Healing From Postpartum Depression With Therapy, Friends & Exercise

Hello! Who are you?

I’m Kristin, a mom to a wonderful little boy and living happily with my partner in the mountains. I’m a travel blogger and have been for over 11 years now! I started off writing about solo female travel after four years of working in finance, unhappy with being in a cubicle.

I bought a one-way ticket to Thailand and was nomadic for years. I loved the freedom of my lifestyle but eventually, like all things, it lost its luster and I started wanting a family and some stability. I was lucky that I met my partner at a campfire in Namibia (who lived in the American West already) and we ended up starting a family several years later.

What is your struggle and when did it start?

I struggled with postpartum depression for over a year. It seemed to start a week before I actually gave birth. I was experiencing ‘false labor’ and was 8 days after my due date, which meant I had to have an induction I didn’t want. 

In the end, my birth ended up being a good experience, but it’s hard being a new mom in the United States. I got zero paid time off and felt the burden of having employees I still had to pay, even though I had no time to work.

We don’t live near our family, so I really didn’t have much of a community to lean on. I felt very alone and isolated, plus had feelings of depression I’d never experienced before. 

I wasn’t my happy self anymore. I withdrew and felt sadness and frustration with the pressures of new motherhood with so little support. 

How did this struggle make you feel at your worst moments?

I didn’t realize until later when I was coming out of the fog that the depression had limited how much I initially bonded with my baby. I loved him but I didn’t get those amazing feel-good ecstatic hormones other moms described.

I felt really robbed of that, but that’s part of why I share my story so openly. So many moms don’t get to feel that and it can feel so unfair and isolating, but it’s so common. 

My partner urged me to reach back out to my old therapist and that helped set me back towards feeling better. 

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Was there a moment when you started to turn things around?

It took me about a year to finally start to feel better. That’s a really long time and I feel sorry for the woman (past me) who had to go through that. 

I wasn’t sure how to feel better for a while. People talk about ‘getting help’ but that’s a blanket term and unfortunately it’s not a band-aid you can just put on and suddenly be yourself again.

It takes time to find the right therapist, medication if that’s what you decide to do (I ultimately didn’t medicate, but I did visit with a psychiatrist to explore the option), to find a new rhythm with family, and in my case, I really needed friends locally.

That’s not something I had prior to giving birth as I’d moved right before the pandemic and worked so much prior to getting pregnant that I was often out of town, and didn’t put in the effort needed to build a ‘village.’ 

I remember slowly I started to be silly again. Started to stop feeling anger and frustration easily again. I had a really nice summer, spending 5 weeks in Africa, which has always been my happy place. I spent half of it working and half of it with my family and by the time we came home, I felt so much better.

I think I just needed to be doing what I used to do again (working on projects) and needed to be in the moment more, which I find much easier there with the wide open spaces and bad cell signal. 

Maintaining those good feelings from being abroad was important once we came home. 

Getting back into exercising was probably about 25% of it, putting time and effort into building a community locally was another good 25% of it, as well as finally starting to get more sleep and no longer lactating, which I think was still doing a number on my hormones, was 25% of it, and a good therapist was the rest.

What steps did you take to overcome your struggle?

I’ve told my friends who are trying to get pregnant to start therapy now. Find a therapist you really like before you start to feel the pressures of new motherhood. It’s a big transition for everyone, and very few of us are prepared to be hit with postpartum depression – I know I wasn’t.

If it’s too late for that, then start now. It is totally OK if you need to meet with several people before you find the one. I met with several before reaching back out to my old therapist and doing FaceTime with her. 

It should be someone who makes you feel safe, heard, and doesn’t just sit there while you talk while providing very little to help you through. They should be able to help you investigate your thoughts and feelings and get to the root of them.

I have also found Emotional Freedom Technique – which involves loving and gentle exploration of one’s feelings while tapping on body meridians, also works wonders.

Have you shared any of this with people around you in real life?

I have been a fairly open book about my struggles. My family, friends, and strangers on the Internet, all know about it. I needed to feel less alone when I was going through it and remember googling so that I could find stories of other people who had had the same experience.

I believe it’s important to share openly, both for my healing and for anyone else. There’s no shame in struggling. We all struggle at some point in our lives. 

If you could give a single piece of advice to someone else that struggles, what would that be?

I wish that I had started therapy earlier. It’s a tool that I have used many times throughout my life and I’ve just let go of a lot of the self-care that I used to do. I used to meditate every morning, I used to do a lot more EFT, and speaking to my therapist weekly.

I let that slide big-time as a new mom, but that’s exactly when you need to be able to find at least a little bit of time for yourself. 

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, YouTube channels, or other resources for you?

I don’t actually have an answer for this, I did not turn to books or podcasts for help. 

Where can we go to learn more about you?

You can read more about me at parenthoodadventures.com, or on Instagram @bemytravelmuse. I’ve also been running a women’s travel blog, bemytravelmuse.com, for 11 years now!

💡 By the way: If you want to start feeling better and more productive, I’ve condensed the information of 100’s of our articles into a 10-step mental health cheat sheet here. 👇

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