“The best way to change life on Earth is to change the way we start.”
In this episode, Nick speaks with Anne Wallen to dive into the intricate relationship between maternal health, psychological preparation for parenting, and the impact of childhood trauma on parenting styles. Anne shares her personal journey as a maternal health professional and mother of six, emphasizing the importance of meeting a baby’s needs and the psychological aspects of parenting.
“Unhealed wounds don’t disappear when you become a parent; they show up.”
“Safety is the foundation of healthy development.”
Anne is a respected figure in women’s health with over 30 years of experience and is a leading voice on global change in maternity care – particularly for those at greatest risk. She continues to educate and empower birth professionals in more than 20 countries, contributes to a variety of curricula, and shapes the future of maternal health through her impactful role as a speaker and mentor. Anne is the Director and co-founder of MaternityWise International, and her legacy lies in inspiring generational changes around and elevating women’s healthcare worldwide.
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Click Here To View The Episode Transcript
Nick McGowan (00:00.91)
Hello and welcome to the Mindset and Self Mastery Show. I’m your host, Nick McGowan. Today on the show we have Anne Wellen. Anne, how you doing today? I’m good. I’m really excited to get into this. I think this is going to be a different conversation than what we typically have, but we were just talking and talking and at one point you’re like, you’re not recording? I’m like, no, let’s start this now.
Anne Wallen (00:10.602)
I’m good, how are you?
Nick McGowan (00:25.614)
So this will be great. And why don’t you kick us off? Tell us what you do for a living and what’s one thing most people don’t know about you that’s maybe a little odd or bizarre.
Anne Wallen (00:34.382)
Okay, well, I am the director of Maternity Wise International, which what we do is we train doulas and childbirth educators and lactation support people. I’ve been doing this for 23, 24 years now, and it’s pretty much my life. I love maternal health. It’s so, important to every human on this planet. And maybe the…
An interesting factoid about me is that I have six kids. A lot of people, when you tell them you have six kids, they’re like, my gosh. And yes, I birthed them all. But five of them are adults. I have a little nine-year-old as well. She was a surprise, like the best kind of surprise. But yeah, so my six kids and yes, that’s really the main reason why I got into the work that I got into when I had my first at 17.
and didn’t feel like I could be the mom that she deserved, loved her so, so, so much. And I had some family friends that I grew up with who actually babysat me who had been struggling with fertility issues. And so I chose to let them adopt her. And we have had an amazing, beautiful extended family relationship. And she recently gave birth to her first daughter just this summer. So I am officially a grandma in addition to all the other things that I do, but
Yeah, that’s a little factoid that most people don’t know. But she’s part of the reason she’s the main reason why I became a mental health professional or a maternal health professional. And a lot of the way things have gone through my life, not just how I was raised, but experiences thereafter have gotten me very interested in mental health. And so I like to kind of create this intersection between the both worlds. And I look at things from a very psychological perspective. So this is
This is gonna be a fun one.
Nick McGowan (02:29.229)
Yeah, I think everything ties back into that. It’s not even just a physical thing. Like I even said to you, somebody has a baby and they go home and how their partner reacts to whatever’s going on or the chaos or whatever the thing is, how does that then tie into the baby and how does the baby move throughout life? Even with you having a kid at 17, you are a child at 17. Though I’m sure we can both think back to 17 years old and thinking I’m grown ass adult and I can do all the things in the world, but you are not. You’re a child.
Anne Wallen (02:50.412)
Hmm.
Nick McGowan (02:59.039)
And the fact that you had somebody that you could hand the baby over to that you knew, you trusted, and you were able to have a relationship, it sounds like that could almost be like an ABC sitcom, you know what I mean?
Anne Wallen (03:05.325)
Mm-hmm.
Anne Wallen (03:13.356)
Yeah, well, I mean, my life is, I always joke that, like, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But I always joke that, you know, Hallmark probably wouldn’t agree to make a movie because my life is so far-fetched. But yes, that’s, that was such a, such a blessing because I really knew that I was not going to be able to do what she needed as far as mothering. And I’ve, you know, hadn’t even finished high school yet. And
my wonderful, wonderful and she was my next door neighbor growing up. And I just knew that they were the right people to take care of her and they raised her and she’s an amazing human being. And it’s just really wonderful to have this open relationship at this point, especially, you know, now that she’s having babies of her own. it was really cool too during COVID. She took one of my doula trainings because she was going to be a doula for a friend of hers. So
Just a really cool, you know, like sometimes things just come full circle and you just, little blessings, little surprises. So.
Nick McGowan (04:22.764)
And you wouldn’t have been able to script that. Like, I love when that stuff happens in life where it’s like, I’m gonna have a baby, hand it over to my neighbor, because I love them. And then years later, like, really? Somebody would be like, that’s crazy. Get out of my office, you know?
Anne Wallen (04:24.863)
No!
Anne Wallen (04:37.355)
Yeah, well, I I knew that I didn’t, I knew that I probably wouldn’t be okay with just never knowing. know, some moms, and I’ve supported moms as their doula through giving their baby away. I’ve supported adopting families as well. it’s, I am really, really fortunate because I don’t think that most people could go through that experience and it would be, I mean,
Don’t get me wrong, it was heartbreaking. It’s still heartbreaking that I wasn’t able to raise her myself. I mean, I’ve had five other kids since then and I know what it is to be a mom and I know what things I’ve missed out on. But being able to have an open adoption is really, really something special and I know some people don’t have that option. And so to be able to give your baby to someone that you think that you can trust and then hope that they’re doing what you would want them to do.
That’s a whole level of, yeah, that’s tough, that’s hard. So, yeah.
Nick McGowan (05:43.52)
could only imagine. I have no idea what that would be like. I don’t have kids, not gonna have kids. And I couldn’t imagine what that’s like just handing a child over. I’ve talked to different people that have had either abortions or they’ve adopted, they’ve handed kids off to be adopted and then just haven’t ever talked to them again or people that have had some kid that are like, hey, by the way, about 30 years ago, you and my mom on a beach.
