Inspired with Nika Lawrie

How To Heal After Pregnancy Or Delivery Trauma with Parijat Deshpande

November 09, 2021 • Nika Lawrie • Season 2021 • Episode 17

Share episode

Parijat Deshpande is the leading integrative high-risk pregnancy specialist, somatic trauma professional, and speaker and author who guides women to improve their pregnancy complications so they can reduce their risk of preterm birth. 

Her unique neurobiological approach has served hundreds of women to manage pregnancy complications and reclaim a sense of safety and trust in their bodies that they thought was eroded forever. Parijat is the author of the bestselling book Pregnancy Brain: A Mind-Body Approach to Stress Management During a High-Risk Pregnancy. She is also the host of the popular podcast Delivering Miracles®️, which discusses the real, raw side of family-building including infertility, loss, high-risk pregnancy, bed rest, prematurity, and healing once the baby comes home. 

Today she shares her best advice on how to heal your body after a trauma around pregnancy has occurred. 

Learn more about Parijat Deshpande and her work at http://www.parijatdeshpande.com.

CONNECT WITH NIKA: https://mtr.bio/nika-lawrie

SUBMIT A QUESTION OR REQUEST A TOPIC:
I would love to hear from you! Please record your question or topic request to be featured in a future episode: https://www.speakpipe.com/NikaLawrie

DISCLAIMER:
*This podcast and its contents are for informational purposes only and are not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your physician or a qualified health provider for any questions concerning a medical condition or health objectives. Additionally, the advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for every individual and are not guaranteed for business, personal, or wellness success. Use discretion and seek professional counsel when necessary.

AFFILIATE DISCLAIMER:
*Some of the resources and advertisements shared throughout the podcast episodes may contain affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something, I may earn a commission.

Nika Lawrie:

Welcome to the Inspired with Mika Laurie podcast. Hi, jot, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to have you here. I'm so thrilled to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, absolutely so. You really help women. You're a high-risk pregnancy specialist and also a somatic trauma professional. First, can you explain what a somatic trauma professional is and then kind of give us the backstory of how you got to where you are today, how you do what you do?

Parijat Deshpande:

Absolutely so. A somatic trauma professional is somebody who works on trauma from a body-based perspective, hence the word somatic meaning body-based, and I very, very specifically body-based, and it really this work is just due to my own personal experience. It was influenced by that. So my original professional training was in clinical psychology, the traditional methods and methodology of supporting people through therapy and, you know, through cognitive work and couples therapy, family therapy. You know, doing that and living my life, um, I went through my own very complicated experience of growing our family. Yeah, I know it's, it's a, you know you, you talk about it more and more. You realize how many of us this very personally, yes, yes, yeah, exactly. So, um, you know, we my husband and I knew we would have trouble conceiving. We were not one of those couples that tried for a long time and we're like what's going on. We knew because of some health issues that I have, and so needing fertility treatment was not a surprise to us. It was what happened afterwards. It was a complete surprise. You know, my very first pregnancy. I got pregnant with our first round of IUI, which is intrauterine insemination, and, um, I got pregnant right away and it ended as a ruptured ectopic pregnancy and yeah, and it was the first time that we'd realized, you know, we we'd heard of miscarriages, we'd known people who've had them, we were um aware that it could happen, but we were not at all aware that pregnancy could threaten my life. And that was extremely eyeopening and just like whoa wait what? And so that kind of got the ball rolling in my head about, okay, how do I recover from this? Because of course, there was a physical recovery that took several months to kind of restore my blood supplies and all of that. But the emotional recovery was very different than what I had experienced as a mental health provider for people who were recovering from any sort of trauma, other types of trauma that I'd worked with. As the patient now is like, hmm, this is a little bit different than what I had experienced, and so I was kind of curious about how my body was healing, not just physically but also emotionally, if that makes sense.

Parijat Deshpande:

And then my second pregnancy we jumped to IVF. I got pregnant again right away, which was great yeah, that's amazing, yeah. And then I developed multiple complications. I actually developed my first complication before we found out that I was pregnant and it just snowballed from there.

