Well, welcome back everyone to another episode of Faithfully Engaged.
I have a guest here that I met on the wide world of Twitter.
We get all sorts of good interactions and also I'm sure we'll get into some bad interactions,
but thankfully this has been a fun person to get to know a little bit on Twitter.
So Robin, let me shoot it to you a little bit and why don't you tell the audience a
little bit about yourself.
Well, thank you so much for having me, Johnny.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, we met on Twitter.
My name is Robin Atkins.
I'm a licensed mental health counselor in Indiana and I specialize in reproductive mental
health.
So I see people with any type of traumatic event related to reproduction, which could
be everything from infertility to pregnancy loss and everything in between.
Great.
And let me just start right there.
I've had a few other counselors on the show before and this is a question I like to ask
offline too, but what's your why?
What got you into counseling in the first place?
Counseling itself, not my specialty, but counseling.
I knew at a very young age.
I was reading Freud by age 12, so it was just kind of destined to be and actually 12 year
old stuff, right?
Right, normal 12 year old stuff, funny story.
I have two siblings and we all have psychology degrees.
So we joke that there must have been something wrong with our family and we all wanted to
figure it out.
We all went into different parts of psychology.
So I'm the only therapist.
The other two are working in other areas of psychology.
But yeah, it was just from a very young age.
I wanted to understand the human brain and human behavior.
And so that was just a natural direction that I went into.
I wasn't sure I originally wanted to be an FBI profiler.
Then I decided I did want a family and that wasn't probably the safest and most conducive
job to have children while doing.
So it kind of shifted on its own somewhere in my 20s and then my specialty didn't start
till my mid 30s and it found me.
I didn't even know reproductive mental health was an option and it's still very rare to
find a specialist in it.
Yeah, tell us a little bit about that.
And I'll be honest that I can understand a little bit of living through having two kiddos
and my wife is, the time of recording this is eight months pregnant.
So we're about to have another kiddo out into the world.
So I see that side of her going through that.
And obviously there are issues both with kind of ups and downs of pregnancy and then I would
imagine too of ups and downs of infertility and all sorts of different issues.
But all that being said, as a professional myself, I don't know a whole lot about that.
And that's part of what was so intriguing to me.
It seems like such a wide chasm that mental health isn't touching very much.
So yeah, tell me a little bit about your journey getting into that as a specialty, what you've
learned.
Yeah, just go more detail about that.
Yeah, so it started somewhere around 2010.
My pregnancy with my oldest living son was extremely high risk.
I was very, very sick.
I was on bed rest for about eight months and then my water broke early and we had to rush
to emergency section.
He was in the NICU for a month.
And while I was in the NICU, I was asking for a therapist and the response was, well, we
can bring you a social worker and no disrespect to social workers.
They're amazing, but it's not what I was looking for as far as the social workers at the high.
I know some social workers do therapy and that's fantastic.
But the social workers at this particular hospital did more community resourcing.
And I didn't really need community resourcing.
I needed somebody to help me process everything that had just happened to me and the new world
that I was in because NICU is just its own biodome.
So they said, we can't do that.
You're going to have to leave to find a therapist outside of here.
And I had a two year old at home and a premium in the NICU.
So I was spending 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. at home and 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. at the hospital and I
wasn't about to take time out to go do some self-care in the midst of that.
So it didn't happen.
And so at that point, I just knew I've got to do something about this.
So for the next several years, I banged my head against several walls trying to get perinatal
hospice and palliative care into our hospital systems here.
And I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
And here in Fort Wayne, we've had two major hospital systems for a long time.
We have a third now coming, but we've had two main ones.
And so I met with everybody at every possible part of the hospital.
You can think of related to pregnancy, birth, postpartum, NICU, all the admin management.
And the end line was always, we don't want to pay for it because it doesn't pay us back.
So at that time, and still now, as a therapist, it's hard to bill while in the hospital.
Every time I go see a patient in the hospital, I either do it pro bono or I have to get approval
way ahead of time from the insurance company for every single visit.
So to do that is really cost prohibitive for a hospital to hire a therapist to be on staff.
And so it just wasn't going to happen that way.
And then I had a loss of pregnancy loss and miscarriage after that.
And I decided I couldn't continue.
At that time, I was working with the Department of Children Services doing home based therapy
with a lot of kiddos facing sexual abuse.
And I started having secondary PTSD symptoms related to that.
I have sexual abuse history in my childhood.
And that really wasn't the issue is when I started having my own kids, it was the stuff
I was hearing started to show up in nightmares about my kids.
And I just couldn't continue in that path.
So I decided to do private practice.
And at that time, I didn't know reproductive mental health was on the horizon at all.
I had not found anything anywhere else about it.
I had studied perinatal hospice and palliative care for years, mostly in Europe and Australia.
I didn't go there.
I wish I had.
If anyone wants to fund that trip, I'm open to that.
But I just did a lot of reading on the research and the educational materials coming out of
Europe and Australia.
And so I opened up my private practice thinking I was only going to handle the issues that
I had had personal experience with.
And I had not experienced infertility other than several doctors had told me because of
some issues I have, I would never have children.
So I kind of, when I got married, thought I was never going to have biological children,
but it didn't feel like, sometimes so young when they told me that I was 15, 16, when
they started telling me that it didn't, at that age, I didn't care.