And here we are, we’re like, you and my mom at a party or whatever. It’s like, but I, one of the big reason why I wanted to have you on is to be able to talk about how the psychology of that ties into not just people that have kids, but people that were kids. Cause even your emails back in the conversations, you were like, yeah, everybody was born. And then what we do from there and how that all ties into it. So why don’t, why don’t you kind of get us started off with like, not only what you see with, people that are having kids.
but also the people that are concerned about having children and what that ties into just the rest of life.
Anne Wallen (06:53.121)
Well, kind of as we were talking about before we started recording, getting ready for having a baby, well, having a baby, you really need to put in the work, you need to prepare. And it’s not just about eating the right foods or avoiding the wrong foods and getting enough water and whatever else. There’s a lot of psychological preparation that people need to do. And we all walk around with our own traumas. We all walk around with our own disappointments and wounds.
you’re gonna carry that into your parenting. And if there is one situation that you’re gonna find yourself in as kind of just this automatic robot, it’s as a parent. You don’t realize all these scripts and all this just unprepared, you know, in the moment reactions that you’re going to have to your own child until you’re there. And then you’re like,
Nick McGowan (07:26.218)
Hmm.
Anne Wallen (07:52.961)
I sound just like my mom or my dad used to say that and I still sometimes even you know I’m on kid number six at this point she’s nine and I still will say things you know two wrongs don’t make her right or whatever little sayings that you grow up with and I realize wow I got that from this scenario or I learned that during this moment when I got in trouble or whatever and it can it can really make a difference
Nick McGowan (07:54.515)
Ha ha.
Anne Wallen (08:22.669)
being aware and intentional with your parenting. And when I say aware, I just mean if you’ve got wounds or if you’ve got trauma or if your parents were abusive, if there was something else going on, you know, in those immediate, the first weeks, months of your life, it is really, really important to meet that baby’s needs immediately or as quickly as possible, right? So,
There are things like crying it out. There are things like scheduled feeds. And they’re actually, we’re not just talking about a physical experience that this baby’s going through. It’s a psychological experience. And so we can get deeper into that if you want to, but a lot of people, they’ll hear from their parents when they become parents, they’ll hear things like, put the baby down, don’t spoil that baby. Or, they should be sleeping all night and they should be doing this or they should be doing that.
You know, we let that baby cry it out. We gave you formula. You turned out fine. Whatever it is, right? Whatever this thing is that might be the response to whatever the parents are wanting to do. You know, the grandparents and well-meaning aunts and uncles, they’ll have some retort usually, right? And advice from your elders is always helpful. And having, just having elders around to…
support your efforts is beautiful and helpful, but sometimes they don’t know what’s best for your baby. And the only person who really knows what’s best for the baby is the parent, especially the parent who’s bonded to the baby. Usually that’s the mom when they’re really, really small. And that’s usually because there’s breastfeeding going on or whatever it is, the main caretaking duties usually falls to the mother. So if that mother is well attuned to the baby,
baby’s getting their needs met, this is teaching the baby that they can trust, right? It’s teaching the baby about relationships. It’s teaching the baby that I’m valuable. I am worth listening to. I am protected. I’m safe. All these different things, right? If you’ve got a baby who is routinely put down after, you fed for 15 minutes, now we put you down. You cry? Too bad, baby. We read the book that said,
Anne Wallen (10:47.18)
put you down, right? Or we heard from grandpa that said put you down, whatever it is. That baby crying so desperately, that’s their only way to communicate that they have a need. So if they’re crying so desperately, I’m still hungry, I’m cold, I just want to be held, I’m scared, I’m alone, whatever it is, I have gas pains, whatever it is, they’re trying to communicate that they have a need. And if we ignore that, if we say, no, I’m going to spoil the child if I pick them up again.
This is programming their brain, right? This is programming their mind to say, no matter how hard I cry, I’m going to be ignored. What does that, for you, Nick, what does that translate to? What does that, what would that tell you?
Nick McGowan (11:17.928)
Mm-hmm.
Nick McGowan (11:31.148)
Trauma as a little kid, you’re just instantly, you’re shoved to the side it feels. And that’s, I think that’s an interesting thing to be able to point out, because look, babies are not gonna listen to this podcast. They will when they get older, but like they’re not listening right now. In fact, none of these episodes are for children at all, primarily because of my mouth at times, I’m sure. But the parents, or the new parents, or the people that are thinking about having kids.
Anne Wallen (11:34.102)
Yeah.
Nick McGowan (11:58.088)
or the people that feel like they have to have kids because the system tells them, their family system, you have to, which that’s another thing that ties into the psychology of it. Like if somebody says, you, hey, you have to have a kid because you have to keep our lineage going. You have to keep our last name going. You have to do this. You have to do that. okay. And then they go and have the kid and then put everything onto that kid or there’s already some pain that goes along with it. I think the big thing you pointed out that stood out to me and especially for the show,
Anne Wallen (12:01.015)
Mm.
Anne Wallen (12:14.614)
Hmm.
Nick McGowan (12:27.61)
is the work that has to be done before that. I’ve talked to different people that have had kids and they’re like, hey, we planned. We did all these things. We read all these books. We then got pregnant when we wanted to and shit was still crazy because they’re parents and like life and people and like things happen. And then there are people that just accidentally had a child and you know, it’s all, it doesn’t matter if you plan it or not plan it, it seems, but going into a big situation of having a child and
Anne Wallen (12:30.572)
Mm-hmm.
Nick McGowan (12:57.552)
sticking it through for at least 18 years or so, it doesn’t seem to me like a lot of people really think about the work they need to do until like after the fact. Like I met with somebody recently who’s got a young kid and he was offered to go on tour with some band and he was like, I can’t because I am attached and I can’t leave my child. And I can see that he’s such a good dad.
But he had said to me, like, things changed as soon as I had the kid, as soon as the kid came into my life. And I hear that from a lot of different people. Like as soon as this happened, then I changed. I stopped smoking or I stopped doing this or I started doing more of whatever it was. And that’s great. But what about the deeper work that’s unseen? Like the trauma that comes from your parents or your parents’ parents or the things that happened that you were a kid that was just crying because you wanted to be held and your parents are like, I can’t.
Shut up in there. How does that then tie into we as people that could potentially then have kids and not see that stuff needs to be worked on?
Anne Wallen (13:54.688)
Mm-hmm.
