Why your emotions change before your period, and what they might be telling you
Why you feel more emotional before your period, what those feelings might be telling you, and when to take them seriously. From Naomi Wu, PsyD.
Undercurrent.
What we are writing now
The series.
Our clinicians write in clusters: one essay that lays out the whole idea, then shorter pieces that go deeper into one part of it. Start at the top of a series and work down, or read any one on its own.
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01
Defenses and the unsaid
The moves a mind makes to keep itself comfortable, read closely and without judgement, from a psychodynamic frame.
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02
Acceptance and commitment therapy
ACT explained from inside the room: the six processes as they actually show up in a session, one essay at a time.
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03
Culturally responsive care
What it takes for therapy to hold culture, family, and immigration history as part of the clinical picture instead of background detail.
- Start here Culturally Sensitive Therapy: What It Feels Like to Be Understood 7 min
- 01 Cultural Competence vs. Cultural Humility in Therapy: What It Means to Be Truly Seen 4 min
- 02 Finding Healing and Belonging: Embracing Mental Health for Asian Americans 8 min
- 03 Culturally Compassionate Care for Asian American Clients: Insights for Therapists 9 min
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04
The cycle and the mind
How the menstrual cycle shapes mood, and where the ordinary premenstrual week ends and something that deserves treatment begins.
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05
Psychoanalytic diagnosis
What it means to understand a person by their level of personality organization and character style rather than their symptom list, and why that changes how the work is done.
Recently published
Recent essays.
The PDM-3: a clinician's guide to the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual
The PDM-3 gives clinicians a systematic way to describe personality organization, mental functioning, and subjective experience. Jean Jho, PsyD walks through the P, M, and S axes, the Psychodiagnostic Chart, and how the manual fits alongside the DSM-5-TR and ICD-11.
Living Between Two Cultures: Bicultural Identity and Your Mental Health
What it means for your mental health to live between two cultures, and why feeling at home in none of them is not a flaw. From a psychologist.
ACT for Anxiety: Why Fighting Your Anxiety Keeps It Alive
The harder you fight anxiety, the stronger it tends to get. A Carlsbad psychologist on how acceptance and commitment therapy changes your relationship to anxiety instead of trying to eliminate it.
Projection: when the feeling is yours but the address is wrong
Projection takes a feeling you cannot accept in yourself and hands it to someone else. Sean Noe, PhD explains why the mind does it, what it costs, and what helps when you are the one being handed a feeling that is not yours.
Acceptance Is Not Approval
Accepting a painful reality does not mean condoning it. A Carlsbad psychologist on what acceptance actually asks of you, why fighting a feeling backfires, and how acceptance is what makes action possible.
Cultural Competence vs. Cultural Humility in Therapy: What It Means to Be Truly Seen
Cultural competence is what a therapist knows. Cultural humility is what they do when they reach the edge of it. A psychologist on the difference, and why the second one matters more.
The Difference Between Letting Go and Giving Up
Letting go and giving up look almost identical from the outside and feel completely different inside. A Carlsbad psychologist on acceptance, resignation, and the line between them.
Feeling like a different person before your period
Many people feel like someone else in the days before their period. Naomi Wu, PsyD on what that experience means, and how to meet that version of you instead of fearing it.
Table of contents
Explore by topic.
The archive
Every essay, newest first.
- What Are Your Values, Really
- Why your emotions change before your period, and what they might be telling you
- The PDM-3: a clinician's guide to the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual
- Living Between Two Cultures: Bicultural Identity and Your Mental Health
- ACT for Anxiety: Why Fighting Your Anxiety Keeps It Alive
- Projection: when the feeling is yours but the address is wrong
- Acceptance Is Not Approval
- Cultural Competence vs. Cultural Humility in Therapy: What It Means to Be Truly Seen
- The Difference Between Letting Go and Giving Up
- Feeling like a different person before your period
- Splitting in psychology: why the mind sees all good or all bad
- Understanding psychoanalytic diagnosis: a different way of seeing people
- Cognitive Defusion: How to Stop Believing Everything Your Mind Says
- Culturally Sensitive Therapy: What It Feels Like to Be Understood
- What Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Actually Is, From Inside the Room
- PMS vs PMDD: how to tell the difference
- The menstrual cycle and your emotional life: what the medical model leaves out
- Defense mechanisms, explained in plain language
- A Faith that Unfolds: A Developmental Perspective of Faith in Adolescence
- Why Trauma Symptoms Can Show Up Years Later in Women
- DBT Skills Are For Everyone: Why This Therapy Isn’t Just for Crisis
- Can AI Replace Therapy? Why a Digital Face Will Never Be Human
- What Words Cannot Hold: A Therapist's Reflections on Emotional Awareness
- What Is a Process Group? Inside Real Talk, Our Adult Interpersonal Process Group
- What Does It Mean When We Say “Relational Psychotherapy”?
- Self-Compassion For When We Screw Up
- Finding Healing and Belonging: Embracing Mental Health for Asian Americans
- Culturally Compassionate Care for Asian American Clients: Insights for Therapists
- Healing from Religious Trauma
- Understanding Transference in Therapy
- Understanding the Shape of Your Grief: Secondary Losses and Mediators of Mourning
- Keys to Understanding the Grief Process: Introduction to Worden’s Four Tasks of Mourning
- To Give Advice or Not To Give Advice: How To Be Present With Our Loved Ones In Their Suffering
- Ways To Support Your Partner With Depression
- Why Is My Anxiety Getting Worse?
The Letter
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One thoughtful letter a month. A new essay, a few lines worth sitting with, and nothing else. Unsubscribe anytime.
We write once a month, never more.
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About Undercurrent.
Undercurrent is the in-house publication of Coastal Therapy Group, a relational psychodynamic group practice with offices in Encinitas, Carlsbad, and Vista. The essays are written by our clinicians, who spend their working hours listening closely to the stories people tell themselves and thinking about what those stories are quietly doing.
Nothing here is a substitute for therapy. If something you read makes you curious about the work of being known, we would be glad to hear from you.