Unveiling Motherhood: Navigating Mental Health and Wellness w/ Keely Clark - Part 2

Are we doing motherhood all wrong? What if there was another way? Brace yourselves for a revealing conversation with Keely Clark, the founder of Mother Bloom Wellness, who shines a light on the often unspoken realities of motherhood. Keely breaks down the concept of matrescence, the transition into motherhood, and the complexities of the postpartum period. She unravels how untreated anxiety and depression can lead to unexpected complications and how the individualistic mindset can add more layers of challenges. Hear from her about the 'perfectionist portal' that is set up for new mothers, and the subsequent guilt and self-neglect that it can trigger. 

Moving onto the art of parenting, we discuss the underrated importance of repair as a vital skill in parenting. Keely passionately shares how our relationships with ourselves can significantly impact how we support others and our propensity to foster healing in relationships. She reinforces the essentiality of accepting our imperfections and highlights the significance of our reactions post imperfection. Gain insights into how Keely lends her support to mothers every day in developing these crucial skills. This episode is a goldmine for anyone navigating the challenges of motherhood or seeking to comprehend the profound alterations that accompany parenthood.

This program is brought to you by:
Kindred Art Therapy
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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: 0:59

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. So today we're having Keely Clark return. She's the founder of Mother Bloom Wellness in Asheville, north Carolina.

Aubrey: 1:28

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, birth 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. This is a part two of a two-part episode, and go ahead and tune in to bizradious if you'd like to learn about the first episode. So we're going to go ahead and continue the conversation that we had in the first part about postpartum and just areas that are unexpected, that happen in the postpartum period and even beyond that. So welcome back, keely. Thank you, aubrey.

Keely: 2:35

Glad to be here.

Aubrey: 2:36

Yeah, so tell us a little bit more. So you were saying that postpartum period that you don't just like. There's so many complications that can happen as a result of untreated anxiety, depression, trauma that happened. So, like I was saying in between the shows, like I just don't know what. I don't know what are some of the things that you've learned in your process.

Keely: 3:03

Absolutely so. So much All the things you know I birth I kind of look at as like the portal, particularly when you are becoming a parent for the first time. That's like any of us you don't know what you don't know right. You can read all the books, you can listen to all the podcasts. You can feel ready and like it's even your calling. This is what you've been preparing for your whole life to become a parent.

Keely: 3:30

As I know, many women sometimes identify with that role very much the maternal side of themselves. And yet the whole experience of becoming a parent is a major life transition and there is a lot of stuff that inevitably is going to come up in that, and so one of the things that is a big part of my work that I like to bring some psychoeducation around is how motherhood and the same is true for fatherhood, but my focus is on moms and so I talk often about this concept of matrescence, motherhood as a developmental stage. So if you think about similar semantically, the word adolescence you think about that time in your life when you were in transition between you know, childhood and adulthood, and how uncomfortable that is, how challenging that can be. So much is changing for you physically, like in your body, socially, your roles are changing. Emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, like all these dimensions. There's a lot of change, right, and we all kind of, I think, can look back on that time and wince, probably like there was something really uncomfortable and awkward around that time in all of our lives.

Keely: 4:54

Well, motherhood is very similar. The transition into parenthood becoming a new, you know, kind of developing new dimensions of yourself, which is required, like when you haven't been a mother before and now you are, you have to step at your. Your body goes through these changes. Similarly, physically, your social roles evolve, psychologically and emotionally, spiritually, your values change. So there is a lot happening in a context of a very short and brief period of time, the birth being the portal into that. And if your birth experience was something that's complicated or traumatic, you know it's loading you up from the get go with even more to kind of process all at once.

Aubrey: 5:46

You know, this makes me think of how, like in more like native societies they would probably, or like more family-centered societies, there would probably be a lot more guidance and nurturance through this process. But we have so much of an individualistic and society that, like women, are going through this process alone oftentimes.

Keely: 6:12

Yes, very isolated from community, isolated from their families, even with more of us moving away from homes and living remotely away from our families of origin and communities of origin. And so, yeah, it's more and more, and certainly was the case for myself. I lived three hours from my parents whenever I became a mother and so I felt that isolation in that way as well. I'm glad you mentioned the individualist piece because I think that plays a role in kind of tying in more complication. We are of a society and mindset that like do everything, be everything and do it all well, right, and so for a lot of women, particularly high achieving, high performing, high accomplished women coming into motherhood and here's something that we haven't done before and it's really unfamiliar and really vulnerable we're having to kind of rediscover ourselves and learn these new skills, but do it at the same time. Be a mother, like, be a nurturer, and feeling a drive to want to do it well, to not mess up. We don't want to hurt our child or to hurt, damage them.

Keely: 7:36

This is where a lot of complications, like mom guilt can come from or kind of a self abandonment, lack of self care.