Anne Wallen (14:05.161)
Yeah, so having a baby is a great motivator for lifestyle changes, right? So if you are, if you have unhealthy habits, having your baby might make you think about your mortality and how, you need to eat better or stop smoking or whatever it is so that you can live longer so you can be there for your child. When you are going through pregnancy, even, you know, no matter what the family dynamic, mom, mom, mom, dad, whatever you’ve got going on.
both partners, or even if you’ve got a single mom going on, the person who is in the relationship thinking about when this baby gets here, what are we gonna do? The kind of deeper work that they really need to be doing includes psychological preparation for just how they feel about themselves, number one, just simply because whether they feel worthy, whether they feel rejected by their parents, if there’s any kind of abandonment issues,
Which abandonment issues start with, you know, crying it out in the crib? We, let me go, can I get a little sciency with you for just a second on that? So, crying it out, they’ve actually done brain scans and they see that crying it out creates a change in the brain structure. So our frontal lobe is the solutions, you know, forward thinking we call it, right? The creative, ambitious forebrain. The hindbrain is the survival primal,
Nick McGowan (15:10.31)
Please.
Anne Wallen (15:30.955)
aggressive, it’s the hunter-gatherer brain. And when you have a baby who is, who their needs are met consistently, their forebrain grows and their hindbrain does not grow. Not that it doesn’t grow, but it doesn’t, the balance is more forward-thinker, right? A baby who is left to cry it out, a baby whose needs are not met consistently. And that’s this, we’re not talking about a baby who has like just a crying spell and we put the baby down.
for safety’s sake, you know, and we walk away so could take a breath and then we come back, you know, we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about a routinely left to cry baby. That hind brain actually grows and the forebrain can shrink. So now you’ve got a kid who’s got the more aggressive, primal survival skills, more violence prone, more prone to, you know, ADD and some other issues that are, you know,
really all about them feeling that they need to survive, right? It’s just such primal, instinctual behavior. So now you have a kid who physically, chemically is growing up with this need to survive, this like fear, right? It’s like I’m on alert, I’m hypervigilant all the time. Now you make them a parent, right? They go through life and they probably have
Nick McGowan (16:55.877)
Hmph.
Anne Wallen (16:58.187)
plenty of issues, right, because of that hypervigilance, because of that, you know, fear that’s kind of like their root chakras in like a high alert mode all the time. So you get into this parenting situation, you’ve got a baby coming, right? You need to be able to say, I’m okay, I can advocate for my needs, I can prepare for the birth experience itself, because the birth experience could be traumatizing. And then,
how am gonna care for this baby once it’s out, knowing that, or subconsciously, knowing that they were treated with a neglectful-ish, not that parents always are neglectful intentionally, but they don’t always know that the baby is just trying to communicate. And there’s a lot of, we’re not gonna go religion, but there’s a lot of religious.
Nick McGowan (17:47.951)
Mm-hmm.
Anne Wallen (17:54.09)
books out there on parenting that talk about babies, you know, being manipulators and things like that. You got to train them to be good, right? Which is ridiculous. anyway, that in itself is traumatizing just to just to read that if I was a, know. Yes. Yeah.
Nick McGowan (18:09.252)
Yeah, basically calling your baby a little demon. Don’t you do it little demon. It’s like, I just want some love. I don’t understand.
Anne Wallen (18:17.267)
Honestly, and there are books out there that have caused babies to become really, really, really sick and even pass away because they’re telling parents, like, you need to have this regimented feeding schedule and you shouldn’t be holding your baby, etc. And, you know, the abandonment issue is huge in our culture. If you go to other places in the world, you’re not going to see people with abandonment issues quite like you do in America.
But in America, we have the Juvenile Manufacturing Association who really, really promoted getting babies out of your bed and using all these furniture pieces, right, for baby swings and cribs and, you know, bouncy seats and all these things that are not the mother, not the parent. And the only thing that a really a baby wants when they come out is that relationship.
They are looking for a face when they come out. They’re looking for a face and if they don’t get a face to connect to, they’re three months behind in their developmental milestones on average. So the face, the connection with another human being is so important. It’s so important just to their brain development. It’s important to their psychological development. And it’s really important for the parents’ development too because when you create this bond,
There’s something in you that softens. And even if you’ve had a ton of trauma, it’s like this little, I don’t know, it’s like this little knowing wakes up inside of you. And you just know, this instinct just shows up and kind of helps guide you in how to meet the baby’s needs in a way that’s healthy and appropriate for the baby. And a lot of times when you look at and you study mom-baby dyads, there’s this,
unspoken language between them, right? It happens during sleep. Dr. James McKenna wrote a bunch of different studies over the last 20 to 30 years on watching moms and babies sleep. And when babies, know, vitals go too low, mom stirs and sometimes they even wake up and touch the baby and the baby perks back up again. It’s very SIDS preventive, you know? So like,
Nick McGowan (20:41.197)
Hmm.
Anne Wallen (20:42.58)
there’s these things that we have these superpower abilities to connect with other human beings and we don’t even realize it. And the thing that oftentimes gets in the way of that is trauma, other people’s well-meaning but bad advice. And how do we like get ready for all of that? So that’s where pregnancy, thank goodness we have nine months.
to get ready for when the baby comes, right? We have nine months to work through our core hurts and figure out how did our parents’ parenting style affect us? And do we want to repeat that or do we want to have a different parenting style, right? And what is best for a baby? And a lot of times, you know, when you just read mainstream information, you know, there’s some real…
Nick McGowan (21:10.945)
Hahaha
Anne Wallen (21:37.873)
Sorry, Nick, I know you’re a man, but there are some masculine solutions or frameworks for very feminine processes and that’s not always the best way to go, right? And you can say your baby needs to eat every three hours. We wanna keep baby alive, right? So we’re gonna make sure baby eats every three hours. But what if baby’s hungry before that? You can’t make them wait. Hunger is one of those things that psychologically, if you are left to be hungry,
Nick McGowan (21:48.419)
Does it make sense?
Anne Wallen (22:08.154)
It actually causes so much stress on the body. Adrenaline goes up, cortisol goes up, like all these things, chemical reactions that really are trauma reactions. If you look at it that way, they happen in the body when you’re left to be hungry. So just something as simple as the baby needs to be fed can cause lifelong impairments, psychologically speaking.
