Latest / The Birth Lounge Podcast / Ep. 458: How Birth Trauma Impacts Your Partner & Intimacy with Ashley Mariani [RECAST]

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Ep. 458: How Birth Trauma Impacts Your Partner & Intimacy with Ashley Mariani [RECAST] · The Birth Lounge Podcast

Nine times out of 10, I hear something that falls under the category of birth trauma and out of those nine times, I would say at least six or seven.
Would qualify as obstetric violence.
And so then I get curious because that's the important piece is to get curious, right? Not judgmental, but curious and asking the partner, you know, I want to be able to hold space for, for what your girlfriend, your wife, your partner was going through, but I want to also hear what your experience was, what happened for you when you were able to, you know, finally and.
be let into that room There was just so much chaos going on.
I felt stuck.
I felt frozen.
I felt like I, I couldn't help.
Hello- Welcome back to another episode of The Birth Lounge Podcast.
I'm so excited to be back this week.
You guys, and today's episode is a kind of heavy one, but I think it is one that a lot of people need to hear.
Actually, this season is all requested by you.
Every topic every week are actually requests from our listeners.
And so I know a lot of you need to hear this topic.
Today, I am joined by Ashley Mariani, who is a registered social worker, and she specializes in couples' perinatal mental, emotional, and sexual health, while also being a fierce advocate for obstetric violence, rather against obstetric violence.
She's seen the implications of birth trauma and how this can impact couples on a mental, emotional, and sexual level.
She works really hard to help people prevent birth trauma, but when it does happen postpartum, she's helping you with resilience building.
Ashley's academic background includes degrees in sexuality, counseling, individual and couples work.
The lens that she works through is rooted in the body's innate wisdom and the nervous system, which, you know, for me, that just speaks to my soul.
She really uses a holistic framework that utilizes movement, nutrition, plant medicine, vagus nerve toning, and functional medicine.
Ashley is also the mother of three free-spirited children, including a set of twins.
So today, we're gonna be talking about birth trauma, and particularly how birth trauma impacts intimacy postpartum.
We're gonna be talking about your partner's role in birth trauma.
So if you're pregnant, listen up clearly so that you can actually make a plan prenatally to help your partner avoid being complicit in birth trauma.
If you experience birth trauma and you're stuck in this realm of resentment and dissatisfaction and wondering if things are ever gonna go back to normal, and being stuck in that fight or flight which birth trauma so famously does to many of us, this is the episode for you.
Ashley is going to be stepping us through how birth trauma triggers us into that fight or flight, how we remain there for weeks, months, years after birth, how this can impact your relationship with your partner more than just sex.
It can actually erode the feelings of love and safety and appreciation in your home.
Ashley's gonna be telling us how this impacts your long-term relationship, how you and your partner can navigate these hard feelings, and how you can reunite with your partner after birth trauma.
Now, don't get me wrong, there's no overnight success or secret reset button, but Ashley is brilliantly laying out steps that you can take today to help get your life back on track after birth trauma.
I'm stoked for this conversation.
Ashley and I are good friends off the internet, and I knew that when you guys requested birth trauma and intimacy and, and how it impacts your long-term relationship with your partner, there was absolutely nobody better to have on the podcast than Ashley.
So without further ado, Ashley, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
I'm super excited to be a part of this amazing podcast.
Heck yeah, we have the best listeners.
And you know, this season's topics actually are all requested from our audience.
And so this is a really cool season.
Yeah, it's a very cool season that taught me a lot, both educationally and also about myself and just like how I had to relinquish control.
The podcast has been like the one thing that I've always been in 100 percent control over.
I've never really asked feedback.
And so this year we did, and these are the topics.
So I'm very excited to dive into these things.
A lot of the topics are not things that were in my brain.
And so I, like I say, I've learned a lot today.
We're talking about how, your partner can help prevent birth trauma.
But before we do that, who are we chatting with? Who's Ashley? I gave you your formal introduction, but like right now who is behind the microphone? Yeah.
I am a clinical social worker.
Like my, my bio kind of explains, which means that I do the active psychotherapy, but I'm registered with the college of social workers here in Ontario, Canada.
I'm a mom of three.
I have two and a half year old twins and an almost seven year old son.
So I feel like even though I don't have the years of experience under my belt, I still have the chaos gone, gone through the birth experiences.
I'm a huge fan of physiological birth.
And I think that there's a lot of misconception when I promote and share on social media about home births and free births and you know, mother led birth experiences that that's what I had.
And so it feels very much like when I get criticisms online about, you know, there's other ways to birth.
People believe that that's how I birthed my babies and both my birth experiences with my twins and with my son were C sections.
So I can appreciate the experience of C sections and also really love to see physiological birth experiences.
I love that.
Okay, so now everybody knows why I chose Ashley for this topic.
You guys may have chosen the topic, but I chose the providers and the professionals that I wanted to see on here.
And you just explained, I think, the Tranquility by HeHe ideal so perfectly.
It's about holding spaces for a lot of experiences and holding space for being kind of...
Like co regulating individuals and people who can have an experience that differs from their core beliefs and holding space from a lot of that.
Okay.
So we know you know, and if you're new here and you don't know yet, go back and listen to.
past episodes, but our, our audience generally knows that a lot of birth trauma is actually preventable.
Many stories of birth trauma come from the way that you're made to feel in labor, that feeling of loss of control that we know could have been prevented or scenarios that were iatrogenic that had we not been following such a medical model, the likelihood of those things kind of transpiring in your birth, unlikely low risk to happen.
Tell us, well, I guess before I say that, I want to hold space for the fact that a lot of that falls on the shoulders of that mama, on the shoulders of that pregnant person, the person who's going to be doing birth, I would say, whether it's right or wrong the majority of that responsibility is on their shoulders.
But.
You're not in this alone.
Your providers definitely have a responsibility as well, but something that often gets forgotten is the responsibility of your partner, right? The other half of this baby, if they're in the, the relationship with you.
So, what do we need to know? Where do we even start? It feels kind of like, eating a whale.
