#speakthesecret
Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts
“This thread is amazing. Needs to be turned into a list and handed out to expecting moms by every ob/gyn. They tell women everything under the sun about what to expect for 9 months; why not this?!”
“I think it’s wonderful you’re making this list for new moms. It would have been reassuring for me to know I was ‘normal'”
“Scary Thoughts” is an expression used to encompass any and all categories of upsetting thinking that can interfere with the well-being of a new mother. Scary thoughts refer to negative, repetitive, unwanted and/or intrusive thoughts or images that can bombard you at any time (Dropping the Baby and Other Scary Thoughts by Kleiman & Wenzel, 2010). Scary thoughts are anxiety-driven, they are extremely COMMON, and most new mothers admit that have, at some time, imagined or worried about harm coming to their babies. The shame of having these thoughts can prevent women from speaking about them. In response to women telling us they feel isolated and ashamed of their thoughts, we asked women to share their scary thoughts in an attempt to help them express these distressing ruminations, so they can get relief and also help other mothers understand how universal this phenomenon is.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Thoughts of suicide are scary, but they are in a different category from anxiety-driven “scary thoughts” to which we refer on this page. If you are having thoughts of suicide, this should always be taken seriously and we urge you to find someone you trust and let them know how you are feeling.
The objective of our #speakthesecret campaign is to obliterate the stigma attached to scary thoughts which are so common in new motherhood.
Our page is an ongoing list of the thoughts that brave women have chosen to share in the hopes of helping women know they are not alone and that having scary thoughts is common during pregnancy and the postpartum period. We will add thoughts as they are submitted.
DISCLAIMER: This list is anonymous. We do not ask for any identifying information and therefore are unable to contact you. You can contact us at any time if you want to modify or delete your submission. We reserve the right to edit or not include a submission if, for any reason, we feel its content is unsuitable for this forum and are not able to respond to individual clinical or medical concerns. We may decide to create a meme from your words which may be (anonymously) posted on various social media platforms.
Please keep in mind that this forum is not a substitute for professional intervention and submitting your scary thought will NOT give you access to treatment. There is no follow-up after you post. If you are worried about the way you feel, we urge you to contact a support person and a qualified healthcare provider. If you need assistance locating a provider who can help you, please email us at support@postpartumstress.com.
My baby was going to die in the middle of the night and I was going to find her in her crib cold and lifeless.
My second daughter needed oxygen when born and was in NICU for 12+ hours. I keep thinking "what if she had died". I keep thinking what would happen to my family if I died, what would I do and how would I cope if my husband died.
I think about my children being abused by others and how devastating that would be. How I would end up in prison for attacking anyone who dares hurt my family.
I keep checking to make sure my girls, especially my baby, are still breathing when they're asleep. I'm scared I'll find one of them dead in bed.
I'm scared I'll trip and fall while holding my baby, or will accidentally stab or burn my kids while I'm cooking. Or that my eldest will run into an oncoming car. Or that I'll end up in a car accident while driving and my girls are in the back.
These thoughts are insidious and feel normalised but show the mental toll of parenthood/motherhood.
I’m reluctant to share or speak out about my thoughts because I am extremely protective over my baby and my situation. Someone might think I’m complaining or that I’m unhappy being a mum, unhappy with my baby. The thought of someone thinking I feel negatively towards my baby in any way makes me feel sick, angry and defensive because he is my entire world and I adore him how dare you think I’m even slightly unhappy with him. Also someone else may blame my baby for causing me to be unwell, or make the point that it’s his birth and existence causing these thoughts but how dare they think negatively in any way about my baby. I’m am so fiercely protective of him, even from myself. People will say ‘newborns are hard work with these sleepless nights’ and I go into protective angry mode stating no he’s not hard work at all and start in an extremely defensive protective reaction. People are getting the wrong idea they may think I’m not extremely in love and grateful and in love with him. People are gonna think negatively about him or towards him or think that I do. How dare they. This causes a barrier in me getting any help or support.
I am so terrified of traumatizing my son in some way. I’m afraid of him being sexually abused. I’m worried about him dying of SIDs.
I'm so sad I can't breastfeed my baby. I did everything to try...I'm using mass produced formula and feel like she's just going to be another cog in the wheel of being addicted to processed foods. All I wanted was for her to have natural food from her mama and I can't give it to her. Nobody understands...
Intrusive thoughts of harm to my family are exhausting me and ruining my life.
While we're out and about, I have visions of my child running into traffic, escaping from a train, or falling into water, etc. Like I actually see this happen in my mind's eye. It's terrifying.
I was a prosecutor for a while. It made me hyper aware. I'm scared someone will sexually abuse my son and I have no real way to prevent it. I'm also scared someone will take inappropriate images or "misuse" images of him. That time made me a better lawyer and impacted people's lives. But I regret the vicarious trauma and sometimes wish it had never happened so I could be blissfully ignorant since these situations are not something I can meaningfully control or avert.
