74: Resilience building in pregnancy & postpartum

When you can really start to understand how stress and trauma affects you on a physiological level and emotional level, you can hold more compassion and understanding for yourself. Nkem Ndefo is on with us today, teaching, informing, shedding light on how to think realistically, holistically about stress. This is totally necessary to understand for pregnancy and postpartum...but also for pretty much everything. Nkem is teaching us about how our bodies and minds respond to stress and ways to build resilience. There are too many gems in this episode to quote, you'll just have to soak this up when you listen. Here are some of the things Nkem discusses with us. * Understanding how a "disorder" may actually be an "adaptive response" to stress. * "What can we build up, what's good, what's working"... "How do we build on that and help build out the strengths?" * "We do grow, we do get stronger, but it has to be within our window of tolerance, if it's outside of our window of tolerance its too much, it doesn't cause us to grow, it causes us to break" * "What are the systemic factors [of stress] and what are the individual factors...one of the most damaging things we say to people is to hold them responsible for systemic factors" * High stress in pregnancy and how that affects the mother and baby. * Ways to support regulating the body-mind system in a supportive way, by being a partner in care. Connect with Nkem and Lumos Transforms: http://lumostransforms.com/ Facebook: @lumostransforms Insta: @lumos_transforms Twitter: @lumostransforms Nkem Ndefo is the founder and president of Lumos Transforms and creator of The Resilience Toolkit. As Certified Nurse Midwife, Nkem holds a Master’s degree in Nursing from Frontier Nursing University. She has extensive post-graduate training in complementary health modalities and emotional therapies, including Level 3 certification in Tension/Trauma Release Exercises and Level 5 certification in Emotional Transformation Therapy. She brings an abundance of experience as a clinician, educator, consultant, and community strategist to innovative programs that reduce stress and build resilience for individuals, organizations, and communities throughout the US. As a clinician, Nkem has worked in settings ranging from large volume hospitals to mobile community clinics. She founded and operated a full scope midwifery and homebirth practice from 2000-2007. And she has maintained a small holistic private practice in Los Angeles since 2007. She worked for California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative researching maternal death outcomes and served on the Los Angeles County Trauma-and Resilience-Informed Systems Change Initiative Workgroup. Currently she sits on the Strategic Planning Committee for the Trauma-Informed Task Force of Greater Los Angeles #theresiliencetoolkit #lumostransforms #buildresilience To check out all of the Mom & Mind episodes, go to www.momandmind.com!