What is maternal burnout and how to escape from it
'08.11.2022'
Source: Rambler
When your activity is connected with the help and service of other people, there is always the possibility of a professional burnout. And who is serving and helping people in 24 / 7 mode, without a lunch break ?! That's right, mom!
Every day we communicate with small people who now and then make tantrums out of the blue, cannot eat, pee and even play without us, writes Rambler. And they need our smiles, warm hugs and love. It is not surprising that many mothers quickly burn out in their motherhood and often discover this when things are very bad and only a specialist can help.
Lyudmila Vladimirovna Petranovskaya spoke openly and bravely about maternal burnout in Russia, she has been engaged in providing psychological assistance to foster families and simple parents for many years. And the phenomenon of maternal burnout became clear to her like a white day. It is impossible all the time to be smiling and happy in your parenthood, sooner or later the bulb burns out. Moreover, we easily recognize that a doctor or a teacher can burn out at his work, but we hardly accept that an ordinary mother with a couple of children is in the same or even greater risk of emotional burnout.
How does everything start?
Here, the leading indicators are our feelings and ability to relax. At the very beginning of emotional burnout, we still have nothing. It is difficult for us, but we cope with it: we take care of the child, we walk with it, we cook dinner at home. But it is only with this that we constantly feel that this is being given to us hard: less and less joy from the child’s smile, some kind of apathy comes over and over, get angry at the escaped porridge, and force majeure is just exhausting. Most of the time, I don’t want to do anything, as if we are starting to save energy. And if at this moment let your mother have a day to rest, sleep off and eat tasty food, and most importantly, be without a child, she will quickly recover and be able to smile at the baby again and enjoy life.
We beat the alarm!
But if the existing state is spiced up with additional stresses: disagreements with the spouse, demanding grandmothers with their own health problems everywhere, they can get a more difficult picture. Inside, everything seems to be giving up, and we can no longer do the most ordinary things: we can not sleep properly (I really want to sleep, but cannot sleep), eat and feel the taste of food, someone loses appetite, and someone, on the contrary, begins with double strength to eat sweet, high-calorie food, sexual relations with the husband spoil. But the worst thing is that in this situation, rest does not help. Even if the mother manages to snatch herself an hour or a day without children, then at this time she will most often just sit and look at one point or cry out of despair that she cannot rest. The child and his needs go to the 10 plan, we automatically change the diapers, feed and even smile is not able to.
Internal fracture
And if this does not help, do not try to pull a woman out of this state, then the mother just breaks down inside. It becomes cold and sometimes even cruel. She may not care if the baby is crying. Empathy and the ability to sympathize are completely disabled. In severe cases, the mother can become cruel towards her child, show aggression. It feels as if all feelings are burning inside, even the ability to adequately evaluate one’s actions burns through. All that remains is an insult and anger to the whole world, which the woman sees as hostile and deprived of humanity: the husband becomes a “goat”, the children are “morons”, and the neighbors are “finished bastards”. The most violent mothers are those who failed to emerge and take a breath of air in their motherhood. If there was no help and support, there was not enough audacity and perseverance to win back a rest or the environment so drowned mother with guilt and this: “Be patient, there’s nothing to whine!”
How to help?!
Emotional burnout is easier to prevent than to cure. Those. at the very beginning, when we lose the joy of parenthood and begin to breathe heavily in our motherhood, just give yourself a time out, a day off:
- Give the child to her husband, grandmother or nanny and be alone.
- Provide yourself with the delicious food you love, even if it is pizza and french fries.
- Give yourself the opportunity to sleep.
- Stroll, if you want to - meet your friends, go to the cinema, dedicate the evening to your adult entertainment.
- To moan This is very unfashionable and even judgmental, but it helps a lot. When there is someone to complain about their difficult maternal share, to disobedient children and husbands playing tanchiki.
The main thing is to make such a weekend for yourself regularly, at least 1 once a week. Then the nervous system will be much more stable.
Mom is a living person who washes dirty priests every day and meets the needs of young children, and sooner or later she will need rest. If you do not reach a critical mass and allow yourself one day off a week, then you will not only save yourself a kilometer of nerve cells, but also remain a stable and good mother to your children. It would be nice if their husbands did not forget about it and helped us to stay alive, not burnt out moms and wives.