Parijat Deshpande:

And that particular pregnancy, I was on bed rest at home I mean not strict bedrest, it was just like chill, put your feet up, don't do a whole lot, kind of thing Because of all the complications I was developing from week six into my pregnancy oh my goodness and yeah, it was really early and so by like week 15, 16, I'd already developed maybe three complications by that point and I was feeling so anxious and I'm not typically an anxious person but I'm terrified of losing this baby. I'm losing another child, Rightfully so, yeah, exactly yeah. And that's what really got me thinking is I know that if I go to a like a colleague's office for mental health counseling, I know what they would say to me and I know what they would do because I was that person Right, and now I am the patient and I'm going. That's not at all what I need. Yes.

Nika Lawrie:

I love that you're saying this right now, because you were totally speaking the exact thing I've felt, yeah.

Parijat Deshpande:

Yeah, and it was. It was such a fascinating internal experience of, yes, I believe in therapy, yes, I think it's super helpful. And in this particular instance, I don't want to know how to calm myself down, I want to know how to save my baby and it really solidified for me. When I was 22 weeks and four days I landed in the hospital already had five complications diagnosed. I was three centimeters dilated and my medical team the next morning I was admitted around midnight the night before and the next morning they came in and they were like we need to prepare you that we don't think you're going to make it more than 72 hours. They said it much more nicely than that, but as nicely as you can say something really horrible like that, we need to prepare you that you're going to lose this baby because of everything going on.

Parijat Deshpande:

And I went hold on, what have you got? Throw it at me. I'm saying yes to it, all right. And I realized that there was one other piece that it was kind of in the back of my head this whole time but now was validated by the monitors, which is when I was scared, the contractions picked up and when I was able to address my body to come into a place of safety. The contraction stopped, no matter how much medication I was receiving, and I went let me try something. And I went, let me try something. And so give me everything, give me all the meds. Yes to sense of sympathy in there on their face of like, oh, this poor woman really just wants to hold on to hope.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah.

Parijat Deshpande:

Okay, sure, we'll let her try. Yeah, and, and so we did. We tried and, and the thing is, they gave me 72 hours and we got 15 days. Oh my gosh, 15 days. And that was the difference between a chance at life for my son or losing him completely. I mean 24 weeks and five days way too early. I don't wish that on anyone, yeah, but it was just long enough for him.

Nika Lawrie:

That's incredible. You're going to make me cry telling the story. Yeah, that is amazing and that's how I do the work that I do today. That is one of the best stories I think I've ever heard. So congratulations to you and your son and your husband.

Nika Lawrie:

And going through something like that, I just commend you and I commend you for sharing your story. That's such a powerful thing and so many women face complications through pregnancy and delivery and even after, with postpartum, and not enough people talk about it and share the story. And you know, I have so many close friends who we've all bonded through traumatic pregnancies and once we started opening up and sharing those stories, like you said earlier, you realize that it's so many of us that have been affected by it. So, yeah, yeah.

Nika Lawrie:

So tell me, you know, going through the process of trying to feel comfortable and kind of relieve that stress and that anxiety, what were some of the things that you found worked? What are you know? Are there tips that you could share, that kind of help relieve that anxiety? Because I know from my perspective and I can't speak for all women, but I think a lot of us from the moment we find out we're pregnant, it's like instant mom anxiety, slash guilt right, and so it's hard to kind of manage that. How do we do that? What are some of the things that you found that worked for you?

Parijat Deshpande:

Yeah, let me start with what I found did not work, which is trying to control my thoughts, trying to be more positive, trying to, you know, make gratitude lists every single day, trying to change, like, challenge my thinking. It doesn't work and and this was again, I don't know that I would have really known this had I not personally been through it, cause my training said everything opposite of that. But it's when you're going through such a visceral experience such as pregnancy, which is, I mean, let's just call it what it is it's an extremely physical experience and and everything is happening on a body-based level, and so why would we then take ourselves up into our head, disconnect from our bodies and think that's going to help, right? So that's and and that's a very pervasive, uh like theme of advice that's out there, but I find, from personal experience and working with clients since then, it doesn't work. It doesn't bring long lasting relief.

Parijat Deshpande:

And the reason that that's important is because if you imagine like you're on this roller coaster right, like, uh, your appointments coming up and your anxiety is going oh my gosh, that's going to come out of that ultrasound, is everything going to be okay and you get to the ultrasound and you're like baby's fine, you're fine, everybody's great, and you're like phew, and you come back down couple hours a day and then you're right back up there, and the issue with that is, physiologically, those ups and downs do impact your body in a way that increases risk of pregnancy complications.

