Jillian here! ***Trigger warning*** I am talking about my experience with birth, PPD, and other things— if you are feeling raw just skip on over this.

As I’m sitting down to write this blog—thinking about how much I care about mommies and where this started from—it feels a long time coming. I have the privilege of being the clinical director here at LVT, but my passion for mommies started almost 15 years ago. 

I was a very young mom and did experience a moderate bout with postpartum depression after my son was born. When he was born he had trouble breathing and ended up in the NICU for about 5 days. I think adrenaline was helping me through that difficult time, I was worried that he was still vulnerable to what landed him in the NICU, so my adrenaline kept pumping for a few months. 3 months after that was when things finally got settled, and that’s when the depression kicked in. 

My doctor offered me a common antidepressant which I started taking for about 2.5 months. I recognized that it wasn’t helping me like I had hoped it would, so I stopped taking it. As I look back on that experience, I wish that I would’ve felt like I had a voice and that I could’ve advocated for myself to my OBGYN that this medicine wasn’t working and I wasn’t getting what I needed. Instead, I kept it all inside and hoped that it would pass. It did eventually pass about 3 or 4 months later. 

Right around that time I heard a local story of a mother taking the life of her child. That was a turning point moment for me because I knew that moms that are well don’t take the life of their children. That birthed in me a desire to do something for these moms, and to be that supportive person for them, that I hadn’t had during that postpartum season.

I continued on my path to a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy so that I could start my work to help these mommies. I definitely came across other passions along the way; I love EMDR (blog to come!), I also am super fulfilled and energized by helping couples, in particular couples where the mom is pregnant and I can help them to feel more connected before their baby comes. However, this perinatal population still sticks out for me and feels really important because there are so few providers locally and there are so few resources to help moms out of these dark places. 

Fast forward to my most recent birth which was much worse…

I had a lot of challenges with this birth: a vaginal tear that wouldn’t heal (blog to come!), a baby that wouldn’t stop crying (blog to come!), and medical challenges with the baby. The first two years were an absolute blur. That whole experience proved to reinforce my passion for helping moms and understanding what a particularly difficult and vulnerable time of our lives motherhood is. Whatever the situation is, whether it’s a traumatic birth, a miscarriage, the loss of a child, even a seemingly “healthy”, uncomplicated birth and postpartum time can be incredibly stressful, and typically is, from what I hear… Although I don’t have experience!

We’re here for you, we want to help, we got extra training so that we can help you and bring you back to the people you love.