Latest / The Reformed Tired Girls Club Podcast / Raise Your Hand if You've Ever Been Personally Victimized by Birth Control
Transcript
- Heather Copfer: Hey girl, hey, welcome back to another episode of the Reformed Tired Girls Club podcast. I am your host, Heather. And as per usual, if you like this episode, love this episode, love the podcast, and want to leave a quick review, a like, comment, subscribe, any of that good stuff, like I tell you, it helps me, it helps the podcast out. Really, really appreciate it if you feel called to do it. Okay, so here's the thing. I don't think it's un Common for women to have had bad experiences on hormonal birth control. And as per usual, I always preface this. I don't think I need to preface this every single episode, but I'm going to let you know that I'm just speaking on my personal experience. Okay. My experience is not the same as your experience or her experience or her experience. This is all talking about my experience that is unique to me. And if you have a different experience and want to share your story about your experience with hormonal b hormonal birth control, drop it in the comments. If you are watching this on TikTok, YouTube, I would love to hear about it. ⁓ because we're gonna get into my birth control story today and how my body became so dependent on birth control that I physically could not come off of it. And I had to hire somebody to help me come off of it. So I went on hormonal birth control when I was 18 years old. And I used it as a band-aid solution for my acne, primarily, right? Other things too, but let's be honest here. I primarily went on it for my acne. But let's also be so for real right now. Who taught us how to track our cycles? Were you ever taught that as a young girl? I wasn't taught that as a young girl. Were you taught about the fertility awareness methods? Likely not. I wasn't. Okay. How crazy that no one taught me. How to pay attention to my body, what it meant during different times of the month when certain things were going on down there. Okay. Crazy. Crazy that no one taught me. It was just like, ⁓ you don't want to get pregnant? Birth control. ⁓ you want to get rid of your acne? Birth control. Because God forbid, someone taught us how our body actually works and how to support it naturally. You know? God forbid. God forbid. No, ⁓ I had to learn that myself on my own as an adult. But yeah, so I went on hormonal birth control when I was 18 years old. And I will be really honest with you. At the time I had my cystic chronic acne, my pepperoni-faced acne, and going on a specific type of birth control. I went to Plan Parenthood and I was like, listen. It was like right after my 18th birthday. I was like, listen here. I know you have a specific type of birth control that's gonna target my acne. I need this to go away. Let's have it. Let's have it. And I was on hormonal birth control for I think around seven years and it did get rid of my acne. I will tell you that it absolutely did. But I will tell you that birth control was a band-aid solution because when I tried coming off birth control multiple times, guess what happened? My acne came back. Mm-hmm. But yeah, okay. So I'm 18 years old, freshly 18. I go to play in parenthood. I get the pill and I'm on it for around seven years. And I can pretty confidently say that hormonal birth control, I don't think it contributed to my depression. I I've heard stories of women feeling very depressed ⁓ when they were on birth control, but I don't think it contributed to mine because I was already experiencing depression before I went on birth control. I've talked about my depression on previous episodes, so go back and check those out if you're interested to hear more about my Journeying with depression and what that was like. So I was around 23, 24. I was like mid 20s when I decided that I wanted to come off birth control. Like I said, I was just tired of taking a pill every single day. And I I noticed that I wasn't very consistent with it anymore. And when I would miss a pill, I would double up sometimes. And when I doubled up, my body did not like that. And I felt very, very terrible. So I tried once. To come off the pill. And my acne immediately came back. My face started breaking out. And I had the most insane mood swings I have ever experienced in my freaking life. And I was like, I don't know what's happening to me. I am dying. I'm gonna go back on the pill. Immediately went back on the pill. I was like, okay, all is well. I don't know what the hell that was, but I don't want to experience that again. So I was like, we're gonna stick to birth control for now. Tried coming off birth control. again to try to see if that was just some kind of like freak accident. Same thing happens. Worse. Worse. And I I I can't even describe the mood swings to y'all because I felt like a freaking crazy person. And I'm like, ⁓ my God. Okay. I need to go back on the pill. Pill, pill me, pill me. And I was like, okay. So my body is revolting when I try to go off birth control. And I was like, you know what? I need to