TRANSCRIPT

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Johanna: Hello everybody, welcome to the Alopecia Angel Podcast: Awaken to Hair Growth. Today I have a special guest. Her name is Gloria Niemi, she's a life coach dedicated to assisting mothers overcome postpartum depression and find happiness as a mom.

After experiencing postpartum depression 7 times, it's an honor for her to get to help other moms experience the same joy and presence too. She lives in Thunder Bay, Ontario, with her husband and 8 children on a massive 160 acre oasis in the woods. In her free time, she loves hiking by Lake Superior, dreaming about her log cabin reading books with her kids, just sitting and soaking in the silence.

So thank you and welcome Gloria. We have so much to cover today. Tell us, we know you helped postpartum, depression, moms, tell us a little bit of your story, how you got into this and yeah, what are some of the signs that we can look for?

Gloria: I am so glad to be here with you, Johanna. A little bit of my story is: I got married at 19, I had my first baby at 20. Many people when they see me today, they're like: Did you start at 12? You look so young. How do you have so many kids? But we did get started young. And there were many, there are many benefits to having gotten married that young, but there were also challenges as well.

I had postpartum depression after my first, and when I was in that postpartum period, I did not know that depression was what I was experiencing. I had many changes in my life in a very short period. I was young, I moved across country to Ontario where my husband was born and raised. So I had a whole new community around me, new family, nobody that I really knew or connected with. It was a totally different pace of life. We lived in the big city, so there was a lot of like traffic and people and construction and all of the things.

There were so many changes in such a short period, and I think that this led to, me not knowing how to explain the changes that I was experiencing or why I was experiencing them in this way. Motherhood itself is such a huge adjustment. Like it's a complete identity shift. You are now responsible for raising this little baby. Becoming a mom causes you to come up against your biggest insecurities, the things that you thought you left behind when you said I do.Like you are supposed to be an adult now and responsible enough to raise this child, and if you aren't at that level of emotional maturity, then it brings that stuff up so you can work through it. But anyways, if we don't talk about this, then nobody knows that's what they're experiencing and why. Especially when we think that becoming a mom is going to be the thing that makes us happy, and all of a sudden everything like angels are singing Hallelujah, and we never have to do another hard thing in our life again.

This can all lead to confusion and disconnection and feeling like there's something wrong, which are all symptoms, of experiencing postpartum depression. So that was my experience of becoming a mom.

And then I had 7 rounds of it after each of my babies. I had some level of postpartum depression. Some of them it only lasted a couple weeks, sometimes it would last many months depending on like my life circumstance or how my ability to come out of that darkness and decide that my life was worth living, which we could get into that later.

Through these many rounds of postpartum depression and not feeling like myself, and then I would find myself again, and then I'd get pregnant and I had to start the whole cycle all over again, I found that there are really, common patterns and there's things that are helpful that can help you prevent postpartum depression, help you get out of that darkness and find yourself again.

Then there are also things that make it worse. And one of the things that really gets me is that it's the symptoms of the depression that make the depression worse. So it's like that never ending spiral. If you are on that cycle and you can't stop it, it will just keep going lower and lower. And that's really why I'm here today is because I want to bring the tools and the mindset shifts, the strategies to as many moms and fathers as possible so that we can stop those cycles. I know that when you can mother with love and from who you are, from your heart, that is when we can raise babies. Not perfectly.

I'm not talking about being perfect parents here, but we can raise our babies in the way that we want to and they can grow into beautiful, amazing whole human beings who have so much to bring to this world as well.

Johanna: Wow, there's a mouthful there. That's a lot. So you experienced postpartum depression 7 times, you have 8 kids. Just let me just set the record straight, and each time you had postpartum depression, did it look the same? Did it not look the same? So let me go ahead and compare this to alopecia. There's a lot of clients who I work with who they've been dealing with cycles of alopecia, on and off, on and off for 10 years, 20 years. They know the signs, they know the symptoms, they see it, and so it's a pattern.

And normally in their patterns, it gets worse and worse each time.

So did it get worse and worse each time for you, or were you able to repair it, catch it, like a fire that starts in the oven? Are you able to catch it in diminish it? Or how did you go about handling these 7 different times of postpartum depression? Because that's huge.

Gloria: Totally. So like I was saying about this, downward spiral, the symptoms, making the symptoms worse. I would say that the hardest, looking back, the hardest postpartum depressions that I experienced were my first, because I was so lost and confused. I could talk to my husband or my mom about what I was going through, but they were like: I don't know what to do, maybe you're screwed. Like they didn't have any tools to help me with it. And then my sixth was the one of the hardest as well, because I had already started my business at that point. I was helping other moms feel better, enjoy their life more. And then here I am having the postpartum depression again. And I was like: what is wrong with me? I should not be experiencing this. So that was really inviting me to another level of healing.