Nick McGowan (22:36.93)
I think something to point out here for people that are listening to this, and if you’re about to have a kid, don’t let her scare you off the ledge. Like go do it because it seems like, look, no matter what happens, people are going to make the decisions they’re going to make. But I think the biggest thing you pointed out is the human aspect of it. That the mom or the parents just in general that are connected with their children can feel that, can be connected with their kids.
Anne Wallen (22:39.22)
Yeah.
Anne Wallen (22:46.419)
No!
Anne Wallen (22:55.732)
Yeah.
Anne Wallen (23:02.664)
Yes.
Nick McGowan (23:05.474)
The fact that you pointed out like, well, capitalistic society was like, how do we make money off this? Well, we want to get the kid out of the bed. We can get them into a whole plethora of their own little suite over here and we can make a whole bunch of money and we might as well push this thing. There’s information that comes from the external world like that. Like, oh, well, baby shouldn’t be in your bed for longer than X amount of time. We should have a crib and like all people have that stuff basically when they have their shower at this point and they get it and they…
Anne Wallen (23:17.962)
Mm-hmm.
Nick McGowan (23:35.381)
have like three to $10,000 worth of stuff that just sitting in there for the baby, when the baby probably needs to be deeply connected with them, but every baby is different. And it’s wild to think about how those systems, the family system that tells us, well, when you were a kid, this is what we did. You made the decisions you made. And that’s to be said that way. But then the other systems that say, you need to have this, you need to have that, you need to have that.
Anne Wallen (23:47.092)
Yeah.
Anne Wallen (23:57.15)
Mm-hmm.
Nick McGowan (24:05.024)
themselves to block all that madness out. Like, thanks for your feedback, grandma. Thanks for your feedback, Capitalistic Society. That person needs to be so deeply entwined with themselves and to understand about themselves. So based on the research you’ve done or the information that you’ve seen, how many people are actually doing that deeper work? Like, hey, I’m pregnant now. I wonder how fucked I was as a child based on the dumb things that happened. How do I not deliver that onto this child?
Anne Wallen (24:10.814)
Yeah.
Nick McGowan (24:33.963)
how many people are actually doing that work? Or is that part of the reason why we’re having the conversation? Because more people need to have that internal conversation.
Anne Wallen (24:41.096)
We really need our society, especially in America, to be doing that work more. Because a lot of people are just, like I was saying before, you’re kind of in this automatic robot mode. If you don’t do the work and you don’t have any kind of self-awareness, you’re just gonna do the things that you don’t even realize you learned to do. So like as an infant, even though you’re not
sitting there taking notes on how your parents are parenting you, you’re learning how to be a parent by experiencing their parenting. And if you look around, we have a lot of entitled people walking around and a lot of broken people walking around who are really just living out their traumas and trauma reactions day to day, rather than looking at them, understanding that that’s what it is. You know, it took me till I was in my 40s
to even understand what narcissistic abuse was, because it felt so familiar. Walking around the planet, being raised by someone who was narcissistically abusive. Now back then, 50 years ago, they didn’t have those words, right? But a lot of people have experienced that and they don’t know what it is. And they’re kind of, you know, either perpetuating it as the narcissist in their relationship or
continuing to be used by the narcissist for their supply, right? And this is such a hot button, like, I don’t know, like a really popular terminology nowadays and everyone’s gonna, you know, everyone walks around kind of saying, I know a narcissist or that guy’s a narcissist or whatever, right? So it’s word that gets thrown around a lot. But the deeper issue is when you are not cared for,
Nick McGowan (26:12.609)
Hmm.
Anne Wallen (26:36.859)
in a way that shows you that you’re valuable, right? Then you grow up trying to prove to yourself how valuable you are, your whole life. And so that’s gonna put you into two camps. You’re either gonna be more like a narcissist, right? Trying to get source from people, trying to get that love and acceptance and to prove yourself worthy, right? Or you’re gonna become more of the enabler, more of the empath type.
Nick McGowan (26:57.066)
Yeah.
Anne Wallen (27:05.925)
Sometimes it’s just how we’re wired when we’re born, but a lot of it’s learned, right? And so you walk around trying to fix everybody else, trying to pre, what’s the word I’m looking for? Like you’re anticipating what they need, right? And you’re jumping in and taking care of everybody else. And neither one of those makes a good parent. So when you have a kid, you’re going to…
Please don’t get me wrong, public, okay? Not all babies are coming out as narcissists, but all babies do come out needing someone to meet their needs. And so they look like little narcissists, right? Because they’re calling out, they’re crying, you you have to do everything for them. And as they’re growing, you’re trying to boost their self, right? And if you have additional kids around between age two and three, that’s a huge hit to the self-esteem of the toddler.
You know, so then you’re trying to like fix that and soothe that and so there’s this whole chain of events that happens between zero and about seven, eight years old. And there’s ways to feed the little narcissist monster that you might be growing or there’s ways to help the child become self-sufficient and self…
Nick McGowan (28:03.466)
Yeah.
Anne Wallen (28:31.529)
self-aware, but also, you know, like help them to develop empathy and help them to develop compassion for others. But a lot of this is not by word. It’s in modeling. And again, we go back to if you haven’t dealt with your shit before you have your baby, it’s going to walk around showing your child how to not be a grownup, but they’re not going to know the difference.
Nick McGowan (28:51.529)
Yeah.
Nick McGowan (28:58.527)
And just keep going. Yeah.
Anne Wallen (29:00.167)
Right, and so even though trauma can be passed on from DNA, right, and it can be passed on cellularly, right, but it’s also passed on just by modeling. Modeling what that reactivity looks like, modeling what that unhealed wound looks like. So, go ahead.
Nick McGowan (29:16.329)
Yeah. Well, it’s interesting with how the, think about often how the body keeps the score. Bessel van der Kerk wrote about that and there are other people that say, I don’t agree with it and that’s fine. You can say whatever you want. I’ve experienced it. I’ve experienced what it’s like to be able to have bodily reactions at things when my mind’s going, the fuck are you doing? Like, what is this? And it’s like, that ties back literally to my mom as I was a little kid.
