3: Depression, Disconnection, and Birthday Blues Clues

Explore how birth trauma, early bonding experiences, and pre-birth emotional environments can shape lifelong patterns of depression, anxiety, and emotional disconnection.

Fresh from welcoming her newborn son, Jennifer reflects on sibling dynamics, maternal bonding, NICU separation, and how unmet needs in infancy can later manifest as symptoms of depression.  This can manifest as resentment, anxiety, emotional numbness, and even the birthday blues many people experience year after year without understanding…why?

Through heartfelt storytelling, spiritual insight, and practical reflection exercises, Jennifer Stirling-Campbell invites listeners to examine their own birth stories without blame or judgement, offering hope for healing, reconnection, and emotional restoration. Jennifer also introduces the idea of revisiting and “redoing” early experiences through intentional visualization and faith-based healing to help release long-held emotional wounds.

If you’ve ever felt disconnected from yourself, your parents, or your sense of worth—and wondered if your symptoms of depression have deeper roots—this episode offers compassion, clarity, and a powerful pathway forward.

View all LINKS and supporting content mentioned in this episode HERE: https://imaquarius.com/depression-birthday-blues/

This episode of the Overcome Depression Podcast is for you if you want to learn:

• How birth trauma and lack of early bonding experiences can contribute to lifelong chronic depression
• Why feelings of disconnection from parents or siblings may have initiated at birth
• How unresolved early experiences at birth or pre-birth can show up as symptoms of depression or anxiety
• Why events surrounding birth can influence emotional patterns like the birthday blues
• How to explore your birth story without blame, shame, or resentment
• Practical spiritual and emotional tools to begin healing depression at its root

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to the Overcome Depression podcast where we share hope and healing from depression. I am your host Jennifer Sterling Campbell and on this solo episode, this rather short episode, I'm going to be talking about kind of a deep topic. As some of you know, I just had my baby boy. He's actually right here with me today. You might hear some little baby noises in the background because as soon as I got my toddler to sleep, this one woke up. So a husband went out to run some errands and this is just how it's going to be for a while. So today I want to start with a scenario, a possible scenario that was given to me. And I want you to think about how this might make you feel if you were the woman in this scenario. So let's just say you are a woman happily married, been married for a few years now, fairly secure in your marriage, feeling pretty, pretty good about it. You're, you're in love with your husband, all of those good things. And one day your husband, comes through the door with another woman and proceeds to tell you that this is Sandra and isn't she beautiful? my gosh, she is amazing. She's gonna live with us from now on and you guys are gonna be besties, like best friends. Just wait, you're gonna love her. How would you feel? Be honest, would you be like, yeah, so excited, she's sleeping with us. um No, would be probably more like, what? What? No, like you're mine, I'm yours, get her out of here. No, she is not welcome, goodbye. And this scenario was actually told to me by one of my Relief Society presidents. I was visiting with her about my son who's now 18 and I was, I believe, pregnant with my second son who's now 16. And she said, this is probably what a new sibling feels like. And I thought about it and I realized, yeah, yeah, I can relate because I was the oldest. And then my sister, Lindsay, came into the picture and I took it pretty hard. I mean, I was only three at the time, but according to my mom, it was not an easy transition. I had a lot of resentment for her. I had been the one and only with all the attention and then all of sudden this other creature comes into the game and suddenly they're getting all of this attention and the attention split. can't get my mom to give me the time of day if the baby's crying. And that resentment followed me into my elementary school years, my teenage years. That's not always the case for all siblings. But for me, because I suffered from depression so badly and my sister didn't. uh Bless her. I'm really grateful she didn't have to go through that. But she didn't understand why I was so grouchy and angry all the time. And we just, fought terribly. And I couldn't understand why she was so adored and took life so not seriously and seemed to be having fun and I couldn't. And I, I envied that. So we had this kind of sibling rivalry going on for years. But Today we're going to be talking a lot about or a little bit about trauma from birth. And obviously this is kind of a different kind of scenarios in you're already born, you've lived life for a while and then someone else is born. But how these dynamics and how