Grief, shame and guilt at bf failure, even years later?

[niminypiminy]

I thought it was all far behind me when I found myself weeping the other day when a friend described in rhapsodic terms her time bf her first born.

The first weeks and months of my first child's life were dominated by the agony of grief and shame I felt at failing to bf the child I had wanted so desperately.

Every bit of well meaning advice was like a knife to my heart. Every time I saw someone do it I was scorched with envy and shame. And it went on and on, and didn't seem to fade.

For reasons too complicated to go into now, I gave up bf child no 2 very early. The pain wasn't quite so searing this time, but it was still there.

Is there anyone else still haunted by the pain of failure, months and years later, or am I the only one?

(A heartfelt plea: this thread is not for anyone who wants to proselytise about lack of support for bf. I have suffered enough at the (albeit unwitting) hands of the advocates of bf. This thread, if it becomes a thread, is for support for us, the failures.)

I really feel sad at the way you describe yourself as a failure... I have recently breast fed my first son for six weeks and after problems, both physical and emotional decided it was best to ff. I have to admit there is regret and guilt but I would not describe myself as a failure and wish s much that you didn't feel that way. I go though times where I feel like I'd tried harder and times where I'm happy with the decision I've made. I don't feel like a failure though, I'm doing the best I can for my son in the way I know how and can, I feel like you need to let go of it, maybe get some help?

Your post is heartbreaking - please don't torment yourself for something that may be straightforward for many women but also never works out for a great deal of others.

I feel exactly like you for my first child and it's hard to explain to most people, only we know how we miss that embrace. BUT this does not make you a failure! As long as you nurture and feed your child, from breast or bottle, your own or formula, they key is that your baby gets a full tummy and most importantly your love and your happiness.

For the record, I'm still learning to bf my second, and I only managed because my dh pretty much does everything else, including taking care of our ds.

And you know what? I can't help but feel guilty to ds for not being able to spend as much time with him as I used to, for being stuck on the sofa feeding dd for hours while he stays in and gets bored. So, guilt is something we can't escape, whichever way we feed, whatever our intentions!

We have to try to be there for our children, enjoy the present with them and disentangle ourselves from the pains of the past, at least to try that, and take care of your own heart too.

You sound like a sweet, kind woman that suffers for something you couldn't help, please give yourself a little break... You've done nothing wrong. xx

Just wanted to send a big mumsnet hug. I'm currently fighting to keep bfing my dtds. My story is different to yours but I was lucky with dd1 and fed her for 8 months with no probs, but the twins are another experience entirely. They were prem and I've been through every problem imagineable. The guilt of not satisfying them is immense and the thought that it's over makes me cry. I was proud that I'd kept going by mix feeding and it's worked fairly well, but on another thread I was told my dtds didn't have virgin guts and I should have demanded milk from the milk bank when they were tube fed in SCBU etc. Makes me feel like a complete failure but then I look at dtds and they are happy little girls, and I remember that my mum stopped bfing early on and I still love her completely and know she would do all she could to care for me. It's so hard to get perspective on an emotional issue and I know I've cried many times in the last 17weeks, feeling I've let the twins down.

If you want to talk this through with a trained professional you could always phone one of the national bf helplines and talk it through / debrief with one of the counsellors if you feel that would lay some ghosts to bed.

I too would suggest talking this through with someone who is knowledgeable on the subject.

You are not a failure.

(I feel the same way about my emcs by the way - we really are complicated creatures)

My mother still feels guilt and shame 30+ years later! She had to mix feed DB after low weight gain and FF me after 2 weeks. I hope she feels better after she witnessed the massive amount of help and support (and hospitalisation, and weeks of pumping) it required for me to establish BF, after she had NO help/support in the 70s.

I think it's a bit of a game of luck. Agree with above poster about EMCS, had that. :(

You did what you could. Your friend was lucky in having a baby who latched better and/or had better help and support.

I think you need some counselling to get over this. You are not a failure in any way. Any chance you may be depressed? Because no, I don't think it's 'normal' to be thinking about it years later. You presumably fed your DCs and took good care of them, BF or FF- neither makes you a good or bad mother.

To be honest, I think it is distressingly common for mums to feel like this, even years later :(

I'm not in a position to offer support or help, OP, other than to say that I know you're not alone by any means. I hope someone comes along who can relate to how things are for you having been through something similar.