So those were the two hardest experiences. And the other ones, I would say there were some similar patterns where I would start to disconnect from people that I loved, wanting to just pull away, be in my safe little bubble, getting more irritable, faster to react with my kids. There were similar patterns and then depending on my like my mental state or the circumstances that I was in perhaps for one of the post par postpartums, I had a friend who reached out and was like: Hey, what are you going through? And they were able to help me, help take me back faster.

So yeah, I would say that those, that's the experience of the difference in, of the cycles in that pattern.

Johanna: So I know that postpartum depression can be, depending on where you live, what group, what religion, what you know what you subscribe to could look a little taboo and maybe even non-existent. For example, when I was pregnant at 40, having my first baby, my mom and my grandma who both have 3 and 4 kids each never mentioned postpartum depression, never mentioned it like a thing. And mind you, they both never even breastfed. So it's maybe it's because they didn't have it, they also didn't have nausea or morning sickness. So maybe because they didn't have it or experience it, they weren't able to talk about it just like breastfeeding. Which is wild to me that they weren't able to do that.

But in any case, I guess maybe they were speaking out of experiences, but how come.

More people are not talking about this, making it more prevalent. So for example, I talked about menopause a couple episodes back. Oprah did this big thing about menopause. Because again, it's another thing that's not talked about. And even the full pregnancy and labor and what this looks like and the possibility of tearing and the possibility of forceps and all these other possible situations never came up until I educated myself.

Gloria: Totally. And I think to some degree it's probably the vulnerability that's required for having harder conversations. Like some of these topics are more uncomfortable if people have not done the healing work themselves to like really meet themselves on that deep level. It can be a really uncomfortable thing to ask someone about. There's also a lot of insecurity. If I experience this. But they didn't experience that, then does that mean that I did it wrong? So that's an also another reason why moms who are inthe depression don't open up about what they're experiencing because they're like I don't know, maybe there's something wrong with me. For sure there is something wrong with me.

Many of us go into motherhood thinking that it's going to be perfect. We're gonna have so much love, it's going to be amazing, like everything that we dreamed of and we don't realize that there are also hard feelings that come during the transition into motherhood.

There's hard feelings that can come up between you and your husband, you and your spouse. Things that you didn't think that you would have to deal with. As you transition into these new roles in your relationship, there's the wounds that get opened up from your past as you begin to raise your child and all the ways that your parents raised you are coming up and you're getting to work through them.

So it's really this idea that something is wrong if we're feeling like this. And then if someone else isn't being open about it, then we're less likely to open up about it too, because we think that there's something wrong with us, or we're broken because we feel like this. But the more that people share, the more safety it gives for other people to share as well. And to recognize that even when you have really hard times or experience really negative emotions in motherhood that does not negate or dismiss the positive times as well. Like we can embrace all aspects of what it means to be a mom, and I think that gives us the capacity to love our kids in the way that we want to love them.

Johanna: Do you think postpartum depression can be prevented?

Gloria: I think that it can. I think that the work that we're doing right now, like there is way more awareness, there's way more tools and resources available than even when my first daughter was born 13 years ago on Saturday. But there's way more awareness and tools now than there was then. When you yourself, as a mom or a mom to be are aware of the signs of postpartum depression, you're able to have the support, like both the internal support, and the external support.

So people who you love and you connect with and trust, there is no need. And then I guess, we could also go down the, path of talking about nutrition, having proper nutrition, like lifestyle habits. That would be a whole nother episode on like how our lives, many of our lives are structured today is so opposite from how we are meant to be living, that it's no wonder to me that there's so much depression and anxiety. But when we can have all of those things in place, the nutrition, the sleep, of course you're not gonna be getting much sleep during the postpartum, but either having the physical support to support you or the internal support to be with yourself as you are not getting the amount of sleep that you are used to getting.

Then I believe that postpartum depression, if not, if it can't be prevented, it can be minimized.

Johanna: Did you experience just outta curiosity, postpartum hair loss with any of your pregnancies? All of 'em? Oh yeah.

Gloria: All of them. I actually just like you can see my cute little fuzzy's coming back. I'm about 11 months postpartum now.

Johanna: Okay, okay. I only asked because with postpartum hair loss, I never experienced it. And granted, my field is the hair loss, and so I was determined to, have my whole army and arsenal of things so that this wouldn't happen and it didn't. I never had postpartum hair loss. And so, for those of you listening, we already know you can prevent alopecia, you can prevent the hair loss, you can prevent the postpartum hair loss, but you can also prevent and minimize the postpartum depression aspects of it.

