In this Episode of Beyond Postpartum I interview Shealagh who is one of our peer support staff here at PPPSS. She tells us her postpartum story, and how finding the right group of friends was important in her recovery from postpartum depressin. She also shares a whole lot of tools and strategies for working through perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, and explains what CBT is, and why and how it can help too.
CW: Shealagh discusses her experience of having a miscarriage
In this episode Shealagh and I talk about
- Having a miscarriage while travelling overseas
- How much having a previous miscarriage affected her experience with her 2nd pregnancy
- Struggling to breastfeed, even though she had done her research
- Being the first of her friend group to have a baby
- The effect that a recent move had on her postpartum experience
- Putting up a facade to seem like she was ok – when she really wasn’t
- Having a thyroid condition on top of it all
- The reasons she didn’t reach out to PPPSS and didn’t reach out for help
- Searching for other mothers who wanted to have real conversations – and struggling to find them
- How she finally found her group of people in the end – and made some lasting friendships
- My pandemic parenting survival strategy
- The shift in identity from career woman to mother
- The hit to her worth, value, confidence and self-esteem, that occurred when she became a mother
- What happened when she did finally reach out to PPPSS and what she learned that helped her recover from the depression she was experiencing
- How foreign the concept of self-care felt for her, but how it was a turning point for her
- Finding the answers within herself
- How different things were the 2nd time around because of all of the tools that she had learned
- Her favourite parts of her job at PPPSS
- What has changed – and what hasn’t – in her work over the past 20 years
- How social media and the internet have been throwing fuel on the fire of perinatal mental health
- How I found my people at the park
- What CBT looks like in the context of postpartum and why it can help
- The tools that Shealagh is using to get through the Covid-19 pandemic