Do you think it might help to talk things through with someone - perhaps a breastfeeding counsellor? Or are you simply looking for kindred spirits so you know that you are not the only one going through these feelings? If the latter then I hope that anyone reading this who feels a connection, please do post.

Even though I am BFing my DS, I still feel guilt and shame over having a highly medicalised birth so I do know how you feel. There was no 'need' for it, just my own inability to hack the pain. I stress over not having had skin to skin, not feeding him for 36 hours after his birth, not kissing him when he was first handed to me. I was too out of it, drugs and exhaustion as my labour stretched over days - possibly because of the epi I had. I worry about how this will effect him in the future and think 'if only you had toughed it out, you let him down' all the time. But I know deep down that I just couldn't have. I guess what I'm learning is that most people feel guilty about something. It's such a shame we put so much pressure on ourselves.

I agree totally with your feelings - it is my one biggest regret in life that I was so rubbish at BF and if I could turn the clock back I would. I feel jealous when others BF with no troubles. But my 3 dc are happy and healthy and you need to think thus about your dc. They are no iller than BF children & are all bright & doing well at school.
I think counselling might help but I also think as other posters have said, mothers have guilt over everything that isnt the perfect picture of childbirth & BF they had in their heads.

Please do not think of yourself as a failure.
You are NOT!

You have successfully birthed and are caring for/nurturing your child.
How you feed your child is entirely up to you.
As long as you and your child are healthy and happy nothing else matters.

You are doing the best you can, that makes you a resounding success.

Please stop reinforcing your own negative view of yourself.
Your child will see you as the best Mummy on earth and that's how you need to see yourself too.

You have shown immense courage starting this thread.
Good luck for the future.

I don't think I need counselling, actually. I have a good grip on all possible rationalisations about how well my children are cared for, how little support I had, how it is all a long time ago and so forth. Most of the time I do not think about it.

But even if I did want counselling, the last place on earth I would look for it, to be honest, is with a bf organisation -- I was very badly let down by both NCT and LaLeche League and will never go near them.

I guess what I was trying to raise, by making my own lingering feelings public, is that there is a downside to the promotion of bf (even though it is fantastically important work, I know), and that is the psychological consequences for women who don't manage it.

I know I am not a failure; I feel that I failed. I know I fed my children; I feel that I gave them second best. I know I was a good enough mother; I feel that I was a second-rate mother.

I know that the emotional effects of all this last for years. My own mother in law cried when she remembered her own bf failures, decades before. I've had random women in cafes tell me with intense pain how they tried and failed to do it. It's not just me. The problem is out there, and it's a hidden grief and shame that affects a lot of women, and I thought I would try and give it a voice.

I'm really sorry that you felt let down by NCT and LLL :(

Is there anything that you can share they they did that we could take back to try to avoid this in the future?

yes i have and still do at times feel like you do. in my more rational moments i recognise that i made the best decisions i could but other times I'm consumed by guilt. ds1 is 3.5 years and i feel guilty, he has asthma which I'm sure is my fault for not breast feeding for longer. i agree that the breast feeding campaigns, whilst hugely important can compound the feelings of failure for many.

niminypiminy - I think I understand how you feel, though our stories are different. DS is almost 3 and I still feel regret at how our feeding relationship worked out. I fed him for 4 months but I should have stopped sooner. I can barely stand looking at photos of him in his first few months as he's so painfully thin. I had access to and used the support available (though I think it came too late). I revisit his long and difficult birth and the first few hours afterwards - why didn't I insist on skin-to-skin? Why did I let him whimper beside me for the first night? I know the answer was because I was drugged up, exhausted and traumatised, but I feel I failed him.
I'm currently still feeding DD at 8 months and this has helped in some ways but hindered in others. Ultimately, I regret that I wasn't able to give him what I'm giving her. Seeing that I'm capable of it has made me question what I did wrong last time. The struggle to breastfeed I'm sure will probably remain one of the most painful (literally and figuratively) episodes of my life.

It does sound quite extreme op but I can see how you feel angry and upset as thay was my experience of bf dd. only advice I can offer is to offer up/share the experience where necessary then move on - the guilt thing is needless but I can see how you feel that way when people say "need to keep going/ try harder" when have no feel for what it is taking to bf and fail.

