Psychologist reaches out to new parents

Dr. Rachel Galliard Smook will speak at Tatnuck Bookseller, Gift Gallery and Café Saturday Oct. 18. SUBMITTED Westborough - What changes when a woman becomes a mother?

Everything, according to clinical psychologist Dr. Rachel Galliard Smook of Shrewsbury. And yet, that significant time of transition has largely been ignored by psychological experts, she said.

"It is one of the only things that a woman goes through in her life where there is dramatic upheaval in her body, in her relationship, in the way her life works, in her identity and her sense of who she is in the world, which is forever changed," Galliard Smook said. "We talk about what happens to a women's body, but we don't talk about what happens to a woman's life."

The lack of study and understanding has led to many cultural myths about childbirth and parenting, and Galliard Smook is dedicated to smashing those myths in order to help families improve their transitions and their lives.

Galliard Smook will discuss this at Tatnuck Bookseller in Westborough Shopping Center Saturday Oct. 18 from 2 to 4 p.m.

"My goals are to get women and their partners talking and thinking about how to keep themselves healthy and safe during their transition [to parenthood], to reduce stress and anxiety, which is so important both for labor progress and the experience of new parenthood. And I want to send them home with resources so they know where to go before minor emotional troubles become major hurdles," she said. "I would like to strengthen their personal toolkits for managing this incredible time of personal change and excitement."

This approach can help women and their parenting partners a great deal, Galliard Smook said.

"Women tend to do better when their development, their emotions, their relationships are acknowledged and incorporated into their care," she said.

She will also talk about common assumptions, shat- ter some common myths and discuss what is scientifically true, she said.

For example, Galliard Smook pointed out, scientifi c studies have shown that 71 percent of the routine procedures a mother goes through in a hospital during childbirth are at best unnecessary and at worst dangerous.

Even the phrase, "Dr. Soand so delivered the baby," has a detrimental eff ect, she explained.

"A woman delivers her own baby and when we take away a woman's authority to do that we aff ect everything about what her transition to motherhood is like," Galliard Smook said. "We aff ect it physically because she's more likely to suff er an injury during birth if she's taught to ignore the messages of her body … We affect it emotionally because feeling out of control in what's arguably the most powerful experience of a mother's life is counter-intuitive and harmful. Potentially we affect it relationally because if a woman feels frightened and incapable during her birth than she might also feel incapable as she learns to parent her new baby. Whereas women who feel in charge of their births and who get to have that experience of their bodies being powerful and capable during birth use that experience. They tend to fall back on it."

Galliard Smook developed an interest in the transition to parenthood while in graduate school, where she realized most developmental literature stopped at age 18. There was very little, if any, on mothers, motherhood and the way women are affected.

"You know, it's the only thing that you cannot undo," Galliard Smook said. "You can get married, you can get unmarried, you can change jobs, you can change where you live, but you can never un-become a parent."