Ask a Therapist - Becoming a Parent

No one has ever been fully prepared to be a parent until they were a parent and learning all the things that come with that. This is a normal process that I'm going to learn over time. (bright music) (text whooshes) Hi, I'm Ryan. I'm a therapist with Headspace, and welcome back to "Ask A Therapist." Today, we have a question from Chazile about pregnancy expectations. "I'm in my third trimester of pregnancy, and I'm feeling terrified. There's a lot around me that encourages me to see it as a beautiful experience, but the fears of childbirth and not being an adequate mother are overwhelming. Do you have any suggestions on how to navigate these fears?" Well, Chazile, first of all, thank you so much for the question. Obviously, this is a major life event that you're going through, and certainly, if you listen to social media or maybe family, there are certain expectations about how we're supposed to feel about this major life event, that being a pregnancy, and tell you it's supposed to be beautiful. You're supposed to be glowing, You're supposed to be all these different things, and when we hear a lot of supposed tos, we can start to internalize that. We can start to feel like, "Oh, well, I should be grateful," or, "I should be happy," or, "I should be excited." And whether those shoulds are true or not, that can be very invalidating for the feelings you are actually dealing with, which might not be acknowledged by friends or family or social media or society for that manner. And that is that it's also really scary. So I wanna validate that for you, that that feeling is also totally normal. If you're going to get through this experience, both pre and post, as you said, wanting to become an adequate mother, we need to be able to validate those feelings. And what we do when we're dealing with these sorts of heavy feelings is we say yes to the fear. We say yes to the feeling. We acknowledge that, "I am feeling this way," and then we try not to get stuck there, but instead, pivot to the and, "And I'm going to do this." So we might say, "Yes, I'm terrified, and I'm reading this book to help me feel more prepared." Or we might say, "Yes, I'm feeling terrified, so I called my doctor for an extra checkup just to kind of ask some questions and get some things addressed that I'm concerned about." So we acknowledge that emotional block that might be building up for us, and then we acknowledge the action step that we're going to take to help us resolve that emotion. And through doing that, we can start to acknowledge that, "Even though I'm scared that I might not be an adequate mother, I can also acknowledge that this is a normal process that I'm going to learn over time. I can ask questions. I can read books....