Tuesday 26 June 2012

Baby Bean Update

Tomorrow is 27 weeks!  We are just 8 days from the third trimester!!
The bean is kicking up a storm on a daily basis and has gotten in a few kicks up under the ribs.  
We constantly refer to the bean as him...but we have no idea what we are having and end up confusing a few people.  I think it would be more confusing to be calling the baby, lentil or bean which is what LB and I usually refer to "it" as.  
I go through hills and valleys between excitement and fear.  LB on the other hand is always excited.
We watched a movie/documentary called Babies and Ringo sat through completely engaged for about 80% of the movie watching the babies on the screen.  Lily didn't get as excited, she might have watched 30% of it which is still a lot for either dog.  It completely melted my heart.  We already have seen the dogs with kids and they love love love them.  But to see the dogs completely engrossed by them on a screen was amazing.
Just 13 weeks until the due date!
                                                                                   Lily and Ringo

Tuesday 19 June 2012

When therapy doesn't work

About 2.5 years ago I reached the darkest of dark places, and I reached out to someone for help and they recommended I see a therapist in Vancouver who did somatic therapy.  Somatic therapy is a holistic approach where the mind and the body work as one and you must heal each in order to be healthy both mentally and physically.  The basic idea in the treatment I which did was that my body was holding onto past experiences and causing/creating the depressive state.  And that through deep tissue and organ manipulation my body would bring issues to the surface and allow healing.
There were a few mistakes and warning signs that were there before the therapy, which in the state of mind I couldn't see, indicating that there may be problems ahead.
The therapist was one who had worked with many many members of my extended family...mistake number one.  Really one needs to separate family from therapy as there are so many boundaries which can easily be blurred.   I was also warned by many others who had worked with her to not go to her and find someone else...mistake number two.  There were reasons why I was being warned, and of course people don't go into details when it comes to their personal therapy, when warning someone not to go to a particular therapist. Turns out she is not licensed to practice anything other then massage.
But I was really really really badly off and I felt like I had no other options. I was in therapy already and with the same therapist I have today; but therapy like anything worth waiting for takes time to really "fix" the problem and I felt like I was running out of time.
So I went, and I went with a family member who was also having treatment with the same therapist...mistake number three.   The actual work done on my body was amazing; and 2 days into the therapy (which was 4 days long and 2 hour sessions) I felt better, both physically and mentally. Somatic therapy can be physically painful as your body moves through the "stuff" (for lack of a better word) and you can end up in weird positions and more then once in a heap on the floor.

However what wasn't done in by this particular somatic therapist was the talk/mind aspect of the therapy...so I was left at the end with all this "emotional baggage" which I didn't know how to process. Not knowing how to process the emotional baggage in a healthy constructive way, is why my body was unable to deal with it in the first place, and then held on to it. There was no consideration on the part of this therapist to have any help on dealing with the emotional side of the therapy, which is really bad practice.   I was lucky that I came home to a therapist I trusted and could help deal with what happened and what therapy had brought up to the surface.  If I wasn't already in therapy I fear something truly awful could have come out of those treatments. So for me personally the negative effects of this treatment were minimal.   
One of the biggest things that happened for me was that she shared what had gone on in treatment of other members of my family....this is so so so wrong. There is a lot of trust you have to put in the therapist,  trust that what you say is private and confidential.   So years later this is still an issue for me because when I was in the time of most vulnerability, I shared things with someone who i know has broken the basic ethics of any sort of therapeutic healing.  
With baby on it's way (!14 weeks left!)  I worry what happened in that room with come out, and I worry who it will be shared with. I worry that the work I have done will some how unravel, if other people learn more about what has gone on for me then I am willing to share.   I worry if in any way this will effect the baby, which is why it has become such a sensitive issue all this time later. 







Wednesday 13 June 2012

GoodBye K

About 6 weeks ago I said goodbye to K and the gym.  It was a hard decision but physically I just couldn't do what I had done before and felt that I was wasting a lot of money and creating a negative atmosphere which was leading to me dreading going to the gym. I will go back to K after I have been cleared by the doc after baby is here.
So I am walking daily with the dogs and thinking about trying out swimming.  I have read and heard from lots of people that it is a really comfortable form of exercise while pregnant.
There are 15 weeks until Baby Bailey's "due" date.  We are getting more excited by the day and time seems to be slowing down to a crawl. In the meantime we have lots of friends and family who are pregnant or just given birth...6 babies in the last 5 weeks!!  of course this makes 15 weeks seem like a long long long time away!