Contraccezione: i profili della donna italiana - 1

Basically we have identified three broad types, of course with all the intermediate possibilities. The first is the woman we called "classic". She is a woman who chose to be a wife and mother, who often works only within the home and the family, who has three main characteristics. She is a woman who is helpful, a very protective woman, a woman who is also very respectful of her own role, unfortunately she is also a woman who, like all of us, also has great vulnerabilities. The first vulnerability is that she feels too helpful, so, many women say: "but frankly it seems to me that I am like those characters in Pirandello, as you want me, always helpful for the family, or even sometimes that I am treated like a doormat". I quote what my patients said to me. They are often women who complain that the house is used as if it were a hotel. And yet, the thing that probably disturbs them the most, and somehow puts them more in crisis is to feel that the value of their role is not respected. The role is respected in the family, but not the value, as if the fact of being a wife and mother was an inferior choice compared to being a professional. The second group of women we have identified is the one that we have defined with a very simple term: "modern." She is a woman who, on the one hand, recognizes the value of what she inherited as a reference model from her family, so the fact of being a wife and mother but, at the same time, she has been encouraged by her parents also towards personal accomplishment, so she's a woman who has her own job, a personal income, who tends to have a very positive experience regarding her body, so she's a woman that we call dynamic, sporty, very curious, in the sense of a very well-educated woman, who reads a lot. This woman tries to live up to her role on all fronts, so she's a woman who has a very precise vulnerability: she's very busy from morning to night, and therefore she has a high risk of chronic stress. Then, since she wants to be good on several fronts, she ends up reducing her hours of sleep and this is her extreme vulnerability. from the physical point of view, but also from the psychological and emotional one. In fact, we see that the woman who works, who is married or has a partner, has one or two children, and is in the high risk age group between 30-35 and 40 years old, is precisely the woman who has the greatest vulnerability, that is the stress that somatizes in a syndrome well-known by all women, but particularly intense in this group, which is the premenstrual syndrome. So she is certainly a very smart woman, in which most of us recognize ourselves, but who pays a price in terms of health, precisely because her desire to be perfect on multiple fronts, makes her vulnerable, I repeat, leads her to reduce her hours of sleep and to have higher somatizations also at a gastrointestinal level, as well as premenstrual syndrome. The third type of woman is the one we have called "my-way". She is, instead, more independent, who almost always has a very free job or at least a job that leads her to travel extensively, to be compared with many different worlds, with different types. She is very aggressive, very smart, generally able to obtain very good professional positions, then we call it independent, informed, self-confident, she has some vulnerabilities, not so much in the younger age, when she is delighted with herself, but around 40 years old, when she begins to take stock of her life, and claims to be very happy with their personal development, but feels that somehow she has not realized an emotional project, for example, she has no children, she does not have a stable couple, and then somehow she feels her being single as the result of what she has invested as energies in the profession, so she can also have emotional hidden wounds, on the side of the construction of femininity and motherhood.