Unveiling Motherhood: Navigating Mental Health and Wellness w/ Keely Clark - Part 1

Do you ever wonder what lies behind the veil of motherhood? Our candid conversation with Keely Clark, the founder of Mother Bloom Wellness and a licensed clinical social worker, brings you face-to-face with all the hidden nuances. A passionate advocate for mental health support for mothers, Keely shares her own journey through prenatal anxiety, deep earth trauma, and postpartum depression, and her transition from the legal system and the VA to mental health. She enriches our understanding of motherhood as she shares her insights into reparenting, the power of self-care and self-compassion for new mothers, and finding authenticity amidst the chaos of motherhood.

Keely courageously opens up about her own postpartum intrusive thoughts, highlighting the immense need to normalize such experiences and alleviate the ensuing anxiety. We delve into the neurobiological shifts that occur during pregnancy and postpartum, their effects on the mother-child relationship, and the guilt and shame often associated with intrusive thoughts. The conversation continues with a deep exploration of postpartum complexities and the best ways to provide support for mothers during this vulnerable phase. Join us as we traverse the terrain of motherhood and mental health, guided by Keely's unique insights and experiences.

This program is brought to you by:
Kindred Art Therapy
Visit https://www.arttherapync.com/ to schedule a free consultation.
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Alynee Davis, PLLC
Visit https://alynnedavis.com/ to connect.
Alynne is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor and Coach.

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Transcript

Aubrey: 0:58

Welcome to Kindred, the show shining a light on local mental health professionals, who are the unsung heroes of our community. Join us as we explore their stories, strategies and the art of healing minds. Let's break the stigma and celebrate resilience together. This is Kindred, where understanding begins and healing flourishes. Today we're honored to welcome Keely Clark, lcsw and founder of Mother Bloom Wellness in Asheville, north Carolina. Keely's virtual therapy serves clients in North Carolina, south Carolina and Florida, while her coaching reaches nationwide. Her passion lies in helping mothers reconnect with their authentic selves through self-compassion and self-care. Drawing from personal experiences with prenatal anxiety, deep earth trauma and postpartum depression, keely guides individuals in reparenting and nurturing their inner selves Through attachment theory, emdr and mindful self-compassion. She supports perinatal individuals and parenting couples, empowering moms to find meaning in their experiences. Welcome Keely.

Keely: 2:07

Thank you so much. Aubrey Happy to be here.

Aubrey: 2:10

Yeah, I'm so excited because the first time that we met, you came into a call that I was hosting and we just got to talking and I felt like we could keep talking for a long time. So I'm really excited that we're getting to do this two-part episode today.

Keely: 2:24

Definitely I love to connect with other moms and to meet other clinicians and, yeah, bring hear more about what others do and share what my passion that I love working with moms as well.

Aubrey: 2:42

And what a need there is. I mean, I'm obviously a mom and, as a mom, like a lot of my friends are also moms just because that's when you're a mom, that's how you make friends, right, and so I'm excited to be able to share this episode with them and just the other providers who are serving moms, who you know could use this information just as a way to be able to help inform their practice. Absolutely yeah. So why don't you go ahead and tell us a little bit more about your background, like how you got to the place that you're at now?

Keely: 3:16

Yeah, wow, feels like a quite the journey, a long time in the making. I have not always specialized in working with mothers. I started what feels like a lifetime ago in a different service field. Once I completed an undergraduate in psychology, I worked in children and family services for a stint of a few years In Wilming to North Carolina. I was a juvenile court counselor and worked with children and youth who had been adjudicated of the. I don't even know what I want to say about that now, it feels like it's so long ago. But yeah so, children and families who are working with the legal system, basically and helping them get rehabilitative services.

