Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert!

This is one of the most difficult posts to write about because it goes against the trope of blissful motherhood that is portrayed in the media. If you are reading this and are affected by it, please take heart and know that intrusive thoughts do pass. They just do. I think that mine happened because I wanted so desperately to protect Lyra that my brain went into overdrive. 

Fear. I blame myself a little bit for the thoughts that started to creep in during pregnancy. Fear of another miscarriage became replaced with fear of a stillbirth. I convinced myself that as long as I could get Lyra here safely, then the fear would end and I could start my life with her and it would all be perfect. No more worrying.

I know now that I had unrealistic expectations of motherhood and that you can't control everything. But the fear and worry increased a thousandfold once Lyra arrived. Fear of Coronavirus. Terror that she would stop breathing or that I wouldn't be able to feed her properly. 

And then the intrusive and racing thoughts started. What if I got so overwhelmed when breastfeeding that I felt I had to throw her across the room against a wall? What if I pushed her pram into the river and floated her away? What if I dropped her down the stairs and she cut her head open on the tiles? What if I dropped her in the bath? What if I became so ill that I committed suicide? I was so worried for Lyra that I manifested horrendous thoughts. Each thought was accompanied by a violent mental and a wave of guilt and upset because I had caused these images. Right? (Wrong: They are a pretty standard symptom of PND, and you cannot control the thoughts that pop into your head. You can control how they affect you however. More on that later.) 

They began to swirl around my mind, one after the other, and I spent several days trying to remember how to think properly. What did Old Beth used to think about? How did normal people think? Why couldn't I switch these thoughts off? 

I didn't want to do any of those things, of course, but I was worried about worrying about them. My mind was frantic and had gone into overdrive. 

To say that the thoughts were distressing is an understatement, and after several days of unrelenting racing thoughts, I rang the GP and asked to be referred for some counselling. 

I didn't have to wait long and after a quick phone assessment and an online questionnaire, the results were delivered to me by post. 

Severe anxiety and severe depression. Oh shit. Panic stations. 

As soon as I saw the words "severe" the label sent me into a spiral. The symptoms of depression rather than anxiety kicked in soon after.

On a positive note:

The thoughts did calm down. They got worse before they got better, but I did that to myself and I'll explain how I made it worse in my next post. 

Since those bad few days with thousands of racing thoughts, I would usually just have one main worry per day and I would get stuck in a thought cycle (rumination and catasrophising, it's called) about, for example, whether or not we should have another baby because I don't want to go through all of this again, but I don't want to leave Lyra all alone; is there an afterlife because I don't want to imagine that there isn't and that we will be separated by death; will I ever be well etc. Trying to reason with the thought didn't work because they weren't healthy reasonable thoughts, but I couldn't recognise that at the time. Now I do, and it's a sign that I'm recovering.

I have found that talking about the thought I'm stuck with helps massively - people can either tell you that you are being ridiculous or help you to reason something out to a natural conclusion. Either way, the thought is out of your head and you are free from it.

A couple of months on, I feel so, so much better about my thoughts than I did when I was experiencing them. I can talk about them and even laugh about them now. I can walk past the river and not worry about floating Lyra down it! It has taken a fair amount of work, and I'm still putting effort in to change my thought patterns, but I have so many coping strategies now that I just didn't have before.

Update: Harry has just read this and said that everyone has thoughts like this that pop into your brain. He says he once thought about kicking a kid into the river - it just popped into his head and he laughed about it and shrugged it off. Because that's what someone with a healthy mind can do - appreciate that thoughts are external and know that when a bizarre one shows up, it's just passing through and doesn't mean anything. I took them seriously, and that was a sign of the illness.