Psychological Support
Antenatal and Postnatal Anxiety, Depression, and PTSD
Having a baby is a huge adjustment. Welcoming a new family member is exciting, but the sleep deprivation, constant feeds, and general relentlessness of the newborn period can also make it a really challenging time, especially if you’ve had a difficult pregnancy, a traumatic birth, or you’re a parent to a bub who’s hard to settle.
Feeling miserable and depressed when you ‘should’ be feeling happy is an awful feeling, and so is feeling trapped, like you’ve made a mistake you can’t undo. But there is help and things can and will get better. Make an appointment so we can help.
Infertility
When you first start trying for a baby, it’s exciting. Fun even. But when your period keeps coming, month in, month out, despite careful research, pregnancy planning, and ovulation tracking, the fun wears off and other feelings start to creep in - sadness, frustration, and when everyone around you seems to fall pregnant without even trying, jealousy too.
And so you start IVF full of hope, but that’s stressful as well. The daily injections, the hormones, the stress of having to juggle blood tests and medical appointments with work commitments. All without telling friends and family what’s really going on, to avoid the constant ‘are you pregnant yet?’ questions and the well-meaning, but often unhelpful advice that goes with it: the miracle fertility drug your friend’s, sister’s, colleague tried that helped her fall pregnant, or the diet a friend read about that increases your chances of conception ten-fold.
When you desperately want to be a parent but your pathway to parenthood is one setback after another, it sucks. Working with a psychologist won’t solve your fertility challenges, but it can help you manage the relationship challenges, stress, and upset that goes with it.
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help, contact us, or check out the resources + recommendations section of our website for ideas on how to take care of yourself through infertility.
Pregnancy and Infant Loss
There’s so much that’s hard about pregnancy loss. There’s the emotion it triggers, the self-blame - Was I too stressed? Was it something I ate? Did it happen because I forgot to take my vitamins? - which is always misguided but impactful all the same because when you lose a pregnancy it feels like it’s something you did, like you’re somehow to blame.
Then there’s the heartbreak and grief, which is such a unique kind of grief, because you’re grieving the loss of someone you never had the opportunity to meet. And the things that usually help when you’re grieving the loss of a loved one - hearing other people talk about the things they loved about the person you’ve lost, or memories of special times you had together - aren’t things you can turn to for comfort, because the person you’re grieving never existed outside your body.
And what often makes it worse is that the support you thought you’d have from family and friends isn’t helpful or supportive. Comments like ‘at least you were only 9 weeks - you weren’t too far along’, ‘it’s usually a sign something’s wrong, so maybe it’s for the best?’, or ‘at least you have other children’ - as though any of those reasons makes your grief less valid or less painful, which, of course, it doesn’t.
The physical symptoms of pregnancy loss - which can be intense and traumatic in their own way - can last for weeks, but the emotional symptoms often last much longer, and anxiety in future pregnancies is common as well.
If you’ve experienced a pregnancy loss, and your grief isn’t passing the way you thought it would, or maybe you’ve processed your grief, but you’re struggling with anxiety in your current pregnancy, we’d love to help. Contact us here.
Hyperemesis
It’s an unwritten rule that when you’re pregnant, you have to be grateful, because there are lots of people who’d give anything to be in your position. But two things can be true. You can be grateful to be pregnant and hate being pregnant at the same time. And lots of people do.
Because it’s hard. There’s the nausea, morning sickness, and physical exhaustion of the first trimester, and as you head into trimester two, things like back pain, heartburn, and not being able to sleep, all start being issues as well. All of which are reason enough to not enjoy pregnancy, but suffering from hyperemesis is a whole other level of pregnancy hell.
It often gets described as ‘severe morning sickness’, but describing it that way is misleading and underplays just how brutal and debilitating the condition really is. It’s constant nausea, retching, and vomiting, so constant and severe, many women can’t get out of bed, let alone work or parent, and lots of women struggle to keep anything down - food or fluid - leading to dehydration and other serious health complications, and that's just the physical side.
Feeling so constantly sick makes most women suffering from hyperemesis miserable. It causes anxiety and worry - women often worry about the health of their baby, their own health, all the things they’re not able to do because of how sick they feel - and a lot of women with hyperemesis contemplate suicide and/or pregnancy termination because their pregnancy sickness is that intolerable.
Working with a psychologist can’t ‘fix’ hyperemesis, but having someone support you through the process can definitely help. And if you want support, but don’t feel well enough to leave the house, tell us. We’re happy to offer online or phone-based support, and you’ll still receive Medicare rebates for sessions.
And if you’re looking for more information, Hyperemesis Australia and the HER Foundation both have great resources.
Birth Trauma
Bringing a baby into the world can be an amazing experience, but it can also be terrifying. Lots of women - in Australia it’s 1 in 3 - describe their birth as traumatic, sometimes because the birth happened quickly and felt rushed and panicked, but it’s also possible to feel traumatised by a birth that didn’t go to plan, or a birth that triggered feelings of powerlessness or feelings like feeling unsafe or out of control.
A traumatic birth doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll suffer ongoing issues, but it does increase your risk for postnatal anxiety and depression, and it can add to your apprehension about future births.
If you develop symptoms of anxiety or low mood after a traumatic birth - which you might sometimes experience as shock, or feeling numb and disconnected - having someone to help you process your birth can really help. So can taking the time to work through what you need in future births to help you feel safe and secure. Contact us, we’d love to help.
Baby Proofing Your Relationship
No-one tells you how much having a baby impacts your relationship. Yes it’s exciting welcoming a new little person into your family, and yes it’s beautiful watching your partner become a parent, but the huge upheaval and sleep deprivation that comes with that packs a punch. So much so that 70% of couples - yep, seventy - experience a steep decline in their relationship satisfaction in the first three years of their baby’s life.
Life with a newborn can be chaotic and exhausting, which makes it easy to fall into the trap of neglecting your relationship, but figuring out how to maintain your connection and re-calibrate your relationship for parenthood is a really important part of your adjustment.
Fine tuning your communication, learning what sort of emotional support your partner needs, tweaking the allocation of household tasks, and navigating the division of parenting duties are all part of it, and whether you need to address conflict happening now, or want to do what you can to prevent it, a clinical psychologist can help you work through all that and more. Contact us to find out more about how we can help.
Building A Relationship With Your Child
Building a relationship with your child isn’t necessarily as natural or intuitive as you might think. It’s a completely different playing field to adult relationships.
As adults, we can talk and use words to tell the people closest to us what we want and need. When they listen and respond, it strengthens our relationships. Kids are different. They don’t have the verbal skills they need to put words to their feelings, and have to communicate their wants and needs behaviourally instead. If you’re expecting that, and have the skills to decode behaviour, that’s not necessarily a problem. But if you don’t, it can mean your child’s needs go unmet, which can impact their sense of security and your relationship, and worsen their behaviour overall.