And so it didn't feel like a big trauma to me or a little trauma.
Actually, I just kind of assumed we would figure it out and my husband knew I couldn't.
So we just kind of figured we'd figure out the kid thing.
Whether it be fostering or whatever we were going to do.
And so we didn't expect me to get pregnant.
So I can't really say I had infertility.
So I didn't think I was going to touch it.
But as soon as people in my community here started hearing there was reproductive mental
health specialists, not only was I getting a lot of referrals for pregnancy losses and
traumatic birth, traumatic pregnancy, post-abortion, women that are at risk for abortion choices,
I was getting a lot of referrals for all of that.
But then people started calling me about infertility.
And really, I have to credit my patients with that.
I've been doing the specialty for eight years now, and they have been so generous with their
vulnerability and their openness and their growth.
And we all learn in grad school kind of the same techniques based on what theory of counseling
we're doing.
But they really showed me the knowledge I needed to have to meet them where they were
without them having to give me a bunch of backstory and medical terminology.
They taught me all of that, the first couple infertility clients.
So I actually just finished writing a certification program in reproductive mental health.
And it's 25 credit hours, and it covers all the different gamut of everything except for
addiction during pregnancy.
That would be its own 24, five-hour course.
And I haven't wanted to touch that yet.
I just finished writing this one.
So maybe that's coming in the future.
But there are, I know of personally about 20, 25 other people in the entire United States
specializing in reproductive therapy.
There are reproductive psychiatrists because there's a few universities that offer a doctorate
in reproductive psychiatry.
So that's really more of a medication management of postpartum, depression, anxiety, and psychosis.
And I do the therapy end of all those things, but I'm not a prescriber.
So there's a lot of money in pharmacology.
So the schools are starting there.
And maybe it'll dwindle down into, there was a reproductive mental health textbook published
in 2021.
And it was the first one for colleges to have a course on it.
And it's wonderful.
It's fantastic.
It's literally called the Reproductive Mental Health Textbook.
So that's for people still going through school.
My certification courses for people that have already finished their degrees and are either
getting licensed or already licensed that want a certification in it.
I think it's great that there's at least some direction there.
Again, I just, I've really been fascinated when I kind of saw you on Twitter and everything
as a solvereproductive mental health on what on earth.
It just makes so much sense when you explain it like that.
It's like, now I feel more so like, what have we been doing?
Like we've been, we've been missing a huge, huge chunk.
And I loved what you said there too of even just on the hospital side of things.
And unfortunately, and I won't get too much into this on my own personal side of things,
because there is just a bottom line that kind of goes in there.
That's not always about patient care.
I know in my wife's kind of post-partum care, particularly our first daughter or our first
child that was born, she would have benefited so greatly from what you were desperately
trying to find there of just somebody coming in and just talking.
You know, it's not like I didn't try to talk to her, but you know, I'm a counselor, but
I'm not my wife's counselor.
She needed kind of an impartial party to come in there, being able to talk with her.
My daughter had jaundice.
We had to stay an extra day.
It wasn't anything major.
She didn't even get any prescriptions, but she would have really benefited from that.
First time mom, having a tough time, nurses could see that.
What a great asset that would be to have for all of these mothers if they need that in
the hospital.
Well, when you think about just as a society, we don't talk about death well or birth well.
They're like the two topics that I see most often in my office, births and deaths.
That's what I see most often.
We don't talk about either one well.
It wasn't even until my husband and my third living child, I've had six pregnancies total.
I have four living children that we kind of realized, you know, maybe before we add another
one, we should try to figure out some ways this is going to impact our marriage and our
relationship with our other kids and their relationships with each other and their relationships
with the new baby.
And like that was never anything that was ever taught to either one of us of when you
are going to grow your family, you need to figure out how that impacts the relationships.
People think about the money and what they need to buy for the baby and childcare.
If they're working, but we don't really think about relationally how that's going to impact
us.
So even just that alone, I think most first time parents, I can honestly say when they
handed me my daughter and they were like, you get to leave tomorrow is like, where's
the manual?
I don't understand why you're letting me leave with a living human being when I've never,
ever done this before.
So it's just kind of bizarre to me that in our Western culture, it's just kind of like
just another day and you go back to work in a week.
Yeah, no, I think that you're spot on and just even anecdotally, and I'm sure most
listeners that have more than one kid can relate to this.
I know in my life when my son was born, yeah, it was exciting.
It was nerve wracking to a degree.
But by and large, we had done that.
We'd been there, done that.
He came home.
Life did continue a little bit more normal because we had done that.
But we were so much more comfortable on that second go round.
That first go round, no.
Every parent, I think, is like, what on earth?
What am I supposed to do here?
And yeah, that is a disservice for our society to not talk about what is birth like, what
are some of the issues that you might come into, but what are some of the great things
you might come into?
I know that's something that my wife has been trying to do with other mothers and things.
Now that we're on our third kid, so often the talk with mothers is, oh, well, just
wait till they're two.
Just wait until they don't sleep or this next thing.
And so is so negative.
Have you seen that with both in your life, with just kind of people talking to you about
being a mother, dealing with kids, and also with your clients, just an overall negative
view towards parenthood and specifically motherhood?
