5. We Inherited Trauma But We Don’t Have to Pass It On

Welcome to She's Honestly Mental, a podcast for women who are done pretending they're fine when they're falling apart on the inside. I'm your host, Karina Rawlinson, ADHD brain medicated, mind and proud mental health hospital alumni.

Still here, still showing up somehow. This is the space for the feelers.

The fixers and the ones who carry it all and still wonder if it's enough. We talk about the chaos, the connection and everything in between, because silence, silence nearly killed me. And these conversations save lives. All right, cacao in hand, headphones on, chaos semi contained. Let's get honestly mental.

Holy smokes, guys, I'm so excited. Episode five is here now. A few weeks ago I was in Perth. Oh, gosh, I've been going back and forth so much lately. My son's having some medical stuff at the moment and we're having to back and forth, see specialists do different bits and pieces. And when you live 800km away from the city, you try to get up there and jam, pack as much shit as you possibly can. Funny story is that I was going to take him to Archie Brothers, I think it is. And so he'd been begging me to go. I was tired, I was wrecked. Like, we'd been up since 4 o' clock in the morning to drive to Perth and we've got there and I just said to myself, I can't do this, mate. Like, I went to Costco and did all the shopping and it just was way too much of my head and I thought, no, not doing it, not doing it. And then at about quarter past seven that night, I thought, bugger it, he's gonna just lay here on his iPad. I'm probably gonna scroll on TikTok, let's jump in the car and let's go to Archie Brothers. So we scooch on up to Karen up, and we get there at 10 to 8 and as we walk in, they're like, oh, guys, sorry. Yeah, it's 18 plus after 8 o' clock and I've just gone. I have literally driven eight hours with a preteen all day and we've got nine minutes. What the fuck? Anyway, so we went in there for nine minutes and whatever and it was great. And then I did a bit of a Google and then I saw that time zone was still open. So we scooted on down to Time zone and we had the best time. It was so good. It was so fun. Anyway, the next morning I got up and we had to be somewhere early. Ish. I wanted to get to this really Cool gluten free bakery called Doe Street. Never been before. But we had to get to the bakery which was like a 1520 minute drive and then back down to where the first appointment was and that was at 9:30 and then I had two hours to spare before going to the next appointment and I was like okay, I can do this, this is fine. But little old me and my spirals went down a bit of a rabbit hole. I mean for those that know, you know, right? I love me some AI and I love playing with ChatGPT, which is amazing. But I love coming across different AI tools that are really good at different things. So I come across this program called Perplexity and it's really good for doing deep research around different projects. And something that has been playing on my mind for a very, very long time about mental health is how it has kind of come about and I literally chucked. I'm just going to find the exact prompt that I put into this thing. Is there any evidence that or research that talks about women's mental health, particularly around undiagnosed ADHD, etc from childhood that then increases their chances of postnatal depression, et cetera after pregnancy and parenthood? I have a theory that because of the change in the women becoming, working, having a life compared to years ago when men did it all that has ended up causing this kind of generational normality that because women chose to work and not just stay home in the kitchen, that if they were mentally struggling that it's their own fault, like they're not supposed to struggle and if they do too bad legit. That's what I put into this thing. It smashes out this and I, I love this because this reference and cites exactly where it's pulled this information from women's mental health, the link between undiagnosed ADHD and postpartum depression. There is compelling research evidence support that the connection between undiagnosed ADHD in women and the increased risk of developing postpartum depression and and mental health challenges following pregnancy and parenthood. This connection reveals a complex interplay between neurological differences, societal expectations and structural inequalities that disproportionately affect women's mental health. Okay. A comprehensive Swedish study examining over 773,000 births found that women with an ADHD diagnosis had a five fold higher risk of developing both postpartum depression so 16.8% versus 3.29% and anxiety disorders 24.9% versus 5% compared to women without ADHD. This increased risk persisted even after Controlling for all other known risk factors, establishing ADHD as an independent predictor of postpartum mental health difficulties. Holy smokes. This shows that women with ADHD were 1.14 times more likely to be diagnosed with mood disorders at 6 weeks postpartum and around 1.2 times more likely to develop mood, anxiety and stress related disorders at 12 months postpartum. It goes on to talk about the devastating impact on undiagnosed ADHD in women. Severe low self esteem, negative self image, where women reporting feeling like a bad person or not an adequate enough human being. Chronic patterns of self blame, attributing their difficulties to personal character flaws rather than neurological differences. And I think if you go back to