through emotional suffering, blending her experience as a clinical hypnotherapist with the understanding that comes from having walked through darkness herself. Her voice is shaped by lived experience rather than theory. Honest, gentle and deeply compassionate, she is not afraid to speak about the parts of life that many people hide. The grief, the fear, the loneliness, the moments when we lose access to ourselves and the slow journey of finding our way back. Charlotte's work invites people to meet themselves differently. To soften self-criticism. To build safety from within. To sit beside their suffering rather than abandon themselves inside it. Gentle, real and deeply human, her meditations and courses are grounded in a simple belief: that even in our hardest moments, we are worthy of compassion, understanding and connection.

View Profile

9 Days

21 students

5.0 stars

25 min / day

English

Lesson 1

Lost - Letting The Truth Fall After Years Of Silence

In this opening chapter, I want to tell the truth about PMDD. Not the clinical definition of it, not the treatments or solutions, but the lived experience of what it can feel like to lose yourself inside an illness that nobody else can fully see. Together, we begin by exploring the loneliness, grief, fear and confusion that so many women carry in silence. This is a space for honesty, validation and recognition. A place where you no longer need to pretend you are coping, and where you can begin to understand that what you have been carrying is not weakness, but suffering.

Lesson 2

True - The PMDD Brain And Why It Feels So Real

In this chapter, we'll explore what current research understands about PMDD and why it can affect far more than your emotions alone. Together, we'll look at how the brain, nervous system, and body respond to hormonal fluctuations, why thoughts can suddenly feel so convincing, and why PMDD can leave you feeling physically as well as emotionally overwhelmed. Most importantly, this session is about validation, understanding and recognising that what you experience is real.

Lesson 3

Shelter - A Place Inside You That Never Left

Today we meditate. This meditation offers you a place of refuge from the exhaustion of living with PMDD. I use imagery of a warm cabin during a storm, where you are invited to rest, be held, and step away from the constant pressure to keep coping.

Lesson 4

Grief - Losing Access To Life

Today we're going to talk about one of the deepest and most painful parts of PMDD: grief. Not simply the symptoms themselves, but the gradual loss of access to yourself that can happen when you live with an illness that repeatedly disconnects you from life, love, safety, and connection. We'll explore the grief that can emerge when survival begins replacing identity, when functioning becomes mistaken for wellness, and when you can no longer remember what it feels like to feel fully present inside your own life. But we'll also talk about hope. About what happens when support finally arrives, and what it feels like to begin finding your way back to yourself again.

Lesson 5

Unseen - Existing While Disappearing

Today we're going to talk about the loneliness of invisible illness. We'll explore what happens when suffering becomes hidden behind functioning, why so many women with PMDD continue carrying extraordinary emotional weight whilst appearing to cope, and how years of feeling unseen can slowly lead us into abandoning ourselves. Most importantly, we'll begin exploring what happens when compassion starts replacing criticism, and why healing often begins not by fighting ourselves harder, but by finally standing beside ourselves with kindness.

Lesson 6

Held - The Tenderness You Were Never Meant To Earn

Today, we meditate. We're going to gently explore something that many women with PMDD find incredibly difficult. Compassion. Not compassion for other people, because you may have already spent years offering that freely. Compassion for yourself. Today, I want to guide you into a space where you can stop turning against the parts of yourself that are hurting and begin meeting them with tenderness instead. A space where the parts of you that have been criticised, silenced or pushed aside can finally be met gently. Because perhaps the woman who has been carrying all of this was never asking to be fixed, if only it was that easy. Perhaps she was simply asking not to be left alone inside it.

Lesson 7

Mapping The Storm - Understanding Your Rhythm Instead Of Being Blindsided By It

Today we’re going to talk about tracking your cycle so that you can begin to recognise your own cyclical pattern. This is really helpful not only for you to see, but for your doctor and gynaecologist to see too. It can feel incredibly frightening when all of a sudden you feel ok one day and then bam, you’re hit face first with a new unbearable rhythm. And even though you know you have PMDD, you are still left questioning yourself. However, what I found was that when we begin paying attention with curiosity instead of judgement, changes occur. The chaos starts becoming more predictable, and slowly, we begin learning the difference between who we are and what the illness is doing.

Lesson 8

Made - The Illness That Shaped Us, But That Doesn’t Get To Finish The Story.

Today we're going to talk about what can happen when the illness begins to quieten. For many of us, recovery isn't quite what we imagined it would be. It can bring hope, relief and a growing sense of freedom, but sometimes it also brings questions we never expected to ask. Together we'll explore the woman you once were, the woman you thought you might have become, and the woman who is here now. We'll acknowledge what PMDD may have taken from you, while also making space for everything it never managed to take. Because perhaps this next chapter isn't about returning to the person you were before. Perhaps it's about gently discovering who you are now... and realising that although PMDD may have shaped your story, it doesn't get to decide how the next pages are written.

Lesson 9

Found - Meeting Yourself With Love

In this final guided meditation, you return to the cabin one last time and discover a version of yourself resting peacefully beside the fire. Through tenderness, compassion and gentle self-connection, you are invited to meet yourself not as a collection of symptoms, struggles or survival strategies, but as a woman who has carried so much for so long. This meditation is an opportunity to rest beside yourself, soften self-judgement and experience the quiet comfort of your own companionship, rather than focusing on healing or fixing. This journey is about kindness, understanding and remembering that you are more than the illness you have lived through.