That's a really great question.
Congratulations, by the way, on your pending third birth.
Yeah, I think most of my patients that come see me, they don't necessarily talk about
motherhood in a negative way, but they have one of two reactions.
They will say all the commercials we see, all the advertising we see very much paints motherhood
is easy and blissful.
So every diaper ad in the world, everybody's smiling and everybody's happy.
That's not what a new mom looks like.
We haven't showered in weeks.
Come on.
So I think they're really irritated that they didn't know the reality of going into how
hard it was going to be to go without sleep and not sure, are you going to eat or shower?
You have to choose one or the other.
All those things, but overall, the actual conversation between them and their friends
tends to be negative.
The complaining side, the wine mom complaining about the kid's side of motherhood.
And it's interesting because I work with a lot of birth mothers, our first mothers,
who their children have been adopted out and they have told me that's a large part of why
they felt they couldn't parent.
It's kind of the talk about how children interrupt lifestyle or interrupt career or goals.
And so they didn't feel suited to mothering.
And then it ends up being a huge trauma for them.
So I think that's a disservice we're doing as well with either glamorizing it as everything's
beautiful and everything's easy and light and fun.
Or as we talk about it with each other, only the hard parts of it rather than the beautiful
parts of it.
And I don't know about anybody else, but my experience with my children, there are definitely
hard days.
Today I must have spilled three things on myself just in a couple hours, moving them around
and carrying my drink with me.
But overall, it's magical seeing the world through a child's eyes again, because it's
like when you were a kid, you can see the same kind of magic of like everything was
simple.
Everything was innocent.
Everything was curiosity and not fear based.
Like so many times adults are anxiety or fear based.
And there wasn't that.
It was just like this big wild world of I want to know all the things and tell me all
the things and why is this happening and why is the sky blue and why is the grass green.
Why do we name things blue and green and why are colors, you know, like all of the deep
existential conversations we have right at bedtime so they don't have to go to bed.
So I'm sure most parents can relate to that too.
But yeah, it's really magical.
And I'm at the point now where I have like my kids are six to 15.
And COVID was horrible overall.
The reaction to COVID was horrible, but we really bonded as a family.
And that's when we started homeschooling.
And now we enjoy each other's company so much that every morning we start out together and
every evening we're kind of all hanging out in my room.
My husband's there too.
And we're talking about whatever latest homeschool thing we're doing or whatever science thing
everybody's interested in or whatever social studies thing was.
And like then we all kind of go to bed, but it's just a really beautiful unity amongst
us now.
And you can't replace that elsewhere.
Absolutely.
That's something that on both ends of the spectrum there that I have been humbled being a father.
I remember when my daughter was, she wasn't born yet.
We just got into the hospital.
My wife was induced and we had to watch all these like hospital videos.
And one of them, it was called like purple baby, something like that.
And essentially it was a don't shake your baby type of video.
And it was, I think it was purple scream maybe.
Anyways, it was essentially saying that a baby is so upset that they turned purple and
you're upset.
So then you're likely to shake the baby.
And I remember watching it.
It was like, of course I've heard of shaking baby syndrome and it's like, I wasn't naive
to the fact that being a parent could be hard.
I was like, of course I'm not going to shake my baby.
I don't need to watch this.
And I was humbled in the fact not that I shook my baby later, but my daughter was, she was
an awful sleeper, just really, really bad when she was little.
And I remember there, there was a time and I don't kind of bring my, my faith in here
too that I even prayed about it of like God, like thank you for one, given that video to
me and for, for humbling me and this fact, I didn't ever have a desire to shake my baby,
but I understood it in those moments when you sleep like an hour and this baby screaming,
you try every technique to get her to go to sleep.
It's like, I get it.
Now that's still wrong.
Absolutely.
You shouldn't shake your baby, but that did give us some skills that was like, Hey, put
the baby in the crib, go walk away.
They're not going to die in the next five minutes if you just walk away.
And that was on that, that, you know, more realistic negative view that I understood.
Yeah, there's really hard moments, but like you're saying on the great moments.
Now my daughter is, she's almost four and she runs up and hugs me says, I love you,
buddy.
You can't, you can't replicate that.
I don't care how much money you throw at me.
I wouldn't take any of that over being told I love you from, from my kids.
And like you're saying that balance there, you need to have both of those that it can
be tough, but man, can it be wonderful?
And yeah, I think overall our culture doesn't do a great job on, on either of those.
When we think about it, it's relationship and marriage has really beautiful parts and
really, really tough parts.
Best friendships, really, really tough parts and really, really beautiful parts.
And I don't know why we look at children as if they're supposed to somehow be better behaved
than adults, but we do look at them as like, you're supposed to always behave and do what
I say and obey me and never be an issue when we allow other adults to inconvenience us.
So that whole kind of philosophy really shifted my parenting about 10 years ago.
And I realized like, why am I expecting my kids to behave better than I expect the adults
in my life?
I expect the adults in my life to have bad days or bad attitudes every once in a while
or whatever meltdowns adults have.
And I am looking at my kids going, you're not allowed to inconvenience me.
No, I want you to inconvenience me.
That's what relationship is, is inconvenience.
It's inconvenience for intimacy.
