20 | Sarah
Sarah and Tilly in the grounds of the MBU
“It was such an intense, physical experience that it really blew me away that it was, in inverted commas, ‘all in my head’ . . . I felt really, ‘unhinged’ isn’t quite the word, but ‘adrift’. I had experienced anxiety before but I always felt like there were tools I could use to pull myself back from the edge. But this felt like I was getting further and further from the coastline, drifting away into this ocean of anxiety.”
We’re all familiar with the adage ‘healing isn’t linear’ but we don’t often talk about the way a non-linear recovery ambushes the way we see, and feel about, ourselves.
This attack on her perceived sense of self is something Sarah was continuously forced to confront with every lapse that she encountered on her recovery from postpartum anxiety, OCD, and depression.
Postpartum progressively broke down any deep-rooted misconceptions Sarah held about mental health and slowly challenged the unspoken belief that our worth is inherently tied to the ups and downs of our recovery.
From starting medication to being admitted to the mother-and-baby psychiatric hospital for the first time, this is part one of Sarah’s incredibly touching and insightful story.
“It's definitely been, I'm sure this is the case for everyone, that parenthood breaks you down - breaks you down in a positive way, I mean - forces you to break apart the nature of your identity and your personality and your hopes and dreams and put those back together.”
“But I feel like for me, it was like a series of stages where I thought that I'd been through the greatest challenge I'd faced and learned so much about myself, and it would be all up and up. Great! We've had the crisis point in the rom-com, and now we can move on to the happily ever after.”
“But then I did have to go back to that place a couple of times, and as you say, that really brought home the lesson that, ‘oh, wow, it's a real thing that progress isn't guaranteed’ and that… when it is non-linear, that's not value-laden at all. It's not necessarily something you can control.”
“There are no medals for winning at recovery… It's been a big lesson in separating shame and those negative judgments from my experience of health.”
“So we had a C-section, and that was okay for me. It was not what we were expecting, but I felt taken care of and protected throughout that process. I knew I was in expert hands, and there were people all around me protecting me. And it's funny, looking back, I did a lot of things to try and avoid the need for a C-section. And then it happened, and it was okay for us. It wasn't that big, bad thing that I'd been afraid of.”
“I always love it with medical things when it seems routine to the doctors because that always puts my brain in the space of like, ‘right, this is the first time it's happened to me. But you're not that worried about it. You're already thinking about what you're going to have for lunch’. So it's funny that I spent so much time worrying about a C-section, but then really hadn't thought about what the experience of parenting a newborn would be like and how that would affect my mental health.”
“So in contrast to that experience, when we were back in the room with Tilly, I suddenly just felt like the massive weight of parenting fall on me.”
“I knew sleep deprivation was a thing for parents. I knew that we would have to cope with waking up a lot, but I hadn't processed what that would mean for me that suddenly my sleep schedule was entirely contingent on someone else.”
“I think I've had anxiety around sleep for much of my life around how much sleep I would get when I would get it. Would I be able to fall asleep? And I was not prepared for that obstacle to show up so suddenly.”
“My days were, at once, wonderful because I was in love with this gorgeous little baby that I had. But my entire day was filled with dread around sunset coming and knowing that I was about to enter, like a battle stadium, fight pit, where my goal was to get sleep but I was up against this adversary of no sleep, being exposed to, like sad and screaming in the middle of the night and just absolute uncertainty.”
“We often talk about uncertainty being at the core of a lot of anxiety, and that was so much it for me. I was so uncertain about what my night was going to look like. I was uncertain about what the baby would need and whether I would be able to meet those needs. And really uncertain about, in those early days, it just felt like it was never going to end. It was always going to be the immediate postpartum period, and I couldn't see a way out of it. I almost felt stuck in this weird, like Groundhog Day where, ‘oh, my gosh, what if this is my life for the rest of my life?’”
“We often talk about uncertainty being at the core of a lot of anxiety, and that was so much it for me. I was so uncertain about what my night was going to look like. I was uncertain about what the baby would need and whether I would be able to meet those needs.”