So for the dads, or let's say sisters or moms or anyone else seeing this from the outside who's not the mom with the new baby, what are the signs that we should look for? You mentioned isolation. You mentioned, being quick to light up, like just anger or maybe some sort of like snappy short answers, over spilled milk or whatever it is. Anything else that we should be looking for? Because, the more signs we can give people, the better it is. Sometimes we're all busy, we're all busy, and it's hard for us to focus on others when we're always also in our own head of things to do, places to go, people to see and all these other responsibilities we have.

As new parents, or even if this is your eighth kid, you're still juggling a lot of balls.

There's a lot of things in the air. And depending if or not you have support, that's why they say it takes a village, but I didn't have a village, I didn't have family and friends, to help me during my, pregnancy, birth, postpartum, anything and I still don't. And so it's me and my husband and that's it. A lot of people out there are like that more and more.

It's like that because we all live far away from family and friends and maybe you move and if you're like me, you've moved many times and whoever you've trusted before, it's like it takes time to trust again, especially with your newborn. It's like you're not just gonna give them to any babysitter. No, that's not happening. And so what are some of the extra signs that we could pinpoint that potentially there's something here?

Gloria: Yeah since it's so individual for each of us, I would say the main thing to look for is if they are not being themselves. Yes, it is normal to have an adjustment period. Like you mentioned that maybe 12, 24 hours you felt that could have been depression, but you were able to snap out of it. So that adjustment period, or they call it the baby blues, that can be normal. There's 70 to 80% or whatever the statistics are of moms who experience that. But if someone is not being themselves, if your wife is not being herself, and you can also use this awareness for yourself as well. I don't feel like me.

And then it's lasting longer than a week. If it's lasting longer than a week, I recommend getting help.

Either just opening up to your husband, reaching out to a friend, your mom a sister, someone who you trust, a therapist, a coach, someone who you trust so that you can stop that spiral before it becomes bigger than it needs to. So if they, like I mentioned, ifthey're pulling away, if they're more irritable, if they are not handling situations how they typically do, if they aren't doing things that they enjoy. Yes, becoming a mom takes a lot of energy and time and bandwidth, but you can still enjoy, like sitting on the couch and drinking a cup of coffee while you snuggle your newborn.

If you notice how they are interacting with you, if they're more disconnected, if they're on their phone a lot, if they don't want to like engage in conversation or they're really, like very sensitive, like not in a good way sensitive, but like anything that you say can set them off. Like these can all be signs that there is an internal conflict brewing, which could be postpartum depression or post postpartum anxiety.

Johanna: So once the mom, the new mom tells their husband a family or their coach or something, like what do those next steps look like, for that person? Because when I'm only just trying to compare this ever so slightly to my own alopecia situation. I told you earlier, like I told my family I had alopecia, I showed them my bald spots in the back of my head and my mother gasped and then everyone else was quiet and no one said anything else after that. They were quiet, non-supportive, how can we help?

None of those things came out of their mouth and they knew that they couldn't help me because that's my hair loss. What are they gonna do? And so in many ways, what are those next steps for the person going through the postpartum depression? Because yes, you tell somebody, but then let's say that falls on deaf ears. Let's say their own mom went through it and she's tough it out, or because she's from a different generation, she's suck it up. Okay, so what does that person do?

Gloria: I would recommend working with a therapist, like that's the first step. There are people who recommend that you reach out to your doctor, which like, of course that is to your discretion. Again, that would be a whole other conversation. I don't agree with medicine. I believe that there is a time and place for it, but probably the majority of the people, who are listening to this medication isn't the first answer. It's not the first line of defense. But I recommend reaching out to a therapist. That in itself can be overwhelming. It can be like, who do I talk to? How do I get a hold of them? What if I don't connect with them? What if it doesn't work out? There's of course the financial aspect if you don't have benefits.

Like there's so many different kinds of therapy, I wouldn't even know how to say which one would be the best for each person. But be willing to contact even 5 or 10 just with many of them will have a short 15 minute phone call that you can just chat with and get to know each other. See if you have that connection before you decide, okay, no, this is the one that I trust and this is who I want to work with. If you don't have the energy or the bandwidth to do that, get your husband or your spouse or someone that you trust in your personal life if they're able to be with you and help you make those phone calls.