the things that happen to us can affect us. And I am happy to say that my sister and I, after having been through life and life got lifey and difficult and we got to know each other better and we saw each other fighting and healing and praying and doing and just trying our bestest to be supportive of one another even though it wasn't perfect. That we have a really, really good relationship now and a very loving one and a very protective one and I'm so grateful for that. It took some time though and some healing and some reconciliation and forgiveness and going to the Lord and asking him to help me to let things go that I'd been holding on to. Whether it was my personality doing it or trauma of some kind, doesn't matter. It still had to be looked at objectively, acknowledged, all the emotions, all the beliefs that went along with those things and asking the Lord to take them one by one. And again, just having that understanding over time of who this other person is and why they are the way they are. Going back to birth though, I think that some symptoms of depression are linked to many things, but could they be related possibly to trauma that we experienced at birth? There are so many things that can go wrong during a birth. And I think that There's reasons for that. It's a part of the life experience. It all starts in the womb, right? So I think some people believe more or less that what happens to the mother affects the baby. Obviously what she eats affects the baby, but also what the mother experiences, what she believes, what she's feeling. If the mother is feeling safe, if she's feeling unsafe, if the mother is being abused, if the mother wants the baby or feeling guilt about the situation around the baby or is the mother partaking of substances that aren't good for her or the baby, there could be so many things. And so, for example, dear friend of mine, I was also close to his mom, and this really good friend of mine suffered from anxiety in horrible ways. And I was trying to dig a little bit and try to help this friend of mine release some of these things so that he could heal. And I asked his mom, because I felt like I could, one time asked her, did anything happen to you when you were pregnant with him? And because that was just kind of my hunch. Like I feel like this is coming from something that happened to you when you were in the womb. And so she responded at first, no, it was a perfect pregnancy, no complications, everything was fine. For some reason, I felt like that wasn't exactly the truth. or like there was something amiss. It just didn't feel like she was being completely honest. And I don't think she was trying to lie to me, but I just felt like there's something here and I wish I knew what it was. Well, a couple months later, I asked her again, we were out at lunch and I asked her again, are you sure nothing happened when you were pregnant with him? And she sighed and she said, well, maybe it's because at the time my husband was cheating on me with a prostitute. And I'm like, what? Like, you really, why didn't you say that before? And she said, well, I mean, I didn't even know at the time. I found out after he was born. So why would that have affected him if I didn't even know what was going on? And I, me personally, I think that we often do know something is amiss. If something of that magnitude is going on, we can feel it, whether there were ready to acknowledge it or try to find out what's going wrong, we feel something's off, right? I believe our spirit certainly knows that something is amiss. And so I think that she could feel and her spirit knew that there was something going on and it affected her feeling of safety and security and worthiness and all those kind of things that would affect a person if you were If you were inside growing in Mama and she was feeling those things, you would feel those things too. So that's one aspect of birth is pre-birth, right? And of course, some people believe also that there's a pre-mortal life or some people believe in reincarnation. I don't exactly believe in reincarnation the way that some people do. However, I do believe that There's a life before this one and the things that happen to us or things that we experienced could also affect us as well. But this particular podcast is specifically about physical birth in this lifetime and so forth. Birth, as a general rule I would say, is by nature a little bit traumatic. I mean, we're all squeezed through a very tiny hole, come out and it's cold and and people are grabbing at us and possibly sticking needles in you if you were vaccinated and there's lights that weren't there before and maybe some confusion and shock. All of those things would certainly affect us more, some more than others, of course, because different personalities internalize things differently. But that alone is a little bit traumatic. um Other things that could add to potential birth memories that could impact us throughout life would be feelings that our agency was violated, feelings of being disconnected or malnourished, and again, emotions, traumas, and beliefs of