Mommy, Deconstructed:: A Postpartum Depression and Anxiety Recovery Guide

By Christina L. Vanneste

A personal story and recovery guide for women suffering with Postpartum Depression and Anxiety.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483544922

Book preview

vulnerable.

Out of Control

Ithought it was only a matter of time before I would be seeing things that weren’t there or hearing voices in my head that weren’t my own. I thought I was losing my mind and would lose everything that was ever important to me. I thought this was the start of my downward spiral into insanity… it wasn’t. I was experiencing acute anxiety two months after the birth of my third child.

The definition of trial is: A painful experience that tests your ability to endure. Everyone has their own personal trial in life. I wrote this book because of a trial in my life that changed me forever. It is called Postpartum Depression (PPD) and Anxiety, and it is a mood disorder that occurs in approximately twenty percent of postpartum women. It struck without warning and consumed me with fear. I literally thought I was going crazy.

I want women to read this book and feel better. I want them to know that they are not alone and that they will be themselves again. In my experience with a postpartum mood disorder (PPMD), I felt so out of my mind and researching this condition helped me feel like I was taking back a little control. I was driven to keep searching for information, and my research lasted for months. For me, knowledge was power, and I was feeling very weak. Every time I had a bad day, I would desperately search for ways I could help to heal myself. I could not stand the way I felt, and I needed to feel like myself as soon as I possibly could. I learned so many things along the way. I thought I would put all the precious gems of knowledge I collected into one book that would immediately help the women reading it. It is a guide for enduring this painful experience.

I am not a doctor or a therapist. Think of me as your friend who has been through a PPMD and is now taking your hand and helping you along the way in your journey. I wish I had had this book when I was struggling. I wrote it for you, and I hope and pray that it is helps you through this difficult trial in your life.

Let me start by telling you a little bit about myself. I am the mother of three beautiful children: Emerson, Tristyn, and Ashton. Emerson is a gorgeous, smart, giving, and determined little girl. She helps me take care of Ashton and loves putting on shows and making presents for people. She has the gift of being a great writer, and is always writing new stories that are quite impressive! Tristyn is one year younger, and he is adorable, with dimples and the best laugh, which is why I love to watch funny movies with him. He has a sensitive, caring soul. He is a deep thinker and surprises me sometimes with his wise observations. Ashton is the baby. Therefore, everything he does is extremely cute and genius! He is very sweet and he loves his big brother and sister so much. He plays pirates with Tristyn and dolls with Emerson. His siblings argue over who gets to play with him next! My children are pretty awesome and exhausting all at the same time.

I am wife to my husband, Lenny. He tells me I can do anything I want and that I will be perfect at it. Nobody will ever love me as much as he does. He is my biggest supporter and never faltered in his belief that I would feel like myself again. Lenny is also an exceptional daddy. He chases the kids around, plays monster, and takes all three of them to Costco on a Saturday with three million other people without breaking a sweat.

I am a dental hygienist two to three days a week, and I love my job. I work in two different offices. I like having my own patients and schedule, and I work for great doctors. It is the perfect occupation for me.

I have an identical twin sister who is also a dental hygienist and interestingly, has never had a PPMD with any of her three children. She knows me so well though that she understands as much as she possibly can. We are very close Our families go on vacations together and we actually work together at one of the dental offices. She is my best friend.

I am also very close with my mom, who babysits the kids while I am at work. I know she hated to see me so distraught, and she was there to support me when I needed a break or a shoulder to cry on.

I am usually a confident, happy, motivated person, and I enjoy cooking, reading, going out to dinner with my friends, watching movies with my husband, and hanging out with my kids, amongst many other things. PPD and Anxiety stole these things away from me for a little while and I thought I would never get them back.

Why should you listen to what I have to say? I have been there, and I understand your desperation. That is perhaps the most powerful reason you should read my story and the recommendations I have to help you to help yourself feel better. PPD and other PPMDs can be incapacitating and devastating to everyone in the family. You may need to attack it (as I did) from as many different angles as you can. The sooner you get started, the sooner you will feel better. I realize you need to get yourself back in order to care for your family. If you are like me, you do not have time for a PPMD. I will do my best to offer you support and understanding and sum up the information you need to know so that you can get on the road to recovery.

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a mood disorder that can have many different meanings and symptoms. Instead of naming all the different symptoms of different disorders one at a time, I will just use the broad term postpartum mood disorder (PPMD). Examples of PPMDs are Major PPD, Postpartum Anxiety or Panic Disorder, Post traumatic Stress, Postpartum Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and Postpartum Psychosis. Your PPMD may be mostly anxiety, or OCD, or Depression, but they all suck and they usually integrate with each other anyway! Therefore, you will see PPMD throughout the book as a blanket term. (I think if we keep using PPD as an all-encompassing term, then other symptoms not typically associated with depression will be overlooked and therefore, not treated.)

In this book, I have also included the voices of other women who have had a PPMD. They, too, understand your pain. My thirst for the stories of other women who felt the way I did was insatiable. I understand that you need to hear that you are not alone. I understand that you need to hear that you will not always feel like this.

