depression during pregnancy? new to the board.
egb+jaf
member
so i feel kind of silly having to even ask this question but i feel confident that you ladies could help.
so, i am having some trouble discerning normal pregnancy mood swings from depression. this is my first pregnancy so i have nothing to compare my experience with. before i got pregnant i would not have said that i was necessarily depressed, but i had many unresolved issues with my mother that were pretty much seeping into all areas of my life. these issues have been life long so i suppose i feel a sort of responsibility to be able to deal with them, seeing as how they are nothing new. weeks before i got pregnant, i watched my mom try and kill herself out of attention. she is far too selfish to ever actually take her own life and i know wholeheartedly that had i not been there she would not have done it, she just knows i would stop her. this was quite traumatizing and only seems to get more traumatizing as time goes on.
obviously now i am pregnant and it seems the smallest things will get me so very upset and down that i just dont know what to do. i love my fiance with all my heart but i feel like he is struggling to realize that pregnancy is going to make me more sensitive and that is only making these issues worse. most of these mood swings/depression manifest from day to day issues with my him, even though i know it isnt the underlying reason. some days i just feel silly and snap out of it, others i feel like it is all consuming.
i am terrified of having my little girl and this only getting worse, it is not a life to have to live. ironically, i am pretty confident that it was untreated depression in addition to bipolar disorder that made life with my mother so traumatizing when i was young. i will cut off my left toe if it means avoiding doing ANYTHING similar to my daughter.
part of me wishes someone would reassure me that it is normal for mood swings to be all over the place during pregnancy, but the other part of me knows intuitively that this is cannot be normal. please give me some advice
thanks for reading that giant post if you made it through the whole thing!
Re: depression during pregnancy? new to the board.
This is great advice. I have struggled with my depression for more than 10 years. OCD for almost 2. Honestly, pregnancy is making it easier for me to be more proactive about my thoughts and activites because my mood directly affects my LO. For example, if a "sad" song/commercial comes on flip it immediately, or if a book/article goes somewhere "sad" put it down and do something else. Don't go to scary/dramatic movies if you're the type to dwell.
At dinner or in a journal talk about the worst part of your day and then the best part. Remember that even the worst days are only 24 hours long, then it's a clean slate.
Give yourself a treat everyday, a 10 minute nap, ice cream, dance party (close your door and rock out to your favorites), permission to skip a chore, etc.
The thing that has always helped me the most is knowing when to ask for help and what to ask for. I know that if I tell my husband, "I need a hug", that he is going to understand, not ask questions, and hug me until I tell him, "enough". Same goes for, "I need to talk" and "I need left alone (he'll give me an hour then check on me)". When I am having good days we'll talk about my depression and he'll ask what he can do.