Anxious About Meeting Other New Mums

Becoming a new mum can be a daunting experience. The best source of support would be from other mums going through the same process as us but what if the idea of baby groups fills us with anxiety?

As a mum of 4 myself and having attended a variety of baby and toddler groups over the years, I can look back and wish I’d had someone help me look at reducing my reservations about attending and overcoming my worries and insecurities. As difficult as I found it, I was able to push myself out of my comfort zone at times and find groups that felt right for me. I even found a long-lasting friendship with another mum I connected with at a toddler group I took my twins to. My confidence built over the years to a point it didn’t phase me when my youngest was born, but what a shame I had to go through such discomfort to get there.

Becoming a CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) practitioner has given me the opportunity to support other mums to overcome these anxieties, to help build a more healthy view of themselves within society and how they experience themselves and others in group settings. I’ve seen many clients work their way through their thought processes to find it in themselves to explore new ways of thinking. I’ve watched them put these new thoughts into practice, to build belief in themselves and feel more relaxed and confident in their new activities.

This article talks through a cognitive behavioural approach to reducing anxiety around attending baby and toddler groups. It helps highlight how unhelpful thoughts can generate uncomfortable feelings which then lead to unhealthy behaviours that revolve around withdrawing from interaction and socialisation. This in turn leaves new mums feeling isolated and low in mood. It will detail how reshaping these unhelpful thoughts can help reduce anxiety and other associated feelings and support a move towards attending groups with other mums in the same position giving all a chance to overcome their fears and doubts together.

It will offer you the opportunity to consider your own specific unhelpful thoughts, feelings and behaviours and detail how you might overcome these. 

The Situation.

We’re a new mum, we’re tired, our life revolves around nappies, feeding, washing, and fighting to stay awake. We worry about colic, sleeplessness, teething, temperatures, injections, breastfeeding in public, and being a good enough mum. We’re alert to every breath, every noise, every cry, every smell!

We’ve appointments to keep and showers to have and meals to eat and relationships to maintain. We’re trying to find the baby’s place in our lives whilst our life revolves around them. 

We are tired, stressed, worried, and on high alert. We are adjusting to our new role in life and accommodating this in all our other relationships as well as within ourselves. And this is normal. We will need time to figure it all out. 

And we’re not alone. There are plenty of other new mums going through the same trials and self-doubts, wondering who they now are and how on earth they’re ever going to get back to some kind of normality.

And we want to meet them. There are opportunities for us to meet them. We will benefit greatly from meeting them. But the thought of meeting them raises our anxiety levels and we put it off week after week, keeping ourselves isolated and lonely, and the longer we leave it, the more anxiety provoking it becomes to reconsider our motives for delaying action. The immediate uncomfortable feelings are relaxed when we avoid going but the longer-lasting feelings aren’t great are they?

Unhelpful thoughts and images.

The first thing we need to ask ourselves is, what are the specific thoughts that generate the anxiety? It isn’t that we might go to a group, it’s what we’re expecting to happen if we do. So what are our expectations of how we might experience the group? Are we worried we might feel inadequate? Are we fearful of not fitting in? Do we worry about judgement from the other mums? Are we afraid we’ll be younger or older or fatter or more shy or worst dressed than everyone else? Are we a single mum and assume everyone else is settled in loving healthy relationships? Do we worry about our behaviour in the setting, that we might say the wrong thing or do something to upset someone? Will we need to get involved in any activities? Maybe we’re really bad at singing and we’ll feel silly performing the actions to the songs when our baby hasn’t got a clue what we’re doing! Do we believe all the other mums might all be sailing through this new motherhood thing with smiles on their faces, coping with the night-time feeds and getting back to work and cooking healthy meals and generally taking it all in their stride?

What images do we see when we imagine attending? Are we sat in a corner feeling awkward and left out? Are we sitting struggling whilst everyone else is having a jolly good time? Are the other mums well presented with their hair done and their nails polished when you’ve only managed to have a quick wash this morning? (If you do find these people in the groups you eventually attend, imagine the sheer struggle they must have faced that morning getting everything just perfect in order to present an image that likely doesn’t fit how they’re feeling inside, OR assume they’ve got Super Nanny living in the spare room)!

Even a fraction of these thoughts is going to take its toll on how we feel about attending.

Uncomfortable feelings.

Now consider how these thoughts and images make you feel. Is it just anxiety? Are you fearful, embarrassed, worried, stressed, overwhelmed, defensive, frustrated, sad?