And I would much rather have that than go through life never being inconvenienced, but
never having a true relationship.
And something you had said earlier, I just made a connection.
So this is, I have no scientific backing for this, no research.
It may be out there.
I haven't even looked at it.
But I was thinking when you were talking about having your first child and how like the anxieties
you have about what could go wrong.
And we tend to like helicopter parent the first kid and the second kid were a little
more relaxed and laid back and by the fourth kid were like, Oh, sorry, no baby book.
This didn't happen.
But I'm thinking about like birth order and the types of personalities we see in birth
order.
And it seems to me that those must be connected as far as my first child is not very, I mean,
she has some anxiety, but she's very, I want to know the boundaries.
I want to know the balance.
I want to know what's safe.
And my second child is wild.
Free spirit.
He's just like, hold on knees before God praying, just holding on with that kid.
And he's fantastic.
But wow, he has a lot.
He's going to be a leader.
And then my third child is his own little person and plays well independently and just
loves to cuddle when on his terms, but he's just happy little guy.
And then my youngest is a drama queen and they're all very different.
But when I think about where we were at in those pregnancies or in the parenting event,
like our youngest being the drama queen, she was so prayed for and so one and not that
all of them weren't, but it was a dip.
We were going into, we were doing a V back at home after two C sections in the hospital.
So it was entirely different birth experience.
I had a lot of birth trauma to work through.
I had two losses.
I was dealing with at that time emotionally and mentally.
And so, and I really wanted another girl.
I had a girl boy boy and I really wanted another girl.
And we didn't know we waited till she was born.
And after she was born, that child was doted on by all the other five members of our family.
So until she was about five, pretty much had to do nothing for herself.
So that's how she became drama queen.
It's all on us, all our fault.
And I take full responsibility for that.
But I'm wondering if we did a better job of, like we do premarital counseling.
Why aren't we doing pre-birth counseling with the whole family?
And how do you want to transition?
And how do you want to work this out?
And how do the kids need to still have time with you and you still have time with each
other?
And how do you get that out of normal part of mental health?
It's a great question.
It really is.
And that's something, as you're kind of walking through that, I'm just thinking in my own
little family period here that when my son was born, my daughter was almost two.
So we tried to explain some stuff to her, but she just didn't really understand.
She wasn't two yet.
So this go around, now my son, he just turned two.
So same type of thing.
We've explained a little bit.
He knows what babies are, but he's just going to have to learn.
This is going to be confusing.
But my daughter, we're gonna-
I have a hat for you though.
Oh, go, yeah, go, go for that.
So what we did with each child that was born previously, when the next one was coming,
we got a little kid's tool belt, like a little two-year-old tool belt and embroidered their
name on it and stuffed it with diapers and wipes and passies.
And they were mommy's helper.
And then they felt super included and super needed and seen and loved.
And they knew how to interact.
They knew what to do.
There wasn't fear around, like, what do I need to do?
Like, mom's changing the bit.
I just need to handle a diaper.
So it was just a- and then we also had baby give the other kids a gift, something very
small.
You don't have to spend a dollar tree.
Most kids are fine with that.
And we gave something to- we had each of the kids pick out something for the baby.
And that way they felt already connected in some way.
And so that was just a really nice transition for our real little ones when the next little
one was coming around, that they already had a place and a role with that child and in
relationship with that child.
I really like that.
We- we did with my daughter and we're doing this with that.
So we're having another son with this new son that's about to be born.
We- yeah, we have little gifts, like little stuffed animals or whatever to try to make
them feel a part of that.
But I love that little- that little tool belt there of really prepping them and having
them be a part of that.
Because I can see that with my- with my two-year-old.
He's just a sweet, hugging little- little dude.
And he's used to being the baby and he's not.
He's not going to get that same type of alone time with the both of us and everything.
So I definitely think him being involved in that process, that is a wonderful idea.
Because my three-year-old, almost four-year-old, she's all- she's all into it.
She loves- she looks at the ultrasound pictures.
She's like, let's get this baby and she's mother hen already.
But two-year-old just doesn't quite understand that.
So I think that that's- that's a great idea to get him involved that way.
Yeah, one other thing we do- and this is kind of giving your listeners an example of what
therapy looks like.
When I work with my clients pre-birth, we talk birth plans, multiple different birth
plans.
We do the ideal, which isn't going to happen, but along those lines.
And then we do the- we need to compromise.
Some things aren't going to go your way.
And then we do the emergency worst case scenario birth plans.
But then we do postpartum planning as well, the fourth trimester, three months after.
And one of the things we talk about is having stations around the house for mom and baby,
like snacks for mom, all the pumping stuff for mom, and a couple different stations throughout
the house.
And then also getting like a rolling cart for the kids to have activities at each place
so mom doesn't have to get up every five seconds to get something for the other kiddos.
Like got stations and of things they like to do, crafts or books or stuffed animals
or whatever.
And then we do the same with snacks.
We have a snack cabinet that the kids are allowed to go into anytime they want.
It's pretty healthy.
And then we have a pullout drawer in our refrigerator.
They don't have to ask and go get.
And that all made my last postpartum much easier than my other ones because we had pre-planned
for what is this going to look like when I'm home and my hubby's at work.
And I've got four kids.
So yeah.
I think really what we're getting at here is just that prep work.
