Latest / Motherhood Uncut / After Lindsay Clancy: What Most Mothers Need to Hear

Transcript

After Lindsay Clancy: What Most Mothers Need to Hear · Motherhood Uncut

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Motherhood Uncut podcast, where we talk honestly about the reality of motherhood.
0:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Kate Kripke.
0:07
SPEAKER_00: This is a space for mothers to feel seen, heard, and understood, especially those navigating the intersection of raising young kids while also maintaining passions, purpose, and work outside of motherhood.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: And it's called Uncut because we do not hold back here.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: Through expert conversations, personal stories, practical tools, and honest reflection, we explore what it means to care for ourselves, stay connected to our kids, and remember that we can feel hard things and still be okay.
0:37
SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad you're here.
0:55
SPEAKER_00: Also, I didn't treat Lindsay.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: I don't know her, and I don't have access to her complete medical history.
1:01
SPEAKER_00: So this episode is not an attempt to diagnose her, explain exactly what happened, or weigh in on what should happen next.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: What I do want to talk about is what this case brings up about maternal mental health more broadly.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: Because yes, postpartum psychosis is real.
1:19
SPEAKER_00: Severe perinatal mental illness is real.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: And we definitely need better recognition, better treatment, better systems of care.
1:27
SPEAKER_00: And we need to take mothers seriously when they tell us something is wrong.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: And we also need to be careful about what an extraordinarily tragic case can stir up for other mothers.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: Millions of women struggle with anxiety, intrusive thoughts, overwhelm, or the enormous uncertainty of raising a child.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: I don't want this case to leave those mothers afraid of their own minds.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: So today I want to talk about both, what this case can teach us about maternal mental health and what it can't, and why I believe we need to get much better at supporting mothers long before they ever reach a crisis.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: But motherhood has a way of asking things of us that many of us were never prepared for.
2:45
SPEAKER_00: The uncertainty, the lack of control, the intensity of loving someone this much.
2:51
SPEAKER_00: And somewhere along the way, anxiety, guilt, overwhelm, and the constant need to figure things out can start pulling us away from the life that's actually happening right in front of us.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: The Calm Connection Experience is my 12-week program designed to help you change that.
3:07
SPEAKER_00: Together, we work on building your capacity to stay present and connected, even when things feel uncertain, uncomfortable, or different from what you expected.
3:15
SPEAKER_00: So you can respond to your kids, to your life, and to yourself in ways that actually reflect the woman and mother you want to be.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: If you're hearing this and thinking, I want that, then I'd love to talk with you.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: You can book a call with me using the link in the show notes.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: We will talk about what's feeling hard for you right now, what you want to be different, and whether the calm connection experience might be the right next step for you.
4:26
SPEAKER_00: There is so much noise.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to add any more noise.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: I also don't know Lindsay Clancy.
4:34
SPEAKER_00: I didn't treat her.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: I don't have access to her complete medical records.
4:38
SPEAKER_00: And I'm not going to diagnose her and tell you exactly why this happened.
4:41
SPEAKER_00: I don't think any of us watching this unfold from the outside should pretend that we can do that.
4:47
SPEAKER_00: But I have spent more than 20 years sitting with mothers who are struggling, both clinically and subclinically, meaning both with severe mental illness and without severe mental illness.
5:01
SPEAKER_00: And there's something happening in the conversation around this case that I want to talk about here on the podcast because I think it's really important.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: I want to talk about what this case can teach us about maternal mental health.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: And just as importantly, what it can't.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about the part we absolutely can't look away from here.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: Let's start with the most serious part.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: Postpartum psychosis is real.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: It is rare, definitely relatively rare compared to the other postpartum mental illnesses.
5:38
SPEAKER_00: And it is a complete psychiatric emergency.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: So women can become profoundly ill during pregnancy and postpartum.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: We know that.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: They deserve to be believed, recognized, and treated appropriately.
5:51
SPEAKER_00: And their families need education about warning signs and somewhere to turn when something isn't right.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: And we need clinicians who understand perinatal mental health.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: We need systems that communicate with each other.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: We need access to appropriate psychiatric care.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: And we need to take mothers seriously when they tell us something is wrong.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: None of what I'm about to say changes that.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: One of the things anxiety does extraordinarily well is take something that's possible and turn it into something that feels probable.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: You hear about a mother who became severely psychiatrically ill and harmed her children, and suddenly your brain says, wait, I've been anxious since I had my baby.
7:05
SPEAKER_00: I've had thoughts that scare me.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: I felt completely overwhelmed.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: I'm what I wonder if I've wondered whether I can handle this.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: And then the next question for many people is, could this happen to me?
