My Nursing Aversion & Mental Health Struggles (BTS Bonus Episode 3)

Welcome to episode three of this Behind the Scenes series!
 In this candid conversation, I'm opening up about my mental health journey, embracing the highs and lows of anxiety, and depression, and sharing how it all ties into my experience with nursing aversion. 

This episode isn't just about my journey; it's an invitation to explore the intersection of mental health, motherhood - and of course, breastfeeding. 

I also dip into the things that have supported me through the most intense periods of emotional and mental struggles in my life and are still supporting me now.  My hope is that they offer you support as well. 

I do share a few details around the trauma I experienced with my daughter's birth.  If you would like to skip that part - jump ahead to 9:56 when I give the warning (at around 7 minutes.) 

Want to learn more from me?
Watch my free, instant access workshop: 
Designing Your Pathway to Toddler Breastfeeding Mastery

Grab your free guide to say "No" to the feed while still saying "yes" to the need at  www.ownyourparentingstory.com/guide

Love this episode?!  Shoot me a DM over on Instagram @own.your.parenting.story and tell me all about it. <3

Transcript

(Auto generated transcript) 

[00:00:00] Welcome to episode three of the Behind the Scenes series. I'm going to be talking about my mental health journey. Remember, this is kind of all focused on me, so it's not going to be too, too sciency. It's going to be my story with anxiety and depression and nursing aversion. I will touch on a couple things that could be triggering around birth trauma, but I will say it before I get to that section, and there is like a chapter marker for when that section is done, so if [00:00:30] you want to skip over that, just hit stop when I say and Come back at that next chapter marker.

I'll have the timestamp in the show notes as well so that you can skip ahead if that's important to you. Now, if you're listening to this episode around the time it's released, you likely had a little intro piece ahead of the regular intro where I talked about an upcoming live workshop. I love running live workshops.

The last time I ran one was in [00:01:00] October of last year. I had an extended Q& A afterwards. Hanging out with all of you was. Incredible. Amazing. And I'm really excited to do it again. The content will be similar. I haven't changed the topic. That, that time I ran it was a kind of a newer topic for me , but I, I have updated it.

So there's going to be some new content there too. And of course. Just that time to hang out afterwards. Bring your questions about parenting, breastfeeding, weaning, whatever you got, and you can pop on [00:01:30] your camera. I'll do it as a Zoom meeting instead of a webinar, so you can just be right there with me. I can see your lovely faces if you want to, and we can talk.

We can do some, some fun stuff there. Okay, so please join. If you're unable to join live, that is okay because of time zone issues or scheduling issues. Just Make sure you still register, and I'm going to send you a copy of the recording, after the event, so you'll have a few days to catch up and watch it and get all of the goodness still.[00:02:00] 

So, moving into today's topic, I, again, this is like my mental health journey, it's vulnerable to share. I feel like I wrote down kind of like a quick timeline, and there's so many things I have to skip over or be very, very brief about. Uh, obviously it's something I could share. Like, I could, I could talk about it for a really long time.

It's my life story, right? So many things to say. So, you know, bear that in mind, right? And if anything feels a little [00:02:30] unclear or whatever just know that I am just barely touching the surface on these things. So, to start out, just growing up in general, I did experience anxiety attacks, but I didn't know That it was anxiety attacks.

And my parents didn't really know that it was anxiety attacks either. Looking back with this benefit of hindsight, my parents had a lot of anxiety and mental health struggles too. , and they were undiagnosed and untreated. [00:03:00] So, I love my parents dearly and I still have a good relationship with them.

They were just doing the best that they could, and they didn't understand it. They didn't have the support. So, when these things would happen, they would do their best, but they didn't have the words for it. They didn't know how to help me with it, because they were struggling with those things a lot of the time, too.

So, again, I didn't know, I didn't have words for anxiety. I actually remember being in grade school and reading the book. I believe it was the book The [00:03:30] Giver, and at one point early on in the book, There's like this description of anxiety, and I think they might have even used the word anxiety, and I remember it was like the first time I'd ever heard that word, and I was like, whoa.

Do you remember just like staring at it and like, I, I feel that, I experience that, I know what that is. And it was just so bizarre for me. Anyways, moving on into teenagehood, being a teenager, and I had some really hard mental health days. And again, I would have these [00:04:00] anxiety attacks, some panic attacks, but I didn't know what to call them.

