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When you're healing from sexual abuse, it can be challenging to explain certain aspects about your trauma and how it shows up in the relationship to your partner or potential partner. Sometimes explaining things can trigger similar feelings around the abuse- whether it's reliving certain aspects of the details, feeling like they don't believe you or that what you went through wasn't actually that bad. Sometimes it can cause some to feel as though their partner is using coercion when they forget details or boundaries or have confusion or questions around your relational/intimacy needs. Many survivors of abuse ultimately desire a loving partnership they can trust to be safe and able to hold space for the complexities of how their trauma impacted them. Safe, long-term loving partners of survivors oftentimes desire to understand their partner's world and how to help them but often struggle with their own feelings of loneliness, insecurity that they need support around. Asking their partner, the survivor of abuse, can be too much for that person to also hold so it can be helpful for many partners to find outside support for themselves. Below is a list of current resources for partners of survivors of past sexual abuse. If you have any resources you'd like to add or are running a current support group either local to Austin or virtually, please reach out or let me know in the comments below!  Groups local to the Austin area:
1. The Sexual Healing Journey by Wendy Maltz
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 Whether you’re having recurring thoughts about accidentally dropping your baby down the stairs on your way down, falling on that sharp kitchen knife while baby wearing, or being so sleep deprived that you sleep through your baby’s cries for hours on end, causing them to die in their sleep, you are not alone.. These thoughts can be scary- alarming even for many parents. So what gives? Am I losing my mind? Does my partner need to sleep with one eye open? Should I walk myself to a psychiatric hospital now? Call CPS and let them know I need to be locked up in prison? The short answer: most likely, no.  There can be an overwhelming sense of power over another life that comes with becoming a parent. For some, that can feel pretty scary. Before now, you might have only ever been in charge of yourself except on the rare occasion or if you had a pet.
In the world of perinatal mental health, we use the terms ego-dystonic and ego-syntonic. Using the example above of harming our baby, ego-dystonic behavior would look like having the scary thought and then feeling distressed about having the thought. You might even have reactionary thoughts to the scary thoughts that sound like: “What do all these disturbing thoughts say about me?” or “What kind of parent thinks about these things?” or even still “I think I’m losing my mind.. No normal person thinks about these things”. Notice in the above examples, the common thread between them is feeling disturbed or distressed about the scary thoughts they’re having. They really don’t want to be having those thoughts. In other words, ego-dystonic thoughts are just that… thoughts. If anything, the more distressing they are to you, the less worried about actually harming your baby a perinatal mental health therapist will likely be. Granted, the thoughts can still feel scary but they don’t say anything about you as a parent. That said, ego-dystonic thoughts can be indicative of an underlying need in the form of: sleep, support, nurturance, or community care as examples. If you’re having ego-dystonic thoughts about harming yourself or others, reach out to a trained perinatal mental health therapist, Postpartum Support International's website, reproductive psychiatrist, or even your OBGYN for help. Beyond that, the book “Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts” is a fantastic read for normalizing some of motherhood’s underbelly.. And finding support/other non-judgmental moms to open up to (more on that in another post). **Please note: If your thoughts are ego-syntonic, the thoughts of harm feel like the right thing to do or in line with your values/beliefs, you have impaired reality testing, and/or delusional thoughts about harming yourself or your baby, it’s important to get help right away. Don’t wait. You can find non-judgmental support and resources on the PSI website right now.  I don’t think anything can ever match the intensity of what it’s like to be a new mom, recovering from birth and learning how to parent a human for the first time. There are so many new things to learn, you don’t truly know the difference between what is considered okay vs what is a sign that maybe you might want to see a doctor, your nipples hurt or your hands are dry from cleaning so many bottles, and you’re trying to navigate a completely new stage of life while keeping a tiny human alive all with no or very little sleep for the first time. There is a lot to be said for how much the first baby can impact your mental health… but what about when you have 2 children?