So where do we start with? What roles do our partners play and how do they help us prevent birth trauma? What is their responsibility? What's the work that leads up to that? What are kind of the the risk and benefits? What are the things that may go wrong postpartum if our partners either play a role in Our birth trauma or don't stop it.
These are questions that like have, you know, obviously rolled around in my head, but they're also questions that our audience has.
So where do we start with this really massive topic? Yeah, those are like so many great questions.
And I think you could probably do a podcast episode on each of them, but they're really, really great.
And there are questions that we need to be asking and that's, that's the great thing.
So Why do I feel like I should be the one talking about this? Well, first of all, I've experienced my own birth trauma.
Second of all I work with couples and my work with couples was what started.
My love for sex and intimacy in working with them and then becoming a mother and going through my own birth trauma experience.
I then kind of navigated more towards perinatal mental health and working with survivors of birth trauma.
And then I came back and married those two areas together, which seems very like, Oh, how do you, how do you marry those two areas together? There's not like literature out there about this.
It's not like you can jump on Amazon or jump on Indigo chapters website and, and find a book on how birth trauma impacts intimacy within a relationship.
I'm going purely based on anecdotal evidence and the hundreds of clients that I've worked with.
And so.
We can, we can come at this from like a political standpoint and say, well, what does the data say? What does the research say? There is no data and research out there about this.
We can start sharing our experiences.
And so I just want to preface this conversation by saying I'm not I have no idea.
If I'm not speaking to your experience, that's totally fine.
What I am saying is that as a therapist working with new parents and their intimacy and their, and their sex journeys, this is what I'm.
Seeing, and this is my experience.
So I can totally hold space for the fact that other people have different experiences, but there's themes popping up in my work and the work that I'm doing, given that it's so niched and so unique because we have clinicians that are sex therapists and that work with couples.
And then that's enough silo.
And then over here, we have perinatal mental health clinicians and they work in their own silo.
And very rarely do we have.
Any clinicians who are advocating against not even just birth trauma, but obstetric violence, right? Because again, that's a very scary territory to begin to poke and prod at because much of mental health is still rooted in the medical model.
Much of mental health.
Many mental health jobs and providers are still based out of medical facilities.
A lot of our trainings are very influenced by medical funding sources.
So I think that there's a lot of fear in questioning.
The narratives of obstetric violence and who's perpetuating the obstetric violence.
So when I say the work that I do is very unique, it's unique in that I'm, I'm marrying all of these different.
Themes that are popping up into like one conversation.
So hang on.
I want to, I want to interject there just really quickly.
I know that you lost a couple people when you said, you know, I'm working off of anecdotal experiences and evidence for the people who you were like, ah, okay, hang on.
Let me pull you back really quickly.
There are so many places in our world that don't have the evidence, and the reason is because they haven't been prioritized.
No one has noticed these patterns.
So before we have that formal evidence, you know, backed by the CDC, the FDA, the NIH you know, any of your big research kind of foundations, Think back to before that became a priority for research, there were just these little people recognizing these patterns starting to tell other people, hey, if you notice this pattern, let me know because I think it may be bigger than us and we need to take it to bigger people.
So don't let If you ever hear something say like, oh, well, this is just a pattern I'm noticing, or it's anecdotal evidence, don't write that off.
Certainly have what feels good to you of what you deem worthy is, is evidence based to you, and what feels safe in regards to evidence, and research, and opinions, and recommendations.
That you feel safe taking, but I would caution you to be, to use your words, actually siloed into only trusting one or two sources for your data.
I find that some of the most educated people and well informed people actually gather their sources from many, many, many angles and many I guess places to get their evidence and they put it all together and they they come up with Something that feels aligned to them.
So just be careful.
If you are looking for always evidence that comes out of one or two institutions, it's going to be a very shaded bias.
Yeah, view that you have not that that's your fault, but just be aware that other angles could be very helpful in helping you have more of a 360 picture of the topic or the choice that you're trying to make.
Very much so.
Yes, exactly.
I put a lot of value into anecdotal evidence because we need to be able to hear somebody's experience and trust them that this is happening for them, right? On a macro or micro level.
Yeah.
Well, just because, you know, it's not being funded by The people who have the big money doesn't mean that it's not the people, the everyday people's experience.
I'm sure everybody has an example of like, yeah, I know so many people that say they've experienced this, but there's either not a program out there for it or no recognition or it's, you know, got a big taboo around it.
There's always something.
A hundred percent.
oKay.
Okay.
So if we go back to this idea of so.
When we talk about birth trauma and obstetric violence, we can differentiate those because birth trauma can happen as a result of almost.
Anything that takes place in labor and delivery and pregnancy even, right? Like nobody has to be necessarily coercive or abusive in order for a person to experience birth trauma.
Obstetric violence happens at the hands of the provider.
One of the medical providers, the nurse, the midwife, the OB doulas even, right? Obstetric violence happens in a way where the, the person is feeling coerced, bullied, manipulated, gaslit, forced, you name it, just this power over the patient.
Most obstetric violence.
Results in birth trauma, but not all birth trauma is obstetric violence, if that makes sense.
So when we're thinking about this from a, what is our partner's role in birth trauma? I kind of want to get even more specific in.
And using more examples of what is our partner's role in preventing obstetric violence and birth trauma via obstetric violence.
Right.
And we just went through, I mean, I feel like this gets said so many times in podcasts, but like, we just went through a really hard couple of years.
Like COVID was hard.
Yes.
I fricking know Ashley COVID was hard.
I know it.
I lived through it.
I get it.
I get it.
You don't have to remind me.
You don't have to tell me.
For sure.
We saw a huge uptick in birth trauma during the pandemic.
The pandemonium is what I call it.
I don't know if we were ever, if anybody ever gets flagged from the pandemic.
So I use the word pandemonium just in case.
And so.
When we think about what was taking place in the medical community, there was so much fear and uncertainty.
And what happens when there's fear and uncertainty is people get very rigid.
And so we saw a lot of policies become implemented.
And as a result, we had these parents who were being separated during the prenatal appointments during the birth experiences.
And that's not to say that, you know, partners weren't involved.
Or our partners were very involved before the pandemic, you know, we, we have issues with that too.
There, there's been more involvement since the fifties and sixties for sure.
