So a little bit about you, and of course I'll do the full bio, but tell us a little bit about this 20-year quote-unquote laboratory that you're referring to and how you got to this moment.

Yeah.

Well, maybe I'll back up and tell you a little bit about how I became me.

And I promise I'll do this in three minutes or less.

Okay.

But it really does, has influenced this, my draw towards this quote unquote laboratory, my clinical work.

But I was raised in New York City, as you know so well.

I didn't know how to do this.

Do it

Because you're actually speaking to the thing that I believe, after 20 years of doing this work and almost 20 years of being a mom myself, really is the root cause of the anxiety that we see so many high achievers experience.

And you know, I will say, postpartum depression and anxiety, anxiety in motherhood, it doesn't choose who to visit, right? There are a million reasons why women will develop what we might call symptoms of depression and anxiety.

That said, perfectionist, type A high achievers are at especially high risk of developing anxiety in motherhood because of this thing that you just alluded to.

You said drinking turned off the thinking, but what drinking also can do, and lots of other unhelpful and unhealthy coping strategies, is it gets us out of the feeling.

It shifts the feeling.

And many of us enter motherhood with what I consider to be a strong strategic intelligence.

Yeah.

Well, the past version of me that would do that, it probably just inflamed things.

And I know that even now, I'm 53, I've got two 19 and 17-year-old daughters.

This is a constant practice for me.

There are still many of times, I mean, they're not throwing tantrums in the grocery store the same way, but they have their teenage version of tantrums.

There's still times when my first instinct is to jump in there.

and try to make it stop, try to make it all better, try to like nip it all in the bud as quickly as possible.

I don't think that's ever really worked for anybody.

So in many

Like, you, you know the, all the memes and the jokes about I'm 39 and my mother still says, "Bring my Social Security card and my birth certificate back as soon as you use it at DMV."

Totally.

Okay.

So, I'm gonna dive into a term called secure attachment right now, 'cause I think it's what you're asking, right? Secure attachment is a very clinical term.

It's a little pop culture-y right now.

But really, when we talk about secure attachment, we're talking about that healthy bond and relationship with our child that allows our child to grow into healthy, secure, resilient individuals, right? That we can come into parenthood, again, thinking a lot about what it means to be, have a good, healthy, secure attachment with our child that's based on our own relationship with our own parents or social media or myths out there.

What a secure attachment requires is both separation and connection.

Right.

Do you think that you started to investigate this like through your work or through motherhood? Cause I, it sounds like maybe did the motherhood come right before the work or were they happening in lockstep?

I mean, ironically, you know, okay so you know if i i didn't go back to grad school i graduated from grad school right before i got married to have my baby so i graduated from college in 1995 i didn't graduate from grad school until 2005. so so when i started my career right around the time i got married and had my first baby I was tuned up.

The volume on my achievement brain was really high because I was like in a career and all those things are really important.

Then I had my baby.

And I think that I had already, you know, again, I said I've had a history of being anxious for much of my life.

So I had done a lot of therapy.

I was not new to self-reflection.

One thing we really like to do is at the end of each, episode is ask our guests, do you have some like parting wisdom, I guess is what we might call it, but whether it is a tool to engage with, whether it is a piece of advice, something you wish you had thought of sooner, or even a question that people might need to sit back and ponder, what would you share with our audience?