7:18
SPEAKER_00: And if you've experienced intrusive thoughts, that fear can become even louder.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: The presence of a frightening thought does not mean that you want it to happen, that you're going to act on it, or that you're becoming psychotic.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: These experiences need to be assessed appropriately, of course, particularly when someone is having difficulty distinguishing thoughts from reality or feels at risk of harming themselves or someone else.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: But I don't want the public conversation about an extraordinarily severe case to make ordinary mothers afraid of their own minds.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: For most mothers who are struggling, this is a very different story.
7:58
SPEAKER_00: And I want to talk about that story too.
8:03
SPEAKER_00: Because there is a very ordinary psychological challenge inside motherhood.
8:10
SPEAKER_00: One of the things I've come to believe after more than two decades of doing this work is that we dramatically underestimate what motherhood asks of the human nervous system.
8:20
SPEAKER_00: Think about what happens for a minute.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: You have this person you love beyond anything you could have ever imagined, and suddenly you are responsible for them.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: And you cannot control them.
8:32
SPEAKER_00: You can't guarantee that your baby will sleep.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: You can't always figure out why they're crying.
8:37
SPEAKER_00: You can't prevent every illness.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: You can't guarantee that they'll hit every milestone exactly when they're quote unquote supposed to.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: You can't make your toddler stop having feelings.
8:49
SPEAKER_00: You can't guarantee that they'll be happy.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: You can't guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen to them.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know, perhaps most difficult of all, there are going to be countless moments when you simply don't know what to do.
9:03
SPEAKER_00: That is motherhood.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't happen because you're doing it wrong, right?
9:10
SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't happen because you're missing something.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: It happens because raising another human being is inherently uncertain.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: Now you put that reality together with the way many highly capable women learned to move through the world long before they had children, right?
9:29
SPEAKER_00: We learn to prepare and work harder and anticipate problems and gather information and find the answer to things.
9:36
SPEAKER_00: We probably learned that competence meant knowing what to do.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: And all of those capacities are incredible strengths.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: They may be part of how you built the life you have.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: And both, you know, both the reality of those strengths and how they've served you, and the reality of uncertainty and unpredictability and the ways in which, even if we're so good at all of those things, we can't necessarily know what's happening for our child or what to do in the moment.
10:09
SPEAKER_00: Both those things are happening in motherhood at the same time.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: Motherhood presents us with something very different than we're used to before we become mothers.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes there isn't an answer.
10:23
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes your child is going to be upset, and nothing you do will immediately make them feel better.
10:29
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes you're going to make a decision without knowing whether it's the right decision.
10:33
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you're going to feel afraid and still have to move through your day.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of the time, you're simply going to have to not know.
10:43
SPEAKER_00: And for a nervous system that has learned that safety comes from knowing and predicting and fixing and controlling, that can be incredibly activating.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: So imagine your baby isn't sleeping.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: I guess is you've had this experience.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: At first, that is a simple fact.
11:01
SPEAKER_00: It's just a fact.
11:02
SPEAKER_00: My baby woke up four times last night.
11:05
SPEAKER_00: But your nervous system doesn't just experience the fact, it starts trying to protect you, right?
11:11
SPEAKER_00: It it your nervous system kicks into gear and suddenly your thinking comes to something is wrong.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: She should be sleeping by now.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: Maybe I'm creating bad habits.
11:21
SPEAKER_00: What if she never learns to sleep?
11:22
SPEAKER_00: What if I can't function at work?
11:24
SPEAKER_00: What if I'm doing something that's hurting her development?
11:28
SPEAKER_00: And so most of us, when we start having these thoughts, we might start to Google, right?
11:34
SPEAKER_00: We might read three books or listen to four podcasts.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: Maybe we go and ask the parenting group.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: Probably we all start comparing our babies with our friends' babies.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: You know, you've probably been here.
11:50
SPEAKER_00: And then maybe what happens next is that you change the schedule or you track the naps or you monitor everything.
11:55
SPEAKER_00: And underneath all of that activity is often a very understandable hope.
12:00
SPEAKER_00: If I can figure this out, then I can finally relax.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: Except sometimes you can't figure it out because babies are humans and humans are unpredictable.
12:09
SPEAKER_00: So the nervous system stays activated.
12:12
SPEAKER_00: And this can happen around feeding or sleep or development or daycare or illness, behavior, or attachment, your relationship with your child, returning to work, whether you're spending enough time with your child, whether you're enjoying motherhood enough.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: So many things.