Keely: 4:13

And it was in that time that I kind of intersected with the discipline of social work and thought like I might like to further my career in that, and so that's what I did. I ultimately went back for a master's after a few years and similarly went back into children and families mental health after completing my master's degree and then, kind of by happenstance, by having landed an internship with the VA just for one year of my grad school program, I worked with the VA hospital setting and after a brief stint back in children and family mental health services, I decided to go back into the VA health care system because I felt like it was a really great system that supported a great cause, it had a lot of great resources and it really esteemed the field of social work, and so I was there for about seven to eight years. But in that time of working in chronic homelessness was actually the area of clinical work. Where I was working at the time, while there I had my first daughter in 2012. And what to say about that? I, you think you know, you think you're ready, you think you're, you're, you're excited. And then I was just blown away, I think, by how much I didn't know, how much I didn't expect how hard it would be. I it's funny because I actually I don't even think I knew how hard it felt to me until like sharing with friends and actually colleagues at the time, fellow social workers, that I was struggling and someone making mention to me have you thought about an antidepressant? And it was so novel, such a new idea to me at the time and I'm not quite. Actually I was surprised that my own providers hadn't mentioned it up to then, but when the friend suggested it and I then went to my provider and asked, it was in taking sertraline about three months, four months postpartum. I had just returned to work, and so I think I was especially struggling, and that's why a friend suggested it the way. I share the experience.

Keely: 6:45

It's like I began to see things in color again. Things felt more hopeful and optimistic, whereas up to that point it's like I just felt like this fog had kind of settled over me. I was going through the motions, you know I was. I had a newborn or an infant three or four months old, who was I had to take the daycare every day so that I could go back to this career, this nine to five job, five days a week. I was going through the motions.

Keely: 7:20

I remember coming home and like just feeling, like the realization would hit me like my the work's not over, like, even though I've been in this office job from eight to five. Today I come home and now it's like round two. I have to, like, wash all the bottles. I have to wash all the pump parts. I have to connect with my daughter. I have to make sure that, you know, she's fed, and if she needs a bath, if she needs to be, I mean anything that she may have needed. It was extra and so for the like, I think I realized or that was part of like where I was really struggling that I am a little bit nervous.

Keely: 8:16

No sharing the story. It's funny because I haven't talked about it in years. Wow.

Aubrey: 8:22

Well, this part is so relatable and I had shared a little bit with you about my experience. But, like you know, it's becoming more well known about postpartum depression. But it's more like the label is out there but not really like the true, like experience or the exactly like what is involved with this. So, it's right all to like hear real stories about like what is this really like?

Keely: 8:46

Right, I think the honestly. I just felt really hopeless and helpless and unhappy in my life in those early months because of how hard it was, how much it demanded of me and how much like life demanded of me, I had to. I had to move back into the role professionally, while also still very much adjusting to being a mom, and I, I, just I, I was really struggling.

Aubrey: 9:16

And so back to the medication because my thought on that is like there's also this piece of grieving the life without your child.

Keely: 9:26

Really, yeah, the ease of being able to come home after a day's work and maybe take a walk or go get a workout in or just rest on the couch and maybe zone out to I don't think it was Netflix at the time, but but something to turn on HGTV or whatever the thing was that just brought me kind of some comfort and ease and rest. I couldn't access that anymore. I I was very much tied up in all the responsibilities and it was kind of like sun up to sundown. I was working in some capacity. There was something being demanded of me or needed of me and there was no connection to myself being able to to take care of what I needed. So it so it felt at the time in all that adjustment and so, yeah, a real grief in losing my freedom.

Aubrey: 10:19

The other piece of this too and you know I don't want to put your partner on the spot, right, I think that this is more of just a very general thing is that oftentimes our partners kind of go on as though life is kind of the same. Then that can make it very difficult on the mother, feeling like, you know, we have this whole other added burden and life. So I'm kind of wondering like where, where were you at, and all of that. Like I know, for me my partner was wonderful, right, but at the same time, being a man not having gone through the same chemical changes, like there's only so much that he can understand.