“I think it's only with the benefit of hindsight that I'm able to acknowledge that I was immediately anxious. At the time, it felt to me like I was normal. I was my normal self with, yes, a baseline level of anxiety, but high coping skills and masking skills. So I was the same, but the world had changed and just become incredibly difficult.”
“And so if I acknowledged that I felt anxious, it felt like that was just because that was an appropriate response. It felt to me like the world was just so hard that all of these tasks I was doing to look after the baby were nearly impossible. And it was just incredibly frightening to not know if I was going to sleep, to not know how to put the baby to sleep. That felt almost normal in a way, which I think is why I couldn't see my way out of it.”
“The first hints that I had of that there was something wrong with me, that I was unwell, came out physically.”
“I would have these bouts of insomnia where I would just wake up and be wide awake, even though Andrew, my husband, and the baby, Tilly, were sleeping. I had these awful nightmares when I was able to sleep that would leave me awake and I felt like a small child, like I was shaking because of how strong these nightmares were.”
“I could not sit still and felt like I constantly had to be doing something. And then things like no appetite and so on, which got worse.”
“I suddenly felt like I was really breathless and couldn't catch my breath, coming up the stairs to our apartment, which is two flights of stairs. Like, my chest was heaving and I was out of breath. I felt like I couldn't sing more than one verse of a nursery rhyme to the baby without losing my breath.”
“And so I ended up, by the time she was one week old, going to the doctor because I thought it must have been a complication with the C-section. I thought maybe there was a problem with blood clots or something because I just felt so intensely physically unwell that I was convinced that there was something really quite serious going on.”
“They did urgent blood tests and chest X-ray and so on. And it was all entirely normal, which was a great relief because it was such an intense physical experience that it really blew me away that it was in, inverted commas, ‘all in my head’ in the sense of being driven by mental illness. That was probably the strongest physical response I've ever had to anxiety symptoms.”
“The first message was, ‘Oh, hey, you're physically well. Great news. So it seems like this is probably anxiety related.’ And the message then was, ‘keep an eye on it and come back if there's a problem’. And in retrospect, I think it might have been helpful to have a more detailed conversation at that point, because particularly with all of the effort it took to actually get into the doctor with a one-week old baby, and when I was feeling so unwell. Hindsight is 20/20, but it probably would have helped to start something more then.”
“So I think only a week after that, I took myself back to the GP because the insomnia and those physical symptoms, the breathlessness had gotten worse still.”
“I felt really, ‘unhinged’ isn't quite the word, but ‘adrift’. I had experienced anxiety before, but I had always felt like there were tools that I could use to pull myself back from the edge. But this felt like I was, I guess, getting further and further from the coastline, drifting away into this ocean of anxiety, and I needed to do something before I felt like I was beyond being able to help myself.”
“We had that more detailed chat around what my symptoms were, what I felt like was causing it, positive supports, and also risk factors. And at that point, she started me on sertraline with the intent that it would take a few weeks to start working. So better to start it then than to look back in a couple of weeks and wish that we'd started it sooner.”
“So I started on the sertraline when she was two weeks old, and that was the first time I'd taken any medication, and that felt like a big step. I'd grown up with a bit of a fear of medicating mental illness that if you medicated it, that must mean it's actually serious.”
“I’d grown up with a bit of a fear of medicating mental illness that if you medicated it, that must mean it’s actually serious.”
“I'd started to overcome that through the experience of knowing how many friends had needed that support. But it still felt like a big deal, and it was another marker to me of being in uncharted territory. This felt really big and serious and also grown up. It was a major factor in my early experiences of parenting of like, ‘Wow, I'm a grown-up in this situation.’ This is like a lot to take on.”
“I think part of the reason it was a shock was, anxiety had been a part of my identity. I knew I was an anxious person. I had spoken to a psychologist before, but I think my identity was 'I'm a person with anxiety who nonetheless keeps it together. I have perfectionistic tendencies. I do get stressed in social situations. It gets out of control every now and again. But then I see a psychologist and I feel better.”
“And yeah, we opened by talking a bit about how humbling and reflective the experience of perinatal mental illness can be in breaking down how you see yourself. And I think, yes, starting medication was one of the big steps for me in starting to unravel, breakdown how I had seen myself before parenthood, because I had to take that away… Previously, I had always been able to be my own life raft when I had felt like I'd come adrift. And it was humbling… And it also took away the floor at that point that previously with anxiety, seeing a psychologist had been enough. Now, if I was taking medication, what else might I need?”