episode one where I read out my letter, this is exactly the stuff that I was telling myself. And then there's this other stuff that they talk about around, like maladaptive coping strategies including substance use, risky sexual behavior and emotional dysregulation. Higher rates of anxiety, depression and trauma responses that persist into adulthood. And so it just goes on and it then starts talking about this thing called the perfect mother. Myth has become a pervasive cultural force that expects women to excel in their careers while also being the primary caregivers, manage all household and emotional labour seamlessly and take personal responsibility for any failures in these areas. So studies on working mothers show that 42% experience depression and or anxiety significantly higher than the general population's 28%. What? Research demonstrates that 79% of working mothers experience extreme anxiety around the expectations that they are trying to live up to. Sorry, what? And where has this all come from? It's this blame and shame cycle. It's gender stereotypes. It's like this, okay, so back in the day when Adam and Eve believe what you want to believe, okay, but like God created Adam and Eve. Adam's the man, Eve is the woman, obviously, whatever. But the men go out and they do their work because their bodies, and this is proven like their bodies, they're physically stronger than the women. So the women to go out to try and like build fences and plow fields and all of the rest of it, like, we're not built for that. Right? As someone said, you're actually. I remember a customer saying this to me at the news agency. You're actually built as a woman to birth a child. And your role as a woman is to care for that child. Because the role for the man is to go out and provide for the families. Along came the women that are like, oh, I want to burn my bras and I want to be free and all of the rest of it. And, you know, God forbid any woman actually wanting to do something for themselves or a woman questioning that the way the world is, because that's when we were told, oh, no, she's actually hysterical. Like, she's hysterical. She needs to be. She's a witch. She needs to be burnt at the stake. Like she's questioning things. And heck, still, some days in this current time, in my generation, there is times where I feel like I'm the witch and people want to burn me at the stake because I am questioning things and I'm like, you know what? I am going to question it. And I want to question it. Not to question it, to be like, who are you to tell me that? I'm like, I want to know. Like, tell me the things that make this happen. Tell me the process that we've used to get to this point. And there's a lot of books and stuff out there that are like, oh, we blame the generation before us and we blame this, we blame that and we blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, can we not. Can we not be blaming anyone? Can we stop playing the victim in this life? Can we be the ones that go, you know what? Actually, I don't blame you. I could blame my parents for lots of stuff in my life, but then I stop and I think about their childhoods and then their parents childhoods and then what they chose. You know, my mum and dad have five kids in five years. Like, heck, man, we had a really good childhood. We also had a really rough childhood for certain different things that happened as we were growing up. I mean, who doesn't? But I don't blame my parents for any of it. Mostly for a couple of reasons. And this is what I think is really important as a human being, right? Is say you fucked up and you've done the wrong thing and you've said something. And I talk about this in the last episode, like you've said something and it's come across really wrong and it's upset someone and someone actually says to you, hey, Karina. That actually really did come across really rude. And it's someone that you trust, like, someone that's in your little circle of security. That person that you know that you could ring at any time of the night and that you could trust to be able to tell you the right thing. Like if you're wearing something and it looks fucking rotten and you think you look good, they're the kind of person that's gonna tell you that I love those people in my life because I need the people to tell me the things. Because sometimes my brain. Well, my mouth says things before my brain's even registered what's coming out of it. And so I do not blame my parents. Why? Because both of them have actually stopped talk to me about these things. Both of them were so incredibly supportive when I was in and out of my mental health stays both of them. And I say all of my parents because I'm very blessed. I have an amazing stepdad, an amazing stepmom. I'm very, very fortunate that my parents have chosen other partners that have just been so incredibly supportive of our big, wild family. And I feel like, what is the purpose of me trying to blame them for something that really they didn't have any real control over? But then when they've realized the things that were a bit messy, they've actually stopped and apologized and changed their behavior. And I really feel like changed behavior is a sign of realizing that potentially the way they're behaving isn't ideal for who you want to be as a person. And I'm really sorry if that sounds a little bit confronting, but I've been confronted by. By so many times, and I found it a really humbling experience. But I truly do love when someone's like, hey, actually, I know that you