There was a fantastic report on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour regarding mental health in motherhood. I think it’s a real elephant in the room and needs to be talked about more, hence why I am covering it on this week’s blog post. The programme talked specifically about perinatal suicide, the leading cause of maternal deaths in the UK. There’s more info and stats here, and you can find the episode on the BBC sounds app on Radio 4 from April 29th.
There were brave women talking on the programme about how their mental health plummeted after having children. After what is ‘supposed’ to be the happiest time of your life but can be an absolute nightmare for what is going on inside your body and brain. Hormone changes, lack of sleep, the shock of realising that your life is forever changed.
I had twins after IVF five years ago, and it has been a real rollercoaster mentally, spiritually, physically. I felt very depressed at the start, especially when I gave up breastfeeding when the girls were seven weeks old. I knew I would not have any more children, had spent many years trying to fall pregnant, and wanted to feed for as long as possible, but realised it was unsustainable with two babies. I read that post natal depression is more common in women who have IVF and who are older (I tick both boxes) which is ironic given we have tried for so long to have the children we now have. I think there is a lot of guilt amongst this demographic, managing to have children that so many aren’t able to do – and yet feeling very unhappy.
I felt alone having twins, as most other people have ‘just’ one baby. There is a real solidarity among twin parents. Unless you’ve had twins, it’s really impossible to understand what it is like. It’s obviously brilliant, but it has its massive challenges.
I also found that among the women in these baby groups I went to (trying to mix and get a bit of solidarity but turning up with two babies when everyone else had one) that everyone seemed to be ‘OK,’ which I know must have been a huge projection – a bit like thinking everyone on Instagram is living a perfect life.
I have always been a projector, and I think it’s part of the illness of addiction and OCD. Compare and despair, as they say. As an addict I think I’m intrinsically and unconsciously addicted to feeling that despair, perhaps because my addict mind wants me to use drugs as a panacea again. Luckily I have enough time sober under my belt to know that isn’t going to work long term (despite maybe temporary relief).
Back to the baby groups, where I felt no one was really talking about what was going on. Perhaps I wear my heart on my sleeve too much, but I felt very alone in feeling what I was feeling. I went to my GP to ask for anti depressants and she wasn’t keen to prescribe them, and that I should go back to therapy which I did and which helped a lot.
Then along came Covid, and being locked in the house with two nine month old babies. Luckily we bubbled with our childminder but it was still very intense. I went back to work as a therapist online and was taking on a lot of anxiety from other people. I was seeing clients on Zoom upstairs, coming down to make a coffee and stepping over babies wanting my attention, when I just needed the water cooler moment. This was of course the same for everyone, and I do think Covid will continue to have profound and lasting effects on the nation’s mental health. A report by the charity Mind said that around a third of the adults they spoke to had reported a decline in their mental health since Covid.
For me, things seemed to settle down two years ago, and I began a lifelong dream, to write a novel. I wrote a first draft in the autumn of 2022 with apparent ease, and all seemed to be going well. Taking advice from the writing course I was doing, and of course from Ernest Hemingway, I proverbially put my novel in a box and let it stew. Just to let you know, that subsequently I have started drafting it again, and again, and am still plugging away at it, but I am plugging and that’s the main thing.
At the start of 2023 I suddenly started getting awful intrusive thoughts, memories from the past which I thought were true, or a different version of them are true. This is known as False Memory / Real Event OCD, but I had no idea about this then, and thinking about it, I cannot remember how I found out that this was what it was – perhaps it was through a friend who had suffered something similar.
I thought the memories were true and I was going to have to find a way to ‘work them out.’ This is of course what the OCD wants, and the more you try and work it out, or seek reassurance, the more it ramps up. I was a therapist, I had clients, I was over 11 years sober, this wasn’t ‘meant’ to be happening to me.
Last year became a living nightmare as this ramping up continued. I started Exposure and Response Prevention therapy with someone who was very unsympathetic and who gave me too much anxiety, too soon. This is known in the trade as ‘flooding,’ the logic behind it being that eventually the brain will acclimatise – but mine didn’t. I stopped with this therapist and was determined to ‘do it on my own.’ Ironically the same GP suggested I go on meds – and she was right, but I refused.
I remember going to a wedding of a dear friend in late June of last year and being at my worst ebb. I was barely able to be there. However, I bumped into an old friend who I ended up sitting with for most of the day. She is twenty or so years older than me, and also a therapist. She relayed to me how she was exactly my age with young children when her mental health plummeted and she also reluctantly went on meds, also after a chance meeting with someone who suggested to do the same. She suggested I see a psychiatrist, and I finally relented.
By a series of very fortunate coincidences (or perhaps the universe moving because I was prepared to do something different) I managed to get in to see a very over booked, brilliant and sympathetic psychiatrist, who put me on an SSRI and sent me to CBT therapy. During the therapy we did gentle exposure work, or Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). It worked, and my life is unrecognisable now. I think of all those people who don’t have the ways and means to do this, and it literally breaks me. I applaud so much the work of wonderful charities like the aforementioned Mind.
It was not an overnight process, and I think one of the main takeaways from that experience which I now bring into the therapy room as I help clients with OCD and practice ERP with them, is that we (they) first of all have to realise that we have OCD. I didn’t actually realise I had OCD, I just thought I was a bad person. It was explained to me, actually by the first guy who I really didn’t gel with, but hey, no experience is wasted – is that if there is doubt and anxiety then it is OCD. That is the lethal cocktail, whatever type of OCD you have. Doubt + anxiety = OCD
When I say it was not an overnight process, it took about ten sessions and for my medication to kick in properly, which took a good few months. I am afraid it did get worse before it got better, and then, a light went on, literally at the point I thought I was going to have to go into hospital. When this happened, it was then that I was able to properly engage with ERP because fundamentally I knew that I was suffering from OCD, and was having periods when the thoughts seemed ridiculous rather than real. When the OCD struck again, like kids’ slime sticking to a wall, I could bear this in mind.
I suggest to clients I see them for ten sessions. It’s a cheap holiday away, roughly, or £1500. Perhaps a mildly expensive designer jacket. Would you rather be on holiday riddled with obsession / wearing a very nice coat or free of it and in rainy England and shopping at Zara? I know for me that OCD is the single worst thing I have ever experienced in my life, so the choice is easy. OCD, when it’s on you, makes getting sober seem like a walk in the park.
I was thinking about this on my walk today – when people say they can’t afford therapy but who would go on holiday, but that is a blog for another day.
There was me thinking I didn’t have anything to write about this week!
I am off to Tenerife for a long awaited girls’ holiday, free from OCD, able to travel, and be a human. This is a massive gift, and also means I won’t be writing next week.
See you in a fortnight. If you want to book a session with me, then send me an email and I will book you in – jessica@jessicadrake.biz
Jess x
Jessica Drake - OCD / Anxiety Psychotherapist 