Parijat Deshpande:

So the reason I do this work is not just to help women feel better I don't. I mean, that's important but I want you to know that you can also influence the outcome of your pregnancy, and this is one way to do. That is, instead of that rollercoaster of constant ups and downs, if we can bring you down and keep you down and make the ups a little less high, for example, right, so less frequent, less intense, and you come down faster and you stay down longer. Physiologically, there are changes that actually happen to support a healthier pregnancy, which is super important. And so, given that, this is why I do my work from a body-based perspective, and so I tell my clients and that's, I think, also what draws them to me is they've tried all the cognitive stuff and they go yeah, this is not quite working.

Parijat Deshpande:

And so we look at the body, and so I mean I would love to give like specific tips, but really what it is is very individualized to your specific body, and that's really important. I'm not trying to withhold information, it's really I'm genuinely saying I think we've gotten into a system where we have become used to quick fixes and they don't actually bring the relief we're looking for, and so it's super important to first acknowledge how your body is presenting this. You know, if you call it anxiety, you call it stress, you call it trauma, whatever it is, what we're talking about is nervous system dysregulation. Your nervous system is in danger mode, survival mode, right, how is that presenting in your body?

Parijat Deshpande:

Because it's different for everybody. For some people it's, you know, tightness in the shoulders. For some people it's tightness in the chest and you feel like you can't breathe. For some people it's stomach issues. For some people it's insomnia, it's elevated blood pressure that just doesn't come down. I mean, there's so many different ways, and so I would say, start there and note, like what is your body's specific language of anxiety, stress, chronic stress, traumatic stress, whatever is going on for you? What is that language?

Parijat Deshpande:

Because there is something happening In the case of my clients, I see, especially with our NICU moms, I see autoimmune disease and chronic illness is a really big sign, like that's one of the big language boulders or whatever you want to you know, like the big thing that's your body's going, we're still here, we're still fighting, even when the fight is over, right, and so when you find that that can, that can influence a lot of how you want to address your body from there, right, you got to figure out where to start first, though. Does that make sense?

Nika Lawrie:

No, absolutely. I mean, I really love that you're saying that because to give you kind of a quick backstory on my situation, so I had a fairly normal, healthy pregnancy. I made it all the way up to, I think, 37 weeks. I had her. I had my daughter about a week early, so full term, and when I went in to deliver I had I did 14 and a half hours of natural labor, only to be rushed into an emergency C-section. My daughter's heart rate dropped. My heart rate dropped. They rushed us in and then I had a very out of body moment during the C-section. I watched everything happen and and then my daughter was rushed to the NICU. She has a heart condition and so that was part of the thing that led to the C-section issue. She was rushed to the NICU.

Nika Lawrie:

The experience was so traumatic for me, so profoundly life-changing, that what I found in my situation was the trauma lasted.

Nika Lawrie:

You know I'm six years out and I still deal with anxiety that comes from what happened and I love that you talk about. You know I have a degree in psychology. I have a big, you know, background in understanding kind of the mental health side of things, but talking to a counselor like I knew what they were going to tell me and that wasn't going to fix it for me, because for me it's like it's an internal physical body thing. Yeah, my brain knows how, like I've done all the things, but yeah, body is still healing from it. And so I I love like I can't say it enough that I love that you're sharing this, because I think so many women often hear well, go talk to a therapist and it'll fix everything, and it may not, because it's a physical trauma and you need to deal with it in other manners, that's exactly it and I love that you are talking about your body still healing, because that is actually physiologically what's happening.

Parijat Deshpande:

Yeah, about your body still healing, because that is actually physiologically what's happening. Yeah, is you know, if you think of our full body like a glacier right and the top of the glacier is our head, for example, that's only one part of it, yeah, and our body that's underneath kind of the ocean surface so to speak it also holds on to memories, and I don't mean that in kind of a metaphysical woo way.

Parijat Deshpande:

I mean no, no issues against people or what you believe, but there are actual biological changes that have happened to your body, um, that stay in a particular kind of format that keeps you in that survival mode and so and I see this play out in pregnancy so I work with women through pregnancy after something like what you've been through and I see it often through, you know the memories that come up that are visceral memories.

Parijat Deshpande:

Like you have not just you, but we all have like a narrative memory of what happened and we can recall moments, and maybe there's some that we've forgotten, and that's okay.

