Postpartum Depression therapists in Talence, France FR

Becoming a mother is a huge event in a woman's life, accompanied by profound changes - physical, emotional, social. Becoming depressed a after giving birth makes coping with and adapting to these changes very challenging. Many new mothers struggle in silence. I offer a confidential space where we can talk about your experience of becoming a mother, its meaning and the impact that it has on your life - internal and external.  

The season after birth can feel isolating, overwhelming, or filled with guilt you didn’t expect. If you love your baby but don’t feel like yourself, you are not failing. In our work together, we gently support your nervous system, create emotional steadiness, and help you reconnect with yourself beyond pressure or performance. You deserve care too.  

Because I am so passionate about women's health and issues, this is an obvious area of interest to me. Despite amazing work by PANDA and mental health organisations, people who give birth are still, in this society, expected to be over the moon once they have children, and to be "WonderHumans". The reality could not be further from this, as becoming a parent is freaking hard work, and NONE should be expected to be perfectly ok in the months or even years after having given birth. I believe we have an absolute duty to support new parents, and this is one big area where I want to support my clients.  

Contrary to common belief, depression is not primarily a biological illness, inherited through the genes. Nor is it the setbacks, crises or tragedies in our lives that cause depression. It is our response to adverse events that determines whether we get depressed or not. Research shows that people most likely to suffer depression are those who react to adversity by taking it personally, seeing all areas of their lives as blighted by it, and the misery as going on forever. Depression is always a second and unnecessary problem, and just makes problematic circumstances worse. This is good to know because it means that, instead of feeling helpless or hopeless, people can learn to take back control over their lives. They may not be able to change certain circumstances but they always have options about how they react to them. The symptoms of depression include low mood, loss of interest or pleasure in usual activities, loss of appetite and energy, sleep disturbance, feeling agitated or lethargic, worthless or guilty, difficulty in thinking straight and having repeated thoughts about suicide. Antidepressant drugs may help some people because they lift levels of a ‘feel-good’ chemical in the brain; unfortunately, they do nothing to change the underlying circumstances or thinking patterns that led to the depression. Depression is always related to unmet essential emotional needs and that is why the human givens approach, which focuses on helping people in distress find healthy ways to meet their emotional needs, is so successful. Depressed people may seem deflated and flat but, in actual fact, they have raised levels of a stress hormone called cortisol, which means that they are in a state of constant high emotional arousal. When our emotions are aroused we can’t think rationally, so this is why people deep in the grip of depression can’t concentrate well or even make simple decisions. Learning simple relaxation techniques to calm themselves down will start reducing those cortisol levels. The main reason that depressed people are so emotionally aroused is that they spend a vast amount of time worrying about the future or beating themselves up about past events. Perhaps they still feel guilty about something that happened recently – or years ago; perhaps they are frightening themselves with dire ‘what if?’ scenarios (likely or unlikely), in which loved ones encounter dangers or they themselves lose their jobs or their homes; perhaps they feel beaten down by chronic pain or anger (“Why did this have to happen to me?” “How could he have been so cruel?”); or maybe they experience a combination. They also have a huge tendency towards negative thinking – “I’ll never be good enough”; “I’ll never cope”; “nothing ever goes right”; “the pain will only get worse”. All this kind of negative imagining and thinking saps an enormous amount of energy – and makes people utterly miserable. Far from feeling more refreshed after a night’s sleep, most people with depression wake up next day still exhausted and feeling totally unmotivated. It is hard for them to get out of bed and do anything at all. We now know why this happens. Psychologist and co-founder of the human givens approach Joe Griffin carried out research over many years which showed that, when we dream at night, we are discharging unexpressed emotional arousals from the previous day. If earlier we were upset about something our spouse did or didn’t do, but kept it to ourselves, we would later dream that out, perhaps in the form of getting angry with someone else (dream content is never straightforward); that would have the desired effect of lowering our levels of emotional arousal, so that we can start next day afresh, even though we are unlikely to remember we had the dream. (If we did express our feelings with our spouse at the time, we wouldn’t need to dream about it. And, of course, if we wake up and remember what our spouse did or didn’t do, we may get emotionally aroused about it all over again, requiring more dream discharge that night, if we still don’t resolve it.)