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1. If you were to give a two-minute “elevator pitch” counseling session to someone recently diagnosed with depression, what would you tell them?
♦ Don’t believe everything you’ve heard about depression, instead read something by Michael Yapko or Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman.
♦ The “chemical imbalance” works in reverse you know…meaning that your thoughts are chemical events in your brain so if you change your thoughts you change your brain chemistry.
2. We know that infertility can lead to depression. But can depression lead to infertility? Please explain.
♦ The short answer is “yes” but that has to be understood in a different way than most people are used to thinking about “cause.” Most of us are used to thinking about “causes” as simple, linear, cause and effect, equations where if you remove the cause you remove the effect. But the mind and body are related in much more complex ways. Infertility can have many contributing factors. Often it is not sufficient to treat the “mechanical” issues of sperm and egg nor is it sufficient to treat the depression. And to make matters even more interesting, statistics predict for the population and not for the individual. That means that even when we can identify something that is statistically important (or not) in, say, infertility, it might or might not mean anything for an individual couple facing infertility.
♦ In other words, there has always been a lot of popular lore about people not being able to conceive and then “giving up” adopting, going on vacation, taking down the nursery and making it a guest room and boom getting pregnant without high tech intervention. While research does not support this as a reliable phenomenon, it is something that we see clinically fairly often. The problem is that many couples then feel great pain at being told this as though the infertility were “their fault” and “if on” they could “take their mind off” of wanting what they want then they could get it, but they can’t and don’t. In the end the truth is that there are simply no guarantees in life and outliers do occur—especially when it comes to fertility.
3. How can moms-to-be who have been diagnosed with mood disorders best prepare themselves for the rigors of new parenthood?
♦ There are two things that moms (and dads) to be (about 14% of new moms whether by adoption or birth will go on to have postpartum depression and 10% of new dads will). One is to build up their social support network and connect with other parents before baby arrives. The other is to get into therapy and begin to identify and change the habits of thought that put them at risk.
4. What would you tell couples to expect sexually once a new baby arrives?
♦ Expect your sex life to be tazered for a while—as in stunned by sleep deprivation and paralyzed into inaction.
♦ Expect sex to be less spontaneous and plan to plan for your sexual encounters.
♦ Expect intercourse to be painful for a while if you gave birth either vaginally or by C-section.
5. How can new parents reconnect as a couple once the baby is born?
♦ There are 4 bridges to desire and it is important to keep all of them open and in use in order to reconnect sexually after baby arrives. Those four bridges are visual, emotional, sensate focus, and erotic imagination. If you’ve gotten into the habit of only have sex when you feel “turned on” visually or “turned on” by deep emotional connection, you might need to expand your way of thinking, train yourself to attend to different sensory information, and enjoy touch and affection for the sake of being close and loving instead of thinking that touch and affection should or must lead to intercourse and orgasm.
♦ The single most important thing you can do is to make sure that touch and affection flow freely without any hint of demand or disappointment when other things (meaning genital sexual contact) don’t necessarily follow.
About Dr. Sara Rosenquist: DrSara.com, AfterTheStork.com
Dr. Rosenquist graduated from the University of Kentucky with a PhD in clinical psychology. She is trained under the Boulder, scientist-practitioner model, which means that she pays a lot of attention to the science behind psychotherapy while the style she uses to conduct the sessions is relaxed and intuitive. She has both a general practice and a specialty practice in clinical psychology. In her general practice she helps individuals and couples overcome anxiety, mood disorders, and other problems to live more full and productive lives. In her specialty practice she helps people deal with a wide range of reproductive health concerns from sex, infertility, and pregnancy, to preparing for childbirth or adoption and parenting. Her new book After the Stork offering valuable new insight on overcoming Postpartum Depression is due out shortly in October.
Read more of our expert interviews:
Betty Dodson, Renowned Sexologist, Author, Feminist, Educator
Dean Osborne, Human Nature of Cheating
Dr. MP Wylie, Relationship Advisor
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