Anne Wallen (29:24.349)
Yeah.
Anne Wallen (29:39.315)
Mm-hmm.
Nick McGowan (29:45.596)
and watching and going, she seems to fly off the handle of things. Note to self, guess that’s how it’s done. Cool, that’s what I’m gonna do. And then you learn later and you’re like, no, that’s not it. she was coming from generational trauma and chaos and wondering how do I pay for this thing? And what the fuck are you crying about? And what’s this? And sometimes that would come out of her mouth. Like, the fuck are you crying about? To go, I don’t know. And maybe she’s just overwhelmed. So even pointing out that people will look.
Anne Wallen (29:51.922)
Right?
Anne Wallen (29:58.568)
Hmm.
Anne Wallen (30:09.831)
Mm-hmm.
Nick McGowan (30:11.727)
and say like, yeah, a lot of people are calling people narcissists at this point because it’s like they learned a new word and they go, well, this looks similar. I’m glad that you’re pointing out that it’s actually deeper and not exactly the same thing at all, but sure, there are tendencies to it. Like the babies need us. Aren’t we like the only organisms that really do that though? Like all other mammals basically are like, cool, you’re born, go get it, have at it. And we need people.
Anne Wallen (30:26.728)
Mm-hmm.
Anne Wallen (30:38.844)
Yeah.
Nick McGowan (30:41.606)
And those people also need the babies because of that connection. It’s wild to think about how things that’ll happen just on a day to day that a parent might think, I was just a little upset or a little cold or whatever, that could change so much with that child. And especially in the formative years. I learned a handful of years ago about a theory called the subconscious winning strategy.
that we develop a strategy as a child to go, oh, note to self, this is how I win. This is how I get love. Like my core wounding personally is to not be abandoned or unloved. That comes from being a child. So I figured out, oh, I can make people laugh and I can do these different things that then show up in a certain way. And I learned that about myself, I don’t know, at 38 years old and was like, oh my God, my entire life I’ve been doing this because it just deeply ingrained in us.
Anne Wallen (31:15.784)
Mm-hmm.
Anne Wallen (31:36.914)
Hmm.
Nick McGowan (31:39.891)
You pointed out self-awareness. That’s one of the biggest things I’ve noticed in every single episode I’ve had on this show, every conversation I’ve had that’s peripheral to the show. If you’re aware of something, you can only then become more aware of it as you’re more aware of it. But you can also push things to the side. I’ve watched parents go, I can’t. I’ve had friends that are parents that they’re like, man, some nights I just fucking can’t even. Anything. Like everybody needs to leave me alone and I just need to stare at the ceiling for a little while.
or they dive into some vice, alcohol or something else. So what advice do you have for people that are trying to figure out, I either have a kid and I need to and want to be a better parent, or we’re thinking about having kids, or I’m still kind of reeling from being a kid, and how do they then work through their stuff?
Anne Wallen (32:33.106)
So I think you could, you know.
Anne Wallen (32:39.752)
I’m hearing some interference. Are we still together?
Nick McGowan (32:42.974)
We’re good.
Anne Wallen (32:45.128)
Okay, this could go off on so many, you’re like the tree trunk just now and there’s so many branches and things that we could just go into off of that. I think one of the things that you have to understand is that narcissism, for example, is a spectrum, right? And so,
one end is kind of it’s a healthy self-awareness, self-love, self-protecting, self-serving, right? The other end is where you’re using people in a malignant way. Now, a newborn, I always make jokes with my students, like the newborns don’t read the books, right? They don’t know what the parents think that they’re supposed to be doing. But when they are little and they’re trying to communicate, right? We can, if we’re cold,
for example, we can go and manipulate the thermostat, right, to make it whatever we want. If we’re hungry, we go and manipulate the refrigerator door and get a snack. Babies can’t do those things, so they’re not manipulators, right? But what they are is desperately trying to communicate with us, and we have to put aside, and you see many a mom who’s had sleepless nights, dads too,
Nick McGowan (33:41.842)
Mm-hmm.
Anne Wallen (34:04.029)
where they’re just doing whatever it is that the baby seems to be needing and it might just be an overnight, know, shit fast story. You’re just, nobody’s getting sleep, everybody’s crying, like everybody’s crying. And you just have to get through it, right? But the fact that you are trying, the fact that you haven’t just put the baby away and said, I can’t do this anymore, you know, good luck kid, right? The fact that they’re not doing that,
Nick McGowan (34:30.332)
You
Anne Wallen (34:33.224)
the baby and informs the baby, I am worth trying for. And so even if they aren’t fixing it, I can see they’re trying. Right? Now, do you need to step away? Do you need to be able to eat, you know, shower, take a crap by yourself? Yeah, of course. Right? And you need to be able to take care of yourself in order to take care of somebody else. And you need to be able to set boundaries and say, you know,
Nick McGowan (34:37.445)
Hmm.
Anne Wallen (35:02.464)
I am, and we talked a little bit about personality types before, but I’m an introvert, right? And when you’re looking at the Myers-Briggs, introverts need time alone, away from everybody, away from touch, away from sound in order to rebuild their battery. Extroverts, they need other people to recharge their battery. And so if you’ve got babies who are almost all extroverts in that
Nick McGowan (35:15.846)
Mm-hmm.
Anne Wallen (35:30.638)
stage of their life. They need somebody else for something at all times usually. And you’ve got an introvert parent who’s like, I am all tapped out. I’m in the negative. Like kid, I can’t help you right now. I cannot do anything right now. I need to go, you know, just take a bath or something in silence. Everyone leave me alone. Knowing that about yourself and knowing that this whole scenario is going to change. Because before baby came,
You probably had self-care mechanisms or habits or whatever in place that you can say like, okay, I am drained. I went to that party. I’ve been at work all day. I need to just have like an evening of quiet. Well, when you have a baby, there’s no such thing. So being able to plan ahead for stuff like that, knowing yourself, being self-aware enough to say, I know what my needs are in a general way, putting a person into this
know, sphere of my everyday life, what do I need to do to keep myself sane while still caring for the needs of this other human being? And being able to build some kind of structure around that. It could be, do I need to live closer to my parents so my parents can help me? Does it mean I need to hire a postpartum doula or a nanny or somebody that’s gonna be able to help take care of the child so that I can take care of me?