I think, just like many other parents do, I just assumed that going from 1 to 2 would be the same as going from 0-1 except for maybe a little more management between both kids and a little less learning of new things. And while those things were true, I think there are a few things that New-Mom-of-2 part of me would have liked to know during my transition from 1-2 kids. *Note- all kids, age gaps, amount of support/help, and situations are different and this is just based off my experiences and the experiences I most commonly hear about in my work with perinatal mental health therapy sessions with clients who have worked with me and in consultation groups with other perinatal mental health therapists and perinatal mental health trainings. 1. You never sleep.. No… Really.. Yep, even more than that. My oldest was 2 years and 2 months old when my son was born.. And while many 2 year olds are still taking naps.. Mine, like many other toddlers, wanted to have a sense of control about things and felt like she didn’t need a nap (she really did). My toddler started protesting naps right when my son was born which led to quiet time in her room instead. While many parents might not have an oldest child who is protesting a nap- most would say their kid either didn’t need a nap when baby was born or their nap schedule was exactly during baby’s wake window.. Meaning, as soon as one went to sleep and you could finally get some sleep after a sleepless night, the other one was awake. Now this blog post is not here to try to scare anyone but more to note that a lack of sleep can be extremely harmful to our mental health. Knowing it’s coming before baby #2 can give you some time to prepare. More on this in part 2. 2. Guilt for my oldest Leave it to a new baby to bring out all of your guilt about how much your relationship has changed since having them. You used to have so much quality time with them and now it seems like all the time you get with them are moments when you are sleep-deprived, not really present, or even irritable. If you are in a good headspace, you might notice that you constantly feel pulled to be with your baby as soon as you sit down with your oldest. There are so many instances in which moms feel guilty for their first born after baby. One thing I found helpful to remember is that just like when we first brought our first born into the world, we had to split up the other areas of our life, too. No longer did I spend countless hours devoted to my husband, work, family, friends after becoming a mom. Babies come in with countless demands and take up quite a bit of space in those early days when it comes to the pie chart of your life. I had to be strategic about my time and grieve for some of the ways I used to be able to show up in other relationships and roles. Just like you did before, you will eventually adjust to the new redistribution of your time in your pie chart of life. There are just some growing pains along the way. 3. Guilt for my new baby I knew leading up to birth that I would probably feel guilty for my oldest after baby was born. I was not prepared for also feeling guilty as a mom towards my new baby. When I wasn’t being needed by my baby, I was needed by my oldest. I moved back and forth between the two and never got to feel truly present with my youngest in the way I was with my youngest as a baby. She had my undivided attention and he got his basic needs met and a whole lot of splitting his time with his oldest sibling. Many moms can struggle with the feeling of hoping that we aren’t messing our second born up by way of forming a secure attachment with them early on. I don’t know who needs to hear this right now but if you or a caregiver you trust are responding to most of your baby’s needs and cries for help with warmth- you are doing exactly what you need to help create a strong, secure attachment bond with them. 4. Overstimulation As an ADHD mom, nothing in the world could have prepared me for how overstimulated I would become after having baby #2. Suddenly there was noise.. Always.. All the time… and dirty dishes and laundry that never seemed to ever stay clean for long.. And toys… oh, the toys.. All over the place toys. Everything always felt so overstimulating in a way I had never experienced before even having ADHD. Over time, I was able to come up with some strategies for dealing with overstimulation which tremendously helped. For one, I accepted my fate when I felt overstimulated and would do one of 2 things: 1 being that I started picking things up right then as the activity of the day or 2 being that I took care of my nervous system first by getting fresh air, going on a walk, taking a shower/washing my face, turning down the lights, and/or putting in earbuds or calming music to mute/mellow out the other noises going on around me. Finally, there are many more ways I’m sure I skipped (part two in the future?), but one thing to take away from this is that this is a BIG ADJUSTMENT. Many of the moms I work with feel like the people around them won’t be as understanding about this being hard because it’s their second. Sometimes it’s the *us* in the equation who struggles with self-compassion going through this transition and not so much the other people in our lives. Just like you went through a transitional period of time with your first you may have logged in your brain as something akin to the “new mom” era, this season of your life equally deserves a chapter to be named in your book of life.. Might I suggest- this is your “new mom of two children” era. |
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