It is my hope that this book will be a comfort to you during such a painful time. With this disorder, you will feel like you are out of control. I am here to tell you that there are things you can control that will enable you to cope. There is a reason women who have gone through a PPMD have described the experience as the darkest days of their lives. It is awful and it isn’t fair that you have it, but it is important to know and repeat to yourself on a daily basis that no matter what category of PPMD you have; it is temporary; it is treatable; you will feel like yourself again… I promise.

What Causes PPMDs?

There are many different theories as to why woman get PPMDs, and there is no one single answer, just as there is no one single solution. Hormones are to blame, as is sleep deprivation, genetics, life circumstances, lack of support, poor nutrition, health challenges, and history of anxiety/depression. I think that just as multiple variables need to come together at just the right time to form a perfect baby, multiple variables need to come together at just the right time to cause a PPMD. It is multifactorial.

So why do twenty percent of new mothers get dealt the hand that no one wants? First of all, PPMDs choose you… you do not choose it… you did not ask for it. There are other sources of information out there for women who feel the need to understand why they were vulnerable, but in this book, I really want to focus on what you can control, not on what you can’t control. You cannot control hormones or genetics or the fact that your baby is colicky or up eating every hour during the night and you are physically and emotionally exhausted. You cannot control the fact that you have a PPMD, but you can control how you deal with it.

PPMDs can occur in the rich, the poor, the woman with the easiest labor, or the woman with the hardest labor. It can occur if your baby sleeps twelve hours a night since birth, or it can occur if you have the best support system in place. It can occur with your first baby, or it can occur with your fourth baby. There is sometimes no rhyme or reason behind what causes a PPMD. I think it’s not fair and it really sucks to have it, but there is no use trying to explain the reason behind it because guess what?… there might not be one.

I do think there is one factor in the development of a PPMD that cannot be disputed… stress.

When work threatens to become beyond our physical strength, and our responsibilities demand that we keep going, fear usually comes into the picture, and any ensuing nervous illness is caused not by the exhaustion, as some believe, but by the fear it brings. (Weekes,1969 p. 32).

(You will see me quote Dr. Claire Weekes many times in this book. She was a pioneer in the development of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and her teachings were a great influence in the treatment of anxiety disorders.)

My grandmother battled a PPMD back in the day when they had no idea what it was or how to treat it. She had electroshock therapy and spent three weeks in the mental hospital. I spoke with her about her experience for the first time just recently and she got very emotional and choked up. Fifty years later! I find it very sad that she had to suffer for so long because it went undiagnosed and untreated. Treatment in those days consisted of heavy duty sedatives and therapy that focused on her childhood, as if she had some deep-seated emotional turmoil from her past that she had yet to uncover. Totally inappropriate. She felt ashamed and weak due to the huge stigma attached to mental illness (especially back then). She had terrible anxiety and OCD symptoms for years and just learned to live with those terrible feelings.

Thank God, we do not have to suffer endlessly with those feelings anymore! This illness is treatable and although there is much more to learn, there is a vast amount of information out there for women now, and many treatment options and support networks available that simply did not exist for my grandmother. I dedicate this book to her because I do not want another woman to suffer needlessly.

My Story

Mothers are all slightly insane - J.D. Salinger

Reading my story can be triggering for the woman who is vulnerable and feeling anxious. Rest assured it all concludes with a happy ending, but if you want to skip my story and go right to the section on the Acute Phase, feel free. You can always read this part later.

There is a ride we used to go on at the carnival called the Gravitron. The ride would spin around, and you would slowly stick to the wall until you couldn’t move, and then the floor would drop and you were thankful you were stuck to the wall or else you would fall into the dark hole. Having a PPMD feels like being on the Gravitron, spinning around wildly and starting to fall off the wall into the black hole before the ride has stopped. It has taken a long time to write this because I have been on and off the Gravitron for months now. I feel like if I could just be given a moment to let go, I could be in my comfort zone for once. But the stakes are too high. I have a husband and three children and a job and a life and if I let go, I might lose it all.

I wanted to write my story before the feelings of despair and hopelessness drift from my memory so this part of my book was written during my recovery. I want other women who are suffering to see themselves in my story and know they are not alone. I want them to seek help and support so that they will not become a statistic, because PPMDs can result in suicide, which is the leading killer of women within the first year of childbirth. The reason for this is that PPMD robs you of your perspective, making it virtually impossible to consider it a bump in the road of life. The sufferer usually feels like this is how they will feel forever. I imagine that the poor women who have committed suicide were just trying to escape (what they perceived as) endless pain. IT IS NOT ENDLESS. When they come out the other side, they will be thankful that they held on and persevered to have recovered as better versions of themselves.

For those of you reading this book who have never experienced a clinical depression, you are going to think I am the most dramatic person you have ever encountered, but for those of you who have suffered with a mood disorder, my hope is to try to give words to the crazy emotions and feelings that are truly indescribable. Therefore, my story is candid and told with complete sincerity.

PPD is a clinical depression occurring within the first year postpartum (I have also heard it can be up to two years). It can manifest as deep sadness, anxiety, obsessions, and intrusive thoughts, or a mingling of all of those wonderful things. It did this with me in my second round of the worst thing that has ever happened to me. When I was in the thick of my PPMD, I felt like my whole world was caving in around me. I actually thought, If this is how I will feel from now on, I will have to commit suicide because it is not possible to live like this long-term. I never imagined I could ever understand why a person would do such a thing, but now I understand more than I ever should.

I always thought depression was being extra