thought that you were doing the right thing, and yet you probably were doing the right thing. But the way that it came across probably wasn't ideal. And maybe next time if you just, like, maybe shuffled a little bit to the left and went at it just from a different angle, like, you've gotta be aware of other people's feelings as well. I hate that saying that a leopard never changes its spots. Or you can't teach an old dog new tricks if that dog's not willing to learn the new tricks. Sure. But if you've got a dog that's sitting there and going, actually, yeah, show me. Show me how. Why not? And I think that's what I truly just appreciate so much about my parents and my family is that they've gone. Yeah, we probably played a part in that. Or we did play a part in that and wasn't ideal. And we're really sorry about that. It actually just eats me up so much to see the pain in their eyes when I talk about some of this stuff, because I can see that they blame themselves, but wholeheartedly, I just don't. I don't. Whereas if you're someone that's constantly doing the wrong thing and really just being an idiot, mate, you laid your bed, you lay in it. Just. I can't. I can't. If you're not in that head space of wanting to be able to help yourself just yet, yeah, I don't know. It's such a fine line. I'm a good human being, but also sometimes I'm like, I just can't with some people. I think that's me. That's just me being honest about life, right? So I've been down that little spiral around the blame and all of the rest of it, but it's this real intergenerational transmission of trauma. Now, I didn't come up that by myself. That was a little bit of AI, but there's research that reveals really big patterns around intergenerational transmission. And it's like us now, this generation, I really see us being these change makers, these ones that go, we're not doing this anymore. We're not continuing this cycle. And I think for me, with my kids, the thing that pushed me to really get the help was because that I could see that they were struggling and I didn't want to be that kind of mum that was selfish and didn't give a shit about my kids. And see, this is me, like, being like, oh, my gosh, I'm saying these things and I don't know if I'm saying the right thing and I'm questioning myself and I'm like, no, I believe this. I truly didn't want my kids to have a mom who didn't believe in herself or had a mom that screamed at them and yelled at them. And, I mean, I still do, but I wanted to be my best version possible. And so I've made it my priority to have me as my number one. And it can be so freaking hard depending on the context and the situation and the life that you have. But it's like, I feel like if you can notice that you're like, oh, I see this one thing. How can I do it a little bit better? And you just make those tiny little changes. I feel like I'm living, breathing evidence of it. It's like, here I am six years on from my first mental health admission, and I'm sitting here talking to people about mental health. Gosh, what makes me an expert? Nothing makes me an expert about it. It's literally just I'm talking about my lived experiences and some fancy AI stuff has definitely helped me find the evidence around this stuff. And when I was reading it, it just made me go, holy smokes, it's not actually me. Like it's not just me. And the belief that I have around this is actually true. So I said to this AI, I was like, okay, so provide me the evidence that this is what is causing issues in society with mental health in general due to these moms over the generations not having the mental support foundations etc that then passed on to their children. Is this whole thing from the way that is almost someone back when decided men were superior. What? And literally like who decided that men were the ultimate. But I suppose like you stop and you look about it, it's literally men were made to be the stronger, more physical person. It's like traditional plow agriculture, which required upper body strength was incompatible with childcare, which led to the early task segregation by gender that became culturally embedded and transmitted across generations. Then you talk about and this is something that I really love. So I don't know if I've shared before, but like in a past life when I was having my older boys, I actually trained to be a hypnobirthing practitioner. And so with that we talk a lot about the language that's used and the stories that have been told around birth and motherhood. And some king somewhere decided that he wanted to watch his wife birth. So he created this chair behind a curtain and the lady laid there and birthed the child on the chair so that he could see. Hence where it then became women birthed on beds to have a baby, which is the most unnatural position for a woman to have a baby. If there's one conversation that I can talk about more than mental health, it is childbirth. But it just grinds my gears. And then you look at the stories of birth being a traumatic event and it's because, well, you watch women birthing on these chairs in the most unnatural position possible. So it's going to be more painful. But then what creates really good views and all of that kind of stuff on TV and movie shows is drama. And so of course when the producers are wanting to have a birth scene, they're going to make it really dramatic. And that's not actually what birth is about. There's just so much around these stories that we've been told as we've been growing up around evidence that's been put