My parents, like, Would just typically let me stay home from school. I would normally express it as like, I'm sick. my stomach hurts, that kind of stuff. Cause again, I didn't know how to talk about it. I didn't have the language. I also was very aware that I had a quote, good life. I was very aware of my privilege.

And so I felt like I, it wasn't. I didn't have an excuse. I didn't have a [00:04:30] reason to be feeling the way that I felt. And that led to a lot of shame and confusion. And I do think that a lot of. Things too had to do with being undiagnosed with ADHD. It's only been the last few years that I've had that diagnosis.

And at the time I just really struggled with a lot of things. I struggled in school. Uh, like I was a good student, but it was sheer anxiety that I was a good student. I struggled to have. Tasks completed, especially tasks that I had to bring home, [00:05:00] like homework or projects, 

anyway, I don't want to spend too much time talking about that. But. I think that that was there for a lot of things. So, I was in my, my third year of university, and I was sitting in an abnormal psychology class, and, uh, with every new, like, psychological diagnosis, right, that we were exploring or learning about, the professor would have us do a screening test, like a questionnaire ahead of time, just personally.

He didn't look at it. It was just something like a paper that was handed out, and you just kind of like, Go through it. It [00:05:30] wasn't required. It kind of sounds funny now, looking back, like, oh, he was screening us for all these different, you know, disorders. Um, but at the time, it kind of just felt like a fun way to get introduced to the experience of somebody living with those conditions, right?

So, talking things like schizophrenia, etc., right? And we got to a unit or a section on social anxiety, and we did the questionnaire, and I scored, like, perfect. And by perfect, type me in, like. [00:06:00] Every single question I was scoring for having social anxiety. Whereas every other screening question I had done, I maybe got one, right?

Like, I would have one of the things out of 20 or something. And, you know, I had made a couple friends in the class. I remember kind of looking around and they, you know, Had like one or two for the social anxiety, not like the perfect 10, like I had or perfect 20. I don't remember how many questions there were.

And I was like, Oh my God, I have [00:06:30] anxiety. This is a thing. What? And it was really. validating and also scary at the same time. Um, and, you know, a few things happened after that, that felt dramatic and big at the time, but looking back, you know, they were not as life ending as it felt in that moment. And it all led me to eventually having an official diagnosis with generalized anxiety disorder, getting medication, as well as starting therapy.

And [00:07:00] things kind of went smoothly for the most part after that. Of course, there were really hard things that came up in my life in that time, but I was doing therapy, um, you know, exploring these kind of new, new ideas about myself. Finding a lot of freedom in things, experimenting, playing. I remember I was doing a lot of songwriting and art and just really enjoying that time.

My husband and I bought a house and eventually, we, I got pregnant with my daughter. 

[00:07:29] Birth Trauma Trigger Warning

okay, so trigger [00:07:30] warning, this is where I'm going to get into my birth story with my daughter and a little bit of birth trauma, so if you need to skip ahead, now's the time to do it. Okay, so frequently I share about my breastfeeding journey with my daughter, kind of the challenges around that and how I was really focused on labor and delivery and not focused on breastfeeding as much and all that stuff.

So, I talk about that a ton in other places if, if you're interested. What I don't often say is that actual delivery for me was difficult. It's very difficult and, I didn't have an epidural,[00:08:00] and I had very supportive nurses in the room and I coped very well through most of labor, which lasted a very long time for me, but it was when I actually went to deliver my daughter that things changed and there was an on call OB, who was Very pushy, and I ended up with an unwanted episiotomy.

Now, I'm not going to go into all the details, but I'll just, I'll just say that and tearing. And it was very scary. [00:08:30] I, afterwards, like while this OB was stitching me up, um, told me, well, while I was there, that I wasn't going to ever be able to birth vaginally again. And Subsequently, like, following that, I ended up with an infection where, like, I remember at five days postpartum having an appointment and I couldn't walk 

I had to go in in a wheelchair, at a certain point with the infection, I wasn't even able to Sit up to [00:09:00] breastfeed my daughter. I had to lay down. I couldn't change her diaper. I couldn't do anything and for those of you listening, which probably nearly everyone listening who has given birth, you know that your, anxiety can really spike in those following days, right?