12:30
SPEAKER_00: The content changes, but the underlying struggle can remain remarkably similar.
12:36
SPEAKER_00: I need to know that this is going to be okay before I can feel okay.
12:42
SPEAKER_00: I want to be really careful here because I don't want anyone hearing this, or I don't want anyone to hear this as an explanation for every case of postpartum anxiety or depression.
12:53
SPEAKER_00: It obviously isn't.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: Pregnancy and birth and postpartum involve profound biological changes, and hormones matter, and sleep matters, and genetics matter, previous psychiatric history matters, medical complications can matter, relationships and trauma and financial resources and social support and cultural expectations.
13:16
SPEAKER_00: It all matters.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: Some women need psychotherapy, some women need medication.
13:22
SPEAKER_00: Some women, some mothers need psychiatric treatment.
13:27
SPEAKER_00: But some, and some, I should say, need a much higher level of care.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: So we want to take all that very seriously.
13:37
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes the most loving and responsible thing a mom can do is to get medical help.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: So the nervous system piece I'm talking about isn't a replacement for that.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: It's just another part of the conversation.
13:53
SPEAKER_00: Because there are also capacities that we can help mothers develop early that make it less likely that they develop clinical levels of anxiety and depression and of the other perinatal mental illness.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: So what if instead of teaching moms how to eliminate uncertainty, we help them become more capable of living inside of it?
14:31
SPEAKER_00: For instance, can I notice that I'm scared without immediately assuming the fear means something terrible is happening?
14:38
SPEAKER_00: Can I allow my child to be disappointed without rushing to make the disappointment disappear?
14:43
SPEAKER_00: Can I make a thoughtful decision without knowing with absolute certainty that it's the right one?
14:49
SPEAKER_00: Can my baby cry while I'm holding them and still experience myself as a good mother?
14:54
SPEAKER_00: Can I say, I don't know yet without experiencing that as a failure?
14:59
SPEAKER_00: Can my child struggle and I remain connected to them rather than immediately trying to control the struggle?
15:07
SPEAKER_00: Can something be uncomfortable without being dangerous?
15:12
SPEAKER_00: So these sound like simple questions, but they're not.
15:17
SPEAKER_00: They're actually capacities, and many of us were never given the opportunity to build them.
15:23
SPEAKER_00: Long before motherhood, many of us we developed deeply learned expectations about what we needed to do in order to be okay.
15:32
SPEAKER_00: Maybe I learned that I need to get things right or to make sure everybody else is okay.
15:39
SPEAKER_00: Maybe I learned that I need to know what's coming, or that I need to be competent.
15:45
SPEAKER_00: Maybe that mistakes aren't safe.
15:47
SPEAKER_00: Maybe that someone else is disappointed means I've done something wrong.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: And maybe you can relate to some of those.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: These beliefs aren't character flaws, and often they've developed for very understandable reasons, and they may have developed, have helped us become extraordinarily successful adults.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: But then we have children, and children bring us directly into places where those strategies stop working.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: You cannot perfectly predict another human being.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: You can't prevent another human being from experiencing pain.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: You can't control every outcome or parent without making mistakes.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: And you cannot love someone this deeply without occasionally being terrified by how much you have to lose.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: So part of becoming steadier in motherhood is not finally figuring out how to control all the things.
16:39
SPEAKER_00: It's developing a deeper trust that you don't have to control all the things, that you can feel that you can feel uncomfortable and still remain present, that your child can feel uncomfortable and you can remain present with them while they feel uncomfortable.
16:56
SPEAKER_00: You can not know and remain present.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: You can make a mistake and repair afterwards.
17:04
SPEAKER_00: You can be scared and still choose how you want to respond.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: You can have a hard day and not turn that hard day into evidence that something has gone terribly wrong.
17:16
SPEAKER_00: This is where I keep coming back to the Lindsay Clancy case.
17:19
SPEAKER_00: We need to be able to hold two conversations at the same time here.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: We need to take severe perinatal mental illness incredibly seriously.
17:28
SPEAKER_00: We need better recognition and better education, better treatment, better systems of care and better support for families.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: We should never minimize what can happen when someone becomes severely psychiatrically ill.
17:43
SPEAKER_00: And we also need to be careful not to make maternal mental health synonymous with catastrophe because there are millions of women struggling somewhere much earlier on that continuum.
17:54
SPEAKER_00: They're functioning and they're working and they're caring for their children and they're making lunches and answering emails and going to pediatrician appointments and showing up at preschool pickup.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: And inside, their nervous systems are working overtime.
18:07
SPEAKER_00: They're worrying and they're researching and they're second-guessing.