And it makes sense.
We do it in everything else in our life.
When we paint, I painted the bathroom not too long ago, you get all the tape out and
make sure that all your materials are all set up, good to go.
That prep work makes the actual painting way, way easier if you do that correctly.
So, we instinctually do these things all the time.
But you're right.
It tends to be in birth.
Okay.
Go figure it out.
And that's a new human being.
We should do a little bit more prep work.
Yeah.
We'll have meal trains and registries, which are fantastic and lovely.
And don't stop doing those.
In fact, do them for months after you think the family needs them.
But it's not just the things.
It's the relationship that we need to prep for and how in the house are we going to maintain
relationship?
And something new we started this year with our kids was since I'm now working full time
and my husband working full time and we're homeschooling, we're like people going everywhere
all the time.
We each take four hours once a month, which each child alone.
So one week, one weekend day, every Saturday or Sunday, I'll take one kid for four hours
and then he'll take one kid for four hours.
And so each kid gets dedicated four hours a month, which seems ridiculously small when
I think about how many hours in a month.
But the reality is that's where we're at.
That's where we've got right now.
Hopefully we'll extend it more.
But they are so much more at peace about I'm going to get mom's ear or dad's ear dedicated
to me.
And I know it's coming on that day and I can't wait till that day or I can tell her ahead
of time this.
I need to talk about these things.
They can talk to us any day, but that's a guaranteed.
I'm taking you out of the house with me without the other kids and you've got me all to yourself.
And that has really helped as well, maintain those relationships and help them feel like
they aren't lost in the mix.
Yeah.
Because naturally, if you don't go out of your way, especially in a situation like our
family, we're about to have this baby and that baby is going to cry, need to be changed.
It's precedent over the here and now takes precedent over when my two year old's hungry
or when he's thirsty.
And that's obviously going to cause problems if we don't come up with ways to be able to
tend to everybody's needs and acclimate that, yeah, now there's this crying little baby
in here, but that's your brother.
And we love this brother.
You just triggered something else I wanted to talk about again for me when you were talking
about the crying baby.
There's a big difference between men and women and it's what research suggests.
So and I'm not and research in this area, but this is what I've read repeatedly in research
is in the pituitary gland, women have a kind of alert signal that men don't have to their
own babies cry, not to necessarily any babies cry, but their own that it's like a pain response.
It sends out the hormones that cause a pain response.
And I'm pretty sure God created that way for the survival of the species because, you know,
middle of the night, I'm exhausted.
But man, I hear my baby cry and I'm hurting and I'm going to get up and go.
But it's just one interesting way of like when we're prepping for having a child, no
matter how, no matter where anybody's at politically or philosophically, whether they're liberal
feminist or conservative or libertarian or whatever they might be, you can't get around
biology.
And so like mother's biology is tuned to the first three months being the survival of the
child.
And that's one thing our society also isn't doing well is how do we support the three
months after and I'm not a fan of like government forcing business to do anything.
I have a small business and I understand lots of small businesses can't afford to give somebody
three months paid leave.
I have lots of out of the box ideas of how we can make that happen without hurting anyone.
But we just don't do that really well of recognizing the mom's biology is built for the survival
of the child.
And also that child has only ever known the mom as an environment.
And so mom's heartbeat, mom's smell, mom's sound.
That's the child's norm.
Dad's voice too.
But mom's body is baby's environment.
So and when you think about things like adoption or when kids get removed by the Department
of Children Services as newborns, there's this can be this trauma or this primal wound that
comes from that.
And so we just don't really do a good job as a society looking at women's biology and
what all it's designed for.
We look at how sex happens and we look at how pregnancy, you know, like how baby develops
in utero and we look at birth.
But we don't really talk about then after what women's biology is made for.
Aneudotally and my with my children, 1000% that is the case of I could be sleeping and
at times it will annoy my wife afterwards.
And granted, I tell her like, if you need me, just wake me up.
But baby stirs a little bit and she's bam, she's there.
And I hear nothing, nothing at all.
And I just go on about my day and maybe the baby's crying a little bit and like, eh, probably
probably hungry.
No big deal.
But my wife, yeah, she is.
She's right there.
And like you said, that that's that biology and what a you mentioned this, what a wonderful
thing that women's bodies are designed that way that that keeps that keeps our baby safe.
Um, that that's fantastic.
And yeah, as a society, um, that is, we've got the lines blurred so much and this goes
into some more of the transgender type of talk to you that men and women are basically
just the same thing.
So biology doesn't really matter.
It's just kind of what you identify as or whatever.
So those signals, eh, yeah, they're not that important.
That's that's just not true.
That is absolutely a big deal.
And I'll tell you, my body can't do half the things that my wife's body can do.
And that is awesome.
Like we should be celebrating that fact, not not downgrading it.
Well, yeah, I, my husband and I have a really wonderful appreciation for the differences
in our bodies.
And it's not just like meat sacks where you can just swap parts.
It doesn't really work like that.
Um, even if we can do surgeries to try to appear as the other gender, the internal biology
isn't going to work.
And this is whenever I hear these stories about like, Oh, we're going to end up, we
have had successful uterine transplants from woman to woman.
And we've had a couple babies born that way.
But there's no way it would work from a woman to a male body because it's not just the uterus.