Keely: 11:00

Absolutely, and there's more that I know today that I can speak to that for sure from a place of understanding now, but at the time I was not yet specialized in this area and so I did not know a lot of what's true and normal. And, yes, absolutely, my partner at the time and my children's father, he was great, he, I think he wanted to participate and do as much as he could, and at the same time I used to jokingly well, or jokingly now, let's jokingly back then but share how, like very clear and distinct images, like being up in the middle of the night my daughter was crying again, it was time to feed her, you know, one of the middle of the night nursing and like trying to get settle her, get her back to sleep, and looking over at my partner at the time and him, you know, rolled over with his back to me, still sleeping, and kind of having slept through all of it, and just like never had I wanted to just like punch someone so hard in the back.

Keely: 12:08

Yeah, the image is like shaking them, like right, right, just the anger and frustration and a deep sense of isolation and aloneness, like I was the only one who could provide for her. I was the only one who could nurse her, who could meet that need. And even if he had been awake, what would he do? Like it didn't make sense to wake him up to, or so I thought at the time, to like have us both be awake, like I was trying to care, take for everyone by letting him have his sleep, but also be up and responsive to my daughter, but ultimately feeling really alone and isolated and sad in that.

Aubrey: 12:54

But you had started to kind of mention, now that you're specialized, like what have you learned?

Keely: 13:01

Yeah, so so much. I would say it was after, you know, my daughter was born and actually I had my son in 2016, and that's what really cemented my trajectory, that I this was an area of interest for me. There was an area of what felt like a lot of gaps. Not enough people were normalizing things for myself when I was moving through my maternal care Providers weren't. I mean, I think there were screenings, but there weren't conversations happening about my mood or anxiety and how this, how my brain, was changing.

Keely: 13:39

You know, this is something that I've learned in hindsight and, looking back, it's like absolutely yes, there are so many neurobiological shifts that happen in our bodies, you know, chemically and hormonally.

Keely: 13:52

Obviously, we know that, but actually the way that the brain reorganizes itself, as I've learned in women and childbearing individuals, it's like mother nature's way of getting you ready to be attuned to this being once they're on the outside. The way it was presented when I first learned. It's like, you know, the human fetus actually needs about. You know, ideally would benefit from a couple more months, a few more months of gestation, but our heads get too large and so we have to deliver at the nine months term that we do, but that's kind of why, you know, the first two to three months postpartum are as particularly critical as they are. There's so much neuro cognitively still happening for the infant that the primary caregiver's attunement to the infant and responsiveness to the infant is obviously imperative. It's the way that the baby survives and so mother nature, to support that dyad and to support that survival, has created shifts in our own brain as we are developing and through pregnancy to be, to set us up to be ready for that kind of responsiveness and attunement to the infant in postpartum.

Aubrey: 15:18

And so, yeah, this is the area where I told the story of what happened during my postpartum period the second time around. This didn't happen the first time around for me, which is why it was kind of shocking and scary for me, you know. So it was like I we have probably like 20 feet from the deck upstairs in my house and also we live in a split level branch and so there's like an area where there's a stairwell in our house where you can stand at the top and it's basically like a balcony and overlooking it is probably good like 10, 15 feet down. So in both of these areas I mean, my daughter was born in May so I'd be walking either outside on the deck and it's beautiful outside and you know nursing her, rocking her, walking back and forth, or, you know, walking by that balcony inside of the house and like almost every single time I'd walk by, I'd have this like flash image that was so vivid of, you know, like trigger warning for anybody, but it was just like this flash image of just like chucking her over the side and like it scared the, just scared me, and like it was like this flash image, and then I would have a hard time being able to get that image out of my mind and then I'd start worrying about it, like, oh my god, what's happening? Like I really don't want to do this. I love my child like I don't, like I don't want anything to happen her. I would just like hold her so much tighter and I'd like so much closer.