Parijat Deshpande:

And there are other moments that physiologically our bodies remember. Yeah, and we can't access that through words, and it's like an example to kind of highlight what that means is if you remember a moment you've had where you've been walking down the street and you smell a particular flower and it just takes you back to your grandmother's house or your childhood home or something, that's a visceral memory that you, like you could say, oh sure, lavender reminds me of my grandmother, but you're not. You don't experience it when you talk like that. You experience it when you, when you have that moment, right and the same thing happens with trauma is those same memories are encoded in your body that we cannot access through words and we have to address that from a body perspective, otherwise, through the next pregnancy, then moments of very normal pregnancy sensations like round ligament pain suddenly send you into a panic because that sensation was encoded as remember what happened last time. That was really scary. Let's not do that again.

Nika Lawrie:

Right, yeah, in my case, I done with children. I had my daughter, I'm too scared to have a second one, and you know, and, and it's a, it's a real, it's a. I love that you said survival mode because even though as a health coach, I help people work on health, I look at you know, mental health was part of that. We look at food and diet and exercise, wellness in general. I still have moments of feeling like survival mode and it's it's amazing how much it sticks with you.

Parijat Deshpande:

Exactly, exactly. And to just reiterate what we're both saying is you can't think yourself out of it and you can't talk yourself out of it, and it's, it's just so important that we look inwards at our body and go how, where is it? How is it presenting itself? Is it through pain? Is it through sleep issues? Is it through heart issues? Is it through digestive? What is that? Because it's telling you your body, is telling you where it is and how to address it, or kind of the door to get in, to be able to kind of let it all out.

Nika Lawrie:

So if we get to the point where we can kind of identify some of those things so you know the shoulder pain or the, you know the feeling in your chest of the anxiety or you know some of the other ones you listed I'm kind of drawing a blank at the moment. But if we start to identify those, how do we go about approaching those to make change? How do we fix those?

Parijat Deshpande:

Yeah. So I would say we don't actually fix it, and I think that's one of the things that I find to be really important in my work is showing and what I say to every single one of my clients is what this is doing is showing you how your body helped you survive right, because what is trauma other than a moment where your life or your child's life, right or both, was threatened? Right, there was a moment where your brain was like this is dangerous, we need to survive, and so it made changes in your body to do exactly that. The issue is not that it did that. It was that, for whatever number, many, many number of reasons, we were not able to come back to safety afterwards, and so I start with all my clients, just showing them.

Parijat Deshpande:

Let's first recognize that this shoulder pain, this heart issue, this insomnia, this elevated blood pressure that won't come down, before we do anything, let's look at this as a sign that your body kept you alive before, when you were going through X number of things, right. Those physiological changes are just remnants of that, and our job now is not to fix it. Our job is to help you feel safe again, and in feeling safe, what that means is you're restoring flexibility to your nervous system so that it is no longer needing to create these cardiovascular changes, respiratory changes, digestive changes, to keep you alive, right? So I start there, right? And so once you have acknowledged that and you go, yay me, you know, however, you do it good job, body Right. At that point, then this is another piece of trauma healing that we don't talk about enough, which is we.

Parijat Deshpande:

Our inclination is to get rid of it, like okay, but this feels really bad, like good job body but I don't need it and healing actually begins with the exact opposite. It is learning to tolerate that discomfort.

Nika Lawrie:

Okay.

Parijat Deshpande:

Right, it is learning to sit with it. The tightness in the shoulder, the sweaty palms, the headache, the whatever is going on, and just notice what that sensation is like. Because what we're doing otherwise is we are reacting to the sensation as being scary or dangerous, and what we want to do instead is to start experiencing those sensations as okay, this is really uncomfortable, I don't like it, but I'm still safe. I don't have to enjoy this one bit, but I'm safe. And the minute you can do that, the coolest thing happens is a lot of those sensations get better. Stomach pain disappears, chronic pain disappears, like shoulders start to suddenly it feels like magically release themselves. It's not magic, it's physiology. Your body is actually changing without you having to do a whole lot, and I think that's the beauty of the human body is it knows how to do this when we provide it the tools or the resources that it needs to complete that stress cycle.

