Dear friends,
There have been quite a few answers to this with lots of possibilities, but I do want to add another. Oxytocin does play a significant role in many processes that involve muscle contractions, like contracting the uterus and the little muscles around the milkmaking cells. But also in the digestive tract and in the bloodcirculation to make the peristalsis and around hair. In people with a different type of reaction this may cause constrictions (decreasing bloodstream in the brains for example) and/or extra movement (causing stomach and gut trouble like wanting to throw out, goose flesh). In some people the troubles actually do occur with orgasms as well and this is not definitely a sign of previous or current abuse!
Warmly,
Gonneke, IBCLC, LLLL in southern Netherlands, where a brave minister of health announced that more children should be breastfed for 6 months and is getting a bad press for it, poor man.
Diane Wiessinger <[log in to unmask]> wrote: I've been in e-mail contact for the past week with a woman who experiences the following feelings with every milk release:
a.. Hollow feeling in her stomach
b.. Ickyness
c.. Yuckiness
d.. Revulsion to food
e.. Desire to curl up and disappear
f.. Guilty feelings
g.. Ill at ease
h.. Bothered (not irritable, but bothered)
i.. Emotional upset
j.. Apprehension
k.. Grief, a sort of sadness
l.. Introspective
m.. Desire to be alone
n.. Fear of failure or of having failed
o.. Not "nausea" like with morning sickness or the flu, but ready to throw up anyway; she has even gagged before
p.. Discouraged, broken down
q.. Weepy/tearful
r.. Worry
s.. Difficulty concentrating
t.. Exhaustion
u.. Oversensitivity
v.. Overreaction and devoting attention to tiny details
w.. Restlessness
x.. Inability to cope
y.. Something in the pit of her stomach (and yet hollow at the same time)
It's a ghastly list, and she has felt it with every MER from the time her third child was a few weeks old. It subsides within about 90 seconds.
She is trying to find an answer, ***and has contact information for nearly a hundred other women*** who are experiencing the same thing. They don't report a difference with pumping, breastfeeding, or spontaneous MER; it's the hormone release itself that seems to cause it. Each of them thought she was the only one to have such an experience. I realized, in wandering through my own files, that I asked about this on behalf of a local MD nearly 2 years ago.
The mother I'm working with finds that behaviors and substances and circumstances that work against milk release also help lessen the feelings with let-down, but don't eliminate them. Another mother finds she can predict by 5 seconds when she'll start to see milk in her pump's bottles, because she has this same sweep of negative sensations. The reaction does not in any way seem to connect to past or current life experiences; it seems to be an automatic and unavoidable response to some specific hormone's release (we've been saying oxytocin but of course we don't know for sure). Women do seem more likely to develop it after at least one normal lactation than to have it with a first and then not have it with subsequent children. The lucky ones find it lessens and may even clear completely as their baby grows.
The typical responses the women get are "you must have been abused, whether you remember it or not", "good coping skills should take care of it", "it's extremely rare". None of those seems to be true. A high proportion of these women continue to breastfeed, and it doesn't seem to impair their bond with their child... but imagine if every single let-down brought with it such a surge of dark feelings! It makes their lives extremely difficult.
I am *stunned* that this many women face this, and that it can be as extreme as they report. This is not the mild nausea that many of us have seen. As the woman I'm working with says, "If I'm thinking about fixing dinner when it happens, I know immediately that I've chosen all the wrong foods." Whatever she's thinking when her milk releases, the thoughts "turn to the dark side." Standard HCPs and endocrinologists don't seem to be of much help to them, and I haven't been able to offer any good suggestions either. The woman I'm working with hasn't been able to get anyone to test for oxytocin or vasopressin, the two most likely issues in our minds. This simply seems to fall outside what everyone she knows is comfortable working with.
It seems to be much more common than we would guess; most of these mothers said they had never reported it to anyone because they knew what kind of response they'd get. And I think they're right; I gave a non-helpful answer to that doctor 2 years ago. I've now written him, asking him to extend my apologies to the mother on whose behalf he asked, and I'm trying to do much better this time.
Any thoughts?
Diane Wiessinger, MS, IBCLC, LLLL Ithaca, NY USA
www.normalfed.com
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