69 | Different Stresses Families Face and Creative Ways We Can Help

Leah: Well, hello there, Annie.

Annie: Hey there, Leah.

Leah: How are you?

Annie: I am all right. I am, as we're recording this, putting the finishing touches on all of the content prep for Clinical Complexities and Supplementation, which is kicking off with our deeper dive that you and I are doing with Rachel O'Brien, about educating families about bottle consults. That is happening on May 11th, which is at the time that this comes out is tomorrow. You can still register and join us with Rachel. She's going to talk about all the ways that she works with families about bottle feeding, whether it's bottle refusal, how to wean from bottle to breast, and how to keep bottles incorporated into a family's routine if that's what they want to do. That is, I guess you could call it our keynote for the Clinical Complexities and Supplementation Conference. If you register for the full conference, then you are automatically registered for our deeper dive with Rachel. Our early bird pricing is going to go away this weekend because our first lives for the conference itself start next week. So check out paperlesslactation.com/suppplementing-babies and learn all about the conference. We hope we'll see you at the deeper dive next week.

Leah: I'm really excited about both the conference and the deeper dive with Rachel. I know she's done so much blogging about the work she does around bottle feeding. I can't wait to have that time together with her to really dive into how she's incorporating that in her business. But also just like all the amazing things she's learned and done. I'm really excited about talking to her but I'm also so excited about the conference. I think it's just really neat to dive into the subject because I mean, really, and truly, it comes up so so often. So there's so much complexity to it and understanding it even better is going to just help us be better lactation consultants. So once again, thank you for putting all that together and helping us learn and grow. I'm so excited to get to be part of that. So thank you for doing that. Today we're kind of talking about something that could come along with all bottles refusals and stuff like that, but it's talking about ways families might be stressed and how can we help them work through that stress or get creative ways to kind of help them just manage it because everybody just experiences life in different ways is what I've discovered when I'm working with families. I feel like something that like is super stressing out a mom, I just really like, whoa, okay, that wouldn't be top of my list of things at this moment that would be stressing me out. So I have to like, wow, I have to really think about like, okay, how can I help this family because this doesn't seem like something I've experienced in my life. So it's like, we really have to get so inquisitive about that. I'm sure you've experienced the same where you have families experiencing all different kinds of stressors and things we might not have ever even contemplated or experienced in our lives.

Annie: Yeah, and I think what you're saying about certain kinds of stress, not everybody is going to see that thing as being stressful. I was thinking like recently about the whole giving people a superbill and seeing if your insurance will reimburse. For some people, they're like, oh, yeah, I'll mail it in and I'll make the phone call and I'll hassle them until they make good on their promise under the Affordable Care Act. Then other people even just like, getting the superbill, that piece of paper can feel like such a weight of stress. You don't know, like, which it's going to be but it definitely affects the families we work with. I think it's important for us to understand that nobody is immune from stress. There is nobody out there. I don't know, maybe there's a person birthing with the woodland fairies and the unicorns and the dolphins and then everything is perfect. So okay, but like the rest of us,

Leah: Everybody else, right?

Annie: We all have stress. So looking at how we're identifying when they're showing us that something is stressful, I think is really helpful.

Leah: You kind of have to have the stress radar on and sometimes you can just hear it in the words they're using, the language sounds way more intense around some certain subject or it could just even be body language. I've seen it in families, like whoa, you start going down one certain conversation and all of a sudden you just see their jaws clenching and their shoulders are eking up towards their ears and it's like whoa, okay, this is a stress point for this family. It might not even be the birthing parents' stress that is going to impact their journey, it could be the co-parent or another family member that is dealing with something really big in their life. We get that trickle down or trickle to the side or ripple effect, maybe we should say, not trickle but a ripple, of stress that bleeds into other people's experiences and life. I know that families that are feeling an immense amount of stress, tend to really have a hard time managing through more challenging breastfeeding journeys. I mean, I'm assuming that everybody else is seeing that same thing. Would that be a good read from your perspective, Annie?

