Where Did My Clit Go? A Somatic Healer’s Journey Through Clitoral Atrophy and Menopause

Prologue

If you are here, you are probably not scared off by the names of female body parts. Welcome. You, and the words that name your body, are held with honor here.

I tell this story as a woman born with a uterus, ovaries, a cervix, and a vagina, and I welcome every form of the feminine soul to be curious alongside me. Our journeys are all unique; this is mine, not a prescription. But this topic should never be a shameful one. We celebrate young women when menstruation arrives; men get answers and treatment for erectile dysfunction on prime-time television. When my transition arrived in full swing, I could not simply ask Dr. Google and find my experience reflected back, and that isolation did real damage of its own.

In the time since I first wrote 49.2, I became a Certified Somatic Healer and embarked on a PhD in Somatic Psychology. I write this from the lens of a woman who sees the world of healing (and trauma) as an intricate weaving of the mind feeding the nervous system and the nervous system instructing the body. This weaving showed up in ways I could have never anticipated as I transitioned into my meno-era, and I had few resources to help me navigate that river of change. That scarcity rearranged my life’s work. It is why I now guide intimacy retreats that deepen connection, back to ourselves and back to our partners.

And because this topic means this much to me, I am not stopping at general somatic healing: in Chapter 50.5, I begin a year-long certification with the Somatica Institute to become a Certified Sex & Relationship Coach, because the next woman lying awake at 2 a.m. wondering where her pleasure went deserves someone trained to help her stage the rescue.

So thank you for being curious enough to want to know a woman’s experience. This is how we open the doors, and how we change the narrative. We owe it to ourselves, and to the women coming along behind us.

I present Chapter 49.2, lovingly numbered for the second month of my 49th year, the exact moment I wrote it. I live in Chapter 50.3 now. My clit got found. She is back, and she is loving this stage of her existence.

And to our mothers and grandmothers and ancestors well before them: I write for you and for all you went through as you tried to navigate your rivers of transition.

Much Love and Empowerment,

Shannon Elizabeth Marsh

CLIT-TOR-US

Say the word clit and watch what it evokes: mystery, total bliss, porn, art, empowerment, awe, misunderstanding. She may be little on the surface, but she is a web of wonders beneath, and she is having her moment.

Mine went missing in my 49th year.

A little backstory. A year earlier, my prolapsed uterus went to live in a bio-waste pit. I kept my ovaries; I was told that would spare me surgically induced menopause, though sometimes a body figures out the uterus is gone and starts the transition early. That “sometimes” is not folklore. A Duke University study found that women who keep their ovaries through hysterectomy still face nearly double the risk of early ovarian failure, and a 2025 review in Clinical and Experimental Obstetrics & Gynecology reports the transition can arrive three to four years sooner, partly because the surgery cuts away part of the ovaries’ blood supply. I am a professionally trained research analyst. I locked that information in and moved along.

The first sign that the “sometimes the body figures out” part was happening to me occurred a few months after my uterus had its farewell. It came as sudden, crushing depression, a narrative that I hadn’t done enough with my life, that I was a waste of space. I am not someone who typically experiences depression. Anxiety? Yep. Depression, not really. It came on suddenly, or so I thought. As a woman who believes in myself, who was I to doubt this sudden self-inflicted narrative I was telling myself? But thankfully, I did question it, and thankfully I did have that little piece of information locked in about the chance of my hysterectomy leading to an earlier transition into my menopause era. Blood work, testosterone, and soon I was back to my sassy, self-loving, wanting-to-fuck-my-husband-until-I-could-not-fuck-anymore self.

This solution-driven woman was about to learn “solutions” in this meno-journey are more like a flowing river with many tributaries, not a still pond of answers where I could rest in a canoe of symptom-free meno-life. When 2 a.m. wakings arrived, progesterone joined the party. The first night I took progesterone, after many exhausted days on no sleep, my husband walked into our bedroom to find me sitting up in bed, asleep, drooling. I racked out. And with good sleep, good testosterone, I was again on the feel-good swim down that flowing river.

