When you don't fall in love with your newborn [ABC Life]

Thanks for sharing this heart wrenching story and how common this is so that mothers can find some sense of hope, know how often it happens, and know it's not their fault.

I would add a more specific view, however, which is that this mom is expressing what some refer to as a bonding disruption - a disconnection that happens in part because of one or more difficult, adverse events that happened during labor (all the medications, the brutal forceps, long labor, worry about his fetal distress etc) and possibly beforehand and that are traumatizing. This is what creates the difficulty connecting.

These are what I think of as very early ACEs and that I specifically call adverse babyhood experiences (ABEs) because they are so specific to prenatal, labor and birth experiences and aren't yet recognized in the way we are learning to identify ACEs.

Psychologist Dr. Tony Madrid writes about this from a place of profound compassion and also offers tools to help mothers heal so they don't have to wait 9 months (or however long) in this excrutiatingly painful and distressing place that is caused by adversity and overwhelm that interferes with the natural ability to connect.

Helping mothers heal also helps their babies heal as they can experience the effects of their mother (or father)'s disconnection, including increased risk for chronic illnesses such as asthma and other symptoms.

I've summarized Tony's work and reference his resources in a blog post:

https://chronicillnesstraumast...-factors-for-asthma/