You know, just, and that’s not selfish. That’s not being a bad parent saying, well, I can’t always meet the baby’s needs 100 % of the time. Who can? Like we have this really unrealistic expectation, this leave it to be for mom mindset, right? Where it’s like, she’s just gonna do everything. She somehow wakes up with makeup on, with her clothes pressed and you know, like she never spent any time on that, right? Well, that’s kind of what we’re expected to do as parents is we’re expected to just
be up and ready for the world and ready to take care of this baby 100 % without having any kind of prep or any kind of get ready time? No, that’s not how it really works. But then you have that expectation which makes people then feel like they’re failing. And that’s not fair either. That’s where if you look at postpartum depression, it has gone up and gone up and gone up and it’s in its highest
Anne Wallen (37:57.818)
in places where, or in family dynamics where nobody’s getting sleep, you know, there’s sleep deprivation going on and there’s no social support. And those are the two key factors. And a third key factor is babies who cry a lot. And babies don’t just cry a lot. So if you know how to meet your baby’s needs, you can understand your baby’s language, if you can anticipate their needs and just kind of, you know,
Nick McGowan (38:04.699)
Hmm.
Anne Wallen (38:27.781)
Be prepared as we just keep, I keep saying preparation, preparation, right? But being prepared and understanding what does this cry sound mean? Does it mean hungry? Does it mean pain? Does it mean sleepy, right? What do these cry sounds mean? And then being able to appropriately respond to the baby’s needs and making sure that the baby’s needs are met quickly. These all feed into a satisfied, healthy, happy baby, which,
creates calm, satisfied, happy, healthy family, right? And then if you are dealing with trauma triggers where maybe the baby crying is a trauma trigger for you, right? And you haven’t figured out what this baby’s need is, you’re gonna be spiraling and that spiral’s gonna, you’re gonna have anxiety, you’re have the depression, you might even develop other issues. And let me just say one really quick little piece.
Nick McGowan (39:08.922)
Yeah.
Anne Wallen (39:26.823)
The news a lot of times says, you know, when a mom kills her babies, right? The news will a lot of times say, oh, she had postpartum depression. That’s not postpartum depression, that’s postpartum psychosis. So postpartum depression and anxiety and OCD and all these other different kinds of mental health disorders, they can turn into psychosis. But psychosis is when you have suspended the connection to reality
in such a way that you would do that heinous act, right? And why does it get to that point? Because we’re not getting enough sleep, we’re not supporting our families, not, you know, we’re not like creating this wrap around care for families. And dads need it too, you know, like we think, mom’s got postpartum depression. Dads get postpartum depression too.
Nick McGowan (40:09.091)
Yeah.
Anne Wallen (40:22.797)
sleep deprivation will do it to anybody. You don’t even have to have a baby. You sleep deprived somebody for long enough and they’re gonna experience depression and anxiety. And so being aware, preparing for having that help afterward, understanding what is it that your personal wounding might look like and how might that affect the way you’re gonna care for your baby. So for example, you mentioned abandonment. A lot of people have…
Nick McGowan (40:30.456)
Yeah.
Anne Wallen (40:49.807)
abandonment issues because of the whole put your baby to cry it out in the bed philosophy that was taught for a long time. It’s not taught anymore, shouldn’t be taught anymore, we know better now. But there’s a lot of adults walking around that that was the way they did it and they’re gonna hear from their mom and dad and everyone, you know, that’s how you should do it. So it feels really unnatural for a reason.
Nick McGowan (40:54.585)
Mm-hmm.
Nick McGowan (41:09.026)
Mm-hmm.
Anne Wallen (41:14.435)
It’s that little instinct, that little knowing that awakens in us when we have a baby that tells us, no, that’s not okay. My baby needs me, my baby. That sound is really grating on me. Why? Because it’s meant for us to do something about it. And so being able to look at, there’s a tool that I sometimes will use, it’s called the self-redemption cycle.
Nick McGowan (41:27.543)
Yeah.
Anne Wallen (41:39.705)
And you’re really, it’s like this little circle, right? It informs who you are. It informs yourself about who you are. But it takes the core hurt. Have you ever heard of this? So it takes the core hurt and then it looks at what emotions are drawn from that core hurt. And then it says, what are you seeking? What do those emotions tell you about what you’re seeking? And then what kind of behaviors are you gonna do to meet the thing or find the thing that you’re seeking? And then a lot of times those are unhealthy behaviors too.
Nick McGowan (41:57.016)
Mm-hmm.
Anne Wallen (42:08.398)
So then you create a new core hurt for yourself, only to do it all over again. And so it’s important for us to really be aware of what are the triggers, right? What are the things that make us feel abandoned or unloved or whatever our thing is, right? And then be able to work through those things because first of all, going into a birth situation,
Nick McGowan (42:08.546)
Mm-hmm.
Anne Wallen (42:36.91)
You have to advocate for yourself. You have to be able to speak for yourself. You have to be informed enough because we live in a profit driven medical society and you cannot, it’s not that you can’t trust doctors as individuals, but you can’t trust the system to have your back. The system is not built to your wellness. The system is to profit and wellness doesn’t bring profit. And so,
Nick McGowan (42:55.81)
Mm-hmm.
Anne Wallen (43:06.616)
You have, you know, a whole system that I don’t want to say is like designed against you, but you have to be wise going into that. If you’re going to have your baby in a hospital, which not everybody’s having babies in hospitals, I’ve had three at home myself, but if you are going to go into a hospital, you have to know what you’re getting yourself into. You have to know how to handle it. And it’s not the time to be defending yourself or standing up for yourself.
you have to feel so safe to be vulnerable, to be able to open your body to let your baby out. And if you don’t, your labor will be dysfunctional. And that psychological piece, which is, I was saying before, like 80 to 85 % of your whole birth experience, it’s not physical. Physically, we breathe, we digest our food, we use the bathroom. We don’t need anybody to coach us how to do those things.
We don’t need to read books on how to do those things. Our bodies know how to do it. And it’s the same way with birth. Our bodies know how to give birth. But there’s safety mechanisms built into the process, survival mechanisms. And one of those survival mechanisms is, is it safe out there? Is it safe for the baby who’s super, super vulnerable? Like you said, you know, we’re the only species that’s like, our baby comes out and they are completely and utterly dependent upon us for everything.
