Menopause Rise and Thrive | Helping Women Navigate Midlife and Menopause

103. Pleasure

• Dr. Sara Poldmae | Healer, Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese medicine, and Functional Medicine Practitioner

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Are you feeling stuck in the "shoulds" of midlife — checking all the boxes of success but still wondering, is this all there is? You’re not alone, and you’re definitely not broken. In this inspiring episode, we're talking about how pleasure, self-discovery, and nervous system healing can reignite your midlife revolution.

Today, I’m joined by Natty Frasca, a pleasure coach, speaker, and fierce advocate for midlife women owning their full power. Natty shares her deeply personal story of transformation after hitting 40 — and how reconnecting with pleasure helped her rebuild her marriage, career, and sense of self. If you’re ready to reclaim your joy and lead with love, this conversation is for you!

 

In this episode:

  •  Natty’s “kitchen counter epiphany” — and how it changed everything.
  • Why feeling good isn't just nice — it’s revolutionary.
  • How pleasure practices heal the nervous system and fuel resilience.
  • Why traditional marriage narratives don't fit many midlife women (and what to do about it).
  • Small, everyday ways to “love push” and ripple positive change into the world.
  • How Natty rebuilt her marriage through intention, imagination, and action.
  • The essential link between pleasure, safety, and true intimacy.

 

Resources Mentioned:

 

Connect with me, Dr. Sara Poldmae:

Website: https://risingwomanproject.com

Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/drsarapoldmae

Have a question I can answer? Send me a message! I love to hear from my listeners!

Sara Poldmae:

Sarah, welcome to menopause. Rise and thrive. I am Dr Sarah pulled May, and this podcast is your go to guide for navigating perimenopause and menopause. If you are feeling a little overwhelmed, trust me, you are in great company each week, I'll bring you expert advice, raw, honest conversations and simple tips to help you stay grounded and maybe even find some humor in the process. Let's rise, thrive and tackle this wild ride together. Hi everyone Today, I am super excited to bring natty Frasca on. She is a pleasure coach and a speaker who believes that midlife is not a crisis, so right there, you know that we have something in common. Midlife is your revolution. She calls it, and she helps high achieving midlife women create everything they want in their midlife and beyond, using neuroscience, nervous system, regulation, pleasure practices and a dash of rebel rousing, love it after a high flying career in ad agencies and non profit organizations, but the time natty hit 40, she looked like she had it all right, I think we can all resonate on it. The 14 year marriage, three healthy kids, a beautiful home and a killer job, she checked all of the boxes of success, and yet she didn't feel happy. So since 2018 natty has made it her mission to help women like us over 40 own every room that they are in, she brings a raw, charismatic and personal perspective on life as a 40 plus woman. Welcome to the show, Natty. I'm so excited to chat with you today.

Natty Frasca:

Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's so interesting. Like whenever I'm on podcasts and I hear that reflected back to me. I mean, I get emotional. Yeah, I get emotional hearing it because I really do look back and think where I was when I hit 40 and now I'm I just turned 49 the transformation, the revelations, the inward journey I've taken and the control I've taken over my life, really, who just hits my heart to hear it, hear it reflected back. So thank you so much for having me. I'm a huge fan of your podcast, and it's really, it's my pleasure to be here today, yay. So I guess, I guess I would start with how it started, how my journey started, Sarah, because I think it's, it's so typical. It's just so typical. Now, having coached hundreds of women, I realize, wow, like I was not alone and at the time. And you know what I hear from one of my in my practice, is that you feel so alone in this journey. So my journey started at 40, and I was really overwhelmed. Like you said, on the surface of my life, everything looked rosy. I had been married for 14 years to a high achieving guy, a good human being. We both worked a ton. We had three small kids. We had a beautiful home and a really nice town, good education for our kids. We had it all right, yeah, and yet I was sinking, and I would lie in bed at night and just think, what is wrong with me? Like, why can I just be grateful for what I have, you know, I have so much like, am I? I wanted more, but I didn't know what I wanted more of. I didn't know how to, quote, unquote, fix myself. I thought I needed to be fixed. You know, I tried juice cleanses and yoga and, like, you know, cleaning in all of these things that were supposed to make me feel better, but really, nothing was working. My husband and I had been in therapy, couples therapy for years, and I guess my real revelation, my first revelation, started in a therapy session where I just was ready to throw in the towel, like we just weren't seeing eye to eye on things. And I said, I want a divorce. And my our couples therapist said to me, Well, what do you want? And I said, Well, I want a condo in the center of town. I want someone to shovel the snow. I live in New England. I want, you know, you know, part time with my kids, so I have some free time, and I want to lover. I definitely want a lover. And he was like, okay, okay, back up. Let me ask you a different question. How do you want to feel? And like I was just didn't even understand the question. Yeah. I was so stumped, Sarah. I was like, Well, I just. Sat there for a minute, and then all of these images were floating through my head, and I had this visualization that I swear was like a visualization from the Divine, you believe in spirit. And it was a picture of me. It was this like movie playing out. And it was me standing at my kitchen countertop, stirring a pot of my grandmother's Ragu and Jerry Garcia playing on the radio.