Aubrey: 16:51

And I ended up going to my OB, dyn and for our you know, routine checkup after the fact, you know it's like really nervous to even say anything, but thankfully she was just really kind and welcoming. She was like do you have any questions or anything that's going on? I was like, well, actually, and I was like so timid about the way that I I'm really not a timid person like I'm very like Straightforward and tell you what it is right. So I can only imagine for those people who are I'm usually very shy and not so forthcoming how hard it would be to be able to ask this right, right, even at hard for me to ask. And I was like what is this thing? That like things are happening?

Aubrey: 17:30

And she said to me she was like, well, actually, like that's your brain telling you and giving you some signals to make sure that you keep your baby safe. And as long as you're feeling fear around that, then that actually means that you're doing what you're supposed to be doing and keeping your baby safe. You don't feel like oh, like a desire to do it, which is where things are going wrong for people. Then like you're good to go and I think this normalizing that help takes so much anxiety out of it, and so then I was able to. When those signals came up, I was like okay, thank you, brian, I don't need that. You're kind of scaring the crap out of me.

Keely: 18:09

Yes, yeah, it's. It's another piece that I've to have learned in all my training that that the prevalence of what we would call that as an intrusive thought right like the prevalence of that in the postpartum and perinatal period is Very high and that's absolutely a testament to kind of to what is happening at that brain level, that we are, our fears, our anxieties are much more sensitive and and In an out of in an adaptive way to support you know, yours and your baby's safety and your bond. But it can be terribly frightening and Absolutely like to talk about it, to bring that up to your provider. It's interesting because, even given all that I know, I still feel a little bit of the guilt or shame in admitting today what I recall in my my own intrusive thought experience. They were of a sexual nature and how disturbing that was for me.

Keely: 19:14

But what I've since learned also is that that's actually pretty common and if there are that, that, the themes of hurting, dropping and and something of a sexual nature harmful happening to your baby, those are actually really common themes for your interest of thoughts for women. But yeah, when you consider, like the, will I be judged for this? What would someone think about me. If they knew I was having thoughts of this nature you know something of this horrific, kind of unfathomable like topic Happening to my child if they knew that I was worried about this, like what would they think about me? And so, yeah, there's all kinds of stigma there and lots of reasons why I Never did, I never, I never brought that up to my provider and even today still feel kind of that icky feeling when I admit it. But I I do because I want to normalize that it is a common part of postpartum for many, many, many women.

Aubrey: 20:23

Well, thank you for sharing about that. I know that that's hard and you know we're hard in certain level of bravery and I imagine that by sharing that, that that's helping your clients as well. Yep, you will to talk about their experiences.

Keely: 20:42

Absolutely it's. You know I've worked with women who didn't kind of much Similar to you. They had had thoughts, they had intrusive images and and fears. And If we're not addressing it like I'm so grateful for you that you had a healthcare provider who was able to normalize that and support you and help you reframe it so that you could work through that, if we don't get that, it can actually For lack of a better word like Fester.

Keely: 21:15

So it's like I know I have worked with women who maybe didn't find me in the postpartum period, but in fact it's like it's been some months or years later, but they're still very much Kind of undoing, like anxiety or depression that took root in the postpartum period or somewhere in the perinatal period, but it was, it was complicated and it didn't really get treatment in that window of time. And so you know if, if not addressed, it can actually linger or or create some residual mental health complications later on. So Normalizing it as early as possible, even if we've not had, you know, a child yet, just a woman entering the maternal kind of transition, knowing that these things are Common and something we can be watchful for but not necessarily have to be afraid of, can make a big difference in supporting that adjustment.

Aubrey: 22:18

Killy, that's a really good spot to leave off on, because I think in our next part we can go more into depth on. You know what, the continuation, postpartum and and some of the complications that you've seen as well. So let's go ahead and take a break here. Do you let listeners know where they can find you?

Keely: 22:37

Absolutely Yep. So I have a website, motherbloom wellness calm, and I am also on social Instagram and Facebook at motherbloom wellness.

Aubrey: 22:50

Okay, well, for those of you who are listening, you can find out more information about this show kindred on this radio us, and be sure to like and subscribe and tune back in for part two of this with Keely.