Like the baby blues, that kind of stuff. So I was already having, you know, normal hormonal changes afterwards. I just remember feeling like I was never going to be able to take care of my daughter, and it was very scary and difficult. So [00:09:30] in those early weeks, I remember being very, very, very difficult.

Eventually, of course, we got the infection under control and I was able to care for my daughter, but still there was a lot of anxiety. You know, at some point we found our groove. Right? Breastfeeding was a little easier. We figured it out, right? I remember I couldn't latch her for the first three days.

There was all those things happening parallel to the infection as well. Um, and my daughter had a lot of colic, tongue tie, all that kind of stuff.

[00:09:56] Skip if avoiding birth trauma story

But eventually, we found our groove. And I remember at about six or seven [00:10:00] months postpartum, it was right around Christmas time, Um, I did the artist's way. So, I always loved doing theatre and singing, songwriting.

Uh, so doing The Artist's Way for the first time, if you're not familiar, it's, uh, it's this like, kind of like a self paced course that's like a book. So it's like this 12 week kind of program to creativity. Um, yeah, I really enjoyed it. Like, part of it is morning pages where you're doing [00:10:30] this free writing exercise every day, as well as these, like, artist dates where you're just exploring these, like, creative, Times.

And it was really, really fun. And I, again, I started songwriting. Things were going really well. I just really, I really enjoyed it. Um, I remember just feeling alive again, right? We often talk about in motherhood and postpartum and the early years of motherhood, kind of that losing ourselves. But I really found, like, I found myself, I was like, Whoa, this is so amazing.

And I felt really free, [00:11:00] exciting. And that was, that was really good. And then, of course, we decided to get pregnant again. I think my daughter, if I, the timeline is right, she was about 20 months when I got pregnant. The first symptom that I had when I was pregnant with my son was nipple sensitivity, which I was breastfeeding my daughter.

So that felt like razors on my nipples every time she would latch. And it didn't take very long for aversion [00:11:30] to become coupled with the, the sensitivity. And by aversion, I mean this really intense urge to shove her off of me every time she would latch. Um, feeling really disgusted by breastfeeding while she was latched.

I wasn't so much disgusted outside of the breastfeeding experience, but I began to just Dread, Breastfeeding. And if you've heard me talk about this in the past, you know that that was super confusing for me. Um, again, I didn't have the words. I didn't have the words nursing aversion until much later to [00:12:00] describe that experience.

 I felt crazy. It really rocked me. I loved breastfeeding. So, it was super duper hard. Um, and now remember, I had had all this wonderful experience before this. So, like, I wasn't in therapy anymore and I wasn't taking medication. I didn't need it during that, that time that I was just really Enjoying life and feeling creative and all that stuff.

Now, it's not to say that hard things didn't happen, they did. There was hard things during that time. But I had a, like, a level of resiliency that was freeing, right? I could [00:12:30] move through those things. There's hard things, I could feel them and move through it. Um, so I didn't, I didn't make the connection at the time.

But parallel to the nursing aversion was a whole lot of other stress. Part of it was this birth trauma with my daughter. As soon as I got pregnant, I now had decisions to make about how, what kind of care I was going to have with my son, so where I live, if you have an O. P. you [00:13:00] don't deliver with the OB that is your primary obstetrician that you see all of your prenatal care for.

You deliver with the on call OB. So it might be your OB, but it might be someone else. Um, so it was scary to me to say, well, I could go with an obstetrician. And if I do, I don't know who's going to be delivering my child. And it could be the same person who I had last time, or it could be a different person.

It could be a worse experience. Right? So I opted to go into midwifery care. [00:13:30] And it wasn't long into midwifery care that, , the midwives were looking over the charts that the doctor, like the, you know, the birth record essentially for my daughter, the charting that the doctor had done, so that was obviously very triggering, right? It was bringing up all of that scary feelings that I had had before, and the worry that You know, I wasn't safe, my daughter wasn't safe, something bad was going to happen, uh, [00:14:00] and of course, being pregnant in and of itself, being hormonal, there's also an opportunity for anxiety and depression to develop simply from that. Um, at the same time, there was some massive, like, I, I truly cannot get into it, but really, really big things that happened in my extended family and my kind of like family of origin, my, my parents and my siblings, as well as larger extended family that were incredibly [00:14:30] stressful. Like, I couldn't tell you how stressful it would be very difficult to, to rank that.