Sara Poldmae:

Oh god, I love it. I were spirit sisters in so many different ways.

Natty Frasca:

It was playing like the way you do, the things you do, and my three little kids were dancing around wildly in the kitchen, and like the kicker of the whole scene is that my husband, who I was just asking for a divorce from, yeah, comes up behind me, wraps his arms around my waist, puts his beard on my neck, like kisses me, and puts like a glass of Burgundy Next to me. So he was still in the picture. He was in my visualization, yeah, and I just started to cry. And you know what? I'm super hormonal. Welcome to 49 and I'm getting emotional just telling the story, because I don't get to tell it very often, yeah, but I had this feeling like I want to be held. I want to slow down, yeah. I want to feel loved and adored. I want to be your queen. I want to feel like I'm number one, and all of these things that were flowing out of me, like wanting to be adored, wanting to be taken care of. They were like, the opposite of how I moved through the world.

Sara Poldmae:

Because, yeah, I was just right, you're talking to it all yourself.

Natty Frasca:

I was like, hyper independent feminist, needing a man was was the opposite?

Sara Poldmae:

Unacceptable?

Natty Frasca:

Yep, yes. And you know, on top of all that, I was raised in an Italian American household. I was the youngest of three kids and the only girl, so I just learned to be the toughest, the fastest hustle, the hardest work, the hardest I was, like, just a really, like, tough human being, like, yeah, nose to the grindstone, pull up your bootstraps. And so it was like that moment, you know, and my husband was like, I want to do those things for you, but you don't let me Oh. And I was like, oh, what does this mean? How am I moving through the world? And that was just like the catapult or the catalyst that sent me on this inward journey to figure out, like who I am and what I want, and how do I want to move through these next 40 50, years, because what I'm doing isn't working. Yeah, and believe me, I'm still a high achiever, you know, I went from, you know, I took a brief hiatus and did yoga teacher training and, you know, meditation coach training, and kind of went into this more woo world for a little bit, and I'm still in it. I'm still very spiritual human being, and that's a very big part of my practice, and I've also built a company, yeah, so there's both. And, you know, so when I went to yoga teacher training, my yoga teacher, when I was explaining to her why I was there, she handed me this book by Sally Kempton on the feminine. And I was like, wanted to throw up, because even the word feminine was like soft and gross. But as I dove into this world, I learned that the feminine is fierce and powerful and the source of creation and and you know now I'm nine years into this journey, studying studying the feminine, studying theory, studying pleasure, studying neuroscience, you know, our nervous system and now how it all weaves together. And that's what I'm that's what I'm here to share with women. And I do believe that when we at the end of the day, when we feel good, we push more love into the world, there is a massive ripple effect to this world, to this work. We push justice and love. We protest. We stand up for what's right. We protect people who have less than we have. Yeah, we just, I believe women are like, just the ones who are going to save this mad world, and it starts with the inner work.

Sara Poldmae:

It's interesting that you said that when we feel good, I think there, you know, I read some of your blog posts before we got on, and one of them was about the election. And I do feel that there has been a. You know, a few months of being stunned in silence because we're all hurt. Well, a lot of us are hurting. I guess there's some people out there that are not, but I can speak for the people that are hurting, yes, although I think the people that are not hurting are hurt people, but that's a whole different they're

Natty Frasca:

they're massively hurt. They're wounded,

Sara Poldmae:

right? And they're feeling that this is a good thing, whatever. But I do feel that, you know, we're all in a collective state of grief, and that's why we're not taking action. And I get really I try and distance myself from all of it on social media, and when I catch myself feeding into it, I'm like, wow, well, by me, like getting upset by a Facebook post is doing absolutely nothing. Is there some way that I can channel my energy and all the good and the beauty that I have in me into taking an action to help someone that is being, you know, hurt by this administration? Is there something that I can do to educate a person or to lift another person up. Because, you know, by falling into the everything sucks mentality, that's exactly where they want us to stay. Yes, and that's, that's where we lose our power, right? We lose our power by staying in that place of victim and of hurt.