Annie: Yeah, and I think that's where I know we've come a long way from when you and I were having our babies at the beginning so many years ago, and we were just talking about this when we were together in Houston. There was so much pressure of like, you have to pick and like, are you a breastfeeding mother or are you a bottle feeding mother? I mean, I definitely felt it and there was that stress for it was so intense of like, I could really just be making a mistake, and that's gonna jeopardize everything and derail the whole process. I definitely noticed like I have clients that are less of them are caught up in that kind of stress than I think I was or my friends were when we were having babies. Some of them, when you're educating, you have to really get creative with how you're talking to them. For one person, the same sentence could be seen as motivation, like, oh, yeah, that was just the encouragement I needed to hang in there. Then the other person hears the exact same sentences like, now I'm like crushing under the weight of expectation and I can't do it. I mean, we can't know in advance what that's going to be but we do have to be creative in modifying how we're communicating with families to recognize when what we're saying isn't landing with them.

Leah: Yeah. I think it all really starts with just being really present in your consult and really having an eye for observation of both like we just said, the body language and the words that the family is sharing. Staying really open-minded because sometimes we might brush off a comment because we're like, okay, nobody's stressing about that, and then it's like, oh wait, that is the thing that they're stressing about, but it would never be top of your mind. I've had some of those instances where I'm just like, and it's not in the realm of like perinatal mood disorder, where it's like, okay, this is clearly different. It's more of like, I've never had that experience so it wasn't even in my realm of comprehension to be stressed about that. It's not until I keep my mind open to, and have my radar on, and then really start asking questions. Just like it trying to understand where their perspective is in the light of this stressor in their life. I think it can be so valuable because I hear it quite often, things that are said to families, it can be one sentence, like you said, it can be one sentence that changes their whole thinking about something like you experience. One sentence really led you, you need to choose between being a breastfeeding mom or a bottle feeding mom, and that one sentence like, led to this immense amount of stress in your life because you had all this other stuff that came with that one sentence. Of course, we don't know that but if we stay open, and kind of asking those questions to really understand where they're coming from and not being too judgmental, let that one go. Nobody's worried about that, it's like, no, this could be like, another person might not have had that experience you had Annie, and could be like, whatever. I'll choose what I want to do like, I don't care, and could have brushed it off within 10 seconds. It would have never been another thought on their radar. We have to understand that we can't really do that to families because we might be really harming them by not understanding what their experience is. Our impact can come from either understanding or just kind of staying with blinders on and thinking that we know everything and we know what everybody's experience should be around breastfeeding and so we're just going to keep tripping along and not really pay attention. I really do think we can up our ability to serve when we kind of think through this. For me, and I wonder for you Annie, what are some of the things that have helped you to best understand an experience that is stressful that a family might be going through?

Annie: The obvious one is, like you said, asking those questions and not making assumptions. So saying what are your thoughts about this or what are you thinking? How has that been for you? What are your goals? Being really open in the questions that you're asking but something else that has been really helpful for me is to have an attitude of agreement with my clients. So whatever they're telling me about their experience, I will just agree with it. If they're like, and it's so funny because what it brings up is something that I remember around this topic is like, bringing me back to 2007 when my oldest child was born. I just remember this one woman, I can't remember her name, it's been I don't even know how long since I talked to her at like a barbecue or picnic, it might have been like a church thing or something. She had had her baby three weeks after mine, maybe a month after mine and she came up and told me she was breastfeeding so hard. So I just gave her one bottle of formula because I knew that's what I needed to do. I felt so much better after I did it. I just remember being like, that's not what you're supposed to do, inside I was like, but they said that if you do that it's gonna ruin everything. I was just like, oh my gosh, how could she do that? How could she make that choice? Now here, I am a lactation consultant and I'm like, yeah, sometimes you just need to do that just to show yourself that the world isn't gonna come to an end if you do that and to take the pressure off. I think back about my feelings about what she said and how unwilling I was to agree with her because of this ideological perspective that I had that was given to me by somebody. So thankfully, I feel like I was mentored well not to bring that into my clinical practice but it definitely is there. That was my immediate reaction when she said that. So thinking about, like, what could have been different inside of me? I mean, we were just friends. I wasn't in any position over her to like, guide her but I was like, what if I had been like, oh wow, I'm glad you took care of yourself. I'm gonna recognize something that you needed to do and you look great today. You looked really tired last week and today you look rested.