So that meant that I was under a lot of stress. I was. Now facing all these decisions, I had to decide whether I was going to have a C section. I was, you know, I ended up having appointments with other doctors trying to figure things out and what my options were, and I was being bullied in some circumstances.

Some people were being supportive, but I really had hard, hard, hard choices to make, um, and feeling [00:15:00] like also under the stress of my family's stress. And, my support system, my family, was under a ton of stress. So, looking back, like, I have a lot of compassion for myself, like my coping skills were just being completely overwhelmed, and as much as I really tried to have it.

Together, I felt like I was falling apart all the time. I can see now that it all makes sense, that a saw, like, this nursing aversion that didn't make [00:15:30] sense to me. I didn't understand why this was happening to me, and I loved breastfeeding, and I didn't know what to do, and I didn't want to harm my daughter or harm my relationship.

Well, yeah, of course that was happening when this larger context is there. Right? This, this birth trauma, the stuff going on with my family, right? And then the aversion itself became a hard thing too, right? Like the aversion happened, I believe, in part because of that stress, but then it was just stressful to have that aversion.

So [00:16:00] I was really blind in the moment to how it was affecting me. I felt like I had to be strong for myself and for my daughter and for my soon to be born son and for my family. And I did have my husband, absolutely, but he didn't know how to help me with these things. He was always there. He was my rock and he loved me and He was incredibly supportive, but it wasn't like he knew how to navigate this.

He had no idea. He was looking to me to tell him what needed to happen next, right? Now, of course, [00:16:30] I probably could have even leaned on him more and asked him for more support and help, but I really felt like it was on me. I was the one who was like the breastfeeding counselor, right? I was the one who should have known, at least in my brain.

What I understand now is that every time my daughter latched, I was coming face to face with vulnerability, and I was not feeling safe. So that vulnerability felt dangerous. [00:17:00] Her little, this little human was so innocent and pure amidst all of this chaos felt, it felt scary and it felt like too much. And again, I didn't know how to articulate that and I didn't fully realize that was happening because as soon as that would happen, right, my, I had these defenses that would come up.

Which was like this aversion. It's not safe to be around something so vulnerable right now.

[00:17:30] And I, I feel like I couldn't tolerate, I couldn't tolerate being in that presence of that vulnerability of that, of that intimacy, of that closeness, of that innocence. And I couldn't. If I felt inadequately prepared to protect myself in those moments, I felt so exposed. I felt scared.

Right? And so it was like this wise way that my body would help me to protect myself would be to experience this aversion. [00:18:00] I really, I didn't have words for it at the time. I did get back into therapy, really what spurred the therapy was. Trying to figure out what to do around the delivery of my son, 

like, so this would have been, I was only pregnant for a few months when I was Kind of working through all that stuff and trying to make a decision and what care I was going to have and all that kind of stuff, so very early on I, I got back into therapy and it was really over 2019, that year, that I was exploring all of the things that I now teach to all of you and that I [00:18:30] support my clients with.

And the students inside of On Your Breast Feeding Story. As I work with people now, I can tell you that I've never had an experience with a client or a student, or even just talking with someone who has experienced nursing aversion or is currently experiencing nursing aversion, who didn't also have stress in other places of their life.

Big stressors that came up that really had nothing to do with breastfeeding. Sometimes it's relational, sometimes it's financial, and it, it [00:19:00] concerns me when there's this rhetoric around breastfeeding, like toddler breastfeeding, weaning, sleep training, or just generally modifying your child's behavior, um, that, that, that's important for maternal mental health.

That the way to support moms is to change children. And yet, and I'm being 100 percent honest with you here, I've never spoken with someone whose stress was simply [00:19:30] about breastfeeding. It becomes, it feels like that's the way to go because that's where it pops up. But that's when you are quiet.

That's when you're relaxed. Sitting with this vulnerability, that's when I was quiet, that's when I was sitting with this vulnerability, that's when it would feel very, very intense. That was where I had space to feel all of the intense feelings around all of these other things. So what I really needed in that time, and what eventually saw [00:20:00] me through to the other side of nursing aversion, was to understand and realize that all of the discomfort and the physical and emotional pain I was experiencing Was wisdom, was my own wisdom.