“The GP said to me, sleeplessness and that initial wave of newborn struggle reaches its peak between six to eight weeks of age for the baby. So she was trying to be very helpful and proactive in saying we need to start looking after you now to build up a bit of a reserve of energy and tolerance for you before you get to that point. But it became a bit of a bogeyman for me where I was thinking like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I already feel terrible. How much worse am I going to feel? And they've already given me medication. What if I end up feeling even worse than this?’”
“This GP, I really felt so grateful to have found her because she did have a real interest in looking after new parents and babies and so on. I think in that visit, when I started on the sertraline, she might have mentioned the mother-baby unit (MBU) for the first time. That might have been the first time I heard of it. I think in retrospect, it was great that she started, I guess, socialising that concept, that I was able to hear it a number of times before it became a reality for me. But at the time, it also had a bit of an anxiety-inducing impact because it felt like I'd started down this road of, okay, I'm medicated. Maybe at some point, being in a mental hospital is in my future. And that felt awful.”
“I'm embarrassed to say now, but in my naivety, people who go to mental hospital, or so I thought, never come back… I think it revealed this real binary in my head… It's yet another lesson that I had to break down and relearn.”
“As I did need help over a few different recurrences throughout the postnatal period, it did get easier for me the second time and the third time around having already crossed the Rubicon.”
“My experience of mental health up until that point was ‘I have to do this on my own, and I'm either going to be okay on my own or I'm going to be locked up’. Whereas over this journey, over the past couple of years, I've realised, ‘no, it's not that different to physical illness’. You can be okay on your own. You can be somewhat okay on your own. You can be not coping. And there's a whole heap of people who can sit with you where you are, meet you where you are, and pick up the slack when you need it.”
”It was such a confusing time in a way, because I do think there is a rhetoric around how difficult it is for new parents, that it's a really tough time having a newborn… But that was, I think, almost a part of my problem that it added to that sense I had that I was unchanged, but the world had just gotten harder. Because there is this rhetoric that the newborn period is very hard, it was difficult for me to differentiate the stresses and anxiety that are baseline from something that did need extra intervention.”
“It's hard to grapple with and summarise because it's so multidimensional. At the same time, I did feel like I had a pretty easy baby as these things go. For all of my anxiety about sleep, she didn't sleep that poorly, and she was generally pretty content. We did struggle with things like feeding, and so I was entirely unprepared for the challenge of dealing with making formula and sanitising bottles and all of that. I can intensely remember being very stressed that I wouldn't be able to, I physically wouldn't be able to manage to, find time in the day to wash our four bottles, and therefore, we'd head into night-time and the baby might wake up and we might not have a clean bottle.”
“I can intensely remember being very stressed that I wouldn’t be able to, I physically wouldn’t be able to, manage to find time in the day to wash our four bottles, and therefore, we’d head into night-time and the baby might wake up and we might not have a clean bottle.”
“Now looking back at that from here, it seems obvious that while something was happening to me to put me in that position of fear because even with the extra sanitising and so on, that's a task of maybe half an hour or 45 minutes, and it's not insurmountable. But at the time, yeah, it just felt like that actually was an incredibly difficult thing that I might not physically be able to do, and that my baby's survival depended on it. That if she woke up in the night and we didn't have a bottle ready, maybe she'd starve and maybe, maybe, maybe. All of the what ifs? that now I can call out as what ifs?”
“It seemed like I was unchanged and I was my normal self. I was in a situation that was much harder than anything I'd ever experienced, but that was entirely normal for other people. They were able to cope with this extreme level of difficulty of new parenthood, therefore, there was something missing in me that I wasn't able to cope, but I wasn't able to acknowledge that as illness. I saw that as like a character deficiency.”