in front of us. And it's like, well, no, it's all actually stemmed from history, from things that have happened in the past. And unfortunately, sometimes it's actually a lot to do with what the men decided. I don't know. That's just my opinion. I love the men in my life, but sometimes. So women would be institutionalised, literally, for holding different religious beliefs or failing to conform to gender expectations. You think of the Disney princess, Mulan, she wanted to go out and be in the army, she had to dress up like a man, like, who decided that that's so not fair for her. And then she gets punished for it. I don't understand why. So there's just so much other stuff. And I suppose something that I really believe in is so my boys go to a school in a very low socioeconomic area. We live across the road, kind of across the big main road in esperance from this area. And I am on the board for this school. And a lot of the kids, majority of the children in this school have been victims to childhood trauma, systemic childhood trauma, trauma that's been passed down from generations and generations, the stolen generation, you know, like these things are actually kind of still happening if you look deep enough. And what I truly believe is that for us to be able to create this change in the world, to no longer have the stigma around mental health, to no longer have these stories around mental health, is to start with changing our story. The evidence shows us that there is this generational trauma that has been passed down forever. All of these stories that have been passed down forever about how we should live and how we're supposed to behave and who says what and blah, blah, blah. And I think that this is where it's so hard, because we live in such a noisy place these days. You know, there's so much social media and all of the rest of it, but the moment you can start to actually look for the evidence that you're a good person, that what you're doing is actually okay, that you are very worthy, you are very knowledgeable, that you are an incredible person, and you start to build on that belief within yourself, you then pass it on to your children, you then pass it on to the people around you. And these are how these trauma patterns start to change. And one of the coolest things that we've been doing through school is this trauma informed care. And we have a bunch of people, staff and teachers and all of the rest of it that are actually trauma informed. So we've got this place, this little community of people that are like, okay, we understand the history, we understand the process of things that have been going on. How can we actually meet these people where they are? And this is what I'm trying to do with the messy middle and sharing with the chaos letters and this podcast is like, how can we give this knowledge to the people so that we can meet them with where they're at, so that we can help these women find ways to support their brains and to understand that there's not actually anything wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with you, my friend. Genuinely, we are living in a world that was not built to support us or our brains. And I'm not saying this specifically for women, I'm saying this for us in general. There's so many things happening, you know, technology and this generational stories of how we're supposed to behave and act and all the rest of it. It's literally someone's story, someone decided this is how we're going to have the world. This is why I hate politics, because it's just like, there's no genuine agenda behind this and we've lost that human connection. It was so fucking crazy. Honestly, I just think it's so nice sometimes when you have these series or you have these beliefs and you find other people that are on the same page and you're just like, oh, you're my person. And I think that's what's been really cool about launching this podcast. And what I hope to bring more into the podcast is more conversations around this, more ways that we can actually connect and talk about mental health so openly that it becomes your mental health is overarchingly the priority for your life. Because once your mental health is in a really good spot, and I know this, and this is why I find having my medication is I eat so much better when I'm supporting my mental health. I exercise so much better when my mental health is in a really good spot. And so it's just those little things, you know, when you find people that think the same as you, when you find people that have the same interests as you, it's just that it's finding that community and those people, and it's all about building better support for you, who you are exactly as you are. Thanks for tuning in to episode five. Make sure if you listen, leave a review, please contact me, reach out. I would love to chat to you. And I'm really excited because I think we've got another one or two solo episodes and then we're gonna have some guests. So. Yes, please. Anyway, thanks, Queens. Thanks for joining. We will chat soon.

Bye. Thanks for hanging out with me on She's Honestly Mental. If today's episode cracked open something inside of you or gave you space to exhale, come say hi over at Instagram. She's Honestly Mental or send this to someone who needs to hear that they're not alone. And if you haven't yet, hit that follow button so the next episode lands in your messy feed right where it belongs. Until next time, take care of your brain.

You're not broken, you're just honestly mental. And all the best people are.