Nika Lawrie:

Or sometimes even maybe the space to do it, yeah, the you know, the willingness to allow it to happen kind of, yeah, this kind of also. I mean you were like speaking my language, like I love this, awesome. But one of my other questions is you know, a lot of times you see women lose faith in their body after, especially after, a miscarriage. Or you know in my personal experience of not wanting to have a second kid after the trauma of the first one, those kinds of things. How can we rebuild confidence in our body to find how to go forward in that sense, absolutely, I can really resonate with that.

Parijat Deshpande:

After all the pregnancy complications and then the extremely preterm delivery, and then I couldn't breastfeed after that, I was like I'm broken, I'm broken, my body doesn't work, it's broken. And you know, everybody around me was like no, no, you're not broken, you're doing the best you can. I'm like no, you don't get it. And there was a day, um, I had this. I was watching. Do you remember the show Quantico? It's like a long time ago, really random. It's like one of my put it on in the background shows and I remember the I think it was like the first episode or something where they had this like explosion in the city center or wherever they were. And there's so many like movies or things you can probably think of that are like that If you haven't watched the show huge explosion, the buildings, like everything just kind of fell apart. And then the main character is kind of waking up and dazed and like can't really about how I was feeling after that whole experience of who am I anymore and like what is this body that screwed me over, screwed my baby over? And like come on, you know, and I was angry and I was like what is going on, and it was that visual that I've always held on to, because what we are trying to do is we're rebuilding, right? You know, whenever that city decides to rebuild, we're rebuilding, but it will not look exactly the way that it did before. And the only way to do that to rebuild the trust, as you're asking you know that's what we're talking about here here is we have to learn to feel safe in our own bodies first. We can't rebuild a city when we think we're still under attack. Yeah, right, in that, in that show example. And the same thing is true for rebuilding the trust in our own bodies, rebuilding a sense of compassion for our bodies.

Parijat Deshpande:

Um, any of that has to come with us feeling safe in our body, and one way that I see that it comes up a lot is when we don't feel safe in our bodies, we disconnect from our bodies and we don't feel them. And so a lot of my clients, when we do a lot of the sensory work they can re-access, you know, maybe their hands, their feet, their legs, their arms, sometimes their chest, but the pelvic region is often like I mean, I know I have one, but I can't feel it. I can't feel it, yeah, and so we've got to re again exactly what we were talking about before, about tolerating sensations. We've got to tolerate being in our body again, and when we can do that, it's almost like we're unlocking um like a, like a door that allows the passage of the grief and the trauma. If you can imagine it like that, it won't. We can't release it from our body if we can't feel our body. If that makes sense.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, absolutely, it's interesting. You know, just sitting here listening to you, I've you know I'm big into listening to your body and paying attention to the signals of stuff it's telling you and at the same time, when you said pelvic area, I'm like I could feel breasts up and legs down and I didn't realize. Oh, I'm not feeling the sensation of like this area exists until you. So that's really interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is a little changing the subject here too, but preeclampsia seems to be really common, especially of late, I feel like, you know, every other day I'm hearing about a woman who has preeclampsia going into the hospital early. It kind of seems like it's on the rise a little bit and I'm wondering, you know what are, what are some of the warning signs and how do we kind of prepare ourselves for something like that?

Parijat Deshpande:

Yeah. So there were, unfortunately, a lot of different warning signs for something like preeclampsia and it can look very different for a lot of people, and I've also worked with clients who did not recognize anything and then went to the doctor and they were like your blood pressure is what? Yeah, you're not going home. And then, 24 hours later or less, baby was born right. So you certainly want to.

Parijat Deshpande:

If you have a history of hypertension, you want to be making sure that you are watching your blood pressure throughout pregnancy, as your medical team probably will allow you to do at home, even especially now in COVID times. That's certainly happening for a lot of my clients. You want to watch out for any excess swelling, especially if it happens very quickly and you can't bring it down relatively quickly. You're going to be they're going to be testing your protein in your urine in case there are no other signs. But that right you want to look for in terms of swelling. It could be your hands, it could be your face, it could be your feet, your legs. It can be really kind of anywhere. So this is important to know, even if it's your first pregnancy, know what your general baseline is and if anything's off from that I would certainly raise concerns with your medical team, and I think one of the things that we're finding with preeclampsia is that this nervous system health is tied to an increased risk of preeclampsia, and so having a history of trauma, having a history of chronic stress, experiencing that chronic or traumatic stress in a current pregnancy, can increase the risk of preeclampsia.