As I felt better, with good feelings came a delightful surprise: my clit enlarged just enough to become the talk of our bedroom. Orgasms were explosive. I felt powerful. Maybe the way a hung dude feels? Check out my clit. Sorry not sorry. I was certain it was attributable to my hormone replacement therapy, and I don’t think that is incorrect, but I was missing a piece of the puzzle there. Hormones are part of it. I was soon to learn that hormones can only do so much. It was that feel-good tributary that was really doing the heavy lifting. And what I was soon to learn was that in the absence of feeling good about myself, or worse, that tributary being replaced by feel-bad-about-myself messaging, things were about to look really bleak. And my clit was going to show me she was vulnerable to those narratives.

April Drought

Then April came, nearly a year after my hysterectomy: the month of the erotic couples photoshoot my husband and I had fantasized about for two years. The week before the shoot, pain arrived. My labia, my clitoris, the little stretch of mons above her, cracking open. It hurt to wear underwear, then pants. It hurt to masturbate; it hurt for him to touch me. I got through the photoshoot because it was sexy and hot and lubrication showed up for me, naturally. On the four-hour ride home, I knew I was in trouble.

My estrogen had tanked. It seemed clear now that my body had, in fact, figured out there was no uterus.

Through trial and error I found my cocktail: hormones, eventually antidepressants, supplements, a beautiful vaginal moisturizer, new vibrators, a menopause book written by a staunch feminist. This is not an essay on the solution to menopause; what worked for me is mine. But when relief went absent, my brain announced my body was failing.

The Messaging

Here is where it gets bad. And here is the part nobody writes about, so I am going to write it boldly.

My entire life, the messaging was everywhere: women of a certain age are washed up. No longer attractive. Headed for the rocking chair. Their husbands leave them for younger women. I absorbed it for decades and told myself: it couldn’t be me. We were newly married. Our sex life was rocking. This was supposed to be my moment.

So when my body began to shift, I did what analysts do: I researched again, certain I would find the science that called bullshit on those narratives and handed me my superpower back.

That is not what Google gave me. Google gave me survey after survey, studies with no established scientific controls, announcing as “scientific and evolutionary fact” that men prefer 21-year-old women no matter how old the men get, while women prefer men their own age or older. There it was, dressed up as data: I was doomed.

I am a Somatic Healer. I know, professionally and in my bones, that the nervous system listens, that the body and brain remember and store every message we feed them. And still, night after night, I force-fed mine that venom.

A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

My body responded. Of course she did.

My vagina seized up and dried up. I started covering up with strategically placed lingerie. This from a woman who had zero issues flaunting everything she had. I quoted my “research” to my husband and had a rebuttal for every response of love he offered. Don’t come for me and my research, Buddy! That poor man really just wanted to bang it out, and I was informing him that he secretly didn’t enjoy my “atrophying vagina.” (Spoiler: he held on. This story gets happier.)

And then one day, and yes, it was that instant, I couldn’t achieve orgasm from our tried-and-true 69. I tried my vibrators. Nothing. I bought new vibrators. Twenty-five minutes for a maybe. My entire adult life I was a highly sexual woman who exploded easily into orgasm from a little pressure, warmth, tongue, vibration. It left overnight.

And my big beautiful clit, my pride of six months earlier? A tiny nub under a large hood. If I pulled the skin back, I found something that was technically a clitoris. Barely there.

Clit Research Time

Do you know what happens when you google clit conditions? You get porn, companies selling libido back to you, and article after article about vaginal atrophy. My vagina was fine. I mean, she was dry and locking up, but she was ok and I had estradiol cream for her. My libido was hanging on. I didn’t need to want sex more, and I didn’t need to read more about my vagina. I needed to know where the fuck my clit went. Where was she?! I found exactly a couple of brave souls writing about the thing actually happening to me: clitoral atrophy. Then the algorithm served me reels of young women mocking it. They’d heard you could lose your clit in menopause; someone should just shoot them now. Thanks, ladies. I don’t even blame them. It is unimaginable when you are young and full of clit-based pleasure.