the mother and father, and possibly siblings. But let's start with the agency violated. I spoke to someone recently who had an induction a few weeks before birth. In some countries, I think Brazil, almost all of the babies are induced or taken by C-section. And C-section actually in Brazil, I think all the babies are cut out. It's kind of, kind of crazy to me because of the importance. We're going to have a whole other podcast about the value of natural birth versus the other and why it's so valuable in mental health. uh But if you were taken out early, not, and you, were not ready. you had not decided because a baby will come when they're ready to come. Most of the time uh there are extraordinary circumstances that would necessitate a c-section or uh terminating a presidency early, even with that babies want to come when they want to come and they will come out when they're ready. And so if that agency is violated, no, you're coming now and you're not ready to come out, that could open up a whole can of emotional emotional worms just with that of having your agency violated. I would say, certain choices of the parents, and this goes for anything, but on your birthday, if you were vaccinated and maybe your little body and spirit's like, but I don't want to be, but that's being done to you anyway, that could come into play. I'm trying to think of other examples, but in my case, uh disconnected was the next thing on the list kind of the opposite of addiction is connection and so the first hour of life if you if your mother has a natural childbirth and Naturals kind of the key here, but in any case that first hour after delivery the oxytocin of the mother and the baby is higher than it will ever be in your entire life until you have another baby and then the oxytocin would be high again, it's higher than you would ever have with sex. It's higher than you would ever have in any other situation. So that connective chemical is intentionally there because of the pain and the chemicals that are released during childbirth that allow the mother and the baby to connect. But it's essential that the mother and baby are skin to skin uh nursing within that first hour that the baby's being held and It's kind of critical that our windows shut, closes after an hour. It's, it's, it's essentially over. And what happened to me was very eyeopening. And I didn't realize till years and years and years and years later, how critical that was for my, mine and my mother's relationship, because we did not have a very good relationship most of our life up to about 38 years old. I'm 42 now. We just didn't really like each other. We fought a lot. I was very headstrong. She struggled with me as a child. I just didn't want to listen and I wanted to do my own thing. I was very stubborn and I would, as a young child, I would push her away when she would try to hold me even as an infant. I didn't want her close to me. And when I started researching natural childbirth for my own sake and my own children, because I've had two of my four children completely natural, I started realizing that what had happened to me had put a wedge in my relationship with my mom. Because while she said that she felt like she connected to me, she had natural childbirth in a hospital, but she didn't use any interventions. She had that oxytocin running high. She said she felt that she connected to me. But what happened after I was born, I came out, they noticed I was very yellow. uh shouted jaundice and whisked me away and only bring me back to nurse and kept me in the NICU under lights for I want to say at least a week if not two weeks I barely touched my mom and I realized oh my gosh I never connected to my mother as an infant and that has affected me for the rest of my life and the relationship that I had with her so When I had that light bulb moment, and this was just a few years ago, I called my mom up and I talked to her about it I said, tell me what happened again. And she told me what happened. And I said, I don't think I connected to you. I don't think we bonded. And again, she said, well, I felt like I bonded to you. And I said, maybe so, but I don't think I bonded to you. And on the other end of the line, it was silent for a moment. And then I heard kind of a whimper and a sob, just trying to, trying not to cry. And she, she just said kind of timidly, well, do you think we can still bond now? And I remember feeling this massive feeling of hope and resolve and decision that, yes, I believe we can. And that was a huge turning point in our relationship when I feel like I intentionally and I understood what had happened for the first time. And I made the decision that I want to have a healthy connection to my mother. And energetically, I believe that in that moment I made one and we've been building on it ever since. Now there were several other things that happened that year that allowed us to connect on many levels. And I'm so grateful for that, but That is my story. again, I want, and a lot of hospitals are a lot better about making sure the mother and the baby are touching and not being taken away