All the other connections between how the immune system is this delicate, beautiful
dance during pregnancy that you cannot duplicate just by putting a uterus in your body.
And then the pituitary gland and all the hormone releases is this cascade throughout pregnancy
and throughout birth.
And like, you can't duplicate that just by putting a uterus in your body.
So it, it really, we appreciate each other's natural biological gifts in such a beautiful
way that we don't have resentment around that.
So like he's naturally taller.
I'm pretty short anyway, but he's taller and naturally stronger and naturally can eat a
hundred, a thousand more calories than me a day and not in gameway, which is really irritating.
I won't lie.
That one's irritating.
But that's his natural.
And I love him for all the things he can do that I can't do.
And then he looks at our kids and was like, I could never have cooked these little ones
and then nurse them for three or four years each.
And he's not relational like I am.
And it is a stereotype, but it's also true biologically in our brains.
Women are more relational and nurturing and men and more hunter gather adventurer.
And so he's like, he's all about the adventure part of dad.
Like he's got that down.
He is like Disney dad with all of the adventure and fun things that he does with the kids.
But when they're crying, it's mom that they go to first, not that they never go to him.
My youngest today wanted to sit next to daddy, not mommy, which is totally fine.
But yeah, it's just a natural built in part of our biology and it's beautiful, like you
said.
Yeah.
Well, and that kind of leads me into this other discussion, discussion point that really
what drew me to you on Twitter in the first place, I don't remember what I first saw from
you, but say constant thing and you have all sorts of people that say some pretty nasty
things to you on Twitter.
But one of the things that you talk often about is that women's biology is not, it's
not bad.
Like women's body being able to have a baby.
That is not a bad thing.
That's a beautiful thing.
That's the way that we're created.
So speak a little bit more into that of that biology, particularly as it relates into the
abortion debate and everything of why a woman's body being functioned that way.
Why is that so important in that discussion?
Man, we would need like 20 hours for me to go all the way through that, but I will give
my best like two, three minutes snippet of that.
Yeah.
I do get lots of nasty feedback because I talk about really hot button issues and I
don't, I don't love confrontation in that like, ooh, I can't wait to fight.
But I don't dislike confrontation.
So I don't get like worked up by, and I tend to ignore the people that aren't there for
genuine conversation anyway.
But so I had an abortion in my 20s and it took 19 years for me to even acknowledge that's
what had happened.
I had done all kinds of denial and cognitive dissonance and all kinds of things to cover
that up.
And my story is a little bit different in that I didn't go in choosing an abortion.
I went in for another reason and was sold an abortion with a lot of cohesion and deceptive
wording so that I didn't even really kind of know what was about to happen to me.
There was definitely no informed consent given.
And that's not uncommon.
Unfortunately, that there isn't informed consent, but that's a whole nother conversation.
But when I first started actually dealing with what had happened to me, I first started
noticing after the day after my oldest living daughter was born.
I was weeping out of fear that I wasn't safe for her.
And I couldn't quite figure out why I didn't feel safe with her.
Like I would have killed dragons for her.
I couldn't figure out why I didn't.
And then it took a while to figure out, oh, instinctively, my very genetics and biology
has had a trauma of being forced to end a very natural biological process in an unnatural
way.
And now my body doesn't feel safe to me.
And then after we had our miscarriage, same, I felt like, man, my body is just...
And some women can't ever successfully carry pregnancy after abortion because their body
is damaged in such a way that they can't.
And so when I think...
I don't...
Without looking at anything religion, without even necessarily looking at...
I guess I do lean quite a bit on science regarding biology.
But when I think of philosophically, and I have a philosophy degree, but when I think
about it philosophically, when we offer abortion as the answer to a crisis situation, what
we're saying is your body is the problem and your offspring is the problem.
So we need to deconstruct your biology, and we need to take away your offspring, and then
your life will be better.
But the reality, number one, that's extremely misogynistic and pretty agist against children
as well and discriminatory all around.
But two, it doesn't actually solve most of the reasons women are in crisis.
So dismantling her biology isn't going to make an abusive partner stop abusing her.
It's still going to do that.
You haven't changed him at all.
Getting rid of the child isn't going to suddenly bring a windfall of cash.
Poverty is still going to be poverty.
So it doesn't...
We're not solving any of the actual issues that abortion has been touted as the answer
for.
Instead, we just continually blame women's biology and our offspring for these crises.
And what I see happening is now when we try to get any kind of protections for postpartum,
like maternity or paternity, and I'm again, I'm not saying government driven.
I'm saying society and community driven, where like let's give leave or let's do PTO swaps
or donating time from coworkers or whatever.
Let's figure this out where we can do floating shifts and stuff like that to make it possible.
We're so quick to be like, yeah, but you could just like, if you can't afford it, maybe just
have an abortion.
And again, your body's the problem, not society.
Society, we need workers.
We need producers, not a producers of children, producers of goods and services.
And so, yeah, you just need to get rid of that part of your biology because that's a
problem.
And it's interesting and I'm not a super feminist, but we don't do that to male biology.
We don't say, you know what, your sperm is the problem.
Now men do get vasectomies and all, if you have sperm content, you want to do that, all
for that, you do you, but we don't give that as like a, well, really, it's your sperm
that's the issue.
