This week I’m chatting with Annie Broadbent. Annie is a psychotherapist, a mum of 2, has written a book about grief and bereavement and she also works with perinatal mental health. Annie is also the woman behind the Instagram account ‘Dark side of the mum’.

This episode comes with a trigger warning as Annie and I discuss dark thoughts that can come with motherhood including thoughts of women wanting to harm their babies.

There’s also a bit of background noise. You’ll hear a friendly bird chirping away and also my one year old having a tantrum – don’t worry. She wasn’t abandoned while I was recording the episode, her dad was there trying to keep everything under control….

In this episode we chat about:-

       -        The ‘shadow work’ that comes with motherhood. This can include denying our less acceptable thoughts                    and feelings and finding it difficult to accept and own negative thoughts and feelings we have about                              motherhood and our children.

-        The cultural expectations of motherhood being ‘natural and instinctive’ when this is often not the lived experience of women.

-        We talked about women who don’t meet the criteria for diagnosis of postnatal mental health issues; these are often the women who miss out on help and support and then end up feeling like failures.

-        How the culture of motherhood makes it more difficult than it should be. There’s so much focus on the baby. Women are idolised during pregnancy and then are forgotten about once the baby is born.

-        Most other on western cultures have some away of marking becoming a mother. E.g special food for new mums, 40 days of rest, ritual baths, sacred fires etc. Annie is of the view we need a way in our culture of honouring becoming a mother.

-        The rush to get back to normal

-        Annie shared the research of Donald Winnicot who talked about the hate a mother feels for her baby. This was back in 1974 yet talking about this is still a taboo today.

-        We talked about the balance between conscious parenting and perfectionism and the pressure that women put on themselves nowadays.

-        We also talked about the reasons women fear sharing their true thoughts about their feelings towards their children.

-        Annie shared that if women are struggling with dark thoughts. They need to be shared and spoken about so women can receive support and make sense of how they feel.

Find out more about Annie.

-        Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/dark_side_of_the_mum/

-        Website  -  https://anniebroadbent.com/

Grab a copy of my self care toolkit for mums here. 

Click here