from each other if at all possible within that first hour. But for a lot of us, this generation, my generation, that wasn't necessarily the case. And I don't think it, really wasn't the case for my oldest and even my, even my second child, it, you know, they, they spent a lot of time in the NICU and Knowing what I know now, I would, I have chosen not to have babies in hospitals. I had my one baby at home and the other in a birthing center and I wouldn't, I wouldn't let the doctors and nurses take them away. No, no, please, like go away. Bring it on with my baby and don't even think about taking them to the NICU. uh But again, I didn't know that back then and a lot of mothers didn't. So this podcast is not about This episode is not about looking back at our parents and all the things they did wrong and blaming them and being mad about it. It's about looking back, maybe asking your parents about your birth story. Like go through it and see if you can find things that maybe cause some anxiety or fear in you, some belief systems that first day that might be impacting you now. No blame. Let's just look at it objectively and try to heal these things. So, The next thing is malnourished. Were you nourished as a baby? Did you get formula, which is it'll keep you alive, but it's there's nothing living about it. It's it's crap. It's just crap. Especially if you were raised on it like with our the way that our grandparents were because they put horrible things in it like corn syrup and we're basically had our poor grandparents addicted to to sugar from day one. It's pretty horrible. I don't think that it's quite that bad now, but it's still not great. And I actually, one of the reasons that I'm so passionate about my milking goats is I use the milk. make goat milk kefir and we're going to have a whole episode on milk as well. But I also thought, you know, after that formula shortage, if I have goats, I can provide milk to infants that might need it. If it comes to that, right? I could keep some babies alive with the goat milk. The goat milk is about the closest thing to human mother's milk that you can find anywhere. There's, I believe recipes out there that you can add a few things to it to make it so that it has all the nutrients that a baby needs. So I don't think it's necessarily a hundred percent going to be everything the baby needs. If you just do the goat milk, not sure, but huge fan, huge fan of goat milk and huge fan of breastfeeding. And I know that some people struggle with that, but the problem with, I think, breastfeeding, and I'm one of the lucky ones, not ashamed to say it, I have never struggled with breastfeeding and I'm so grateful. It's just easy for me, never had a problem. A lot of people struggle with it. A lot of people struggle with it. Or they just stop producing, they don't produce enough. And I think the women of our day and age are just one of the reasons that we're so stressed. A lot of women are having trouble. You have to be relaxed. You have to be somewhat happy, I suppose, to produce milk. You have to be eating and nourished yourself. And a lot of us are just stressed to the max or we're shamed if we breastfeed in public. And there's this, I shouldn't be doing this, and this guilt and shame around breastfeeding in public that I think some women take a little too. too seriously or too hard and that maybe that affects their milk production, not sure. But it's a thing and studies are showing that for every generation and there was a whole generation of moms who believed the propaganda and the advertising that said that formula was better than breast milk. So everybody was buying formula because they thought it was better for their babies. And yeah, I can't even believe that that happened, but it did. And so I think a lot of the moms today are struggling because statistically, generationally, every generation that doesn't breastfeed, that does something else, formula or whatever, the next generation has an even harder time breastfeeding than the one before. Interesting, right? And so it's just one of those, I'm desperately, desperately begging anyone who can. who will, who will try. If it's hard for you, if you feel traumatized through breastfeeding, I know some women feel traumatized when they breastfeed for various reasons, do everything you can to get your baby that breast milk, whatever you have to do. it's just, it's so important and no shame here, but really make an effort. It's astronomically important for generations ahead. But if you were one of the babies that didn't get your mother's milk. First of all, you're not suckling, you're not connecting to mom, you're getting a bottle. uh So that connection is not gonna be as much. it's just not nourishing. If it's not breast milk, it's not gonna nourish, it just doesn't. And that's the sad truth. Again, it will keep you alive, but it's not going to nourish. And that can affect a child for the rest of their life. uh So with that said, I would like to encourage anyone listening to go back to when they were the date of their birth, maybe do some journaling, write down some things