5 tips for preserving mental health during pregnancy and the postpartum period

In the perinatal period (from pregnancy to one year postpartum) it is vital to have support in many forms. If you are pregnant for the first time, or thinking about getting pregnant, you already feel fears and anticipation just thinking about it. At all these times, psychological support during pregnancy is important and smoothes the path until the baby’s arrival into the world and prepares the woman for future and unpredictable challenges.

Katherine Sorroche, a psychologist specializing in women’s mental health and parenting, explains how this support practically helps women’s lives during this transformative period. “Psychological support during pregnancy, as well as psychological prenatal care, encompass a triad that I consider essential for this woman to reach the postpartum period more emotionally strengthened: information, prevention and management of stress”, summarizes Katherine, illustrating some situations that therapy during pregnancy covers.

Context of the pregnant woman

“It is during pregnancy that one understands this woman’s life story and the context of this pregnancy and various spheres, such as economic, social, affective, family and others”, says Katherine. In this aspect, she explains that this is also where therapy will reveal previous histories of depression or other disorders, so that the psychologist can act more directly in the prevention and awareness of situations that may occur in the postpartum period and throughout the psychological postpartum period. .

“Marital maladjustment, dysfunctional support network, recognition and validation of feelings such as impotence, insecurity and confusion, prevention of psychological illnesses appear in these conversations”, she exemplifies.

Fear of childbirth and other fears

In relation to stress management, childbirth is a crucial point to be discussed, according to Katherine. “This is how we help women to be clear about the possible options so that they can make a decision safely, taking into account their wishes”, says the psychologist, adding that this agenda also addresses unconscious fears and anxieties in relation to pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period.

Emotional puerperium X physiological puerperium

The process of becoming a mother and adapting to the new life and the new routine, in addition to, mainly, integrating the role of mother with all the other roles that are important for this woman is included in what is known as the emotional postpartum period, or psychological postpartum. “And it is extremely important to highlight that this transition and woman-mother integration process can last up to two or three years of the child’s age”, warns Katherine.

For this reason, it is important to differentiate the physiological from the emotional postpartum period. “The physiological puerperium is the period that the body needs to readapt as a body that has given birth, that is, a body that is overloaded, under physiological exhaustion as a result of pregnancy and childbirth. It lasts between 45 and 60 days”, explains the psychologist.

Also at this stage, women may develop the baby blues or puerperal sadness, says Katherine, defining this situation as a period of emotional instability, crying for no reason, sudden sadness, introversion, irritability and tiredness. “It can occur between the third and fifth day after birth and should disappear by the end of the baby’s first month”, she calculates.

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Unconscious emotions that come to the surface

“During this period, there is an unconscious reliving of the bond established with her own mother. This pregnant and later postpartum woman unconsciously relives her own pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, feelings of security or insecurity, the deprivations she may have experienced, feelings of abandonment and rejection, all healthy or unhealthy emotional states in the relationship with one’s own mother”, reveals Katherine.

In her view, dealing with these personal emotions that emerge during pregnancy will greatly help women experience pregnancy, childbirth and their first bonds with the baby in a more conscious way. “These episodes in a woman’s life tend to be a reflection of how she experienced this with her own mother, therefore, the sooner we look at and take care of this relationship, the more emotionally strengthened this woman will be to experience a calmer postpartum period”, he recommends.

Vulnerability and fragility

This is a period in which, physiologically, the woman becomes more emotionally “regressed”. This means that she becomes more sensitive and vulnerable, more fragile, according to the psychologist.

“For many women, demonstrating this fragility is putting themselves in a place of extreme vulnerability and symbolizes weakness. The sooner the pregnant woman allows herself to receive help and even accept her own fragility, the more she will be strengthened to face the challenges of motherhood”, warns .

Katherine says that many mothers bring demands about the fear of childbirth and also the postpartum period, revealing their anxiety about this future period that is about to arrive. “Some also seek psychological support during the second pregnancy to prevent the second postpartum period from being as intense as the first,” she reports.

Illusion of control

The expert analyzes that fears and anxieties also emerge as a reflection of a life of planning, following goals, achieving them, moving on to the next objective and everything else that today’s woman is used to managing. “This has put us in a position of control and predictability over everything, but that is precisely what motherhood will not allow. It will be impossible to have predictability and any type of control over the birth, over the first days with the baby, over breastfeeding, about your feelings and emotions”, anticipates the psychologist, considering this one of the crucial issues in the psychological approach during pregnancy.

Crying for no reason: how to deal with it?

Faced with this well-known symptom, Katherine has a position: “I strongly recommend that you cry, that you let it out. At this stage, we don’t want to name the feeling. We have to give vent to this crying”, she acknowledges. She explains that it is time for therapy to understand all the changes and difficulties that the pregnant/postpartum woman is experiencing and then raise awareness and bring clarity. “We can only deal with what we are clear about, so in therapy this woman will understand where this crying and this nameless feeling comes from — whether it is fear, anxiety, anguish, sleep deprivation, physiological changes, and others “, says the specialist.

5 expert tips for pregnancy/postpartum

• Seek psychological support from the beginning of pregnancy and maintain it throughout the postpartum period;
• Know that you have no control over anything;
• Become confident in building your way of mothering;
• Don’t get attached to manuals, don’t be the mother of a checklist. There is no perfect motherhood;
• Prepare yourself for the postpartum period, but understand that only when you get there and open yourself up to experiencing this moment every day will you truly understand what it is.