But there's still not enough involvement for it to make sense.
And then the pandemic happened and then we saw these mothers going to appointments without their partners and then having to come home and inform their partners and their partners may be desperately wanting to be at these appointments and feeling very helpless.
About what their roles are and what their responsibilities are and what what they're supposed to be saying and doing and how they can support and if they have questions, how do they get those questions answered? And now the mother's carrying this mental load of tracking these questions and writing down these questions so that she can then bring it to the next appointment.
And.
The partner's not even there to be able to ask for themselves.
And so right then and there we have these pregnant people, these mothers carrying the mental load of pregnancy far more than they had done in the past because.
There was literally somebody policing them saying, you cannot, your partner cannot be here under no circumstances.
Is your partner allowed to be here? In, in some situations I was able to advocate for some of my clients by calling ultrasound ultrasound clinics and saying, You know, this person is a trauma survivor.
They have a support person that will be coming in with them under no circumstances should their support person be separated from them.
And I did get a lot of pushback.
anD when I did speak to managers, I would say, I'm telling you that there's somebody coming in.
That's a trauma survivor.
You don't need to know what their trauma was, but can you imagine a trauma survivor in a dark room being asked to pull their shirt up and lie on their back with a stranger touching their body using an instrument that.
feels extremely violating.
So knowing that they have a support person there to hold their hand, check in with them, you know, feel safe, a safe person that's extremely important regardless of what policy is.
So we were able to get around some of those barriers thankfully.
And then we kind of saw things happening in labor and delivery.
And I don't know what was happening.
You know, in, in your experiences, but here there was a lot of separation during induction.
First of all, lots of separation during induction, which is terrifying.
Lots of separation of, of couples in the early stages of labor when they were birthing at hospital.
So no, unfortunately, until you're in active labor, your partner is not allowed in the room.
This is terrifying.
So.
As many prenatal classes, as there were being hosted, there still wasn't enough information on how a partner can show up during this time and not only advocate to avoid birth trauma, advocate for themselves and advocate for the family in general.
And so when I sit with a couple and a couple is telling me we're just not having sex, sex is non existent.
There's no intimacy.
I don't feel seen.
I don't feel heard.
I don't feel connected.
I feel resentful.
I feel like I'm carrying the mental load.
My first question is, was there birth trauma? Tell me about, tell me about your labor and delivery experiences.
How old are your children? Usually I have this information that they have children.
How old are your children? Okay.
You have fairly young children.
Can you tell me about your birth experiences? Nine times out of 10, I hear something that falls under the category of birth trauma and out of those nine times, I would say at least six or seven.
Would qualify as obstetric violence.
And so then I get curious because that's the important piece is to get curious, right? Not judgmental, but curious and asking the partner, you know, I want to be able to hold space for, for what your girlfriend, your wife, your partner was going through, but I want to also hear what your experience was, what happened for you when you were able to, you know, finally and.
be let into that room There was just so much chaos going on.
I felt stuck.
I felt frozen.
I felt like I, I couldn't help.
I felt like I was, you know I was just very limited in what I could do.
I don't, I'm not a doctor.
I don't know if the decisions that the doctor was making were, were correct or not.
And I think that that's where we get ahead of ourselves in that.
When we're doing our prenatal classes and we're teaching couples about all the things to look out for.
We also need to be teaching them about emotional attunement and we need to be teaching them about being a team and we need to be teaching them about not just being in the team in the sense of like, we, we have this sporting event that we're doing this marathon that we're running and we need to make sure we're there supporting each other, but a team in the sense of like, I'm noticing that.
You're shutting down because the physician just walked into the room and I want to stop and pause and say, excuse me, doctor, but I'm noticing that my wife has just shut down or my partner is just shut down and I need you to exit the room before she proceeds to answer any of your questions because I need to make sure she's okay.
So it's, it's really like, how do I hate using the word empower because I never feel like it's, it's, it's nobody else's job to empower you.
But for lack of a better word right now, how do we empower the partners to feel like they are active in protecting.
And again, like I know that there's a lot of feelings that come up when I say protecting a pregnant person or protecting a mom, a pregnant woman, because we're not fragile, but as a role, as a partnered role, I want to think about the, the partner being able to preserve that bubble and preserve that energy and not always have to rely on doulas to save them.
I don't want the partner to be the savior either, but I.
No one knows you better than your partner walking into that room.
Right? Yeah.
Okay.
So gosh, my heart breaks for everybody who like experienced that horrendous stuff.
We were seeing very similar things here in Boston.
I think the whole world was just experiencing collective trauma.
Okay.
I do have a question about birth trauma in dads.
How many, let's see out of every 10 dads.
How many are you seeing walk away with birth trauma? Because I think a lot of us, until you dive into this world, we typically think about birth trauma being only the, the mom or the birther's like thing to kind of carry.
And it's not.
First of all, she needs support in that.
But second of all, these dads, these partners, typically are experiencing their own trauma, especially kind of more intense and severe they are.
Would you agree with that? Yes.
And I bring this back to there's a, a book that's essentially like the Bible that I put out to all of my clients.
It's called burnout, the secret to unleashing the stress response cycle and burnout is written in a way for female embodied women to kind of like understand their hormones and what's happening for them.
But The breakdown of understanding burnout in general or understanding, understanding a trauma response isn't gendered.
And so when I look at the theory in general and I look at, okay, so when we have the stress response cycle, if we can't complete the stress response cycle, we get stuck in this feeling of impending doom trauma.
And so.
The, the example, I mean, it's escaping me detail for detail, but the example that's given is.
You're walking the side of a mountain and a boulder rolls on you and your body goes through all of these stages.
Like first you're high in adrenaline trying to push that boulder off and you're pushing, you're pushing, you're pushing.
And eventually your body is going to give up and say, listen, we've exhausted all of our energy.
Now we're just kind of going into shutdown and giving up and being ready to die.
Like we're just going to die.
And then some fellow hikers come along and they push that boulder off of you and you should be ecstatic that you're alive, but then you're carrying this feeling of like, I didn't do that for myself though.
Like I didn't complete my stress response cycle.
I didn't finish.