Keely: 7:49

We are so hyper focused on caring for our families and our children that we can really lose sight of taking care of ourselves.

Keely: 7:58

There's also this concept of like the perfectionist portal in postpartum period, where those brain changes that I was referencing in our first part were set up to kind of expect to be able to do things well and to perform well and believe socially that we should be doing everything well and perfectly. And yet, biologically, ships have happened in our brain where little left oriented problem solving and analysis and logistics the parts of our brain that are good at solving problems were a little more like attuned and to right side function. Where we're attuned we're more intuitive, and so sometimes that like gap between those parts of our brains can be where a perfectionism and self doubt and poor self esteem can really fester and intensify and create even more. Shame for a new mom who's just learning how to parent parenting as a skill. She's just learning herself and these new dimensions of herself, and there can be a lot of. I mean that's where we might see some depression, it's where we might see a lot of anxiety emerge. I'm kind of bouncing all around.

Aubrey: 9:33

This is good, because what it sounds like what you're talking about, really is like pretty much anybody in our society who's you know mostly like anybody really is vulnerable to this experience. And I'm also thinking at the same time about like how many people fall in the same boat as me who experienced early childhood trauma, and like chronic trauma, where like maybe they weren't parented in a way that they want to continue parenting.

Aubrey: 10:03

So not only are they trying to figure out how to be the best version of themselves as a parent, but also trying to undo and care for themselves at the same time. There's just so many balls in the air that you're trying to juggle.

Keely: 10:17

Yep, yep, absolutely. I'm so glad you mentioned that, because that's another complication we maybe we could call it that. I see that, yes, when you become a parent, like parenting is a skill that that we kind of the only template that we have for it at that point, when you first become a parent, is the way you were parented, and we can know in ourselves that I don't really identify with that. I don't like the way I was parented or these parts, these ways that I was, in which I was parented, didn't work for me. I want to be different, and yet that's still the template, it's still the blueprint of how we've learned.

Keely: 11:01

I really love to and, like I said, attachment work is a big part of what I do, and so I like Stan Totkin Wired for Love, in which he says you have to be loved to know how to love, and so we are often kind of forging or, like you know, birthing from ourself this new way of relating to a person, to someone we love, relating to ourselves, which means we have to heal and unpack a lot of how that that blueprint was first, those tracks were first laid and what didn't work for us, what was wounding to us in our earliest formative years. There's a lot of that that's inevitably gonna come up when we become a parent, because now we're being called on to parent someone else and we're often rejecting something from our own experience of being parented in order to do it differently. But we have to heal around that first in order to get better at parenting, the way we want to parent and being in line with the values that feel really important to us.

Aubrey: 12:15

Yeah, I want to clarify this piece as well, because this is something that for me as a mental health practitioner, also a parent and a mom, that I felt, like you know there and I think that a lot of people get caught up in this like this idea of like you need to heal yourself first I really have come to believe that there it's a. It's like a cyclical process that continues happening throughout your child's whole life span, because now that my son is, he's turning seven this month and it sounds like your son is also about the same age, just turned seven yep in September and so like, and you know, because your daughter is 11, right that way, you know, every year he I'm reflecting back on that year of my childhood and I'm healing, like that part of my eyes.

Aubrey: 13:12

Yes, it's not like I'm healing it all at once before it all kind of happens. It's more like things are getting triggered as I go and I'm trying to work through them as I go and that part brings up a lot of guilt and shame but at the same time like I know that there's no other way that it could be done. That's right.

Keely: 13:30

That's right. Yeah, I mean I'm. Thank you for the clarification. I I certainly don't believe either that any healing has to happen before we can be fully equipped.

Keely: 13:40

I think healing happens in relationship, always and continuously. And so as we are growing these new, these new parts of ourselves to to, to respond to our an An infant or a toddler or a young child, an elementary, school-aged child, a tween, an adolescent, teenager and beyond, like we are constantly being Kind of met and remit by, you know, parts of ourselves through that journey, that we have a continuous opportunity to Find more healing or to help it fully develop in our self, while also, you know, being helping to shape, you know, our child's experience of in the world too. Like the parenting is lifelong. I share this with the moms I support all the time. It's like we don't have to be perfect and we don't have to get it right every single second. We kind of have the whole the rest of our lives to be in relationship with our children, to make an impact and to really fully Expand the potential for them in their lives and for us in our relationships with them.

Aubrey: 14:58

Yeah, and I'll add to that that, like as a child of you know parents that they did everything that they could to try to do it the right way.

Aubrey: 15:10

But then when they're met with um criticism or like my reflection on how things Were not helpful or things that they did wrong, that their their guard goes up and they're not able to address it, and I find that it would be so much more helpful and healing.