18:10
SPEAKER_00: They're trying desperately to get motherhood right because somewhere inside them is this belief that once everything is okay, they'll finally be able to relax.
18:21
SPEAKER_00: Maybe even they'll finally be allowed to relax.
18:25
SPEAKER_00: I want us to care about those mothers too.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: And my guess is that many of you listening right now can relate to all that.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: You would put yourself inside that category.
18:55
SPEAKER_00: Some might be, but most of them are not.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: I want us to care about this other population of women because they shouldn't have to suffer that much in the first place.
19:08
SPEAKER_00: And actually, let me take that back.
19:09
SPEAKER_00: It's not even about this other population of women, because what we've all learned, if we've been following this Lindsay Clancy case, is that in many ways she was that woman before things became incredibly critical for her.
19:29
SPEAKER_00: But or and I'm gonna say it again.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: There is so much we can teach and support before someone reaches a crisis, even before they reach levels of clinical anxiety and depression and need more clinical levels of treatment.
19:48
SPEAKER_00: So maybe one of the most important things we can teach moms is something remarkably simple.
19:54
SPEAKER_00: You do not need to know everything to trust yourself.
19:58
SPEAKER_00: Your child doesn't have to be happy for every moment, in every moment, for you to be a good mother.
20:05
SPEAKER_00: Emotional discomfort doesn't automatically mean something is wrong.
20:08
SPEAKER_00: And uncertainty doesn't automatically mean you're unsafe or your child is unsafe.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: And motherhood isn't asking you to create a life in which nothing difficult ever happens.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: It's asking you to learn how to stay connected to yourself and your child when it does.
20:27
SPEAKER_00: And that is a very different goal.
20:31
SPEAKER_00: I believe it's a conversation about maternal mental health that we desperately need to be having alongside the conversations about illness, diagnosis, and treatment.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: We should absolutely care for moms when they're in crisis, and we should get much, much better at caring for them long before they ever get there.
20:54
SPEAKER_00: Before I wrap up today, I'm just gonna ask you to do a little bit of an assessment for yourself, a little bit of an internal check.
21:05
SPEAKER_00: How are you feeling?
21:09
SPEAKER_00: We often ask moms a question, how are you doing?
21:12
SPEAKER_00: And our knee-jerk reaction is good, right?
21:14
SPEAKER_00: Fine.
21:15
SPEAKER_00: But I want you to ask yourself, how am I feeling?
21:19
SPEAKER_00: And the next question is, how do I want to feel?
21:24
SPEAKER_00: And and then one level deeper when I'm feeling, you know, emotional discomfort, call it worry or disappointment or irritability or anger or sadness, and maybe even the next level, fear or anger.
21:46
SPEAKER_00: How am I talking to myself?
21:47
SPEAKER_00: And what am I putting into place at that moment?
21:52
SPEAKER_00: And just notice if you go into action mode at that moment, and action mode so you try whatever you can to not feel what you're feeling.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: I just want you to pay attention to that.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: Because the feelings themselves are never the problem.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: And I have never sat with a mother when she's told me how she was feeling and described to me what her thinking is and the context of her life is and her situation is.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: When I haven't said to her, of course you feel that way.
22:22
SPEAKER_00: The feelings always make sense.
22:25
SPEAKER_00: But we do want to help you, all mothers, all of us, teach our nervous systems that emotional discomfort doesn't have to mean something bad is happening.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna end there.
22:41
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna invite you to come find me on Instagram at Kate Kripke or in my email, Kate at Kate Kripke, if you have any questions about this.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: Because my guess is that the big majority of moms of listeners here to this podcast have been there.
23:01
SPEAKER_00: And I want to hear from you.
23:02
SPEAKER_00: I want to know what helped, what made things worse, what you wish you had had when your kids were little, if your kids are now older, and what you think about all this.
23:11
SPEAKER_00: Because this is a very important conversation.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: All right, listeners, if you found this episode helpful in any way, or if there's someone in your life who you think might benefit from hearing it, I would be so grateful if you take just a moment to subscribe, rate, review, or share this episode with a friend.
23:35
SPEAKER_00: Of course, it does feel good to know this podcast is resonating with you, but honestly, the bigger reason I ask is because the more subscriptions and ratings and reviews the podcast receives, the more accessible it becomes to mothers who may really need this kind of support and conversation.
23:51
SPEAKER_00: And as we all know, motherhood was never meant to be done alone.
23:55
SPEAKER_00: But it really does take a village to raise a mom or two.
23:58
SPEAKER_00: So thank you for helping us grow this community one conversation at a time.