I wasn't able to push that boulder off of me.
I didn't complete that task.
And if you were taken back to a situation.
And to a similar situation and facilitated a similar experience of like, okay, let's, let's act out the scene again, let's roll the boulder on you.
Let's roll a heavy enough boulder on you that it mimics what you've went through, but also you still have the ability to push that boulder off.
Then we can facilitate that stress response cycle being complete type of thing.
And there are other ways to do that.
Through running and weightlifting and you know, you name it.
There are so many creativity.
There are so many options for completing the stress response cycle.
But what I see in these dads is that.
They're in this situation where they're, where they feel so helpless and they're just like stuck and their adrenaline just pumps up.
But now they're in a social situation where they don't have the correct information.
So their adrenaline is so pumped up and then it's that point of like, oh, well, you've just used up all your adrenaline stores.
So now we're just going to shut down.
And then they go into freeze mode or fawn mode, right? Where they're just like, I don't know what to do.
I'm not a doctor or that core belief of like, what the doctor says is what we need to do.
So now I'm fawning.
I'm fawning.
I'm fawning.
My intuition is telling me speak up, do something, step in.
episiotomy.
And now I'm sitting here watching this doctor perform an episiotomy without telling her that that's, or giving her that option.
Telling her, Hey, this could be something we could be doing right now.
Do you consent to it? I'm sitting here as, as the father watching this happen and I can't do anything.
My body is frozen.
My vocal cords are frozen.
And then it happens.
And then that stress response cycle doesn't get completed.
And so now they are walking around with that feeling of like, I could have done something.
I could have prevented this thing.
Why didn't I stand up? And maybe it's not even conscious.
Maybe it's subconscious, just kind of knowing like I could have, I see her suffering.
I see her going through this.
I see the pain that's happening and I could have prevented it.
It's a feeling of like, I let her down and that's the ultimate like knife to the heart for male partners.
I feel.
Yeah.
And sometimes they can't even put their fingers on it.
Just that, that feeling of like logically and rationally.
I know that.
There's nothing I could have.
I mean, logically and rationally, I know that this is the outcome and maybe I shouldn't have known that I could have said all this.
Nobody told me that I could have said that nobody told me that I could have done this, but I can feel it inside of me that I should have protected her from the outcome.
And that protection piece is so important.
In feeling and this is kind of where we're going to get in a little controversial because I'm going to talk about masculine and feminine energy and.
When I talk about masculine and feminine energy, I'm not talking about man and woman.
I'm talking about yin and yang.
I'm talking about sun and moon.
And if you think about what a yin yang looks like, we have a black piece with a small white dot in the middle and we have a white piece with a small black dot in the middle.
And what that symbolizes is that We have all of this masculine energy, which is civilized by the dark, but within that masculine energy, we still have small pieces of feminine energy and vice versa.
Right? So when a woman is in a birthing space, when a woman is pregnant, when she is in her most feminine energy ever, like birthing a baby is the most feminine essence you will ever have.
And.
That is when your partner needs to show up with that complimentary energy.
That is when your partner, you can't, you have to talk about this ahead of time.
Like if we're talking about feminine energy and the birth experience and labor and delivery, we need the, the, the polar opposite.
We need that space to be protected, which is why I think some.
Of the birth workers out there who carry a lot of masculine energy are so desirable, because it is that we want we want both though right like we want the caregiving which is very feminine energy but we want the protective, the directive, we don't want to be sitting there with a birth worker that's Indecisive and isn't clear and has anxiety and low self worth.
And we're like, what are you doing? I, why am I managing your feelings at this time? I don't want that.
And that's what a lot of women will say too.
Like I'm going through the contractions.
Why am I sitting here catering to you, my partner and your experience of this? Like you're about to faint.
Great.
I am not helping you while you're about to faint.
Like I can't manage you.
Right.
That's masculine energy.
The caretaking is the feminine part, but the like, trying to manage your partner in that moment, that's masculine energy.
And we don't want that.
We want these, these beautiful humans to be embodying so much feminine energy to be able to go through this experience.
So.
That's not to say that there's anything wrong with the partners.
It's just, we need to go back to the beginning and relearn how to show up in the birth experience because this then ultimately impacts their intimacy.
Baby comes, healing begins to happen physically.
You can.
Check off the boxes of things that partner is doing, you know? Yeah.
My partner's, he's a great dad.
He's a great partner.
He's changing bombs.
He's showing up.
He's getting up in the middle of the night.
He's giving bottles.
He's helping me pump.
He's bringing me water.
Like he's doing the things, but I just, Don't feel that connection to him.
And I don't know why.
And that's when we kind of go back to, okay, well, what role did he play in your birth experience? Tell me about what you can remember.
About the environment and how he interacted with the environment.
Oh, there was obstetric violence.
Oh, how did he interact with those medical professionals during that time? Well, he just.
Sat there and did nothing.
And I know logically in my head, like he was frozen and there was nothing he could do, but now I'm in a situation where I feel like I have to keep him at arm's length because he didn't.
Keep me safe, which sounds so bizarre in my head or sound so bizarre out loud saying it, but my heart just feels like you were there and you watched it happen and you couldn't keep me safe.
And I can't convince my body that you are safe.
Yikes.
That's a tough place to be.
Yeah.
Can I tell you something that nobody warns you about? Your partner wants to help.
No, seriously.
I've worked with thousands of families over the last decade, and I have never met a dad who woke up and thought, "You know what sounds fun? Being completely useless during labor.
My nipples are useless, so why try during birth?" The problem isn't that they don't care.
The problem is that no one has taught them what to do.
So when labor starts, they end up standing in the corner, holding your Stanley cup, asking you if you need anything every seven minutes while you're having contractions and contemplating murdering them.
That is exactly why I created Dad Daze.
Dad Daze is my childbirth and postpartum course specifically for husbands.
It teaches them how to support you through labor, advocate for your birth preferences, navigate the hospital policies, provide comfort measures, understand what's happening in each stage of labor so that they can stay off of your case, and confidently step into fatherhood after baby arrives.
But honestly, the biggest transformation isn't what happens in labor, it's what happens after.
