A mother says she felt “ashamed” after feeling “completely detached” to her newborn son following his birth four years ago.<\/p>\n
Michaela from Wigan was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after four miscarriages and a still birth before her son was born in 2022.<\/p>\n
“I just felt disbelief, like he wasn’t mine. I couldn’t make it add up that it could be OK,” Michaela said.<\/p>\n
Michaela eventually received help from the Building Attachments and Bonds Support service (BABS), run by Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Trust, which works to connect mothers with their young children.<\/p>\n
Michaela, who is now speaking out to urge others to get help, said she had always wanted to have children.<\/p>\n
“I’ve always wanted to feel the kicks and get excited,” she added.<\/p>\n
But her pregnancy was dominated by anxiety. She and her husband had spent years dealing with repeated loss and when Nico arrived in 2022, she was unable to properly respond.<\/p>\n
“Everything I did, I just felt completely detached,” she said.<\/p>\n
Michaela worked hard to overcome her feelings, playing with her son, telling him stories, researching the best way to build a bond, but nothing worked.<\/p>\n
She said: “I met all his needs, so his nappy was always changed, I did baby-led weaning with him, I breast fed him for 18 months. From the outside, I looked like the perfect mum, the Instagram mum.”<\/p>\n
Inside though, she said she was “a mess” and “couldn’t cope”.<\/p>\n
“There was no bond, and I knew that he had bonded with me. And that was the hardest thing. I knew that I was his world. I knew it,” she added.<\/p>\n
Clinical psychologist Dr Catherine Corker said it was a more common situation than many people realised, partly because so many mums were reluctant to speak up.<\/p>\n
“It can still feel like such a taboo for someone to say, ‘I’m having really unexpected feelings about my baby. I didn’t expect to feel this way’,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I think the feeling of shame and judgement and guilt gets in the way of people saying ‘I’m really struggling’.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A mother says she felt “ashamed” after feeling “completely detached” to her newborn son following his birth four…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":789271,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-789270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=789270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/789271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=789270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=789270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=789270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}