Nick McGowan (44:30.444)
Yeah.
Anne Wallen (44:32.068)
And so if our subconscious says, it’s not safe for that little vulnerable person to come out, it will shut down labor. And you can give it all the drugs you want. You can give it all the pitocin you want. It’s not gonna receive it. Your brain’s gonna shut down those pitocin receptors and say, nope, it’s not safe out there. She doesn’t like the doctor. Or the lights are too bright. Or yeah, or whatever the reason that’s triggering her.
Nick McGowan (44:51.03)
Politics.
Anne Wallen (44:58.884)
you know, making her feel unsafe. And it could just be there’s a male doctor and she doesn’t feel comfortable around males in that way, right? And so it could be all kinds of things. As a doula and as a doula trainer, I have seen thousands of different scenarios where, you know, she might love her doctor and feel super safe with her doctor, but she gets to the hospital and guess what? It’s the person on call and she’s never even met them.
Right, and now we have a hurdle to get over. And does she feel strong enough and confident in her ability enough to not let that affect her? Or is she, or does she not feel that way? Right, and in the moment, you’re just trying to hang on for dear life. You’re just having labor. You’re just trying to get through it, right? And so all these other psychological factors are really tough to have to.
Nick McGowan (45:50.678)
Peace.
Anne Wallen (45:54.488)
navigate, that’s why you’ve got to prepare ahead of time and really have somebody there, whether it’s your partner who’s very well versed and really, you know, knows what you want and is willing to stand up for you, or a doula, or you’re home with your midwife, you know, whatever your scenario, but it’s definitely not for the faint of heart, but it’s also not for someone who is
just kinda coming at it willy nilly like, yeah, I got pregnant, yeah, I’m gonna have a baby, and yeah, we’re gonna do this thing called parenting. I mean, you can do it that way, but you’re gonna be on autopilot the whole time. Your reactions to things are not gonna be intentional and worked through the way that they should be for the betterment of your baby, right?
Nick McGowan (46:32.246)
Hmm.
Nick McGowan (46:41.731)
yeah.
Anne Wallen (46:44.803)
The best way to change life on Earth is to change the way we start, right?
Nick McGowan (46:50.324)
Yeah, what a good way to put that. And especially all of this ties in to so many different pieces, but it’s all similar. Like you go into some big situation, you have to be prepared, but you also need to understand about yourself. And there are people I’m sure that try their best to be as prepared as they can be. Again, I’ve had a few friends that are like, I’ve read every fucking book I could. I talked to everybody I could.
Anne Wallen (46:58.522)
Mm.
Anne Wallen (47:14.777)
Yeah.
Nick McGowan (47:16.278)
And I still expect to screw this kid up in some sort of way, because I’m going to say something weird or whatever. it’s like totally, like you’re just going to do what you’re going to do and your kid’s going to go how they’re going to go. But that’s the sort of like anti-matter in the middle of it. That’s like, well, all that stuff is just going to happen. But as long as you’re best prepared, you’re going to do what you can. Those people that are kind of wandering around that are like, well, we had a baby and like, I still don’t know my stuff or what’s going on. That.
Anne Wallen (47:36.558)
Yeah!
Nick McGowan (47:45.714)
level of self-awareness takes many, many, many blocks to get through to be able to get to that point. So the whole purpose of this show is to be able to help people on their path towards self-mastery and really figuring themselves out and living the best life that they can. So for the people that are on that path towards self-mastery, wanting to have a kid or have a kid or are still kind of reeling through the stuff that they’ve been through as a kid, how…
What’s your advice for somebody that’s on their path towards self mastery that’s kind of going throughout all that?
Anne Wallen (48:19.747)
So the number one thing that you can do is to just nurture yourself, right? Nurturing and making it okay to get things wrong. Having self-forgiveness, having self-grace. Because as you go through these blocks, I could tell you just from my own personal experience that going through different, you know, looking at what has happened to me and saying, okay, this event, and I’m gonna sit with how this event makes me feel.
until I can take away the power from it. And some people use counseling for that, some people use EMDR. I found EMDR super helpful. I think too, know, alongside having self-grace and having self-forgiveness, being with other people who are healthy psychologically is really important. If you are in a situation or a relationship that is kind of keeping you in
I don’t want to say in abuse because maybe the relationship isn’t abusive, but maybe in a situation where you are constantly triggered or you are continually kind of repeating bad habits, right? And you’re recognizing that, but then you’re in this situation where they’re just triggering you and triggering you and triggering you. You got to get away from it to be able to heal it. It’s so tough.
to be able to heal something while you’re in the midst of reaction. And honestly, you know, we talked about the word narcissism and the word trauma and things like that. One of the most powerful ways that I feel like people can heal from stuff and actually keep digging into their past and finding the next thing, right? Like, okay, well, I healed from this and now what? What’s the next thing?
Nick McGowan (50:17.15)
Mm-hmm.
Anne Wallen (50:17.325)
You’re subconscious, two things. One, I really believe that your subconscious will always answer you. And before you even finish the sentence, right, you know the answer. That’s your intuition, you can trust it. Right, so being able to say, what’s the thing that is really holding me back right now? You know it, your subconscious just told you what it was, right? And then going through that, working on that, focusing on that. The other thing is, is that for people,
A really powerful tool for us to get understanding about something is labeling. So when you are, let’s say narcissism, when you are looking at narcissism, you can say, hey, here’s a behavior. This makes me feel uncomfortable. What is this? Why does this make me feel uncomfortable? it’s gaslighting. I’ve got a word for that.
Nick McGowan (50:52.861)
Mm-hmm.
Nick McGowan (51:08.148)
hehe
Anne Wallen (51:09.977)
Right? I’ve got a word for the bandwagoning technique. I’ve got a word for flying monkeys. I’ve got a word for all these different things. Right? And so being able to look at your shit and having a label for the different things that you’re experiencing, having a label for the different reactions that you might be having. Number one, it helps you to understand it. It helps you have a little more power over those things rather than it having power over you. But then also, you know, we can Google it.
