For most new mothers, the days, weeks and months following the birth of a baby are challenging and exhausting.  And for some new moms the postpartum experience actually results in a crisis and a real collapse of self.  I believe this subsection of new mothers who suffer so intensely in the postpartum period might be more deeply understood and more successfully treated if we consider them through the lens of character style, and in this case, specifically the oral character style.  

During the symbiotic phase of development, “there is no conscious differentiation between oneself and one’s caretaker” (Johnson, 1994).  The infant experiences the mother as its self, and the mother too has a sense of sharing her infant’s experience.  This symbiosis is critical to survival in that it forces the mother’s attention to be always on her newborn in a way that helps ensure proximity and acute awareness of the newborn’s needs.  Our earliest psychological developmental task is embodying the capacity for attachment and bonding (Johnson, 1994); failures in this period result in schizoid and oral adaptations in the fundamental structure of the infant and later the adult.  For mothers who suffer greatly in the months following birth, I believe it is often the case that their own early infancy was fraught with either harsh, aversive parenting or deprivation and unreliability.  It’s almost as though the birth of the baby forces the mother back in time to when she herself was an infant.  If the mother was well cared for by an attuned, consistent, responsive other, that newborn part of her will likely be well resourced and able to draw from her own full tank.  But a mother who did not herself receive the kind of attuned and empathic responses that a newborn requires for optimal development will find herself overdrawn and out of gas as she tries to nurture her own new baby.  The meaning that she makes of her struggle and the way in which she responds to the crisis also tend to fall in line with her established character style.  

The central theme of the oral character’s life is denial of her needs.  “Orality will develop where the infant is essentially wanted and an attachment is initially or weakly formed but where nurturing becomes erratic, producing repeated emotional abandonment, or where the primary attachment figure is literally lost and never replaced.  Essentially the oral character develops when the longing for the mother is denied before the oral needs are satisfied” (Johnson, 1994).  As an adult, the oral character suffers from “the inability to identify needs, the inability to express them, disapproval of one’s own neediness, inability to reach out to others, ask for help or indulge the self.  The individual tends to meet the needs of others at the expense of the self, to overextend and to identify with other dependent people” (Johnson, 1994).  Her false self appears to be nurturing and helpful, but in truth she is desperate for the kind of sustained care and love she never received.   This false self is her “compensated” self – that part of her self that has learned how best to function in a world where her needs could not be met by being helpful to others and denying her own longing.  She also has a “collapsed” self that emerges when the compensation fails, such as in the postpartum period.   

The postpartum period is a time when mother and infant need an extraordinary amount of external support.  Oral characters tend to find themselves in cultures that are consistent with their own style, meaning there generally aren’t supportive systems in place.  Consequently, as the new mother is coming into a psychological reexperiencing of her old injuries from her early infancy combined with absolute need for support in the present time, she experiences herself as alone and as burdensome and is re-injured in the same manner that caused her orality.  

The therapeutic aim in working with new mothers who are suffering in the postpartum period is to assist them in identifying resources and mobilizing adequate support as quickly as possible.  This can be quite challenging when working with women who fundamentally don’t know how to ask for what they need and don’t feel entitled to receive what is offered.  In her collapsed state, mom must be encouraged to go ahead and ask for and take in some of what she has always longed for and what she has secretly been enraged about never having received.  I find it necessary to bluntly state and firmly repeat a sort of mantra to these new mothers attesting to the naturalness of their immense needs in the postpartum period, the idea that mom is of little use to baby when mom is undernourished on any level, and also an ongoing, exhaustive review of all of her potential resources.  Allowing feelings of need and longing to emerge, to be named, felt and then grieved is the beginning of a transformative healing process.  We are gifted as mothers with an opportunity to readdress our early attachment wounds through the process of bonding with our own babies.  But as adults we now have the power to bring words and consciousness to the experience so that we can affect the outcome in ways that are consistent with our deepest values.  

Author: Jessica Sorci, MA, MFTI

References
Johnson, Stephen M. (1994). Character styles. W. W. Norton & Company.