And so we need to get a do away with that.
And so when I think about, we're just now in our society starting to include like breast
feeding rooms in public places and changing tables in all the restrooms, not just women's
restrooms, but for dads too, we're just starting to creep into like acknowledgement that women's
biology and children exist outside of commercialism.
Yeah.
That is such an important discussion that our bodies, and I'll take this into the faith
side, that I believe our bodies are designed by God for a specific reason, by a specific
creator, it's just mockery to his design of kind of how we treat each other's bodies.
And that's again, as part of what really drew me to a lot of your posts is just that openness,
goodness, like to just flat out say, yeah, I've had an abortion on Twitter.
This is asking for all sorts of feedback from different people.
And I love that you know yourself and you know, hey, I'm able to take this and the people
that yeah, I'm a big fan of a heavy block button or meat button if people are just being hateful,
like who cares, just go ahead and do that.
But the people that are legitimately want to have a conversation, who knows, who knows
the type of impact that you could have there, and really driving that discussion back into
our bodies are not the problem, the way that they're designed.
That is not the issue.
They are designed well.
And I'll go to again on especially that topic on women's biology.
Yeah, there's some stuff with men, but even even when we get into transgender stuff kind
of back into that discussion, my spaces by and large aren't impacted that much.
There are some cases here and there, but women's spaces are absolutely impacted massively.
And it's such a shame that this is being covered in more of a feminist type of lingo and more
of a left leaning type of lingo that this is progress.
No, no, it's not.
No, it's that whole topic.
So I have so much love in my heart for people who truly have gender dysphoria.
It is painful, painful.
And what they need though is not the politicization of it and not the, you know what, we can cure
a mental health issue with surgery.
No, we can't.
We've never been able to cure mental health issues with surgery.
Every time we've tried in the history of psychology, it's gone drastically wrong.
So we have to treat it with relationship.
That's the only way we treat mental health issues.
And so I feel for people who are transgender and that this is harming them.
And then I feel for women who like myself, I've been, like I said, I have sexual assault
history where if no offense to any man at all, but if I'm in a bathroom or a locker
room or anywhere where I'm expecting to be able to be vulnerable physically and a man
shows up, I'm instantly on high alert.
And that's uncomfortable for both of us.
And so what's really shocking to me about that whole movement, I guess it's not shocking
anymore.
What was shocking to me in the beginning was when we were saying, like, okay, let's have
individual spaces for those who are transgender.
Let's just have a bathroom for them to use.
And no, no, no, we want yours.
That's where it felt like, okay, this really isn't about what those who have gender dysphoria
need to feel accepted and supported by culture.
This is about wanting to remove and break down the differences between male and female.
And like transhumanism is what it's really ultimately about.
And honestly, when I look back at the history of abortion, it's about transhumanism as well.
And so it's all interconnected.
I've done a lot of Twitter posts about like, can you see the connections between all of
these things and all these things in human trafficking and all of these things and birth
control?
And I'm not opposed to birth control as far as it being available with informed consent.
I'm fine with that.
But I do think inherently birth control says your body's problem, your biology's problem,
you need to stop your healthy biology.
So even that has subtle psychological repercussions of being so flippantly, like the FDA just
approved the first over-the-counter birth control this week.
And I'm like, and now, so it's just very flippant, like, yep, your biology's problem.
That's what we need to stop is your healthy biology.
And yeah, it's all interconnected and all of it with the idea that we can escape our
biology, we can transcend our biology.
And I'm like, well, we don't even fully understand our biology.
So I'm not sure how you think that's going to be successful, number one.
But number two, we're going to hurt a whole lot of people along the way attempting to
do this.
And I started talking about abortion on Twitter, not even from a pro-life or pro-choice perspective,
but just because I know, because I work in this line of work, that I'm not the only one
that had trauma related to abortion.
And so it was for the other women who were like, I've never, ever seen another woman
openly say in public, I had an abortion and it was terrible.
And I'm deeply wounded.
And I had to face the trauma of losing my child, but also the trauma of I did that.
And so that's why I originally started talking about it.
It wasn't even to try to convince people one way or another.
It was to give this woman support.
And you said, like, who knows what could happen?
I tell you what has happened.
And I didn't do it for this reason, but it's been so beautiful.
I've had lots of women in my private messages, my DMs, either asking for resources for help
or I'm considering an abortion and I want to talk to you and ultimately choosing not
to have one.
And I get to walk with them through that.
And even if they chose one, I would walk with them through that too.
My care for them isn't based on their choice.
It's based on them as a human being.
And I want them to see themselves that way.
And I want them to see their child that way ultimately.
And so I'm with them either way, but I've watched women choose not to have abortions
and watch them just seconds after their child's born.
They're messaging me, oh my gosh, I can't believe I even thought of it.
And then we're dealing with that trauma of I thought of it.
But just the joy that instant and not everybody has that instant response.
And that's a whole nother level of birth trauma we could talk about at some point of people
that don't feel instantly bonded because that is a thing that happens.
But so far they have.
And so it's really been almost like a ministry field for me that I didn't think Twitter would
ever be a ministry field for me, but it really is.