But what I also recommend is that it comes from within. No one can help you if you can't help yourself. And so if you can't even make the phone call to a therapist to get help, then maybe visiting with your doctor would be a best. But when you're like: Okay, yes,it's overwhelming, yes, it's uncomfortable to make this phone call, but my mental health and my ability to be here as a mother for my children is important enough to overcome that negative emotion. And so I'm going to make this phone call that shifts something inside of you and that already stops that negative spiral that you are on, that puts you on a trajectory toward headed towards health and happiness and healing.

Johanna: So when it comes to postpartum depression, what are some of the symptoms or things and how bad can it get? So for example, with alopecia you can go bald, you can lose all the hair on your head, eyebrows, you know all, everything on your body.

And it can get really bad mentally, physically, emotionally. You can get a second or a third autoimmune disease, the list goes on. So what are some of the things that we can see with postpartum depression and how bad can it get?

Gloria: So I like to view depression as a sliding scale. So some people view depression as like a one picture box, like the only way that I know that I have depression is if I am laying in my bed all day. I've got a dark hoodie on, my hood is pulled over my head and I'm just crying and I can't do anything. And that is one picture of depression, but depression is a whole scale. So on the milder side, there's someone who is still functioning in their life, but they are bringing a heaviness with them throughout their day.

Their heart isn't in what they're doing, they don't really feel like themselves, like something feels off, they feel sad or they are easy to cry, those kind of symptoms.

In the middle, we have a more medium severity or depth of depression, which is it's not just the mild but you're still functioning. It's maybe, you are more reactive, more sensitive, you have less energy, you're more on your phone. You don't do the things that you know you should do to be happy or to have energy. And then on the severe side of the scale is where you have like suicidal ideation, also death ideation where you just, you don't actually wanna kill yourself, you don't think that you should be alive or you, just wanna fall asleep and never wake up. Or you think that you, your kids would be better off without you. There's also like hallucinations, those are some of the more severe symptoms of the depression.

Johanna: So in terms of statistics, what data can you show us in terms of like how many women I. Are affected by postpartum depression, how many women speak up, how many women, get the help? How many women, any data that you can share with us, whether it's Canadian based or American or anything else or internationally.

Gloria: The only statistic that stands out in my head is that 1 in every 4 women, will experience postpartum depression. And as for tracking the percentage of women who reach out, like that would be a really hard number to track because most people just either deal with it on their own, or they never deal with it, or they want to pretend that it never happened. Like they just put it in a little box and put it up on a shelf in their mind, and that's the end of it. So I don't know how, those are some interesting things that I could do some research on after this. But I don't know how we would even track that.Johanna: What resources are there for people going through postpartum depression right now? Let's say they're like: Gloria, I love this. Where can they go for more resources?

Gloria: So one of my favorite websites is Postpartum Support International, PSI. They have a huge database, they have many therapists who have done postpartum specific trainings, and that would be an excellent resource that I would recommend going to.

Johanna: Awesome. Have you yourself, like dabbled into maybe, I don't know if there are any, I'm sure there are associations Facebook groups or anything else. I've been on a couple Facebook groups for different things, whether it's health or, anything else related to it. And most of 'em are hit or miss. And most of 'em are negative and bitter and not really helpful. So what is your take on that for you or for postpartum depression in general for this industry?

Gloria: Yeah, so there are many Facebook groups who are specifically for postpartum depression and anxiety. And I would say that it depends on what you are wanting to get from them. I agree there are a lot of posts on there that can be really negative, very very not uplifting and supportive. But there are also places or people in those groups who you're able to share in them and be heard and validated and Hey, you're not the only one who is experiencing that. And that in itself can be helpful, especially if you're feeling very ashamed of how you are feeling. If that sounds like something that would be supportive to you, then for sure go, join a couple Facebook groups and share some of your thoughts and experiences in there.

Johanna: What are some takeaways or some tips that you would give somebody who knows somebody who's going through it right now besides, going to PSI getting a therapist or what other things can they do right now and implement or maybe assess or evaluate to see what may be needed right now or like those next steps?

Gloria: The first thing that comes to mind is just to reach out to them, tell them.

Sometimes it can be a hard conversation to have, but just say: Hey, I see that you are not, you haven't been yourself lately. I wanted to open up a conversation and see how you're doing. If there's anything I can do to support you here, if there's something that you are needing either from me or if I can help you get it from somewhere else.

It makes me think of one of my postpartums when one of my sister-in-laws, or I guess I had initiated this phone call. We were talking about something, that was coming up in our relationship that was challenging for both of us. But when I had reached out to her and we were having this conversation and she was like, yeah, I've noticed that you haven't been yourself, but I'm just like, I don't know what to do for you. I hope that you get better. And that really hurt because I was like, you notice that I'm not being myself?

