What does it mean when a girl doesn’t get her period or experiences menstrual issues in her teenage years and later in adulthood?

Menstruation signals the transformation of a girl into a woman. On a physical level, it indicates readiness for motherhood, meaning the body has matured enough to bear a child. This is a normal process governed by the law of time. Time affects the body in a real and direct way. For our consciousness, however, time flows relatively. If the body and consciousness are well-connected—if sensorimotor amnesia between the two is low—then the perception of time is roughly aligned on both the physical and conscious levels. A person can mentally move from the present to the past or future, depending on the situation. Strong emotions can make time seem to pass faster or slower, but this doesn’t apply to the body.

If a teenage girl does not get her period at the usual age or experiences major issues with menstruation, it may indicate pressure from the environment she lives in—especially from her parents, most often the mother. This external pressure can delay her development. A girl may be 14 years old chronologically, but her development may be hindered by environmental pressures working against the natural flow of time. Time pushes the body to evolve in a specific direction—from birth to death. Environmental influences can either align with this flow or obstruct it. Normally, a girl gets her first period around the age of 13 or 14, initially irregular but gradually becoming more consistent as part of the natural development into womanhood.

There are two extremes. In the first, parents or the environment pressure the child to grow up too quickly—usually due to unconscious motives. Parents may want the child to become mature as soon as possible and take care of them. In this case, the girl may get her period too early, which can lead to intense, painful, or exaggerated menstruation. Such pressure accelerates development in a rough and forced way.

In the second extreme, parents unconsciously resist the child growing up according to the natural timeline. This is often due to an unresolved parental relationship between the mother and her own mother. If the mother lacked proper parental attention as a child, she may prolong her parental bond with her daughter—common in single-parent families.

If either or both parents depend on the parental relationship with the child and don’t want to let it go, problems arise. A strong partnership should precede conception and birth, so that in addition to a parental role, the couple maintains a partner relationship. Initially, the parental role—especially for the mother—requires more attention, reducing focus on the partnership. As the child grows more independent, the parental role decreases, allowing the partnership to strengthen again.

However, if the partnership was weak before conception, or the child was born as an attempt to fix a broken relationship, parents may resist the child growing up, because a maturing child weakens the parental bond, revealing the poor quality of the partner relationship. Fixing a relationship is harder than preventing a child from growing up. The child senses this misalignment and often unconsciously complies with the parents’ wishes, even if they are unspoken.

Chronic menstrual issues that begin due to environmental influences in childhood and adolescence often persist into adulthood.

So what is the solution?

It depends on the age of the girl or woman experiencing chronic menstrual problems. If she is still dependent on her parents, the mother (and ideally both parents) must work on increasing emotional maturity and effectiveness. Their partner relationship is key to creating a healthy environment for the girl to grow. If the girl is mostly independent and able to establish boundaries with her parents, it is sufficient for her to engage in the AEQ approach herself. If her mother joins as well, the results are even more effective.

The older the woman, the less impact her mother has on changing her menstrual processes.

Learning must include a physical component, which the AEQ method strongly emphasizes. All second-level emotions are stored in the body and have a powerful influence on and from it. One must begin to work clearly and consciously on this. Many clients are mentally aware of their problems—they think about them, read books, attend seminars—but avoid the body. When I teach them AEQ exercises that reduce sensorimotor amnesia, they begin to feel things they don’t like.

This reveals how long they’ve tried to keep the body separate from their awareness. Therefore, increasing emotional maturity—which I teach in AEQ programs—is essential to tolerate what is repressed in the body, to allow it to surface into consciousness without fleeing or fighting it in an inappropriate way, which would prevent the resolution of chronic issues.