Starting the Conversation About Maternal / Paternal Trauma

What is maternal / paternal trauma, you ask. Exactly. It's one of the most common forms of trauma today that's unnamed, unidentified, undiagnosed and making generations of people mentally unhealthy. So let's starting talk about it to start addressing it.

You've heard it here first - the term maternal / paternal trauma was introduced here at Psychedelic Therapy Connection to start a conversation that's long overdue in this country. Millions of stress out, burned out, depressed and straight up traumatized parents know it's there like a dark cloud hanging overhead, but without a name it's hard to call it out for what it is.

It's trauma. A lot about getting pregnant, staying pregnant, delivering a child and then raising a young child is traumatizing today for a number of reasons. Let's kick things off by looking at this new, but definitely prevalent, mental health issue at a high level. We'll address the primary sources of maternal / paternal trauma as well as why this problem is so bad and getting worse.

Sources of Maternal / Paternal Trauma

When you consider all of the potential sources of trauma for parents, the list is actually pretty extensive. Some sources of trauma are fairly obvious while others are so covert they are a surprise even to the people experiencing the mental distress.

The primary sources of maternal / paternal trauma are:

Reproductive Issues / Infertility

Miscarriage

Stillborn Birth

Abortion 

Infant Death 

Premature Birth / NICU Placement

Baby Diagnosed With Disability

Maternal Death 

Maternal Near Death Experience 

Difficult Delivery 

Care Taking For Special Needs Infant/Child

Postpartum Depression

Burn Out

Loss of Agency

This is not an exhaustive list, but these are the biggest sources of maternal / paternal trauma. When you consider the various stages of parenthood, it's hard to find a mother or father who isn't painfully familiar with at least one of them.

Why Addressing Maternal / Paternal Trauma is So Important

Maternal / Paternal trauma is a serious issue we have ignored for far too long. It is our personal belief here at Psychedelic Therapy Connection that this is the root cause of the Mental Health Crisis in America.

We're calling it the root cause because parents have a direct effect on the mental and emotional development of their children. There's going to be a residual effects for the children of mothers and fathers that are struggling with a mental health disorder. It goes right back to what many clinical therapists and psychiatrists already know - most of our issues start in childhood. Worse still is that those children can embody it and then pass it along to their own children.

Unless we address maternal / paternal trauma it's going to continue to have a domino effect that spreads mental health issues much further than they need to go. There's no way for a mother or father to parent to the best of their ability if they are struggling with mental distress.

Why Maternal / Paternal Trauma is Getting Worse

Even just one of those sources above can lead to clinical PTSD, Anxiety or Depression. But the truth is, many parents deal with a combination of factors. And on top of that they are expected to just deal with it. And that's at the heart of why this serious issue is getting worse.

Parents Are Taught to Ignore Themselves and Focus Solely on Their Baby

If you experience trauma before or during delivery good luck. Because as soon as the baby is born you are expected to push all of that down deep, ignore it and put all your focus on the new baby.

Yes, babies need our focus. However, the way mothers and fathers are expected to disregard themselves in order to do that is mentally unhealthy.

Why don't we offer counseling and mental health services during pregnancy and shortly after delivery? Why don't we have parenting classes expressly about dealing with the emotional turmoil that can come with becoming a parent?

Because we as a society are trying to act like this problem doesn't exist when it most certainly does. It's as if we are deathly afraid that admitting it will mean we're bad parents, when the opposite is actually true. Ignoring a parent's emotional struggles and mental health issues is ultimately damaging for the child, and knowingly doing that is bad parenting.

This is an issue that has manifested in other serious ways. Years ago a California consortium looked into why maternal deaths rates were so high in America - among the worse for developed nations. It turns out the two primary causes of maternal deaths, eclampsia and hemmoraging, were preventable in most cases. So why did the deaths occur? Mainly because medical teams were taught to put all of their attention on the baby and the mother's needs went to the wayside. Ignoring the needs of the mother literally has cost thousands upon thousands of lives and created an immeaurable amount of trauma.

California now trains medical teams to continue monitoring the health of the mother instead of ignoring her in order to look out for the signs of eclampsia and hemmoraging so that fewer women die. This writer is one of the women who benefited from that research and fortunately still alive to tell the tale.

This is a perfect example of how ignoring the needs of parents can be detrimental. The mental health of mothers and fathers also needs the same level of attention. Imagine how much pain, suffering and even death is caused by us ignoring the problem of maternal / paternal trauma.

Unrealistic Social Expectations and Pressures

The problem really began during/after WWII when millions of men came back from war traumatized. Instead of getting help with those issues they had a lot of kids - the Baby Boomer generation. On top of that the economy dramatically changed and women entered the workforce in significant numbers, often out of necessity because things started getting more expensive and the American capitalism economy boomed with the added workers, production, and income that was generated for buying more stuff.

Then we got sold on the idea of buying more stuff and more stuff, which is the backbone of capitalism. We needed to own a big home and fill it with tons of stuff. And if your neighbor got some new stuff, well you needed that stuff too.

All the while we were taught by society that we needed to still maintain that family structure regardless of how the dynamics changed. Women in particular were taught they simply needed to do more, get more productive, figure out how to balance it all with little to no support unless they had extended family nearby to help with the child rearing.

Today, with the internet and social media things are even worse. Parents are continually in comparison mode, gauging how well they are parenting compared to others. They told a million different ways they are doing things wrong and there's more pressure than ever to get it exactly right. Simply feeling like you now have to also show the world what a great parent you are on social media with expensive family photo shoots and picturesque vacation shots is an additional stressors that wasn't there in the past.

Isolation Leading to Less Collective Childcare

Raising a child is stressful in and of itself. It is a full-time job all on it's own, and it's most effective when you have numerous caring adults who can help raise them. It's the whole "it takes a village to raise a child concept", which is how we naturally did raise children back in the day. Innately, that is how it's supposed to be done.

But that isn't how we do it at all in the U.S. today, and it's making parents mentally unhealthy. We're simply too overburdened, too busy, too stressed. Often just one parent at a time is charged with watching all of the children for the bulk of the day so that the other parent can work, or that is left to childcare workers and there's no parent involvement. For many parents, this then triggers feelings of guilt because we're being told we should be super parents handling it all.

With little to no breathing room it's near impossible to catch your breath and feel like you're not about to hyperventilate. To give ourselves breathing room kids get put in front of screens, and it ultimately makes familial and societal issues worse.

What We Can Do to Address Maternal / Paternal Trauma in the U.S.

One of the simplest solutions for maternal / paternal trauma is psychedelic therapy. Why? Because it's effective for starters. But more importantly, it's because psychedelic medications are fast acting. Parents don't have a lot of spare time. People with kids need efficiency. Correcting issues as quickly as possible is also extremely important for the children that are being impacted whether it seems like they are or not.

There's also the matter of epigenetics. If you want to have a child or plan to have another one, mental health issues need to ideally be addressed beforehand to avoid any potential epigenetics backlash. But that's a whole other blog post topic, and we certainly will be discussing maternal / paternal trauma more.

We'd love to hear the thoughts of others on this topic. The more we discuss it, the more we will normalize maternal / paternal trauma so that it can be addressed in the way that's needed.