Name: 【TED】Alexandra Sacks: A new way to think about the transition to motherhood (A new way to think about the transition to motherhood | Alexandra Sacks)
Uploaded: 2018-09-20T22:51:36.000Z
Duration: 6 min 17 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Do you remember a time when you felt hormonal and moody?

your body was growing in strange places and very fast,

people were expecting you to be grown-up in this new way.

Well, these same changes happen to a woman when she's having a baby.

And we know that it's normal for teenagers to feel all over the place,

so why don't we talk about pregnancy in the same way?

There are entire textbooks written about the developmental arc of adolescence,

and we don't even have a word to describe the transition to motherhood.

I'm a psychiatrist who works with pregnant and postpartum women,

and in the decade that I've been working in this field,

She says, "I'm not good at this. I'm not enjoying this.

So I go through the symptoms of that diagnosis,

and it's clear to me that she's not clinically depressed,

"It isn't supposed to feel like this," she insists.

So I say, "OK. What did you expect it to feel like?"

She says, "I thought motherhood would make feel whole and happy.

I thought my instincts would naturally tell me what to do.

I thought I'd always want to put the baby first."

This -- this is an unrealistic expectation

of what the transition to motherhood feels like.

I was getting calls with questions like this from hundreds of women,

because telling them that they weren't sick

I wanted to find a way to normalize this transition,

to explain that discomfort is not always the same thing as disease.

So I set out to learn more about the psychology of motherhood.

But there actually wasn't much in the medical textbooks,

because doctors mostly write about disease.

And it took me two years, but in an out-of-print essay

I finally found a helpful way to frame this conversation:

It's not a coincidence that "matrescence" sounds like "adolescence."

Both are times when body morphing and hormone shifting

lead to an upheaval in how a person feels emotionally

And like adolescence, matrescence is not a disease,

but since it's not in the medical vocabulary,

since doctors aren't educating people about it,

it's being confused with a more serious condition

I've been building on the anthropology literature

and have been talking about matrescence with my patients

using a concept called the "push and pull."

As humans, our babies are uniquely dependent.

Unlike other animals, our babies can't walk,

So evolution has helped us out with this hormone called oxytocin.

so it rises even if you didn't give birth to the baby.

Oxytocin helps a human mother's brain zoom in, pulling her attention in,

so that the baby is now at the center of her world.

But at the same time, her mind is pushing away,

because she remembers there are all these other parts to her identity --

This is the emotional tug-of-war of matrescence.

This is the tension the women calling me were feeling.

If women understood the natural progression of matrescence,

if they knew that most people found it hard to live inside this push and pull,

if they knew that under these circumstances,

ambivalence was normal and nothing to be ashamed of,

and I think it would even reduce rates of postpartum depression.

so if we're going to change the way our culture understands

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【TED】Alexandra Sacks: A new way to think about the transition to motherhood (A new way to think about the transition to motherhood | Alexandra Sacks)

depression

profound

physical

pattern