“There's a real danger in the rhetoric that we provide to new parents. It normalises what can be incredibly difficult… my experience seemed similar enough to the way we characterise new parenthood as a society that I wasn't able to differentiate that something was wrong. People do say it's ‘so hard’ so then when I found it ‘so hard’ that just seemed like, ‘Oh, well, this is what I signed up for. And if I'm not able to cope with this, I probably should have thought of that before I decided to have a baby.’
“I was lucky that I began to feel the effects of the sertraline within three weeks. And by that point, Tilly was close enough to six weeks old and had started to do longer sleeps overnight. I felt like I was hitting my stride a little bit. And I remember one afternoon thinking, ‘Oh, I'm not anxious. I feel happy.’”
“From that moment on, I had this quite lovely period, in retrospect, where I did feel well. It was a bit of an insight, I think, into what a more standard newborn experience might have been like, where, yes, there were hard parts… But it just felt so much easier and so I would be able to take her for walks in the afternoon, and I would feel like I could get the bottles washed and still have time to have a shower and to maybe even read a book to the baby without feeling entirely overwhelmed.”
“And that was wonderful. It really felt like the clouds had parted. And I thought, thank goodness for antidepressants! I'm now the biggest advocate for medication. This is wonderful! This is all I needed! And so I became a convert from this position of like, ‘oh, my gosh, antidepressants are terrifying’ to… ‘I'm fixed, that's it!’
“But she reached around four months old, four and a half months old, and hit the four-month sleep regression, and it all came crashing down again.”
“So she was up many, many times in the night, taking a long time to settle. So I went from getting maybe seven or eight hours of sleep a night to getting at most six hours of sleep a night across four or five blocks. And it was just devastating to my well-restedness to begin with. But then also, I thought that the medicine had fixed my anxiety, particularly my anxiety around sleep, and this challenge to my sleep just brought it all to a massive head again and sent me flying backwards.”
“I was back to that position of, I would wake up and enjoy maybe the first two hours of being awake during the day, and then the rest of the day was spent absolutely dreading sundown. First of all, for the witching hour and just the experience of being around Tilly, crying a lot during that period, which I had begun to find incredibly triggering. She's always been very strong-willed and vocal, and she had a very loud and passionate cry. So it was quite a sensory experience, but also all of the then emotional and mental, psychological connotations of that around, ‘I love this little person so much, and she's unhappy’. That in itself is terrifying and saddening. The secondary connotations of ‘I can't meet her needs, and that's why she's crying’. And then the tier below that of, ‘what does that mean for me as a mother?’ particularly I think since we had been doing so well. I had a long way to fall from, ‘Oh, my gosh, I'm Supermum’ to, ‘crap, it's all fallen apart’. And it was a bit of a mirage, and I actually don't know what I'm doing.”
“So my anxiety pretty well went back to where it was at the start. I don't think I had the same breathlessness and so on, but all of the other symptoms came back. I just felt physically unable to sleep, to get the bottles washed on time, to get out of the house, to do anything more than very basic, feeding the baby, changing the nappies, like the absolute bare minimum of tasks throughout the day.”
“On top of the anxiety, it felt like there was this additional black layer of depression that grew on top of that. I'm sure it was happening on a hormonal and a neurological level, but psychologically, it felt like it grew out of that thinking around, ‘I'm so anxious that I can't meet the baby's needs. What if that says something about who I am as a mother?’ It felt like anxiety posed the question, and depression stepped in to give the answer of, ‘Of course, you're a terrible mother. Yeah, that's right. This baby is perfect. She's the most beautiful creature to ever have lived. And you are absolutely failing her that you cannot meet her needs. You cannot get her to sleep.’”
“On top of the anxiety, it felt like there was this additional black layer of depression that grew on top of that... it felt like it grew out of that thinking around, ‘I’m so anxious that I can’t meet the baby’s needs. What if that says something about who I am as a mother?’ It felt like anxiety posed the question, and depression stepped in to give the answer.”
“I began counting how many books I read her in a week and being convinced that I was letting her down. I love reading, and I was not able to share my love of reading with her. So therefore, I was an awful parent because I'd only managed to read her one book this week and she would never catch up because the first thousand days are the most important.”
“I could go on all day verbalising those horrible thought patterns, but you can begin to see how they blossomed.”