Instead of hearing, "Uh, just tell me what to do," or, "Uh, can I help you with anything?" You'll have a partner who already knows what to do, a partner who understands postpartum recovery, a husband who knows exactly how to support you in breastfeeding, and they're not going to start slinging formula your way the first time that you start crying.
They're gonna know that tears are normal for you and the baby, and maybe even them.
A partner who can recognize when you're struggling and knows the resources to contact to support you, a husband who understands that the mental load shouldn't just be on you.
Because the goal isn't for him to help, the goal is for him to actually be an active participant in building your family and in the days after you bring home your baby.
If you're pregnant and you're wondering how to get your partner more involved, head over to thebirthlounge.com/daddaze.
That's D-A-D-D-A-Z-E, and get him prepared before the baby arrives.
Trust me, future you will be very, very grateful.
That's thebirthlounge.com/daddaze.
I wanted to give you a quick heads-up that June 14th through 16th only, you will be able to use the code Dad50, D-A-D-5-0, to save $50 on Dad Daze.
Again, that's Dad50 to save $50 on Dad Days.
This is the best Father's Day gift that you can possibly give your partner if you want to have a stellar pregnancy, birth, and beyond.
Again, use the code Dad50 to save $50 on the Dad Daze course.
See you there So what are you seeing in these couples as far as pattern? So if people had birth trauma and they're sitting there being like, is this me? Like, is this our family? What are some things that these couples might exhibit in terms of, um, I don't even know, would we call this just like survival mode, or like maladaptive coping styles, maybe a little bit of both, and this has nothing to do with whether you want to love your partner or not, it's like, you know, the way that you're each protecting yourself, so, what are you seeing? In terms of themes with these people.
And then I'd love to break down kind of how that does impact intimacy.
Yeah.
I mean, because I go through like this checklist of, of, okay, you're not having sex.
Okay.
You've had small children.
Okay.
There has been birth trauma.
Okay.
It was obstetric violence.
Okay.
He is not meeting your emotional needs.
There's no attunement.
Sex is difficult because now there's resentment and it's not even that it's difficult because there's resentment because of the birth stuff, but the birth stuff is now the cherry on top of the fact that you're mothering.
And caretaking your partner, who is supposed to be in theory, your protector is supposed to be have direction, have clarity, take initiative.
And now you're sitting there, quote unquote, nagging and reminding.
And again, going back to this theme of mothering.
So I mean, and I've talked about this before online.
Our, our brains are not programmed to have sex with children.
Our brains are not programmed.
A healthy brain does not want to be sexual with a child.
So if your brain has compartmentalized this idea of children equals.
No sex, which is healthy.
When your partner starts to act like a child, your brain goes, Oh, okay.
Yeah.
No, we're not doing that with that.
We're caretaking.
No, we don't, that power dynamic does not exist in the world of, of healthy sexuality.
And so now you've just been slotted in with the children.
Where I have to remind you to pick up your clothes and I have to remind you to eat and I have to bring you to your dentist appointments, and I have to ask you to do chores, quote unquote chores, and I have to lay out a list of how you're going to interact with the children during the day.
Like you are now considered a child in my brain and I do not want to have sex with you.
There is nothing.
About that situation.
That is initiative.
That is direction.
That is leadership.
There's nothing about that.
That screams mature, masculine energy.
And if it's not mature, masculine energy, if there's no mature, masculine energy, then by default, a woman cannot experience mature, feminine energy.
Because you need that match, you need that energetic equal, the balancer.
The ying and the yang.
Ah, I love it.
I know there are so many people out there, A, I know there are so many people out there being like, wow, that's...
Why I don't wanna have sex with my husband.
I love him very much and I'm proud of the life that we've built together.
But I don't want to be sexual with him.
Okay.
I also know there are so many people out there being like, wow, this just got so woowoo.
But it has to be that way.
Mm-Hmm.
because it's the essence of the human experience That is what relationships are built off of.
Energy, it's why you started dating your husband.
It's why you decided to stay with that person.
I have a baby with that person.
Okay, so Talk to us a little bit more about that mental load.
I feel like everybody listening out there I guess not everyone the majority of our listeners are probably really dialing into yeah That mental load is tough.
And if you don't have that equal, right? If you, you are partners with another adult to have that equal balance of support.
And so if they have slipped into that realm of the child maybe some tips on how to get out of that.
My inclination is just have a discussion, but then I know there are so many people who have said, I've been having the same discussion for 14 years.
You know, How do we get out of this cycle? Is the answer therapy? I mean, I'm biased, obviously.
The answer isn't always therapy, no.
And you and I had kind of discussed about topics a couple, a couple weeks back, and this is kind of when I go back to this idea of...
Initiation into manhood.
And I want to come away from the controversial topics of manhood, womanhood, gender ideology.
I don't want to go there right now.
And yes, that is definitely a part of, of how I work and I understand and consider it, but Thank I also need to pay attention to the population that I work with and the population that I work with identifies with the term manhood and womanhood.
And so this is again, where my information is coming from is from my clients.
And so when we look at women entering into, when we look at girls entering into womanhood, we have a, we have very concrete.
For the most part examples of, of leaving a phase of life and entering and being initiated into the next phase of life.
So we have our, our menstrual cycle.
So we go from girl to woman.
When we have our menstrual cycle, when we transitioned from woman to mother.
We have a birth experience of some capacity, whether that's fostering adopting it.
And I'm not going to get super specific here, but just becoming a mother is a very transitional experience.
There's a concrete thing that takes place.
And now you are a mother.
And even in talking to clients who foster and adopt and have not had pregnancies but still have children, there is this piece missing for them that they're just like, bam, they're a mother.
And so they have a hard time moving from that.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Now I'm a mom.
Like I, I don't know how to wrap my head around that.
That headspace is, is difficult for me to enter into.
So when I'm looking at that difference between mothers who foster adopt and mothers who have had their own children who have birthed their own biological children, their transitions are so different.
Those are two completely different experiences.
What do men have? Men wake up some teenage morning with the ability to ejaculate semen.
But there's no real indicator that they've Like transitioned to manhood, really? There's no societal experience of I am.
