Ladies in waiting: Partnering with our bodies
Pregnant women and their bodies go through a tremendous amount of changes. Your body is putting molecules together to create a new human and, even if this is something you've done before, the changes can cause some anxiety. Some changes are subtle. Others not so much! Maybe you’re nauseated. Maybe you’re bloated. Maybe you fall asleep at your desk at 3:30 in the afternoon.
You may wonder if these changes are “normal.” It's common for pregnant women to experience a change and then make a quick judgment about the change: Is this a “good” change for the pregnancy or a “bad” change for the pregnancy? In psychology, we call this assigning a valence to an event. Calling something “good” or “bad” comes from how we have perceived good and bad in the past. And it can also be influenced by how anxious we are.
The Story of Eva
Eva is a 37 year old woman who is 6 weeks pregnant. She has a history of anxiety and was very anxious during the four months that it took her to get pregnant. Now, she continues to be anxious. For example, she hasn’t experienced nausea during this pregnancy and this makes her anxious. She thinks of the lack of nausea as a “bad” thing. It feels to Eva that she is “failing” the pregnancy in some way. She feels “defeated.” After all, all of her pregnant friends were nauseated in early pregnancy. In the past few days she has begun to experience bloating and discomfort in her breasts. She thinks of this as a good change and worries that the bloating or discomfort will diminish. According to Eva, that would be a “bad” change.
In therapy, Eva explored her tendency to assign the label of “good” or “bad” to a change. Over time she learned how to understand that change is not inherently “good” or “bad” but, rather, something that just is. She began to accept that, because she is pregnant, change is inevitable. She also began to accept that her body knew best about how to change and that she could partner with her body to accept the changes her body created without the need to assign a valence.
Therapy taught Eva that the antidote to change is curiosity. She began to be curious about changes in her body rather than judgmental. For example, at her 8 weeks ultrasound visit she was curious about the pictures she saw on the ultrasound. She was amazed at the placenta and the little fetus with a rapid heartbeat. Over the next few weeks, she noticed that there was indeed a decrease in her bloating and discomfort in her breasts. Rather than be anxious about this however, she accepted it as a change that just is. She began to accept the fact that her body, which puts molecules together to grow another person inside of her, knows what it is doing.
