Hello Baby, Goodbye Intrusive Thoughts

This self-help guide for moms is about coping with intrusive thoughts and OCD, but I felt that the author was less interested in talking about OCD than she was in outlining her plan for overall "maternal wellness" and creating more equitable divisions of household labor. She skimps on the unique, hard-to-find OCD content to cover concepts that are done to death elsewhere, and even though I agree that feeling less overwhelmed with household work and other commitments will help your mental health, people don't buy books about OCD for this kind of life management advice.

Also, I wish that this book wasn't just for mothers. The author briefly acknowledges that some dads also deal with intrusive thoughts, but she doesn't include anything for them, and so much of the book has to do with the social and emotional aspects of motherhood and mom pressures that I wouldn't recommend this book to a suffering father. It bothered me that the author spent so much time talking about unrelated life management topics without throwing a line to dads by including a single case study or chapter about fathers with intrusive thoughts.

Despite my frustrations with this book, the author shares many helpful insights about OCD and intrusive thoughts, and she gives evidence-based advice for how to fight OCD through CBT principles and exposure therapy. She also includes example stories from her own parenting journey and from composite examples of other moms. I like that she gave examples from women in different situations, including a woman who is dealing with intrusive thoughts and anxiety about family planning, a woman who is fearful about adding a second child to her family, and a single mom. The author also writes about the impact of former pregnancy loss on maternal mental health.

However, although she provides a range of different examples, the author almost exclusively writes about palatable and less disturbing expressions of OCD. Although she acknowledges that OCD can involve intrusive thoughts about harm, she focuses on fears like, "What if I'm a bad mom?" and "What if I didn't sanitize this bottle enough?" Even when she gives examples about moms feeling fearful of injury and death, this almost always has to do with worrying about potential accidents. There's only a few references to fears that you'll physically harm or sexually assault your child, and the author only ever mentions these concepts in passing, one-sentence examples, without actually addressing the incredibly heavy topic of having irrational, fearful thoughts about something so terrible.

Still, don't get me wrong. Milder intrusive thoughts can be terrible as well. "What if I'm a bad mom?" could just be a random worry during a discouraged moment, but if someone is thinking this all the time, and it feels like a wildfire in her brain, and she is spending lots of time trying to put out that fire by reassuring herself through visible or mental compulsions, then that's OCD. Still, even though this can be a genuinely awful intrusive thought for some mothers, the thought in and of itself is quite mild. It bothered me that the author spent so much time writing about it, while ignoring inherently traumatizing and stigmatized expressions of OCD.

Her reassurances would also carry a lot more weight if she engaged with worse OCD themes. She tells readers that their fears and irrational thoughts don't make them bad mothers, and that they're only worrying about these things because they love their child and want their child to be healthy and protected. However, because she doesn't detail what it's like to deal with intrusive thoughts about harming your child, and just writes about the stuff that's easier and more palatable to think about, someone dealing with worse thoughts could find that this book just makes them feel worse.

The author almost entirely sidesteps worse OCD problems, and she primarily gives examples of normal worries that might or might not get magnified to an OCD level. It really bothered me that she didn't engage with OCD-specific fears. This book can be very helpful for some moms dealing with postpartum OCD, but that's only if their intrusive thoughts are merely upsetting, and aren't inherently taboo.

I would not recommend this to someone whose intrusive thoughts revolve around fears of harming their child. If someone is terrified that they'll commit a heinous crime, even though they don't want to do that thing, find the thoughts abhorrent, and would never act on them, the author's reassurances will fall INCREDIBLY flat, because she thinks you're just worried about accidents or not living up to society's standards for moms. I would recommend "The Imp of the Mind: Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts" by Lee Baer to this audience instead.

I couldn't get past the parts about either ignoring or reframing your feelings of anxiety...

That is extremely unhelpful and diminishing to the person's experience. Anxiety, post partum or otherwise is both real and valid. Ableism at its best.

This is a must-have resource to help one improve mental health, resiliency, and live a more full and happy life. It is full of great strategies, advice, and easy to implement ideas. This is one I'll return to again and again. Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the advanced copy of the book.