If you’re not enjoying your pregnancy – or even if you mostly are – what is the best way to deal effectively with your concerns? A few are likely to come up. I don’t know a woman who has had a completely concern-free pregnancy.
First, take a good, close look at your concern. Not because you want to get all wrapped up in it or overly dramatic, yet to try to make an objective examination and determine what – really – is concerning you. The more specific you can get the better.
Sometimes we have a vague idea of what’s causing us anxiety and we can get into thinking it’s this whole area of stuff that’s worrying us. A woman might think that she’s worried about the health of her baby, yet when she digs deeper she might be able to identify the specific thing that’s concerning her – which might be that she has a hereditary disease she’s afraid her baby will get or that she’s afraid she’s not going to do a great job of eating healthily or something else. Instead of a woman being generally worried about the health of her baby…which might leave her feeling overwhelmed and not sure of what to do, she can zero in on something she can specifically address.
When we’ve identified our specific concern, then we can consider – what, if anything, do we want to do about it. Often when we clearly identify what specifically is bothering us, courses of action come immediately to mind. And, if not, we now at least know what to google about, ask our friends about, and/or brainstorm about.
The bottom line is to understand your specific concern and then ask yourself what, if anything, you want to do about it. The key is to not ignore anxious or worrisome feelings. What we resist persists…and we don’t want our concerns to fester and grow. Instead we want to learn what we can from our concerns. They are trying to tell us something: that we want to do something differently, that we need to do some more processing to fully understand that our current choice is the right choice for us, that we want to tweak our approach somehow, or that we have to come to terms with the idea that something is out of our control and we need to let it go.
