Bio
Amy Cottreau-Moore is a Freelance Writer and Social Media Manager from Atlantic Canada.
Before she found writing, Amy worked in the healthcare field with senior citizens who were afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease. In 2019, after having her daughter, she took the plunge and followed her dream of writing as a career. Amy has written several articles on the writer’s platform Medium about mental health, relationships, and writing. She also has a background in technical writing and currently works for Valnet INC. She started as a writer and is now the manager of MakeUseOf’s Social Media Team.
She was born and raised in Waasis, NB and currently resides in Dumfries, NB with her husband Ryan, daughter Willow, and pets. She enjoys gardening, meditation, and bird-watching in her spare time.
Intro
From the hardest battle I’ve fought came my two biggest achievements: the birth of my daughter and the creation of my book.
After experiencing a traumatic childbirth, I suffered from acute postpartum post-traumatic stress disorder and postpartum obsessive-compulsive disorder for most of my first child’s early life.
When I was diagnosed with PPOCD in late 2018, I was hoping I could find reading material about my diagnosis. After all, people write books on everything these days. I was wrong. I searched endlessly for a book strictly for women who suffered from PPOCD, and there were none! I remember thinking, “Someone should be writing about this. How are there no books about such an important women’s issue?”
When I became a writer, I promised to write this book after my illness stabilized.
And I did. The Maze in Your Mind Has a Way Out takes you through my experiences and offers advice and comfort to women suffering from this debilitating illness. This book details how I learned to live with PPOCD, and features helpful advice, and quotes from other mothers who experienced postpartum mental illness.
From your first doctor’s appointment, to fear of relapse, this book gives you everything you need to know about living with postpartum obsessive-compulsive disorder.
This book and my story are living proof that the maze in your mind does have a way out.
Passage
I picked up my beautiful baby girl Willow Cordelia. She was sleeping soundly, swaddled in a green and white swaddle with drool bubbles coming out of her mouth.
Willow was a small baby; she weighed seven pounds when she was born. She had big beautiful brown eyes, and she smiled quite a bit, even in the beginning. I know, I know—it was probably gas, but I like to think otherwise.
The nurses constantly commented on how alert she was. Her eyes were open and full of wonder as soon as she arrived, but like most babies, she was cranky and missing the comfort of the womb.
“My life is complete,” I thought happily; this is what I’ve always wanted: A family of my own. From the outside, no one would know what went on inside of my head daily, and I intended to keep it that way.
I grabbed everything I needed to comfortably sit for a while—my phone and a bottle of water. I was so proud of being able to nurse her, and I loved our private moments together. However, being alone with my baby terrified me. Most of the time, I felt incompetent even though I was fully capable.
What’s more, whenever I picked her up, the nightmare began all over again…
Soft lo-fi music played in the background, and the soft yellow light from the Himalayan salt lamps I loved lit the room as I took her over to our cream-colored suede chair to breastfeed her.
All of a sudden, a lightning bolt shivered through my brain. Images of me dropping her displayed like a movie I couldn’t pause in my head. She fell to the hardwood floor, blood was everywhere, and she was screaming. I pictured her living as a quadriplegic, unable to feed herself—bound to a wheelchair and feeding tubes because of me.
When I came back to reality, she was safely in my arms and enjoying a feed, moving her little feet as she nursed. She was unaware that her loving mother and life force had just pictured something so gruesome.
I completely disassociated from what I was doing, but I was still able to care for her during these episodes. This happened every time I picked her up until she was 13 months old.
I couldn’t stop it, I had no control, and I never knew when I would disassociate from one day to the next. This is what it’s like to live with PPOCD.
Many of the signs of PPOCD are not pretty, but they need to be discussed openly. If you have many of the signs and symptoms, I speak about in Chapter two, please be aware that you are not alone. These symptoms are not who you are. They are a symptom of your illness, and your healing will begin by acknowledging these symptoms.
It is estimated that three to five percent of women are affected by PPOCD after giving birth. Fathers have also been known to exhibit the symptoms of this illness.
Why isn’t PPOCD talked about more openly?
It is too polarizing for most people to handle, and many women are afraid of what will happen if they get help for their PPOCD. A parent doesn’t want to admit that they have images of their child dying or being severely injured playing in their heads on a continuous, unrelenting reel.
When we admit to having these thoughts, it terrifies us that people will think we want these scenarios to happen.
When you have PPOCD, you don’t want these horrifying things to happen, but you can’t stop worrying about them. In fact, many mothers who experience these horrible images have a pristine and wholesome image on the outside, but inside they are suffering.
Postpartum Depression is a debilitating condition, but it is not a well-documented condition. As most of us know, women’s mental health issues are not as well-understood as they should be.
PPOCD is not a well-known disorder. Typically, it is not spoken about on talk shows or written about in books.
We are entirely hidden in the shadows in the worst-case scenario. In the best-case scenario, we are getting help for postpartum OCD, but we are still hidden in those shadows.
When the disease of OCD is spoken about or depicted on TV shows, it is usually a caricature. A man or woman who compulsively cleans, flicks light switches, or washes their hands constantly.
However, PPOCD manifests differently than other types of OCD.
On social media, OCD memes are used by people to describe normal habits like wanting colors to match or a specific way of cutting toast. Our illness is used as a punch line for a joke or as a personality quirk.
But, PPOCD is not a quirk or a cute meme. It’s a real-life, debilitating condition.
Our pain is often hidden from our spouses, parents, siblings, and friends. Most of all, we hide it from our children. We don’t want them to be scared of us. When we suffer from PPOCD, we hesitate to ask for professional help because we fear our children will be taken from us. So, we suffer from these images replaying in our heads with no apparent way out.
But there is a way out, and that is why I’m writing this book.
Paperback: The Maze in Your Mind Has a Way Out (lulu.com)
EBook: The Maze in Your Mind Has a Way Out (lulu.com)
