Women who participated in the counterculture movements reach climacteric: Reflections on the feminine experience of this passage

This research studied the inner experiences of 30 Brazilian women in their 40s and 50s, living in the city of Sao Paulo, with a university level of education, who identified themselves as having participated in the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s. This study probed the lived experiences of these women in various aspects of their lives, for example, physical, sexual, psychological, affective, and their inner mythologies about older women, aging, and this passage. Furthermore, this research probed whether the set of values, beliefs, and practices experienced in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s overweighed for them the social charge of negativity and prejudice concerning older women and menopause, that is, if these women presented forms of rupture or continuity in relation to the way society's cultural mythology relate to this period of a woman's life. For data analysis and the thematic method were used in a combined manner with a basic phenomenological attitude. The procedure involved individual interviews and workshops oriented by the Gestalt approach and the Personal Mythology perspective. In addition to the oral accounts of the participants, plastic and poetic experiments based on Gestalt art therapy were also utilized as ways for self-expression and the further elaboration of experiences. Results indicate that while countercultural values and practices were still pervasive in many areas of the participants' fives, for most of them their self-esteem and self-perception as women were imbued with the negative values and beliefs of Western societies' widespread cultural mythologies regarding older women and menopause. Most of them go through this passage misinformed and lonely, with feelings of loss, shame, and denial. However, the workshop experiences served as awareness-raising groups for these women, helping them to retrieve their countercultural values and experiences, and to start extending their scope to this area of their lives questioning the mores of the social milieu where their experiences occur. This outcome of the workshops' experience attests to the therapeutic relevance of women's groups in helping them deal with the conflicts and changes of this passage in life. The Gestalt therapy approach to group work enriched by the perspective of Personal Mythology proved to be of value in this process and suggests a very practical way of supporting women during this phase of their lives. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)