Leah: A lot of times, the hard thing that takes years and years to understand is like, you don't know what somebody's gone through. You don't know what their current situation is. What might seem like not a good idea for you or for another person might be just the thing that that person needs. I like this language around all of this about getting curious This is something I've really tried to change my language around is instead of saying, like, I gotta figure that out, I gotta work on that. That all sounds really hard. So if you're going to tell a parent, we got to figure this out, like, why are you stressed, we're gonna figure it out. I mean, that seems like, oh my gosh, there's an end to this, we're gonna figure it out. I gotta push through until we figure it out. If we could change the language a little bit, and just say, like, hey, let's get curious about what's going on for you and what might help. Let's just explore that a little bit. Let's get curious. So this idea of changing some of the language to curiosity. So I'm working really hard on that in my own head and be like, okay, instead of thinking I gotta figure this out, I'm gonna work on this. I'm gonna be curious why that's coming up for me. I'm curious why I feel so stressed when I'm thinking about this. I think we can help families have a better relationship with the things that might be stressing them and the solutions that might help lead to less stress if we could talk in this language of curiosity. So I just invite you to kind of think about how you could word some things in your consults when it comes to your family sharing something maybe that's really stressing them out. It helps you really lead to them finding the solution, like, hey, let's just get curious about what are some things that we could try to figure, I was able to say figure out again, you hear me? I'm working on it, work in progress. But helping them open up their mind to curiosity around the stressor, curiosity about why it's coming up for them right now, and curiosity about solutions not to fix the problem. Obviously, sometimes problems aren't fixable. Stresses aren't fixable, but how can we help them cope and manage in a stressful situation or stressful event that's going on in this time in their lives? Have you heard me use the word curious? You're gonna have to hold me accountable. I'm really working hard on this.

Annie: I like it. I also know that you're a naturally curious person. You will have all the questions about all the things. I'm a naturally like, there's a right way and there's a wrong way. I can get very in my head about the process and what should be happening. For me, I guess my version and maybe I'm just not naturally that curious. I don't know. I think for me, it's thinking about life as like improv theater and just saying yes and, to whatever's happening. That really helps me just get myself out of my rule maker head and just be like, they come and they're like, well, I mean really extreme scenario of a family is like, we're only feeding our baby four times a day. Then I can be like, yes and imagine how well your baby would be gaining weight, if you fed them eight times a day.

Leah: I love it.

Annie: Yes, you're feeding your baby. Hurray, you're not not feeding your baby. It's a start. So viewing it from building on what's good, that's there. There's always some seed of goodness that you can pull out of something and build your foundation on that in the conversation that you're having versus trying to push against somebody who's saying, I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this, or like, no, no, no. Then you bring like, but no, it's actually like this and then they're like, Okay, like, get out of my house.

Leah: I feel like they just tune you out. They can't hear you.

Annie: I would.

Leah: Absolutely, I feel like we have some really good solutions right now of ways that we could, maybe not solutions, but ideas of ways that we could really support families no matter what kind of stressful situation they were going through, or what's coming up for them now that their parents and now that they're dealing with sleepless nights and crying babies. All of that can bring up different life challenges for them so I think now we have some new languages that we can use. This reminder to just be more open minded about that a lot of people have stressors that might not make sense to us. But we can really help ourselves in them by understanding and getting creative with trying to help them work through that and have that be part of your care plan building is to take into account those stresses.

Annie: Speaking of care plans, if you sign up for Clinical Complexities and Supplementation, you can attend a session by Johanna Sargent, about motivational interviewing and using that to create care plans for families. I'm very excited. I've heard her speak about motivational interviewing before and she's going to bring it specifically to talk about supporting families that are on a hard journey of having to do all the things because they're trying to get to where they want to go instead of being where they want to be. Instead of already being happy with how things are going people who are trying to make a change so and being able to show up for families in that way. It really makes such a big difference for them feeling supported and us filling the role that we're meant to do, which is to help them put all the pieces together and support them along the way.

Leah: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, this has been a great conversation, lots of good reminders for me and I've got a new yes and language that I'm going to work on incorporating on top of my curious language and I will look forward to getting to see you or talk to you next time, Annie

Annie: I will have so many questions for you when we do. I will try.

Leah: Awesome. All right. Talk to you soon. Bye.