And so I just try to be faithful when God says, I need you to show up here and I need
you to be vulnerable and I need you to say all the things that you either are scared
to say or don't want to say or people don't want to hear.
I need you to say those things and trust me that I'm going to bring the people to you
that need you.
And I'm going to give you that mute button for the people that you don't need to hear
who still need to hear your message, which is why I don't tend to block.
I tend to just mute because then they still have to see me, but I don't have to hear them.
And so you can get my message all day long.
That's fine.
So and I just try to be faithful to that.
And it's born some really beautiful offline relationships, both with wounded women, wounded
men from abortion, but also very liberal women who are really wrestling with this, losing
their spaces.
And as we start talking about that, they're starting to see the connection with that and
abortion and not maybe that they're deciding I'm not going to be pro-choice anymore, but
I really need to rethink the fact that they're selling that as a liberation for me.
Why are they telling me my body needs, I need to be liberated from my body.
That doesn't seem very pro-woman to me.
And so I've just had such beautiful connections with people and they may never, my goal isn't
to make somebody pro-life.
It's just to have the real honest conversations and the genuine love from human to human that
wherever you land, we're worth the conversation and we're worth the respect while we have
it.
So it's just been beautiful overall.
Absolutely.
And you mentioned the keyword there is vulnerable.
And I know not everyone listening to this is going to go and treat or tweet different
things about abortion or reproduction or whatever it may be.
That's fine.
But if kind of the whole purpose of this podcast is for me to talk with people and to challenge
the listeners to do something, to be active and not just be angry, be apathetic.
And at some level, if you're going to engage, you have to be vulnerable.
It doesn't have to be online.
But to make an impact, you have to be vulnerable.
You have to accept some people aren't going to like this and that's okay.
But there is another side of that, that there is this beautiful side.
None of those interactions would have happened had she not said anything.
Right.
And I don't think being vulnerable online is a good idea if you haven't worked through
your own trauma.
If you have trauma, you're going to get severely wounded.
People will say the most hurtful things.
And it's not like I'm a robot.
When I do see those things, they do hurt, but I just am able to now quickly turn it
into a quick prayer for them and move on.
But if you're not worked through your trauma, that could really set you into a bad place.
So I wouldn't encourage that.
But what I do a lot of work with my patients is when I do, we conflict resolution, the
fastest way to end a fight is vulnerability.
And it can be something as simple as I'm really scared or I'm really uncomfortable having
this conversation.
And so I need to just slow down.
And I need us to bring the level down a bit.
And I want to hear you and I want to understand you.
So vulnerability understanding.
I really want to understand you.
Even if I disagree with you, that's okay.
I just want to understand you correctly.
Yeah.
That's a great point.
And sometimes that starting point is being vulnerable to help myself and just be able
to get on that road.
Yeah.
Our paths aren't all going to be the same.
They'll be different.
Well, Robin, I think that we could probably talk another three more hours about this conversation.
Really, really enjoyed it.
I think this is such an important piece and hopefully some of the listeners will kind
of understand that this is a big gap here and maybe get treatment for themselves or
kind of advocate for treatment elsewhere.
For people that are listening, how can they be in contact with you after the show?
That's a really good question.
So if you want to follow all my shenanigans on Twitter, my handle is at truth agape.
And then if you want to kind of see what my work is, I have a website.
Now when I was thinking of my business name, I love my business name, but it's not make
for a great website or email name.
So I can spell it if needed, but it's www.carisetveritasllc.com.
How you spell that is C-H-A-R-I-S, which is Caris, at E-T, veritas, V-E-R-I-T-A-S-L-L-C.com.
It means grace and truth in Greek and Latin.
Those are the two things I endeavor to bring to every session is grace and truth.
So that's why I picked that name.
And I do love it, but it doesn't make for a great website or email.
And then if they want to email me, they can.
My email's on the website, or they can just R-A-K-Ns at carisetveritasllc.com, and they
can email me.
I will say this right now.
I can't treat anyone outside my state.
I am only licensed state of Indiana, so I can't treat anybody outside my state.
And I have a six month waiting list.
However, I am more than happy to help someone find someone in their area, or at least part
of what I've done on Twitter is here's what you should look for in a therapist and here's
some red flags to avoid because right now there's so much, and you know this, there's
so much social justice in therapy now that it's not really about therapy as much as it's
about politics for some people.
And so I just talk about here's some red flags to avoid to not end up in a session where
you have an activist instead of a therapist sitting across from you.
And I'll speak on behalf of Robin.
I've done this on my, in my own private practice, which for those of you that don't know, my
private practice is Truth and Grace counseling.
So we have a lot of similarities there in the name.
But I love, I love when somebody's from Pennsylvania or I had somebody in Canada areas that I'm
not licensed in to be able to point them in the right direction.
I love it.
So yes, don't, don't hesitate to reach out to her, especially when it comes to reproductive
issues like that.
She can help point you in the right direction.
And gender related issues, because I'm part of a couple organizations, networks across
the world where I can quickly throw out a, to somebody treat in the state and get answers.
So.
Perfect.
Great.
Well, I'll include all of that down in the show notes.
So you guys can be in contact with her and Robin, thanks again so much for coming on today.
Thank you so much.
I really enjoyed it.
Absolutely.
And thank you to everybody that tuned in today and we will catch you on the next episode.