I told my provider. Just more vaginal estrogen. The estradiol cream gave me a fat pussy. Pretty, but it did not bring back my clit.

A Kidnapping and a Ransom

Here is what I believe, as a healer and as an analyst: there is real science behind what your perceptions, and your society’s reception of you, do to this transition. In 2024, The Lancet published a landmark menopause series arguing that how a culture frames this transition shapes how women actually experience it, and warning against treating menopause as a story of decline. Anthropologist Margaret Lock famously found the same thing decades earlier: Japanese women, in a culture that framed this stage as a respected passage rather than a punchline, reported dramatically fewer hot flashes than North American women. The narrative is not just in your head. It is in your body.

Because your soma is listening. The listening is logging. And your body is built, above all things, to protect you.

So hear me: my clit was not simply stolen by menopause. The kidnappers were my own invasive thoughts, fueled by misogynistic, self-serving narratives designed to control the burgeoning female since history began. I told myself, under no uncertain terms, that I had no purpose, that my husband couldn’t want me, that I controlled none of it, and my sweet clit did what protected beings do. She retreated into her deep, unseen network. She tucked herself into a cocoon of safety. She had to.

The ransom note, it turns out, was written in my own handwriting.

The Way Back

I made my way back. Chapter 50.3 tells that story, and she is a whole dragon emerging. Yes, I do the medical things; my cocktail is mine and yours will be yours. But none of it, not one cream, pill, or pellet, was going to coax my clit out of hiding until I started sending different messages down the line, until my nervous system could convince my body: I am still here. I am still me. I am still a sexual being. And my time is not ending. It is just beginning.

So imagine it with me. What if the desperate 2 a.m. googling returned a different narrative? What if those searches served up stories of women whose clits went quiet, who got confused, and then got educated and empowered? Women who nurtured their souls, fell in love with who they are now, thanked who they were, told the bullshit surveys to fuck all the way off, and believed they were desirable, amazing, and just getting started?

That is why we must empower each other, not because we need one more “you can do anything” podcast, but because our somas are listening, and the listening is logging. Women of every age and stage are powerhouse dragons on fire. You will not kidnap or scare our Ladyland into submission, and if you try, I will shout this louder.

Find your people. Ask the questions. Know your body. Know your brain. Know your thoughts, and know your worth. You are not alone, so please, don’t carry this alone.

All My Love and With a Renewed Ladyland,

Shannon Elizabeth

Common Questions

What is clitoral atrophy?

Clitoral atrophy is a reduction in the size and sensitivity of the clitoris, most often linked to declining estrogen and testosterone during menopause or after hysterectomy. The clitoris can retract under its hood and become less responsive, making orgasm difficult or impossible where it was once easy. It is rarely discussed, even in menopause resources, and many women cannot find information about it when it happens to them.

Can clitoral atrophy be reversed?

Many women see improvement through a combination of approaches: hormone therapy (systemic and localized), regular blood work to check testosterone and estrogen levels, vaginal moisturizers, continued sexual stimulation, and addressing the psychological messaging around aging and desirability. Research including The Lancet’s 2024 menopause series indicates that how a woman perceives this transition affects how her body experiences it, so treatment that ignores the mind-body connection may fall short. What works varies from woman to woman; a knowledgeable provider matters.

Does hysterectomy cause early menopause even if you keep your ovaries?

It can. A Duke University study found women who keep their ovaries through hysterectomy still face nearly double the risk of early ovarian failure, and a 2025 review reports the menopause transition can arrive three to four years sooner, partly because surgery reduces blood supply to the ovaries. Sudden depression, sleep disruption, and genital pain after hysterectomy are worth investigating with blood work rather than dismissing.