that your mother may have been feeling, that you may have been feeling based on your story and what you know about your birth and your mother's conception of you. Were you wanted? That's another experience or another consideration as some babies are born into situations where mom is terrified of having a baby. She's human, right? I mean, it's okay to have human feelings, but were you wanted? Were you loved? Were you giving up her adoption? Were you uh treated like someone who was well? Where did you fall in the family? Were you first, second, third, fourth, fifth? uh 12th. My husband was 12th and his experience is an interesting one that I won't share here, but everybody's got a story. Everybody's got a story and everybody's birth story is important. And God knows exactly what you're coming into and what you're experiencing and how to heal it. So taking some of these emotions and beliefs that you may have picked up from day one to the Lord. Asking Him to take them from you and asking Him to heal you, to allow you to forgive yourself, forgive your mom, forgive your dad, forgive your circumstances, forgive God for putting you in a circumstance that you may have thought that wasn't ideal or cursing God for not allowing your mom to have the resources she needs or whatever it is to take those things to table. God's not gonna condemn you for being mad at Him. or mad at mom or any these things, just acknowledge where you're at. Or just acknowledge some of the emotions and feelings that might have been occurring and that you might still be hanging on to and how those might be manifesting. And after that you could spend as much time as you need to kind of purge that, either on paper. What I often do is I'll say in the name of Jesus Christ, I ask thee, my heavenly father, to please remove these feelings of or these beliefs of from my body, my soul, my heart, anywhere that I feel it in my body. I feel like I have pain in my back. that where this is hiding? that all the feelings buried alive never die? There's aches or sicknesses that we might be experiencing because of events from our past, maybe the day of our birth. So. With that said, after going through all of that purging um of emotions and beliefs and asking the Lord to take them from you, that's the atonement, and you might need help doing this from any of the practitioners that I've interviewed on this podcast would be good to use, um you can do what I call a perfect scenario redo. And what this is and what I do, Regularly, if I find things in my past that need reconciling or forgiveness or I wish hadn't happened or wish it happened differently, I can go back and reimagine the event in real time. absolutely perfect. Exactly how I would have wanted it. And of course you can do it kind of like a movie where it's not necessarily in real time if it's an extended period of time like nine months in utero. But snapshots of mom feeling safe, mom with dad and they're happy, of mom being so excited to have you. And she just can't wait to meet you. And she's so happy that she was able to conceive you. And the perfect birth where everything goes right. There's no interventions and everything is just perfect. You come out, you're loved, you're held, you are feeling safe and secure and special and important. And that redo can give you the perfect foundation to build on. Whether or not it happened in real life or not, you can give yourself that foundation. And I like to go back to the scripture of, the Lord, will remember your sins no more. And it's not that God is like forgetful, like stupid forgetful, like, yeah, I don't know. I don't remember. It's more like we can rebuild that. We can fix that. Really. really truly and not think of the pain anymore, ever again. It's just not, like you could probably conjure it up, but it'd be like, oh yeah, I guess that did happen. But gosh, you know, it doesn't hurt me anymore because you've rebuilt this perfect, this perfect birth, this perfect moment, the perfect parents, everything that you wish you'd had. And with that, I will leave you to go to work. or at least consider, mull over this and move forward in your progress towards overcoming depression. Again, if you have just found this podcast and you want to learn more, I would encourage you to go back and listen to the podcast episodes from the beginning, one through 51. And then these shorts I'm doing again right now, I'll be putting out some of the longer forum episodes with guests. in the near future. But for now, we're just doing these unedited, unfiltered raw episodes from the comfort of my bed and my iPhone with a simple recorder. Nothing fancy with my baby sitting in my lap. That's just how it's going to be for a while, and that's totally okay with me. So for those of you listening, thank you so much for joining me this week. I hope that you found some of this information helpful. and that you feel loved and joyful and that as you move forward that you can heal from depression as I have. And with that said, this is the Overcome Depression podcast. Again, I am Jennifer Sterling Campbell. We will see you next time.