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Michelle introduces herself and discusses her experience with postpartum anxiety.
Michelle:
My name is Michelle Lacy and I am a counselor. I work, I have a practice in Gilbert, Arizona, but I am also a survivor of postpartum anxiety disorder.
My daughter is 8 years old now and she is my second child, and after she was born, I just knew something wasn’t right. I just didn’t feel like myself. I sort of like had a fog over my head, and shortly after she was born, we moved to California. And, of course then it got worse because then I was more isolated, didn’t have friends, didn’t have family there, and I just got consumed with fear and worry. And it was like a black cloud over my head and I just thought, “Oh, this is how life is going to be. This is, this is how it is, and so I am just going to be miserable.”
But then it turned into more believing that I wasn’t a good mother and that my kids really didn’t deserve me as a mother because they deserved better. And I truly believed those lies as my depression and my anxiety got worse and worse. And I didn’t know anything about postpartum depression or anxiety.
Even as a counselor, I got nothing about that in school, and the worst time came for me when I really believed that my family would be better off without me. So I kind of had this plan in my head to get in a car and drive away, and my sister was coming to visit, and I figured, “Perfect, she would be a much better mother than me, so I am going to just leave then.”
But I think God had another plan or something because he introduced me, I got introduced to a woman who connected me with a therapist in California. In California at the time they had a lot of resources, and there was a lot of information available, and once I was able to read about it and recognize that this is a real thing, I didn’t felt so alone. I realized that I wasn’t alone because I truly believed that I was the only person going through this. And I am one of those people that people came to me for help, so how in the world could I be feeling this?
So I had a great sense of shame. I felt awful. I felt, I felt full of guilt, shame, and a cloud of darkness over me. And then I met, I got the right kind of care and help, and with time, I got well and I found myself again.
View More Videos On Postpartum Depression:
https://www.empowher.com/condition/postpartum-depression
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