figure this out because obviously this is not good for me. This is not good for my body. And coming off birth control, my body physically cannot come off birth control. And I'm like, and I'm like instinctively, I'm like, this something's that this is not good. This is not good. We gotta figure this out. So I ended up coming across a health coach on I think it was TikTok, maybe it was Instagram, one of the two. And this health coach, she was a specialized hormone health coach. And one of the things she helped her clients with was transitioning off birth control. And I was like, I don't even know this was a thing, but I need this. And I'm also a person where I'm like, what the what the fuck do I know? I don't, I don't know everything. I don't know everything. And I don't have like a big ego to be like, I'm gonna figure this out myself or like this isn't true. This isn't gonna work. I'm like, you're an expert in what you say you're an expert in. Great. Help me. Help me. So I hired this girl and I joined a program and it was it it was very holistic and it was a group program and I there was a course with it as well. So I got a lot of education out of it as well. I learned a lot about my body and my food and my nutrients and how birth control has depleted my body. And it was just such a mega eye opener. I believe I've talked about this before, how this birth control story and this moment of me working with this coach was kind of the beginning of me going down a path of becoming a health coach because it truly did change my life. But long story short, at the end of the program, through this health coach's guidance, I was able to transition off of birth control safely without any side effects. None. Zero. I was mind-blown. And you may be wondering, well, how do you prevent pregnancy? You know? ⁓ something else that I also learned throughout this program and working with this health coach was what the different phases of my cycle are, the the windows that I am able to get pregnant, you know, we're talking about your follicular phase, your ovulation phase, your luteal phase, your menstrual phase. In learning what's happening in your body and how to measure your basal body temperature, how to gauge your cervical mucus, to to know if you're ovulating. Like no one ever taught me that. No one ever taught me that. And if you're grossed out by that, I'm not sorry. That's just basic human bodily functions. So get used to it. And I've been off birth control. I'm 31 now. I've been off birth control for five plus years. I've been with my partner for nine years and I've never gotten pregnant. So There are other ways other than birth control. But if you are on birth control, again, I'm I'm always like, I feel like I'm a broken record a lot of time because I always say things like, I'm always speaking on my experience. This is no shade. If you do this, never, never judgment, never shade. And I'm always gonna make that clear. Okay. But tell me, if you're watching this on YouTube, if you're watching this on TikTok, or wherever you're watching this, let me know in the comments what is your experience with hormonal birth control? Did you have any bad side effects that you noticed? Did you not have any bad side effects and you were fine on birth control and you were able to come off of it easily and get pregnant easily after coming off birth control. Like, I want to know. I want to know. I want to hear from you. I want to know your stories. And I think it'll be helpful to other women as well and men if you're here. Hi, hi men. To to hear what it's like to be on birth control and to experience these side effects. Because I think it's You know, ladies, you could probably relate where you've probably been called crazy or or you've been looked at like, well, what the hell is wrong with you? And you maybe have major PMS and mood swings and, you know, who knows, whacked out hormones causing these side effects. It's not your fault. It's not our fault. And you know, there are still people out there that do not know that you can only get pregnant a certain amount of days out of the month. I had a conversation with a woman not that long ago where I had mentioned that and she looked at me like I was crazy and had five heads. And was like, ⁓ you have like a like a five day window. You know, like you you can't get pregnant just any day of the month. And she was baffled. But I digress. I digress. Like I said, I've been on first control for five plus years, never gotten pregnant. It's the best thing that ever happened to me. And I went down a rabbit hole of learning about supporting my body naturally. I became a health coach and here I am today talking to you about my experience at home. Hopefully, hopefully this ⁓ resonates with you to some extent, lets you know that you are not alone. I see you. I want to hear from you. And yeah, I hope you enjoyed this episode and just want to say thanks as always for being here and being part of the community and joining, tuning in for another episode of the Reformed Tired Girls Club podcast. Per usual, I'll see you next week.