Parijat Deshpande:

How that happens, we're not entirely sure. Part of it the theory is that when your nervous system shifts into that survival mode, your immune system changes, as does all other body systems, but your immune system changes in a way to increase inflammation in the body. So that could be one way. There is other research that's showing that the cardiovascular changes that happen when your nervous system goes into survival mode or is staying in survival mode can increase the risk of preeclampsia, and there's a lot of different ways that we think preeclampsia begins. There's just not a lot of knowledge about that, and I think that's why it's so important that when you're taking preventative measures, talk to your medical providers about what medical preventions you can take. And also, do the nervous system work? Do the body work to support your body, to restore what I call the neuroendoimmune balance? It's like these three that have to be in balance in a particular way in pregnancy to support a healthy pregnancy, and so I think both of those are really, really important.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think I love that you brought up the kind of the connection between stress and inflammation and how that can also lead into issues around pregnancy or around delivery too, I think so many times we go in to see our OBGYNs, our physicians, and you know they do the normal tests.

Nika Lawrie:

they OBGYNs our physicians and you know they they do the normal tests, they listen for the heartbeat, those kinds of things, and then they send you on their way and there's no conversation around stress during pregnancy. There's no conversation around. You know, even they say eat good food, take your prenatals, but they don't really talk about food as it links to inflammation and causing issues as well.

Parijat Deshpande:

Yes, exactly.

Nika Lawrie:

What's your thought around the inflammation and the connection between food and pregnancy issues? Maybe if there is a link there.

Parijat Deshpande:

One of the things that I like to remind people of is you can only get as much out of the nutritious food you're eating as how healthy your digestive system is. Yes, if your digestive system is functioning in survival mode, you are not getting the nutrients from your food, no matter how beautifully pristine your diet is. You're just not going to because, if you imagine, in survival mode and I talk a lot about being chased by a bear as an example of that you're being chased by a bear. Getting the most nutrients from your spinach salad is absolutely not on the priority. And this is a used example, because that is physiologically what's happening in your body every moment of every day, when you are living in a body with chronic stress or traumatic stress.

Parijat Deshpande:

And so, yes, diet is important. Yes, take really good, high quality supplements as needed, but you have to make sure your digestive system is working properly in order to get the benefits of that. And I think how it all fits together is when the nervous system and the neuroendoimmune balance is restored, we see a decrease in inflammation, and then you can eat a low and a high anti-inflammatory diet and further reduce that inflammation and really support your body in a really powerful way, but again, it requires being able to be in a body that is functioning optimally to get the most out of those the food and the supplements you're taking.

Nika Lawrie:

Absolutely you. We've kind of already touched on this a little bit, but you know a lot of the women I've talked to, and myself as well. The anxiety really lingers long after delivery, even after breastfeeding. My daughter's going to be six, it's still there. And you've kind of talked about feeling safe in the body and those kinds of things. But how do we start to heal? Do we connect with providers to work through that? How do we start to tell ourselves that it's okay to feel safe? How do we get deeper into that?

Parijat Deshpande:

Yeah, I love that you're asking this because you're so right. I've seen a lot of clients who were not sure if they wanted to have another child for similar reasons as you. I do not want to do anything similar to that ever again, ever again, yeah, right, yeah. And there are many women and couples who decide it's just not worth it. And there are others who really want to again.

Parijat Deshpande:

And regardless of where you land on that decision, what you're saying is exactly physiologically true that as long as your nervous system is still functioning in bear attack mode, right Survival mode, that anxiety or those sensations will linger and it does not go away with time. And I say that not to discourage people but to really validate that it's not you, it's not you're doing anything wrong. It is that we've got to go, like you're saying, deeper into the body to be able to heal from it. And so the experience of safety. I say we've got to feel safe in the body. But that's actually kind of the aftereffect of re-restoring the balance and the flexibility to the nervous system. And so a good place to start I suggest is focusing again on can you tolerate the sensations in your body, of the parts of your body that you can feel, and then can you restore sensation in the parts of your body that you can't feel. Right is very much body-based. You can't again like, you can't think yourself into safety, you can't tell yourself you're safe. You have to actually feel it.