“I really realised I was in trouble when I was trying to get her to sleep one evening, and I'd been walking around my bedroom for maybe an hour, this darkened room, listening to the white noise again, patting her endlessly, and she wouldn't go to sleep. And the thought crossed my mind of, she and Andrew would be better off without me. It felt like that came from nowhere, and I thought, ‘oh, no, that is dangerous!’”
“This has been a bit of a story of me, I guess, finding it difficult to understand what was happening to me, and therefore being a bit slow on the uptake and I don't mean that at all in a derogatory way to myself, but I was a bit behind in understanding the symptoms I was experiencing. But that was a flag where I thought, ‘yeah, I need to get more help!’”
“So it was at that point that I went back to the GP to have another conversation because that just felt like a threshold that I didn't want to cross.”
“Again, it was testament to how lucky we were in finding this great GP practice that I had got an appointment at the practice with a different GP from my normal one, and I can't exactly remember what prompted me to do this, but I called the receptionist and said, ‘Is there any chance I could see my doctor?’ She must have heard something in my voice because she said, ‘It seems like you're having a hard time. Can you tell me a bit more what this is about?’ That really set off the waterworks. I find it very hard to break down in front of other people, but I found myself suddenly crying on the phone to this receptionist saying, ‘I feel like I'm in a really bad place mentally. I've got this four-month-old baby. The doctor has been very helpful with this, and I want to talk to her about what I need to do next.’”
“She really understood that, and she was very empathetic and lovely on the phone. She then made a note for the doctor who called me back after she'd finished seeing all of her patients that evening, and I was able to talk that through with her on the phone.”
“At that point, I told her my story, and I told her that I'd had this thought of they'd be better off without me. And she vocalised my internal experience by going, ‘oft, yes, we need to do something about that!’”
“So at that point, she suggested increasing the sertraline dose. And she also suggested going to see a psychiatrist to get more, I guess, specialist management of my experience. And she reminded me again that the mother-baby unit was an option if I felt like things were getting out of hand. And so that felt good. I always feel good when it feels like I have a plan and something to be working towards.”
“But at the same time, in retrospect, it's really rough the way that our medical system works. When you get a referral to a psychiatrist from your GP, you're left to call around and find out which psychiatrists and psychologists have capacity to see you. And you're left doing all of these administrative tasks, which felt like an incredible amount of work to do when I was in the situation of struggling to find time and energy in the day to shower.”
“It was another big threshold to cross to go and see the psychiatrist. I'd previously seen a psychologist, but it felt like another level of severity or intensity.”
“I was very lucky that I managed to get a cancellation appointment with Michelle. She was on the list of psychiatrists my GP had recommended, but I hadn't picked her out in particular. And it just so turned out that she was in charge of the mother-baby unit… I feel very lucky that that happened because most of the other psychiatrist's office I spoke to, it would have been several weeks before I'd been able to get into them. It was maybe five days before I was able to go and see Michelle. That was very fortuitous. So it's lucky that I ended up with an appointment with probably the perfect psychiatrist to see in my situation.”
“I was really grateful from the outset at how she [the psychiatrist] managed to be very empathetic, but also calm at the same time, and calm in a way that made me feel like my experience, while difficult, was not going to be difficult for her. It was difficult for me, but it wasn't going to be difficult for her to treat.”
“My mental illness had convinced me that I was uniquely damaged and uniquely suffering in a way that I couldn't express to other people, that other people would never understand and that no one would be able to help, that I was messed up - irretrievably. And that conversation with Michelle was one of the first glimmers of hope that she seemed so unimpressed by my story. She was very empathetic and warm about, ‘this has been a really hard time for you’, but she didn't seem shocked by anything I had to say. That was a nice sign that, ‘oh, maybe she has seen people like me before, and maybe there is hope for me here.’”
“So we spent this time discussing my experience, and then towards the end, [the psychiatrist] was saying, ‘We can help you. These are the things I would consider: a combination of changes to medication and therapy.’ And then she had this really lovely way of phrasing it, of saying, ‘sometimes we do this on an inpatient basis. We have this mother-baby unit, and that can be a really useful environment to accelerate your recovery, like do this in this intensive way. But of course, other women prefer to do it on an outpatient basis, too, and that's fine. We can accommodate that’. And I thought, even as she was saying that, in the midst of this experience, I thought that's such a lovely way to deal with the taboos that people have around becoming an inpatient in a psychiatric facility to frame it like that: some people do this, some people do that, whatever you need is fine.”
