EMDR for Breastfeeding Grief or Trauma
When breastfeeding hasn't gone the way you hoped, you might expect to feel disappointed or sad. What can be more surprising is when those feelings don't seem to pass. Perhaps your baby is older now, but seeing somebody breastfeeding still brings an unexpectedly strong reaction. Photographs from those early weeks might be hard to look at, or you may find yourself replaying what happened and wondering what you should have done differently.
Our experiences of breastfeeding can also become tied up with how we feel about ourselves. When you think about what happened, thoughts such as 'I should have tried harder', 'I couldn't give my baby what they needed' or 'my body let me down' may come up.
These thoughts can be particularly painful when they feel familiar. Perhaps 'I'm not good enough' is a feeling you've had at other times in your life too. This is where looking at earlier experiences can sometimes be helpful when we're trying to understand why particular memories from breastfeeding still feel so upsetting.
What is EMDR?
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. It is a psychological therapy that was originally developed to help people process traumatic memories and is most commonly associated with the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
During EMDR, you bring a particular memory to mind while also engaging in bilateral stimulation. This usually involves moving your eyes side to side, though you can also tap or listen to alternating sounds. This helps the memory feel less distressing and more like something that happened in the past, rather than something that still provokes a strong emotional response in the present.
Why does breastfeeding grief feel so painful?
We make sense of difficult experiences using what we already know and believe about ourselves and the world. Imagine a mum who desperately wanted to breastfeed, but despite huge amounts of effort, things didn't work out as she had hoped. She comes away from the experience with a powerful feeling that 'I wasn't good enough'.
Experiences during breastfeeding may have contributed to this feeling. Perhaps she felt dismissed when she asked for help, or watched her baby lose weight and felt responsible. Each of these experiences may have reinforced the sense that she wasn't doing a good enough job as a mother.
For some women, the feeling of 'I'm not good enough' will also have a much longer history. They may recognise the same feeling when they think about struggling at school, being criticised by a parent, being excluded by friends, making a mistake at work, or other difficult experiences from earlier in their lives.
Those earlier experiences can help us understand why something that happened during breastfeeding still feels so emotionally powerful. They can also offer clues about which memories might be helpful to work with in therapy.
How can EMDR help with breastfeeding grief?
Many people come across EMDR as a therapy used to treat PTSD and assume that it is mainly used following a particularly traumatic event. In practice, EMDR also gives us a way of working with a wide range of distressing memories and the beliefs and feelings associated with them.
When I'm thinking about using EMDR with breastfeeding grief, I'm interested in what happens for someone now when they are reminded of their breastfeeding experience:
What memories come to mind?
What thoughts do they have about themselves?
What emotions or physical sensations come up?
Are there particular situations that trigger these reactions?
Have they experienced this feeling at other points in their life?
Sometimes that leads us to a particular breastfeeding memory. At other times, it may lead to a collection of experiences that seem to share a common theme, such as 'I'm not good enough', 'I've failed' or 'my body is a problem'.
Why might we work on something that happened years ago?
A mum may logically know that she did everything she could to breastfeed. She may understand all the circumstances that were outside her control and recognise that she would never blame another mum who had been through the same experience.
Despite knowing all of that, she may still feel that she failed.
This gap between what we know and what we feel is often central to psychological therapy. We can talk about why somebody wasn't a failure and look at the evidence for and against that belief. Sometimes that can be really useful. But at other times, the deep-down feeling is still 'stuck'.
We're interested in experiences that seem to have shaped how somebody currently thinks and feels about themselves. As those memories are processed, their emotional intensity and associated beliefs can change.
What are we hoping will change?
EMDR doesn't remove memories. The aim is for someone to remember an experience without experiencing the same level of distress, and for some of the painful beliefs associated with the memory to shift.
A woman may still wish that breastfeeding had worked out differently. She may continue to feel sad about losing an experience that mattered enormously to her. Therapy doesn't require her to decide that breastfeeding wasn't important after all.
What may change is the meaning she has taken from the experience.
The feeling of 'I failed' might gradually shift toward recognising that she was doing her best under exceptionally difficult circumstances. The hope is that this becomes something she can genuinely feel and believe, rather than something other people have repeatedly told her she ought to believe.
If memories of breastfeeding continue to cause significant distress, guilt, or feelings of failure, support from a psychologist with experience in breastfeeding grief, trauma, and EMDR may be helpful.
Dr Kelsey O’Reilly
Consultant Clinical Psychologist
Dr Kelsey O'Reilly is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and founder of Breastfeeding Psychology, supporting women's mental health during and after breastfeeding challenges and offering training, supervision, and consultation to infant feeding professionals.
A mother holding her sleeping child close