It is just as important to focus on these generated emotions. It is these emotions that we then try to avoid. They’re uncomfortable and unpleasant and we’ve already got enough on our plates. Our hormones may still be all over the place and we could already be teary and down and feeling overwhelmed so we won’t want to add to these difficult feelings by considering doing something outside of our comfort zone.

As much as we might try to avoid these feelings and try to distract ourselves (see behaviours further on) we would be much better off listening to our bodies and sitting in these feelings that are trying to tell us something, usually that we have some self-confidence/self-image/self-esteem/self-worth issues that need addressing.

Imagine being completely accepting of ourselves in our entirety, our strengths and our weaknesses, our attributes and our flaws, our abilities and our inabilities. How much confidence we would have to walk into these groups without fear, how self-assured we would feel in our ability to deal with any potential difficulties, how excited we might be to try something new and meet other non-perfect people.

Unhealthy behaviours.

Unfortunately, when we’re stuck in our own limiting beliefs we realise that it’s much easier to make ourselves feel better by avoiding these feelings and any ideas of attending groups. We convince ourselves they’re not for us and our children are much better off with our individual attention. We try our best to distract ourselves and ensure we’re too busy to even contemplate a group. We tire ourselves out and make excuses and become more and more isolated and disappointed in ourselves. The relief of non-attendance in these groups then becomes the thing that makes us feel anxious and low and only serves to enhance our belief that we can’t do it (back to thoughts and feelings). And so the cycle continues. In order to break the cycle, we need to find a way to take action anyway, despite our anxieties, however we CAN make this much easier on ourselves.

How do I overcome this anxiety cycle?

The anxiety cycle tends to stem from the irrational thoughts we have about ourselves and the situations we are entering into therefore, although it is important to identify how our thoughts impact our mood and our behaviours in order to clearly see the cycle we are in, the thoughts are generally where the work will need to be focused.

It can be very helpful to write all our thoughts down and ask ourselves these questions:

• How do they sound when we read them out loud? Do they feel the same way they did when we carried them in our head? 

• Where have they come from? 

• Are they true and where’s our evidence? 

• What have our previous experiences been? 

• Will things always work out badly? Who says? Can we challenge them? 

• Are we neglecting the benefits and the potential positives of the situation? i.e. what if it all works out well? What if we really enjoy it? What if it turns out to be the best thing we’ve ever done? 

• Can we rationalise our thoughts? 

We need to balance out our thoughts in order to make them more realistic. Being more realistic about the situation will help you feel more at ease and help you take action. Here’s some examples to get you started:

Irrational thought: “They’ll all stare at me when I walk in.”

Balanced thought: “Most people will be engrossed in what they’re doing and won’t see me come in, others might be interested in meeting someone new and want to make me feel welcome.”

Irrational thought: “I’ll be sat on my own with nobody to talk to.”

Balanced thought: “There might be other mums there for the first time that would welcome somebody to talk to.”

Irrational thought: “They’ll all be judging me, I won’t be as good a mum as they are.”

Balanced thought: “We might all be questioning our abilities and comparing ourselves to each other. We can help reassure each other that we are doing good enough.”

Irrational thought: “I will stand out as different from the other mums.”

Balanced thought: “We will all be different in one way or another but it doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy each other’s company.”

And so on. Try to find a more balanced thought for each of the unhelpful thoughts you’ve identified for yourself and write them down.

Read through them. How do you feel when you read through your more balanced thoughts? More relaxed? More curious? More confident? More willing to consider an attempt at a group?

Getting out there!

Once you’ve found more balanced, rational, healthy thoughts, and you’re feeling somewhat more relaxed about the potential of attending a group, it’s time to put the thoughts into practice. Going out and finding the evidence that supports these new beliefs is paramount to cementing them in your own mind. When you’ve done it once and find that it actually went okay and you survived and maybe even enjoyed it, you’ll feel much more at ease going again, or trying another group.

I remember my good friend and fellow mum telling me that the first time she attended the group we met at, I wasn’t there and she didn’t feel she quite fitted in and nearly didn’t return but that as soon as she met me at her second session she felt at ease and comfortable enough to keep on coming, and thank goodness she did, those children are now adults and we’ve supported each other through 4 more children between us.

Remember, if you do go and you genuinely don’t enjoy it, you have the option to never return in the knowledge that you gave it a try. But bear in mind that there may be another group out there that is a better fit for you and your child, it isn’t you that didn’t fit the group, the group didn’t fit for you (nice rationalised, healthy thought to end on)!