Aubrey: 15:32

And this is where my approach comes in as a parent, where I'm always reflecting and I'm always humbling myself to the idea that, like I didn't do it the right way. And there there is a different way. Like I had an experience just a few weeks ago where I Like totally lost my cool with my son. I was like yelling at him, just like the floodgates opened in terms of like my Anger just kind of rushed at him at that moment and I felt bad about it later and I ended up having a conversation with him about, like, my feelings in that moment and just not trying to justify, but sharing with him. You know it wasn't okay for me to act in that way and that's really like that repair process. Is that healthy modeling of like you know that there can be repair and that humiliation can create a lot of just continuation of the relationship. Right, absolutely.

Keely: 16:36

I'm so glad that you mentioned that. That's a big part of what I believe too in my practice that repair. And I have to also kind of plug Dr Becky here, because I'm going to say this and it was kind of the center point of her recent TED talk. But she says I don't know if you're familiar with Dr Becky Good Inside, but she's an attachment, child and family psychologist but she says that repair is like the most important parenting skill and I a thousand percent agree with that.

Keely: 17:12

It's like we can be imperfect, we can have a loss of self-control and self-regulation in our own humanness. You know, as people, as adults, even though we're older doesn't mean that we necessarily always have it all together. We are still just every bit vulnerable and susceptible to frustrations and loss of ourselves in the moment, being overwhelmed, and so that's okay. Number one the number one thing that we can focus on is how we repair that with our children and how we model to them. It's okay to be imperfect, but what you do next is it makes all the difference.

Keely: 18:01

It's like a lot of times I know this comes up with in the moms I support that's a little bit of how we're re-parenting ourselves too, because I know there's a lot of in our generation. We're not used to hearing apologies to think about, like what it might have, how it may have helped us or how it might have contextualized things. If any of the adults in our lives might have said, you know, I really don't like the way I said that, let me try that again. And so at any point that we're introducing that as a skill to our children now, even when they are babies and toddlers, like I mean, wow, the difference that that can make over the course of their lifetime and what they understand is possible in terms of security and relationships, is that it's really encouraging to me to think that we are beginning to do that more collectively as parents and humans today.

Aubrey: 19:08

Yeah, and what you're saying really is, you're making this broader connection to how, like you know, the parent-child relationship is the foundation of all other relationships and, like I mentioned earlier, how divided our society is at this point. It's really sad and scary to witness and it really to me really comes down to just how divided those familial relationships are and, like you're mentioning it, that like how prevalent it was in our parents' generation that they weren't able to like, humble themselves and to recognize the areas where they could have improved, and that like how much damage that has created in the wake of that effect.

Keely: 19:59

Yeah, you know, I think it goes forwards and backwards, like it's we're all interconnected and kind of like we were saying relationships, you know, are lifelong, and how we can always be working to repair and improve the health and function of our relationships and quality of our relationships.

Keely: 20:20

It also, excuse me, it also starts like at the center of the self and this is why excuse me, I'm sorry, that's okay why I have such a focus on, in supporting the moms, that I do this, a focus on self-compassion and self-care and re-parenting the self, because I think the way that we talk to ourselves and the way that we support ourselves very much impacts how we are then available to support others in our lives, to be the kind of parent that we want to be, to bring, to kind of foster the healing and supportive relationships that we want the world to feel and know Like.

Keely: 21:15

It's very dynamic and bi-directional, you know. So how we relate to ourselves, how we heal with our with ourselves and learn to maybe be the parent to ourselves, that we're learning how to be to our child as a new parent, that that makes all the difference and why it's so, so important as a skill to really develop just a way of being gentle and nurturing and self-compassionate and forgiving and humble. In our experience as new developing moms that still have a lot to learn but have a really lot of great strengths already too, it feels like such important work and I'm so grateful that I get to work with moms every day in this journey.

Aubrey: 22:14

Kelly, it has been wonderful having the opportunity to talk to you about these topics just around parenthood and motherhood, and I just think how valuable this conversation is and I can't wait to share it with all of my friends and colleagues. Where can we learn more about you and your practice? And you know all you want socials. Where is that?

Keely: 22:38

Yeah, great. Thank you so much. I am so grateful to be here and would love, if anyone wants to check me out. I'm at wwwmotherbloomwellnesscom and also on socials over on Facebook and Instagram at Motherbloom Wellness and I have a weekly support group that meets virtually for moms, both expecting and experienced moms, and there's more information on my site about that as well, and I have a newsletter monthly that I like to share little bits of like what's happening in my practice and little tidbit supports tips that might support moms about once a month, and you can find info about that on my site as well.

Aubrey: 23:26

Awesome. Well, for those of you who listened in today and you like this episode, be sure to check out part one that is also listed on bizradious, and be sure to like and subscribe. Thanks again, keeley. Thank you, aubrey.