My husband wants more kids. I do too. Truly. But I was in labor with our first (an IVF baby, so there's a whole lot of emotion pent up in that as well) for nearly 4 days. After he was finally born by emergency c section, I swelled up like Violet Beaureguarde in Willy Wonka. I couldn't bend my legs to sit on the toilet and my skin started splitting. It took two courses of Lasix and two weeks to go down. After that, the PPA set in. It was a lot for my 37yo body; it's now 19 months later, my hips didn't settle back in right, and I feel weaker than I did 2 years ago. But, I'm not getting any younger. I wonder: am I stupid to want more kids? Am doomed to repeat that kind of experience? If that's likely, does that make me a bad mom for exposing our existing child to that? Am I being ungrateful for this gift we worked and prayed so hard for? Could my marriage handle it? I have these thoughts and don't want to voice them. I am not sure there are answers. If they exist, I'm scared to know the answers or to see what happens if I do talk about the thoughts. First I am mad at myself for being unreasonably worried about something I can't really control, then I'm mad at myself for not talking about the worries. I try to relax and have faith that things will work out as they're supposed to and that I am loved and it will be ok. But I don't always succeed.
My baby is almost 2 and I am still terrified I'll die suddenly or get diagnosed with a terminal disease and he'll be left alone without ever knowing all the things I wanted to teach him or how much I loved him. This first struck me hard when he was about 8 mo old and I had to go away for 48 hrs. I was on the plane and started penning a farewell letter to him in my head. I was obsessed. I couldn't stop "writing" it. I wondered if I should record it just in case we crashed. Then I started thinking: if I do write something like this down, maybe I'd actually end up bringing it about by "speaking it into existence" or tempting the fates or whatever. I still don't know what to do when these thoughts find me- sometimes multiple times a week. I usually just have to sit with them until inevitably the distractions of the moment take over.
I leaned to grab something by my feet on the ottoman while rocking my baby, and I was convinced I'd pressed him into my arm/body too hard that I had crushed him. I checked him over and over and over and my thoughts started spiraling down the "what ifs".
This is when I first recognized that maybe my anxiety was more than just "new mom worries":
It was about 3am, and I was rocking my approx. 3mo old son in his nursery. He was hungry and I had just fed him some breast milk from a bottle. I realized that the bottle I'd used was the same one we'd found left in the car for a few days the week prior. It was silicone, not plastic. I had cleaned it twice and sanitized it. There was no smell, no discoloration. The bottle was fine. It went back into circulation. But, in those wee hours, I found myself absolutely SURE I had just given him some kind of bacteria that would turn into a digestive superbug that would ravage his little body- moving faster than I could catch and address it. I had visions of his death (something I still -- over a year later -- find difficult to "say"/type out) and, in that moment, I could literally feel the inevitable world-rocking guilt/blame I knew would follow beginning to well up inside me.
This incident caused me to stop and say "maybe my husband is right" maybe I have been being unreasonable. Not in everything, but certainly in some things. Maybe it didn't make sense to spend my sleep time waking up every 20 minutes just to check my son was still breathing. Every time they screened me for PPD, I wasn't depressed (its true, I wasn't). I didn't know PPA was a thing. No one ever said. No one ever asked. But it is a thing. It is a very real thing.
After that night in the nursery, I started talking about my feelings with friends and loved ones who were fellow moms. This helped. Eventually, I would come to realize the source of my issue. Namely: My pre-child self could work through moments of anxiety by thinking about the "worst case" scenario including how I'd meet whatever challenge I was worried about- to convince myself I could survive and overcome it. That coping mechanism disappeared when I had my son. The "worst case" scenario became unthinkable and only led to a death-spiral of other "bad" thoughts. I wish I had taken the time to get professional help.
PPA did a doozy on my marriage that we're still working to recover from, and it invaded this special newborn time with my first child. It made me question myself in a way I never had and it made my husband question my judgement in a way he never had (which only caused further resentment and disappointment in me). The whole situation makes me sad (and mad) to this day. Things eventually got better. As my hormones leveled out (which didn't really happen until after I stopped pumping), as I continued talking to others, and as I started being able to name what I was feeling, I got better at carrying it and at managing it. But the scars in my marriage, in myself, and in my post-partum recovery journey are still there- and I still struggle to identify when anxieties I have concerning my son are reasonable and when they warrant re-thinking.
If you've read this far... if this speaks to you... take the time you have now (hopefully while you're on some kind of parental leave), and talk to someone. Consider a professional if you can. Consider getting yourself the book "Good Mom's Have Scary Thoughts" - its pictures not pages of text - and it might help you realize this is not new and you're not alone.
I am afraid I will never feel like me again. I am mad that physically I will never be the same (literally, I had a failed surgery to go back and address something that didnt heal properly the first time around). I love my husband, but I resent that his life did not change nearly as drastically as mine did, simply due to biology.
♥ THANK YOU ♥
to all the brave women who continue to disclose their scary thoughts.
Together, we will educate many and help reduce the anxiety and stigma. #speakthesecret