The most loving thing that someone can do is say: Hey, you aren't being yourself, and I know this isn't how you are or how you wanna be. So what can we do to help you like that? When someone is able to go that extra mile to love and support you when you are having a rough time, that is one of the most incredible things that anyone can do.

Johanna: Understood. And going back into when I told my family I had alopecia, I don't blame them for not supporting me because they were probably as ignorant about alopecia as I was. They were without the tools and the techniques and the strategies and the ideas, like my mom said, go see a doctor. Really thanks, because that led me down this black hole of situations, which at the end of the day I'm grateful for because again, now I'm able to intern help people with a proven strategy and not the medication route, which has no results or outcome or, anything favorable to it for hair loss.

So I don't blame my family. The thing is, it's like when people don't know, they don't know. It's like when you're at school, when they're like: Hey, who knows the answer to problem number #7? When no one knows, everyone's just quiet, right? Everyone's just like hiding their hands and their arms and because they don't wanna be picked on. It's the same thing just in adults. It's like: They don't know, they don't know how to support, they don't know. So this is why I wanted to bring you on, because I don't know, I don't know how to support moms around me, my friends around me who are having babies, whether it's their first time or 10th time, figuring this out I guess from a friend standpoint or family friend standpoint, I only, and this is me moving back to the US only now have I heard of like food trains where every person makes a meal so that the new mom doesn't have to cook for a week or 2 weeks.

This was never a thing in the Netherlands, this was definitely not a thing in Japan, I've never heard of this in Latin America. Nor in any of the 5 other states that I've lived in.

Granted I wasn't having kids at that time, and so only now am I a mom and all these things have perked up. I'm just trying to think outside the box. Like besides the food train, which is something I learned here in the US that people do. I had no idea people do this. What more can we do to support any new mom, whether or not they have the postpartum depression or not, to facilitate and help them yeah, to help them better. I know a lot of times in churches they do this.

Whether you're young or old, because my heart goes out to you, especially that you said that you were a new mom like at 19, 20 years of age. And I was a new mom at 40, but at the same time, whether or not I was older than you or not, I still almost went through the same things. I also didn't have the help. I also didn't have, the resources, especially not in English. 'cause I lived in a Dutch country, and so the thing is, it's just it was almost even harder, in many ways, in many aspects. And it was covid on top of it.

So I was really isolated which could have been a good thing.

Again, going back to the initial question, what more can we do for a new parent, a new couple who's having a new baby for the first time, and where we know that this is going to, potentially create new routines, new this lack of sleep. Also, maybe the mom or the dad don't have time off. Let's say maybe they have to get back to work or the dad, there's no paternity leave depending on the company he works for, and so he has to go back to work. Same old, and the mom, maybe she is an entrepreneur and maybe she has to go back to work, where you couldn't take necessarily a lot of time off. You had toget back to work because that's part of the situation. So what other things outsiders can do for new parents or anyone having a new baby?

Gloria: So again, I would say just reaching out, like asking them, Hey, what do you need? You just had a baby, offering help. Do you want me to come, make a meal for you? Do you want me to take your other kids on a walk while you have half an hour with your spouse or just you and your baby? Do you want me to do some cleaning at your place? Like depending on the level of your relationship with that person, how much you love them and care about them, what kind of support you genuinely want to offer?

Because another thing to keep in mind is people know when you are doing something, like just because, and you don't actually wanna be doing it.

If you feel obligated to, or if you actually are doing it because you want to, like it's coming from your heart and 10 times out of 10 someone is going to want something that comes from your heart versus something that you feel obligated to do. Any of those things that I recommended, if there's a way for you to financially assist them, or even just being an ear to listen: Hey, I've been, I've had three kids myself maybe, and, this is your first kid, I'm here to listen if you ever wanna chat about anything, I'm here for you.

Johanna: How can my listeners connect with you, Gloria? And is there anything else that you'd like to leave us with?

Gloria: Okay, they can connect with me on Instagram. I am at @operationhappymom

and then come find me on my website. It's just my name, glorianiemi.com. I'd love to connect with you further.

Johanna: So if you are dealing with postpartum, if you're dealing with being a new mom, if you're dealing with, this is your 10th kid and you have no help, reach out to Gloria because your children deserve it and you deserve the help. You deserve the support. And if you have any issues with hair loss, postpartum, Covid, alopecia areata, totalis, universalis, androgenic, traction, female pattern, baldness, I can help you, I can get you to the results. And this is the key. It's like there is help out there and we just need to take action. Anything else, Gloria?

Gloria: No, that's everything. Thank you, Johanna.

Johanna: I love seeing you smile. You have such a beautiful smile.

Gloria: Thanks.