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Chapter 7: Dealing with Mixed Emotions
No matter how your opinion about childbirth was shaped, ultimately, for some women, a c-section can be a constant reminder that after nine months of expecting one scenario, things didn't go as they’d planned. Trying to make sense of feelings of disappointment or failure while you also deal with your physical recovery, sleep deprivation, and the demands of caring for a newborn, is enough to leave anyone feeling overwhelmed! Mental health experts are quick to warn that holding on to or not addressing these negative emotions can wreak havoc on your emotional, mental, and physical well being. They key to healing, they say, is finding a way to process all of these emotions so that they don’t stay bottled up inside.
The Road to Healing
It can take time to process a c-section delivery and accept it for what it is—another birth option. This doesn’t mean that you won’t always have mixed emotions about the experience, but rather that you’ve moved beyond the hurt, anger, sadness, or guilt. Getting to this point may take much longer than you want or expect. You can’t put a timeline on it. For some, healing comes in a matter of months, for others years, and still others never. (We talked with several women who said they were still bothered by their Cesarean deliveries more than a decade later.) Several of the therapists we interviewed for this chapter said that much of a woman's success in dealing with the negative emotions will ultimately come down to how she deals with—or learns to deal with—disappointment, unfairness, and just plain randomness. As one psychologist bluntly put it, "Life sucks sometimes. But part of being a grown-up means you pick yourself up and try to find ways to cope."
Other information that's included in this chapter:
- Coming to terms with your c-section
- Rethinking the birth experience
- Dealing with postpartum depression
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