It was my body's wise way of trying to protect me. I didn't know that every time I tried to distract myself with my phone, being on games, right? Like, [00:20:30] to avoid the pain. Or, just deep breathe the discomfort away, or control my daughter's behavior, right? That I was actually telling my brain, because I was trying to avoid the discomfort, I was reinforcing to my brain that the discomfort was dangerous.

And that was compounding. The mental health struggles I was having at the time. And it was really what kept me in survival [00:21:00] mode, right? Because you're in survival mode when there's something that you are trying to just survive, because there's actually a threat to your life. You're, you're very survival is being threatened.

There's something that is dangerous. So all of those feelings became dangerous to me in that moment, and in that experience, in that time. So what really brought me through that was to understand that the feelings were protective. The feelings were wise. And even to start to [00:21:30] lean into those feelings, to start to actually love those feelings.

So the thing that gave me freedom was realizing that everything I was trying so desperately to avoid was actually keeping me safe. I needed to soften into it. I needed to learn how to embrace it. And it was really befriending it. It was loving it. The aversion, the anxiety. That's what was key for me to move through all of that.

And here's the [00:22:00] wild part is that that happened in 2019. I was working through that journey and into 2020 for sure. But really, in 2019, that was where that was beginning. And of course, I had learned that, like, the seeds of it were planted at different times and you can look over that story of my life and see, and the therapy I started, you know, back in university and whatnot.

But, it was really that aversion. Experience that I began to hone this skill of working with my [00:22:30] internal experience, working with my anxiety, working, like, working with those feelings, learning how to love them, and in loving them, I was diffusing them, I was, they were no longer scary, I loved them, they were good, they, they served a very important purpose for me, and that softened this alarm system in my brain that was keeping me in Survival mode.

And of course, when I was in survival mode, I couldn't be creative, right? Like, you literally lose [00:23:00] access to those parts of your brain when you're facing a threat because everything, all of your internal resources get focused on surviving. And so there was no room or space to connect with my daughter, to play, to songwrite, to do the things I loved and feel that freedom.

So it's been learning the skill of befriending and loving the survival state, my anxiety, my depression, my aversion, that has made all of those things more manageable. And it's [00:23:30] allowed me to find creative solutions amidst the chaos, because if you've been listening to these behind the scenes podcasts, you know that I've been in a survival state much of the time in 2023 and even still now at times because of some health things I've been going through.

So I can see now that. My breastfeeding aversion was an opportunity, an opportunity to learn important, important skills to create emotional safety within myself. [00:24:00] That, I mean, gosh, had I had that my whole life? Had somebody been teaching me that when I was a lot younger, right? My parents just didn't know how?

Man, things might have been a lot different for me. I don't know. And I'm grateful that I have the opportunity now to model that for my kids and teach that to my kids now so that, hey, they, Maybe aren't as overwhelmed by those things in the future, right? They can find more resiliency through them. Um, but yeah, it's skills I learned five years ago that I'm leaning on today.

And I know I'll be leaning on [00:24:30] for many times in the future as well. And I can see that had I, had I weaned for my mental health, I wouldn't have Had the opportunity. I would have been bypassing that aversion. It would have been discomfort. Uh oh, right? That's not good. That's scary. That discomfort's bad. I need to just get rid of it.

I need to stop whatever's triggering it. And I wouldn't have learned the skill because it really was. Leaning into the aversion, [00:25:00] loving the aversion, that soothed the aversion. Because the aversion was my body sending me big, big signals that I was not safe. Because as soon as I would look into my daughter's little vulnerable face, I wouldn't feel safe, right?

Because it would remind me of my own vulnerability. It's hard. It's hard to be with all that. So it's really this emotional safety, creating the ability to feel safe with all of the feelings that were coming up, even if the feelings were negative ones or big, big ones, right? [00:25:30] So, and then turn around and be able to support my kids with that too.

So, hey, I could talk about this forever and ever. I will touch on this some more in the live workshop coming up, but it has been a pleasure to share even just the snapshot of my mental health journey and how it's paralleled and touched my breastfeeding journey as well.

 If this podcast episode has been inspiring to you, if it's meant something to you, if it's resonated with you, please like shoot me a DM on Instagram. I'd love to hear from you [00:26:00] and I will see you all next week, and hopefully at the live workshop on February 2nd.