Common Ground Podcast, Episode 53
Guest: Amber Venner
Written by D.J. Reiter
What does it actually take to stay connected to someone who is changing in ways you can’t see and they can’t fully explain? That question sits at the heart of Episode 53 of the Common Ground Podcast, where hosts Philly and Sydney Nicole welcome Amber Venner, registered nurse, speaker, and perimenopause educator, for a candid conversation about hormones, communication, and what it means to stay curious instead of trying to win.
Amber is the voice behind @shecomesfirst.av, an Instagram platform that helps midlife women and the partners who love them make sense of perimenopause. She built her career in nursing, but it was her own unexplained symptoms — brain fog, missed appointments, a sudden inability to keep her usual pace, that sent her looking for answers her medical training hadn’t given her. What she found became a mission: closing the gap between what women are actually experiencing and what they are being told, by their doctors, their partners, and sometimes themselves.
The Nurse Who Didn’t Recognize Her Own Symptoms
Amber describes a period of feeling completely unlike herself: forgetting appointments, losing track of responsibilities she had always managed easily, and quietly panicking that something was seriously wrong. “I’m not feeling myself,” she says. “I could not keep things straight anymore in my head.” It took her, a trained nurse, months to connect what she was feeling to perimenopause, which is part of what convinced her that most women have no real information at all.
A Diagnosis Built on Symptoms, Not a Single Test
Because hormone levels swing rather than decline steadily, blood work during perimenopause can come back looking completely normal, even when someone feels far from it. Amber explains that many women are told they are stressed, anxious, or depressed long before anyone mentions perimenopause, and that conditions like PCOS can produce nearly identical symptoms, making an already murky diagnosis even harder to pin down. There is no single test; the diagnosis is built entirely on the pattern of what a woman is experiencing.
The Buffer That Keeps Everything From Surfacing at Once
One of the more striking ideas in the episode is that stable hormones do more than regulate mood; they act as a kind of buffer that keeps old stress and unprocessed emotion from surfacing all at once. When that buffer weakens, Amber says, the brain can no longer mask what it used to; that is part of why some women in this stage are newly diagnosed with ADHD, or find themselves suddenly unable to push down feelings they have carried for years. Hormones do not create the underlying pattern; they simply stop hiding it.
Ask, Don’t Assume
The most practical thread of the episode is about what partners should actually do with all of this. Amber’s advice is simple: ask, don’t assume. “Do you want me to listen? Do you want me to help you fix it?” she says partners should ask directly, rather than guessing. Sydney offers her own version of the same idea, a shorthand from a friend’s marriage: “Do you want me to get in the mud puddle with you, or do you want me to pull you out of it?” Both are ways of replacing assumption with a direct question, which turns out to prevent a lot of unnecessary conflict.
Curiosity Beats Being Right
The conversation widens into a broader, sometimes pointed debate about gender roles and the impact of the feminist movement on modern relationships. Philly and Sydney push back on some of Amber’s points, and she pushes back on theirs, but the disagreement itself becomes the episode’s real lesson. As the hosts put it in their closing takeaway, the goal was never to make the other person lose; it was to stay curious about where they were coming from. Understanding someone, Sydney notes, does not require agreeing with them; it just means recognizing that you are both trying to be heard.
Key Takeaways
● Perimenopause is diagnosed by symptoms, not a single test. It can look like anxiety,
depression, or a dozen other things first, which is part of why it goes unrecognized for
years.
● Hormones do not create your emotional patterns; they remove the buffer that was hiding them. When that steady baseline disappears, old stress and unprocessed feelings
become harder to push down.
● Ask what someone needs before you try to fix it. Wanting to be heard and wanting help
solving a problem are not the same request, and guessing wrong creates distance
instead of closing it.
● Understanding is not the same as agreement. You can see where someone is coming
from emotionally without sharing their conclusion, and that distinction is what keeps a
disagreement from becoming a rupture.
● The goal of a hard conversation is not to win it. Trying to make the other person lose
turns a relationship into a competition, and nobody benefits from losing in their own
marriage.
Reflection Questions
Have you or someone close to you experienced symptoms that were dismissed as stress, anxiety, or simply getting older? What helped you find the real explanation?
Think about the last time you needed support from a partner or friend. Did you ask for what you actually needed, or did you expect them to already know?
Is there a pattern in your life, physical or emotional, that you have been masking rather than addressing? What would it take to name it honestly?
When was the last time you disagreed with someone and chose to stay curious instead of trying to be right? What changed because of it?
If you are supporting someone through perimenopause, or any major life transition, what is one question you could start asking instead of assuming you already know the answer?
To connect with Amber Venner, follow her on Instagram @shecomesfirst.av for resources on perimenopause and midlife health. Listen to the full conversation on Episode 53 of the Common Ground Podcast.
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