I'm a man now.
I'm not just a boy.
I'm a man now.
And I think that Hollywood really pushed this idea of like, when you have sex for the first time, you are now a man, but like, no, that's not, that's not accurate at all.
And so we have this, Lost art of initiating boys to men.
And I can't remember whose podcast I heard it on.
I want to say it was dad work, Kurt.
I'm not a hundred percent.
So Kurt, if it was on your podcast, I apologize if I don't get it right.
There's this story explained that Cultures, traditional indigenous cultures still kind of practice that initiation into manhood where in this particular tribe, it was the young boy hits a certain age.
I want to say 14, 15.
And the idea is that they go out into the wilderness chaperoned by their father.
The father sets them up by a fire.
It's nighttime.
The father says I am going to blindfold you and you are going to stay by the fire for the whole night.
And in the morning you are going to navigate your way back to the village, but you have no idea how you got to this.
You were blindfolded.
And so the initiation is the boy.
Sitting through the darkness and this in the fear of what's out there and the fear of not knowing if he's going to survive and not being able to take off the blindfold and sitting by the fire as and having the fire as their only source of protection.
And then attempting to navigate their way back the next day and surviving the wilderness and et cetera, et cetera.
There's a caveat to that story and that the father is with them the whole time and they just don't actually know and their father is there protecting them.
So it's still that idea of.
I'm not going to let anything happen to my son, but I also want my son to know that he can do hard shit and do it by himself.
And so, because we've lost this art of initiating man boys into manhood, but women are still being initiated into womanhood and still being initiated into motherhood men are also.
Not experiencing anything about initiating into fatherhood outside of, Oh, here's your baby.
We're here you go.
We're giving you this baby because we've lost this sense of community and we've lost the sense of a village, even for men.
And.
Even this sense of like providing, we have so many instances of men with severe depression.
And when we, when we talk about depression in men, we go back to this idea of they're, they're not feeling fulfilled in their life.
They're not providing for their family.
The number one stressor for men is finances.
Through and through.
Why? Because finance equals providing.
So yeah, we might not out, might not be out hunting and gathering, but men who are out working jobs that they're bringing home money to provide for their family.
And again, we can get into gender stereotypes, but this is what I'm seeing this idea of like, I don't feel fulfilled as a man, unless I'm going out into the world and working for an income and coming home and giving my family the ability to eat and have a roof over their head and do the things.
And it's not to say that I don't want my wife doing those things too, or I just, I, as a man want to be able to do that, to feel fulfilled.
So then when we have this, Even with COVID.
Okay.
Now so many people have lost their jobs.
So many people are not working.
We see depression and men skyrocket because they're not able to pay their bills and they see their family suffering.
They're not able to fulfill that mature masculine role in that sense.
So initiation from, from manhood to fatherhood is not as evident as it used to be.
And It is not as prominent for men as it is for women.
So what we're seeing is this uptick in what I would call like the man child, which I think a lot of partners would say, yeah, I have, I also would say that the experiences that I'm going through in my marriage would be classified as having a man child, but just these men who.
Aren't able to hold space for their partners, aren't able to do things for themselves, cannot take initiation, are are stuck in this shameful little boy critical mother dynamic.
So they're so afraid of criticism, they're so afraid of doing things wrong, that they just hide and don't do anything.
And then the partner takes on the shameful mother role, where it's kind of like, you do nothing, you don't help me.
I'm telling you I need help.
And then they cower into that shameful little boy.
And they're like, Oh, poor me, poor me.
Right.
And so when we, when we're talking about how do we move away from that dynamic, it's, it's complex.
It has to be very Choreographed almost, because if you're asking a woman to step out of her masculine, because she's had to step into her masculine to fill the gap of her partner, right? Because again, yin and yang, if he's gonna, if he's not going to be in his masculine, somebody has to be in their masculine and it's going to be her.
And then by default, he steps into a feminine role, whether that's immature or mature feminine, it doesn't really matter.
He just takes on that feminine role.
I have never seen a mature masculine man and a mature woman in a hetero cyst dynamic ever, ever.
So if we're going to talk about women stepping away from that masculine energy and allowing the space for their husband to lead, they need to be able to trust that that's, what's going to happen.
Cause we're asking her to surrender.
We're asking her to say, I trust that you have this.
I'm just gonna take a step back.
I'm not gonna micromanage.
I'm not gonna criticize.
I'm not gonna tell you how to do A, B, and C.
I'm just gonna take a step back and Let you take the reins, but there has to be trust there because if he doesn't step up then things are going to fall apart.
Oh, I'm sorry.
You wanted to be in charge of taking our kids to camp.
Okay.
Well, camp started two hours ago and our kids still aren't there.
I was taking a back seat to this because you were supposed to be taking the reins and leading, but now it's not getting done.
And if it's that meme, who's gonna do it? Like, if you don't do it, who's gonna do it? Right.
So there does need to be this dynamic conversation in a partner being able to say, I want to surrender.
I want to take a step back.
When we look at what.
Equates healthy, mature, feminine energy.
We're talking about intuition, surrender, sensitivity, nurture, openness, free flowing.
And when we look at healthy, masculine energy, mature, masculine energy, we're talking about protection, direction, stability, clarity, certainty.
The number one intimacy killer.
Or the intimacy killer for healthy, mature, feminine energy is feeling unseen, unsafe, or misunderstood.
And the intimacy killer for healthy.
Mature, masculine energy is being criticized, micromanaged, or shut out.
So if a male partner is going to sit there and say, stop nagging me, let me figure it out.
Let me do this.
Then the partner can go, okay, you might not get it right, but you'll vent.
You are committed to doing it enough for me to be able to step back and say, okay, I can, I can let you figure it out.
But he has to be want, he has to want to get there and yeah, of course it doesn't vice versa to that.
If, if that female is always pushing her partner away you know, not letting them in, not trusting them, that's equally as bad.
Totally.
Yeah.
Okay.
So how did we get here? That the American culture has no initiation of manhood if this is something that cultures used to do How did how'd we get here as a nation? I think that's a great question.
And I think that there's probably a lot of controversy in the hypotheses around that I think that Helicopter parenting and bulldozer parenting had a lot to do with it again.