“I remember responding quite quickly and saying, ‘actually, the mother-baby unit sounds wonderful. Yes, please sign me up. That sounds like just what I need!’”
“I knew that in addition to the psychiatric and psychological support, they also had mother-craft nurses and other supports to help with the logistics of managing baby.”
“I think during the initial consult with [the psychiatrist], I was anxious that she would get to the end and say, ‘You're not sick enough for the hospital’. I still didn't understand quite how unwell I was… So it was a relief when she presented the mother-baby unit as an option. And I was in this weird, I guess, dialectic, where I didn't think I was really unwell enough to need the hospital, but also was very relieved that I was able to go to the hospital.”
Sarah was able to disclose her intrusive thoughts to her psychiatrist as well.
“I began very early to have those thoughts of ‘what if I throw her against the wall? What if I were to suddenly drop her? What if I hurt her? What if I strangle her?’ And all of that just felt so wild and terrifying. It felt like there was maybe this beast within me that was going to be unleashed and do these horrible things.”
“It got to the point where I would feel guilty after having been alone with her, putting her down for a nap. Not that anything ever happened, but just the OCD had become so strong that I began to feel awful and guilty and again, deficient as a parent, just by having the opportunity to act out those terrible fears.”
“For context, as well as anxiety, maybe 18 months, two years before I became pregnant, Id had met with a psychologist to discuss OCD. And then, as was my habit with psychology, done a little bit of work and thought, ‘okay, I'm well enough now’. And just disregarded doing anything to improve my toolkit better.”
“And so, yes, that did come up in the initial conversation with [the psychiatrist]. I wasn't brave enough at that point to describe those more sexually-related thoughts, because it was another part of that isolating, effect of mental illness that I was still relatively convinced that she might call the police if I disclosed those thoughts to her. But I did tell her about the thoughts about harming the baby, dropping her, throwing her.”
“And it was another glimmer of hope that she said, ‘While you're waiting to come into the MBU, there's this book called Dropping the Baby and Other Scary Thoughts’* And can you have a more concrete reminder that you're not alone in this and you're not that special than the fact that someone actually wrote a book where the title is one of your deepest, darkest fears?”
Psychoeducation was a big part of Sarah’s understanding of, and recovery from, OCD, and her insights are incredibly eye-opening. “The fact that it's a thing that is happening to you that you're suffering from rather than you being a person who might cause suffering to others is such a massive flip… OCD is, I think, the paradigm of expressing just how much you can make yourself suffer by thinking you, as an individual and your character, are to blame when it's in fact, it's something that's happening to you!”
“OCD is, I think, the paradigm of expressing just how much you can make yourself suffer by thinking you, as an individual and your character, are to blame when it’s in fact, it’s something that’s happening to you!”
“I think it's such a double-edged sword with early parenthood where you're suddenly exposed to this incredibly vulnerable little creature and a wonderful, miraculous, bouncing bundle of joy - all of those cliches! . . . And because they are so vulnerable and precious, your instinct is just to have such a dichotomy in your relationship with them that they're this perfect, wonderful little thing that needs all of the good things in the world. Even for an entirely mentally well parent, that's a very difficult standard to live up to because you are always going to be imperfect. You'll stuff up and continue to stuff up. So even without those other added layers, there's heaps of guilt and shame and fear tied up. Once you layer on anxiety, OCD, depression, it's just another layer of awfulness.”
“It also feels like there's a bit of time pressure that you become convinced about how much of an opportunity there is to set development alive in your child's brain and do all of these wonderful things for them to set them up for life. Then if you're struggling in that newborn period, it feels like there's a ticking clock that if you don't get well and if you don't learn the skills and if you don't get a handle of it, it's not as if there's time for rupture and repair. Your baby is only a baby once! So I had this experience of, every day I wasn't on top of what I needed to do and my health was a day that she was missing out on having a good mum. It was the opposite of what I needed to recover.”