Natty Frasca:

Yes, there's, there's actually, there's an amazing, well, I have so many things to say about this, Sarah, I mean, I know, and I don't want to keep the whole episode focused on it, but I know. But I think it's really important and it's timely. And I think this, this, you know, obviously, is going to go live in the next couple months, since we're still living in this climate, I think it's a really important conversation to have, yeah, and you know, one of the things that I talk about a lot, you know, in my family and with clients, is this idea of love pushing. And it's like, love pushing is like, every single day I when I go out into the world, I make a conscious effort to push more love into the world. And it could be a 90 second interaction with someone on the street, a woman saying, like, you look so beautiful, right? You know, you are a stunning human being. I can feel your energy from across the street. Or, you know, a couple days ago there was a food pantry, slash, you know, housing project near me, and there's always this, like, massive group of Chinese men that sit outside and wait for the food pantry to open. And a couple days ago, I said, You know what? Or it was at night in bed, I was thinking about, they're having so much fun. They're outside. There's all these picnic tables at Spring. I want to bring them something fun tomorrow morning, and so I went to Dunkin Donuts and brought them, like, two dozen donuts, not a healthy right at all. Like, I don't even eat Dunkin Donuts. But I was like, this might be fun. And like, maybe I'd start a great conversation. So it's like, I'm always like, we It doesn't have to be massive action

Sara Poldmae:

or expensive or super time consuming,

Natty Frasca:

no, but I do believe in, like, the energetics of it, like going out into the world and saying, like, who can I help today? You know, maybe I'm just carrying the groceries up, you know, three flights of stairs for my old neighbor, yeah, you know. But whatever it is, it's like, those micro actions every day make a difference

Sara Poldmae:

Absolutely.

Natty Frasca:

And if everyone did it, everyone was doing that work, the world would be better. And then it's like, those things build. Then it's like, okay, you're gonna volunteer at the, you know, shelter, you're going to do more consistent work,

Sara Poldmae:

but because it feels so good to do things like that, so it becomes almost addictive, right? That pleasure, sensitive, pleasure, area of your brain lights up from doing the little things. So doing the big things comes easier, because, you know how, how it feels, and it's,

Natty Frasca:

it's fuel, it's, it's, it's powerful. And I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Adrienne Marie brown. You know her book pleasure activism. You know she is an activist. She is a black queer woman who has built her life around activism, and pleasure activism talks about self care and service, yeah? And the weaving of those two, and it's an incredible read, and pleasure is essential. It is. It is, because, like you said, when we feel good, we do good, right? Yeah, I love that.

Sara Poldmae:

So you had this epiphany, kind of almost a breakdown, right? I mean, massive breakdown. You're about to lose your marriage, right? You're about to lose your marriage. And did you quit your job?

Natty Frasca:

I did. I did quit my job. And in retrospect, you know, I say to my clients, you don't need to burn it all down, but you can, you can, you can, and like, sometimes you need to, you know, I've had clients who have left the. 26 year marriages, sometimes walking away is the right thing with thought, I kind of just burned it down and ran away. I mean, I didn't have to. I'm actually glad I did, because I'm here now. I think I needed to do that to kind of create a new story for myself. But, yeah, I left my job and I went on this inward journey. And I started with the yoga and meditation, and learned about energetics and chakras and spirit and the feminine. And then I went to coaching school with Martha Beck, and she's just a light, you know, she is just like fun, and got my coaching certification and and I dove into the world of pleasure and studied pleasure. I mean, I read scientific papers on pleasure, I read a lot of neuroscience research around pleasure, and have really woven that those theories and those practices into my work with women, because at the end of the day, pleasure, the way I describe it, anyway, is simply the things we do that give us a sense of expansion, yeah, that just make our bodies feel good. And when we follow the path of pleasure when you experience pleasure, this bodily sensation, and also there's brain chemistry involved. We our bodies are like, Oh, this is good. And our brains are like, Oh, more of this. We keep following that path. It compounds. And the more pleasure you experience, the more joy you experience. You shift your brain chemistry, your body chemistry, you you know, you soothe your nervous system. Yeah, it's it is the pathway. It is an access point.