Maybe this is just a correlation, but if we look at when helicopter parenting really started and which generations it started with, we can kind of start thinking about, okay, which generations are really struggling with the idea of uh, the man child, really, and if I think back to it.
I mean, the baby boomer generation have their own hangups for sure, but I would say that it would be very rare within the baby boomer generation to find a quote unquote man child and for good or for bad, right? There was still a lot of unhealthy.
Toxic masculinity messaging from that generation, right? Boys don't cry toughen up man up.
Those are still very toxic messages.
We're now just coming into a generation of parents that are saying.
Like a child being able to do something on their own and build that confidence and risk take and build independence is important where where past generations did not prioritize those things.
I just need to make sure I do everything for my child.
My child is safe.
My child never goes without my child never suffers.
No negative quote unquote negative.
Emotions are either good or bad, and I don't want to see negative emotions.
So I'm going to set my child up for happiness and no struggle and no challenges.
So we never had young men who had to face hardships and should they face them alone? No, they shouldn't be facing them alone.
It's a parent saying, Hey.
This is fucking hard.
I get it.
I understand and I'm here with you and I'm not going to criticize you and I'm also not going to take this problem away from you because this is your problem to handle.
Man, that's so powerful.
I have recently been digging into, um, your parents and how they were parented.
And how that impacts the way you were parented.
So essentially, I've been looking into my own parents parenting style when they were parenting me and how that was impacted by the way they were parented.
And I think that this conversation is very much intertwined into that because the way you were parented, is just so like enmeshed in all of this, your coping strategies, the way you respond and react to these things.
The way that you come back and reunite with your partner, the way that you communicate those things.
So.
All right.
I have a million, million questions.
I would love to talk about, I think, as we wrap up here, two pieces of our partner or dynamics that we have to consider.
And I think it's good for you to know this about your partner regardless.
And if you don't know these things about your partner, It's never too late to look into them.
Like if you're in a relationship, you should know this stuff.
So do it today, right? And that is your your partner's love language and their learning styles.
So we talked a lot about the way that we help our partners feel equipped and ready to take on, confident to take on that responsibility of helping prevent birth trauma.
relies a lot in the education they get beforehand, right? We talked about it can't happen in the moment.
It's got to be building blocks that we have laid down before you are in labor.
If you're looking for something that is geared towards you and your partner, the birth lounge is a great childbirth education.
It's my membership.
So doors open four times a year.
Be sure to check that out.
It's just the birth launch.
Com.
But within this education, I think understanding these deeper puzzle pieces of your partner, like their love language and their learning styles can be very beneficial.
Can you talk to us about how you might go about learning those two things about your partner and also how this is gonna impact.
Their role in preventing birth trauma, your communication in pregnancy, labor, postpartum, and maybe even how it plays a role in your intimacy.
Mm hmm.
Mm hmm.
So, your learning style and your love language are...
Are very easily accessible.
You have to just sit down as a, as a couple and like do the quiz.
So, I mean, they're very pathologized in that sense of like, Oh, here you answer some questions on an assessment and you have an answer.
So when we have learning styles, we have visual.
We have auditory, also musical.
We have physical or kinesthetic solidarity, social, mathematical, verbal for the most part.
I think there might be another one in there, but not one that comes to mind.
So if we are trying to communicate something to our partner, like a need or an expectation that we have, and we don't know their learning style, we could be.
Approaching it all wrong.
Right.
And for all of the early childhood educators and the, and the teachers listening, you know, this, you know, that you can tell a child that one plus one equals two all day long, but if they are not auditory learners and they, they can't hear you in the sense of like, they're not picking up that information because they're not auditory and maybe they're visual learners.
And or sorry, I mean, I guess that would fall under verbal, but it may be their visual learner.
So then you have to go to the board and you have to write one plus one equals two.
And that's how they're going to learn.
Then that's how you have to adapt, right? And we see this with, with young boys.
And I'm saying I'm boys because I have two sons where if I.
Tell my son.
Okay.
One plus one equals two.
He's going to be like, what? I didn't hear you.
What, what, what? I didn't hear you.
But if I do something like, okay, put your body in this hula hoop.
And now let's put another body in this hula hoop.
How many bodies do we have in this hula hoop? And he's moving his body around and interacting with the hula hoop.
He's going to remember that much more than he is going to remember me verbally saying to him.
One plus one equals two.
So figuring out what your partner's learning style is, is going to be helpful in how you deliver information to them, right? If you say to them something like, Hey, listen, I really appreciate when I'm done pumping.
If you could come and get the pump parts and wash them out and sanitize them and have them ready for me to do again in two hours from now, if they're like, Not verbal learners and they're hearing you and they're distracted with something else.
They're just going, Oh, okay.
Huh.
Yeah, no problem.
But if they're like physical or kinesthetic learners where you have to bring them over and set that expectation of like, I need you to wash, come to me.
Here you go.
Take them.
Next step, go to the sink and wash them, sanitize them.
Next step, go to the dry rack, put them here.
What you just did with like me supervising, yes, it's micromanaging, but you're trying to create that baseline, right? Like I'm showing you exactly what my expectations are.
Now you've physically done it and you can replicate that.
It's burned into your brain.
You got it now.
Yes.
Yes.
Right.
Never hand model on this.
A hundred percent, a hundred percent.
Right.
And I see this with couples too, when we're talking about things in theory in session, where she might say something like, you know, I just, I would, I would really appreciate a little more attention when we're, when we're even like through foreplay, I would just appreciate more attention on, on less.
genital body parts.
I would like more attention on my neck and more attention on my lower back.
And I just need that buildup.
And he's going, okay.
Okay.
And then they come back to session and I'm like, so how'd that go? He's like, well I kissed her neck.
And I'm like, is that all you picked up from that? Like, that's all you heard from that.
Okay.
So let's face each other.
I want you to put his hand on your body, on the places that you want him to touch.
When you're moving into that foreplay space.
And so by him physically doing it, he's like, Oh, these are all the okay places that I can touch.
Right.
So you really have to learn how you have to understand how does your partner learn best.