If you have a word that you’re like, my goodness, you know, this thing is really just triggering me. Why does it trigger me? Okay, comes, I can see that it’s stemming back from this thing that happened to me. And like I said, just ask yourself the questions. Just keep asking yourself the questions. And when your subconscious tells you this is what it was, then you can look it up, right? One of the reasons why I learned about narcissism is because I was Googling, why doesn’t my husband like me?
How sad is that that you got to ask that question? But I soon found out that it’s one of the list of things in the narcissistic playbook. And so then you start to realize, this behavior happened at this point in my life and at that point in my life and at that point in my life. And because you have a label for it, you can start to identify the root cause. And that’s where you can kind of start taking your power back.
Nick McGowan (52:35.719)
Yeah.
Anne Wallen (52:38.456)
and you can rework the programming that’s going on in your head. And so then you’re no longer a robot, just on autopilot. You can have a moment, you could take a moment to pause and say, I’m not gonna respond like that anymore. I’m gonna, I look, I see it for what it is now. And I’m not gonna let that do this thing to me. And I’m not gonna let that do that thing to my child, because I’m not gonna respond the same way anymore.
Nick McGowan (52:54.547)
Mm-hmm.
Anne Wallen (53:08.132)
And I’ll tell you what, every kid, I really believe this, every child is born to bring the balance. So like if you have, and I apologize for all the noise in the background, I am in New York City. I don’t know if you hear the sirens. They’re about to come right in front of my building, I could tell. All right, they’re gone. Okay, so.
Nick McGowan (53:08.231)
Yeah.
Nick McGowan (53:30.483)
Alright.
Anne Wallen (53:35.074)
give them a second. So when you have, you know, these, this labeling and when you have this balance that the child is bringing into the family, you know, you, you might say, that kid’s a, that’s a wild child or whatever. A wild child compared to what? Maybe you have very placid parents, right? And then the child’s just bringing the balance. They bring in the party. Or you have parents who are, you know, maybe really
Nick McGowan (53:35.155)
They’re good.
Nick McGowan (54:00.989)
you
Anne Wallen (54:05.061)
just super extroverted and then you get this little introverted child because they’re bringing the balance or you have two kids, right? I’ve had my two boys, they’re kind of like in the early middle of the six of them and I had one that was like large muscle. You tell him to dig a hole, he’s gonna be like, how deep and how big and tell me where to go and I’m on it, right? And then you got the next kid.
who was very small motor skills, very artistic, you know, just like super minute focus, right? And you tell him to dig a hole and he’d be like, I don’t know how to dig a hole, right? So like they’re opposites, but this is what happens in family structures. It’s like the kid comes in and they fill the gap of what’s missing. This can get tricky if you have stuff that you haven’t worked on in the past, because guess what?
Nick McGowan (54:48.443)
Mm-hmm.
Anne Wallen (55:02.852)
Kids also bring the triggers. So for example, my nine-year-old, love her to pieces, she’s really different from me. It’s a challenge sometimes to be her parent because I don’t know what to do with her half the time because she’s just so different from me. And so that in itself is a little bit of a trigger. And so as a parent, when you are trying to learn, because a lot of times we think, oh, we’re here to
Nick McGowan (55:18.096)
Hmm.
Nick McGowan (55:24.272)
Yeah.
Anne Wallen (55:32.696)
you know, mold and shape this person. But I want to challenge that perception. I think we’re really here to figure out who this person is and help them to be the best of whoever it is that they’re supposed to be. And we’re not really supposed to be directing that all that much at all. Right. And so that also can be really tricky if you don’t know who you are. Right. If you’re if your stuff
Nick McGowan (55:57.893)
Yeah.
Anne Wallen (56:01.496)
goes into identifying as, I worthy? Should I speak up? Do I have to fight for stuff? All the different things that go on as a child inside of you, your child, it’s gonna be mirrored back to you. And if you haven’t figured those things out, if you didn’t figure them out as a child, how are you gonna have answers for your kid when they’re going through the same thing? So.
getting into and really just there’s actually a book for if you’re pregnant now or if you’re looking at getting pregnant, there’s a book called birthing from within. It’s kind of a whole system. I really like it because it kind of digs into the psychological aspect of, you know, this labyrinth of how were you created mentally, emotionally, and then how are you going to walk or step into parenthood, you know, as a person who can
be there for your kid in all these different ways that you’re gonna have, it’s gonna be demanded upon you whether or not you have the skills to meet the needs or not, right? Yeah.
Nick McGowan (57:05.967)
Yeah, whether you like it or not. man, there’s so much to that. And again, I’m not going to have kids ever. I’m no longer equipped to. And I can think about how these things relate to us as people without kids because we were kids at one point and this ties back. Even the two kids that you have that you talked about, you literally just described my brother and myself. And my dad was like,
Anne Wallen (57:25.112)
Yeah.
Nick McGowan (57:34.359)
I understand the one who can dig the holes. I don’t understand why you’re building things and you’re painting. What the hell is this about? I’m gonna stick with the one over here because that makes sense and parents can go to that. They can look at that and they can do those things. But I really appreciate that you’re challenging people to understand the most about themselves and where their things have come from so that they don’t really bring them into anything further unless they go, hey, I learned this before cause I went through some shit.
Anne Wallen (57:56.334)
Mm-hmm.
Nick McGowan (58:03.077)
Here’s how you go about it a little differently, but you do you kid and I’m here to support you. I think that’s a crucial thing that you really pointed out and I appreciate you pointing that out. This has been awesome to have you on today and I appreciate you being with us. Before I let you go, where can people find you and where can they connect with you?
Anne Wallen (58:08.109)
Yeah.
Nick McGowan (58:27.194)
Did I totally cut out there? Awesome. So I’d asked where can people find you and where can they connect with you?
Anne Wallen (58:36.484)
Well, I am like I said the director of maternity wise you can find me there. That’s easy maternity wise calm just like that And you can also find me. I’m a contributor to brains magazine So I have several articles published there and if you want to find me on LinkedIn, I’m Anne Wallen. So hey
Nick McGowan (58:58.896)
Again, Ann, it’s been great having you on today. I appreciate your time.
Anne Wallen (59:01.988)
Thank you.