Sara Poldmae:

And when you're feeling pleasure, it's hard to feel fear. It's like the opposite of fight or flight. And so many of my patients come in, and there's so much that's at the root of of the struggles in perimenopause and menopause, stress can really exasperate so many of those things. And by finding things that bring you true pleasure, it takes you out of fight or flight, because you can't be having an amazing time feeling good in your body and your mind, and also be scared. I mean, there can be an exhilarating fear, like you can get a lot of pleasure from skydiving, and there's a certain type of fear that comes along with you can, I certainly can't that's like my worst nightmare. But there are certain people that pleasure involves a little bit of fear. But I'm talking about that chronic state of, you know, yucky, fear and stress and all of that. So it's basically, I'm not an expert, but I sort of am, and it's like taking your body out of fight or flight. Yes, one way to mitigate the stress response and help you to learn, brain and body connected that you're safe, right? Yes, and safety is like a primal need for humans, and it's also something, I think, with marriages, like you were saying you just wanted to be held, you just wanted to feel held, which, to me, there's a word safe that comes with being held absolutely so in marriage, if we don't feel held, we probably don't feel safe, and it's hard to keep a sustainable relationship going unless we we have that safe place to come home to.

Natty Frasca:

Well, there's no intimacy. There's no true, deep intimacy without safety. Yeah, I mean, we build connection, but, you know, we need safety as a baseline.

Sara Poldmae:

So how did you rebuild that then? Because, you know, it takes two, right? I mean, there's a huge part of it that you could own in acknowledging what you want. And then did your husband just kind of run up and and just embrace everything, or

Natty Frasca:

No, not exactly. I mean, I guess I think of relationships as like puzzle pieces, right? Like we, you know, my husband and I had these patterns that we were really locked in, yeah? And I decided, Well, I first decided that I was going to be a new person, so I actively made the choice that I was going to create a new life for myself and that I was going to show up differently. So I took responsibility for my part, yeah, and I also did a lot of imagining of what I wanted my relationship with him to be like. So I would actually lay in bed in the morning, and I remember doing this practice, I would imagine like, even if it felt like a pipe dream, that he and I had the most delicious, intimate, loving, friendly, fun marriage. Like the marriage I always dreamed of. And I was like, If that's true, who would I be today? Who would Maddie be if she was living in this amazing marriage? What would I do? How would I behave? And so I started with little practices, like we would lay in bed in the morning, and instead of just hopping out of bed, I would stroke his back, because that is what a woman who is in a beautiful, loving relationship would do, yeah, and I think he was really, like startled, but as I began to shift the way I showed up, he slowly began to shift, and he began to feel safer. I mean, it's true, I was the complete leader of this. Yeah. I mean, I have done a lot more work than he has, but he's been very open and willing to come with me, and he's really softened himself. We changed the way we were raising our kids. We changed the conversations we were having at the dinner table, but it came from me shifting and, you know, in the beginning, you know, I made this conscious effort that like I was no longer available for fighting. So, you know, when I felt like things were kind of going there, I would just tell myself, I'm not available for fighting, yeah. And I would say to him, I'm not available to fight. I'm just not available for that. I am available for a good conversation about what's happening with both of us. And if you want to do that, I'm really open. Let's set a time for later tonight, after the kids go to bed, and let's talk this out. But I'm not available for fighting, and I don't know over time. You know, that was nine years ago, and I have to say, like, I have mixed feelings about marriage in general. I love, love, love my husband.

Sara Poldmae:

I mean, how could you not if you've been married, you have mixed feelings?

Natty Frasca:

Yeah, I'm just not sure. Like, even I've got I have two daughters who are 20 and 21 I have a son who's 17, and I think having a partner is really great. I love having someone to hang out with and but this whole like best friend, you're my everything. You're you know, this narrative were sold that your life, that you get married at 26 that I did, which was pretty young, and that your life begins and ends with this human being. Yeah, I just, you know, there's a lot of things that make me happy, and he's one of them. So I approach it a little bit differently, many, maybe, than most the mainstream and that I'm always seeking lots of sources of excitement. I have many different facets to my life. It's not just my family and my marriage.