And I'm really coming at this from like a Female to male perspective, but opposite also I haven't had any instances where men have been sitting in session and have said she just doesn't understand it when I'm speaking to her, unless it has to do with like logical mathematical instances where women are like, yeah, my brain doesn't work mathematically.
When you're telling me about finances, literally my brain goes to mush.
So I need to see a visual representation, or I need to see something different that displays it that way.
That's kind of the only place that I can, I I'm seeing that and love languages are the same.
There's quizzes that you can do finding out what your partner's primary love languages are.
And the number one thing that you have to remember is that cannot speak your love language to your partner.
That's not how that works.
Your partner feels most loved when you speak their love language, not when you speak your own love language.
So if your partner's primary love language is acts of service, and yours is physical touch.
If your partner says something like, I don't know, I'm just feeling like a little bit disconnected and you're like, Oh, touchy, touchy, touchy, touchy, I'm going to touch you everywhere.
What's wrong? You know, I'm showing you love.
I'm showing you affection.
And they're like, what? That is your love language.
You want to be touched.
Now I'm just feeling extra unseen and extra unappreciated.
And like, all you think about is yourself because you attack me with your love language instead of.
Trying to learn and oftentimes I hear men say like I'm just not romantic.
I'm just not a romantic guy Well fucking learn learn then it's not hard.
That's that is weaponized incompetence Yeah, learn how to be romantic.
Yeah weaponized.
Oh my god incompetence.
We could just Do a whole episode on that for sure.
You know, I really walked away with is like You know, women are superior, for sure.
We are the better half in a lot of these things and so many aspects.
Oh my goodness, I know.
And I joke around, but.
And so many cultures before this culture.
Yeah.
Women were, like, Goddesses, literal goddesses and to experience a woman during menstruation to be present during childbirth, like you were in the presence of a walking goddess.
And we lost that along the way.
And I would really love to get back to that place.
Yeah.
And there are, there are good.
Men out there.
I mean, there are great partners, but there are good men if you have a shitty partner Male or female and and they are not doing that the things that you know you think that you need or you feel like you need to help your mental health or Make your house run or lighten your mental load or feel fulfilled So You guys um, don't let them off the hook by just saying, well, that's just the way that they are.
You deserve better.
And quite frankly, I believe that self help and it improves everybody involves life, even the people who are resistant to it.
Everybody will benefit.
So you deserve better.
And your partner deserves better.
Chances are, if you're feeling unfulfilled, your partner probably has some unfulfilled places as well.
Yeah.
And I mean, even when we look at instances of perinatal mental health and we go back to what's your partner's role, how is your partner supporting you? So if there hasn't been a birth trauma experience and you had a great birth and you had a great labor, but like, God, like you're just feeling all these things.
Okay.
How was your, if you're choosing to breastfeed, how's your breastfeeding journey going? And then.
Like, what is your partner's role in this? Well, you know, I was expected to get up and take care of the kids and he was sleeping in.
And again, like, I don't mean to, to criticize men by any means, but when I'm working with women and I'm like, okay, like he really, and this is why when women come to therapy and they're like, yeah, I have postpartum depression.
And I'm like, and you're here by yourself.
No, your partner needs to be in session too.
We need to, you are a system, you are a family system and you can't carry that mental load of, I am the broken one.
I have depression.
I need to fix myself.
He plays a role in this too.
And he has to know what his accountability is and all of this and his responsibility.
God, I love that and I love even more and I know this is a big ass financially But if you have the means to do couples therapy and then in conjunction do individual therapy at the same time you'll have to be with a different therapist, but it is just it's magical and you can make leaps and bounds so quickly.
It's like it's just like a full Relationship reboot.
It's powerful stuff.
I'm I obviously am a huge huge proponent of therapy I'm open about mental health online and I'm always encouraging it on all of my platforms.
And then, you know, I have people like Ashley on the podcast to help normalize it.
Mental health is a really tough thing.
And it's always been around, so you're not broken and this isn't new.
It may be new to you and it may feel scary to you, but there's a lot of us out there who've been doing this work in this space for a long, long, long, long time.
And we're not scared.
And so you can bring your fear to us and we can help you.
Manage that.
Ashley, this has been such an amazing conversation.
I have like cried on the inside for people.
I've cheered.
I have had mind blowing moments.
I have had like, oh my god, that makes so much sense moments.
Is there anything else that you want to share with our audience before? We log off.
Great question.
It's always like, well, first of all, it's, it's wonderful sitting here and having a host in a podcast that is like genuinely listening.
And I can, I'm, I'm reading your body language on the video and I can see like your emotional experience and just having these conversations.
And I love that so much.
So I really appreciate that.
Secondly, if people are looking to explore their intimacy, their relationship with just intimacy in general, not specifically with birth trauma and intimacy, but with intimacy on my Instagram, I have a link tree in that link tree.
There's an Etsy link to a workbook that you can download to understand your relationship with emotional intimacy, your relationship with sexual intimacy.
And.
If that isn't what you want, there's also something that you can download for exploring physical intimacy through sexuality with your partner.
It's sensuality based, so it's going to look like exploring different parts of your body.
It's based on the sense it myth, sensate method.
If anybody knows what that is it's just saying like the goal is not orgasm.
The goal is not climax.
So let's focus on what sensations come up.
For us, let's focus on being present with certain body parts and taking note of what's happening without getting to the climax as like the goal here.
So if anybody's interested in either of those things, those are available.
Yeah, I think that's it.
Okay.
You mentioned your Instagram.
Where can they find you? Yes.
Instagram.
So my clinic is at mindonline.
ca and my personal page is at the rogue.
therapist.
I love it.
I love that name.
I love it.
All right, you guys, this has been so much fun.
I always love hanging out with y'all every single week.
If you are listening to this on the podcast, go over to YouTube and you can see Ashley and I's beautiful face.
If you are watching on YouTube, pop over to the podcast and per usual, everyone head to Instagram and follow me at Tranquility by HeHe and then also the.birth.lounge
all right, you guys, until next time, bye! Thank you so much for tuning in today.
I love hanging out with you, and it is an honor to be your go-to gal when it comes to preparing for your baby.
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