In reflecting on her time in the MBU, Sarah speaks highly of the Circle of Security program. “I think that was a really welcome part of the MBU experience. Definitely, the Circle of Security helped, I think, in two different directions. First of all, the whole framework, acknowledging and identifying that parents aren't perfect… It's a real opportunity to show them you're a real person as a parent, you're not godlike, and so it's okay that you're not perfect and they're not perfect, but also to show them this is the way that we lovingly come back together and say, ‘Yes, I messed up, but I still love you and I'm still here for you, and that doesn't change.’”
“Then I think in the other direction, I found it quite validating because I could see that I was already adopting some of those skills… and showing her just how much I was enjoying the experience of her being around, even though my postpartum experience was in many ways quite shitty. So that was helpful as well. I was learning new things. I was learning that I could set more realistic expectations. And also I was learning that I wasn't a bad mum after all. I was already doing many of the things that I needed to do to be good enough.”
In addition to the Circle of Security program, Sarah spoke openly about her experience in the MBU in general.
“I think, first of all, the environment was very useful - living alongside other mothers who were having similar experiences, everyone had their own unique challenges, but many similarities at the same time, particularly in a time where everything was still so COVID affected.”
“My mother's group had met a couple of times in person before it was not possible. And so the several weeks that I spent in the MBU, that was one of the first times that I'd been around other mums with babies of similar ages, let alone other mums who had already acknowledged that they were really struggling. So you didn't have some of that competitiveness and baby race atmosphere that can sometimes happen with mums groups.”
“I think another thing that was useful for me was gaining exposure to different therapy modalities. So a lot of the time that I had spent in psychology was chiefly CBT, and I found that quite difficult, useful in some ways, but it never really felt like it was entirely getting to the bottom of my problems. And one of the lovely therapists, among the many things that I enjoyed in her sessions, she brought up some other skills from DBT and acceptance and commitment therapy. And that made me feel like I had more control over how my recovery might play out that I could look into different forms of therapy.”
“And I think the other thing I'd say that I found super valuable was that support to do with parent craft, and that turned out to be super useful as well. And they were able to help me with Tilly and to help with her sleep… they had really helped me with some of those settling skills and adapting to the needs of a slightly older baby in ways that thankfully did last. And I think as well, made me feel better prepared for the ups and downs of sleep that were to come.”
“And just as one final comment on that, I remember even the first night on the MBU, I didn't sleep that well because it was a new environment, and it was the first time that Tilly hadn't been with us. So it did take a while to get to sleep. But still, I slept from something like midnight to 7:30 or 8:00, and honestly woke up and went to check-in that morning and felt like a whole new woman… Our rest as mothers matters and that is true, I think, for every mother, but particularly when you have become unwell mentally, rest is just such a significant component of getting to a place where you can begin to recover.”
“I think I ended up being there for four weeks that first time. It was a really strange experience to go from having nurses available around the clock to it just being the three of us at home again. I thought it would be much harder than it was, but it actually was easier than coming home from hospital with Tilly the first time.”
“And I think a part of that was, I no longer face the anxiety of worrying about whether or not I had a mental illness. I'd crossed that bridge. I had been to a mental hospital and survived it, and I had gotten better. I felt so much better than I had when I'd gone in that I knew that it was okay to be mentally unwell, and I knew that it was possible to get help and to get better.”
“And so we did quite well, really, for several weeks there. We got back into a bit of a routine. I inquired about getting Tilly into daycare earlier than I'd thought, just to give me some free space and at least one day a week to look forward to. And so it felt like things were on the up and up.”
“It's funny. I then felt like, ‘wow, look at me. I'm so refreshed and revitalized. I have this very earthy, resilient understanding of myself as a person who has mental illness and is on that path to recovery.’”
“It turns out I still had a somewhat superficial view of my own identity and of how mental illness worked.”
To be continued…
Listen to the full episode:
click for part two of Sarah’s story
*Recommended Book:
“Dropping the Baby and Other Scary Thoughts: Breaking the Cycle of Unwanted Thoughts in Motherhood” by Karen Kleiman, MSW and Amy Wenzel, PhD.