Sara Poldmae:

very different than the marriage that we're in, you know, me being a career woman and having a lot of outside interest. And you know, I grew up in in a household that did not support the idea of me being able to depend on a man, or me being in the type of Pollyanna relationship where you live and breathe only for the marriage. So I was taught from very young age, you know, that that's just not the way it is. And so I've always leaned very heavily on female friendships. Lean very heavily on sources of joy that aren't just in the marriage. So I can completely resonate with what you're saying, but sometimes that can be hard for the other partner in the relationship, because, you know, I travel a lot more than my husband's ex wife did. I have a career, and at the end of the day, you know, some days I'll like to have a nice conversation, but if I've seen 14 patients in a row, and you know, some of them were really deep, emotional conversations, I don't want to sit with my husband and talk about the weather or the Daily News or anything. Yeah, so, you know,

Natty Frasca:

I'm totally with you and and so there's, there's this imbalance between what's expected and what is and what is. And, you know, I married a, I wouldn't say he's very traditional when I, when I met my husband, he was a bar owner, and we had a, you know, he was very non traditional. But what I learned was that, you know, he was, he was born in Turkey and raised in a very traditional family. I met him at a time when he was kind of active Wild Child, yeah. But after we got married, and it's funny, this is a joke that he does not like when I say this, but I would say I got tricked, because once we got married and we had kids, it was kind of like he had this expectation that he couldn't actually verbalize, because that might mean he was not a feminist, which he claimed to be, but he had very, very deep traditional training in his bones, in his ancestry. Yeah, that that was, you know, what a family looks like what a mom behaves. You know, his mother made, you know, was in the kitchen all day, cooking all day, and

Sara Poldmae:

I'd like to be in that household. I love Turkish food.

Natty Frasca:

Yeah. I mean, the food's incredible. She's an insane chef. People flock to her kitchen,

Sara Poldmae:

but it comes along with a lot of expectation that he probably didn't even know that he would have for a mother and a wife,

Natty Frasca:

exactly, but it just that I married that, yeah, you know, that's what he saw. So we've done a lot of unraveling around that, and now, you know, I have to say we've come a long way. He does the laundry, does the dishes, he brings me coffee in bed every morning like it's very we're very much equals, but we're 23 years into our marriage, so it's been a wild ride.

Sara Poldmae:

It takes some work training a husband. I don't mean that in any derogatory way, but I'm kind of dealing with the same thing,

Natty Frasca:

yeah, and untraining myself to to set boundaries, to know that it's okay, to put my foot down, to recognize how I've been trained. There's so much unbinding.

Sara Poldmae:

Yeah, 100%

Natty Frasca:

for all of us, yeah.

Sara Poldmae:

Well, tell us then as we start to wrap up this wonderful chat, tell us a little bit about how you work with women, and how women can get in touch with you, because through your personal experience as well as your professional training, it sounds like you have a lot to offer.

Natty Frasca:

Yes, I do. Thank you. I work with women only one on one, so I have a private practice, and what I've learned over the years, because I've run group programs in the past, is that there are things that women want to share that and want to talk about, that need safety, yeah, that require small spaces and and I'm the safe space for many women to really get clear and honest about the life that they've created and what they want to create, and taking ownership over that and how to kind of resurrect this bolder, more confident, more in tune, person they want for the second half of their life. So yeah, I work with women, one on one, six months or a year. Most women stay for a year. And you can follow me on Instagram at the feminine rebellion, or my website, the feminine rebellion. And, you know, slide into my DMs, get on my email list. There's lots of ways. Oh, I have a podcast, the feminine rebellion. Oh, really, that would never cast. I would love to have you on Sarah.

Sara Poldmae:

Oh, that would be fun.

Natty Frasca:

We can continue the conversation.

Sara Poldmae:

That would be amazing.

Natty Frasca:

Yeah, I would love that. So, yeah, that's easy to find me. I'm visible, I'm available. I love working with midlife women. It really it's my purpose. I have lots of purposes, but it's one of my big purposes,

Sara Poldmae:

yeah, yeah, it's beautiful. Well, I love hearing your journey, and I know my listeners enjoyed this as well, and I hope some of them reach out to you. I'm definitely going to follow you. You have to check out her blog post, because they're amazing. There's one that I'll give a shout out to about asking for help, asking for three things each day. So I want all my listeners to go to your website, feminine rebellion.com and please, if you read nothing, read that one, because I think women really do need to get better about asking for what they want, and it was just such a beautifully written blog post. So thank you so much for spending your time with us today, I really enjoyed talking with you. So much. Me too.

Natty Frasca:

Thank you so much for having me. Sara, absolutely, and thanks for listening

Sara Poldmae:

Till next time, ladies,

Natty Frasca:

bye.

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