Parijat Deshpande:

Yes, and and once the pregnancy's over, once the postpartum period's over, once baby is toddler or preschooler or big kid or teenager, teenager what's kind of left is can I tolerate the sensations of my body, because it's not dependent on the circumstances as much anymore and I say that with an asterisk of parents with children who have medical complications or complex needs going forward.

Parijat Deshpande:

It is certainly a more nuanced situation, but for the most part, regardless of the circumstances, the question is can I feel my body and can I be okay with feeling my body the way that it is? And that's usually the hardest part of the work. Yeah, and it is the most essential. And once you can do that, it is actually quite beautiful how our bodies start to heal themselves, because that balance just restores, because our bodies know how to do that. We are built with being able to have a flexible nervous system. We're born that way. We learn how to support that and all we have to do is get out of the way and allow for that healing to happen on its own. It's actually really, really beautiful.

Nika Lawrie:

Amazing. Yeah, it's such a needed process. There's so many of us that have gone through it, so I love you. You also, you recently wrote a book called the Pregnancy Brain. Inside the book I'm assuming it shares a lot of the stuff we've kind of talked about more in depth. Can you talk a little bit about what's inside your book and where we can find?

Parijat Deshpande:

it as well. Yeah, so Pregnancy Brain is the book I wrote, and I wrote it for the person who was me and going through a high-risk pregnancy and terrified and feeling all these things feeling guilt for having a broken body and for grieving the loss, the many losses you have when you have complications anywhere along that family building journey and showing you how, when you can restore that neuroendoimmune balance, you can actually influence the outcome of your pregnancy and your health and baby's health, and how important that is. And so I go into the science behind that. I share parts of my story, I share client stories, and you can find that book on Amazon as a paperback, you can get it as downloaded as a Kindle, or you can get it on barnesandnoblecom or you can even request it from your local independent bookstore or your library yeah and uh, and they should be able to get that for you.

Nika Lawrie:

Wonderful. I'll be sure to link to it too in the show notes, just so it's easy to connect and find too. Um, where I have? One last question for you, but where can listeners connect with you? How can they find you and, ideally, use your service? Because, oh my gosh, this is such an important thing. I love it, Thank you.

Parijat Deshpande:

Thank you, yeah, I just I do love the work. I do. I mean, you know, when you find something that you're doing, you're like, oh, this is why I was put on this earth. That's this work and I this work, and I do it through the path to baby program for anyone who is wanting to be pregnant again and have a different outcome and increase your chances of having a healthy pregnancy after prematurity or loss, and that you can find information about that on my website, barijatdeshpandecom. It's just my full namecom, but I hang out on Instagram. I'm at healthyhigh risk pregnancy. So what I love after doing interviews like this that are so much fun is I love to know what listeners are taking away from. So if you are not driving, take a screenshot of this episode and tag both of us and let us know what your biggest takeaway was. I love hearing kind of the ahas that people are having when they listen to our conversation. So bye and say hi, I would love to meet you, yeah.

Nika Lawrie:

Thank you. Well, okay, before I get to my very last question, I know I've said it a couple of times through the show, but I just really want to recognize you for the work that you're doing. I know, you know my own personal experience, some of my very close friends experience, and there's so many women in this world that have struggled from that and, you know, lost the sense of self or lost the sense of safety and security or, you know, are still struggling with the trauma from it. I just want to validate you for the work that you're doing and the fact even you said it simply to validate the feelings that the women are having, because so many times in society our feelings, our issues are just, you know, pushed away or not taken seriously. And for you to validate it, I think really is powerful for so many people that this is real, this is happening or this did happen and it's okay and we can improve and start to feel better and move forward. So I want to thank you for the work you're doing, thank you so much.

Parijat Deshpande:

That means a lot yeah.

Nika Lawrie:

Okay, so the last question I have for you what advice do you have for someone who wants to make change either in their life, in their community or around the world?

Parijat Deshpande:

Ooh, that's such a good question. Yeah, honestly, I would say, do it. You have a perspective and strengths and your own unique touch that the world needs and the community needs and your family needs and you need and nobody can do it like you, so do it.

Nika Lawrie:

Love that. I think you're totally right. Love it Well. Thank you so, so much for being on the show. I'm super grateful for the knowledge and information you've shared with us today.

Parijat Deshpande:

Thank you so much for having me. It's lovely chatting with you, wonderful.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Nika Lawrie

Host