Quite frankly I am not sure how much harder I could have tried - was depressed ,so over
Medicated (needlessly as it turned out
As mastitis wasn't the issue) that I was sick on antibiotics and I still ended up with an operation to remove a glactacoele).

I did best I could by dd (eventually moving to mixed then ff) but I do feel that the pain sickness and upset trying to feed ruined the first month or so of her life making it harder than it needed to be.

Now I can cope with this as I watch dd now who is healthy and happy. Am also awaiting birth of new baby in a couple of weeks- there is no way, If have similar bf issues, I am blighting the beginning of our lives together with the same ordeal I had with dd .

Carrot cake -If they ever called back that would be a start (repeated calls to both and never spoke to anyone /nor did they return my calls) . Also with the best will in the world (and I know bf are largely volunteers) calling back after a week is not good enough as happened with hospital adviser . Sorry but when you get to point of desperation of op or some of posters on here you need help quickly not days later when the misery has had more time to build.

And as for discussing issues with a bf counsellor - such is my cynicism now I am not sure I will bother with the feeding bit on the nct course this week . I do want to bf but I have no desire to repeat the inconsistent and then absent cycle of support I have last time.

niminy , I know you are not alone. I have spoken to women who have tears in their eyes 20 and 30 and even in one case 40 years or more after not breastfeeding the way they wanted to - years before breastfeeding promotion and breastfeeding counsellors came on the scene....I agree with you about breastfeeding promotion having the capacity to exacerbate strong feelings (and I wish you had not been let down by the bf orgs - can you describe how they could have helped better?) but I think the feelings you have of sadness and grief are real and exist whether or not there is promotion and support.

This whole area - feelings after not breastfeeding - is being studied and there is a view that the psycho-emotional effect of not bf is akin to an embodied grief. The body 'thinks' there is no baby any more when the milk is not being made/used, and the body goes into grief mode. This is all to do with psychodynamics and psycho-somatic effects and naturally it's not really a physiological 'thing' you can 'test' for.

If you feel up to searching for more info, let me know and I will post some links.

I'm glad to hear that feelings about not breastfeeding are being studied, Tiktok. I have to say, however, that we need to differentiate between women who did not bf and never wanted to, and those who wanted to, tried and failed. (I know the word fail is hard for some people to hear, but given the language around bf that alternately emphasises how natural is it, and how you also have to try hard, there is almost no space to feel that it simply 'didn't work out' in an emotionally neutral way.) Anwyay, the experiences of these two groups will be sharply different.

I'm afraid I'm a bit sceptical about your whole 'embodied grief' thing. I think it is more likely that you have a group of women who want to do the best for their much-desired children, and who have heard all the messages about how bf is best, and then they can't do it, and inevitably feel that they have failed their babies, and they have not measured up to their own ideals of what being a mother (and also, I think, a woman) should be. Of course, motherhood is one long series of these experiences, but this is the first, and it is especially primal. And it just feeds into women's horrible competitive-envious relationships with other women if you see other mothers doing all around you what you have failed to do yourself.

As to what bf organisations can do. I think principally, they can take it on the chin, that the way bf is promoted by them is a causal factor in such feelings. If you are saying that 'every woman can (and should) bf', naturally those who fail will feel, well, failures. Bf organisations need to face up to that. It is simply not good enough parroting the 'if only there were enough support'.

Secondly, if they are serious about helping women who failed to bf, they need to set up a dedicated service (much as maternity units have dedicated midwife counsellors). The job should not be left to bf counsellors who see their role as helping women to bf. Noone could be less useful.

Thirdly, representatives of bf organisations who help in maternity units need to focus on helping the women who are in the most need rather than those who are most easily helped. In my case, my baby screamed and squirmed away from the breast. The LLL counsellor simply walked away and went to talk to people who just needed a little help adjusting a latch.

I felt sad the first time I failed and guilty that I didn't try hard enough.

The second time round I didn't feel any guilt but I have on occasion felt quite pissed off with some threads on MN. I'm not that bothered that bfing didn't work out. I feel that I have failed as a parent in lots of ways but I honestly do not consider my lack of success at bfing to be one of my failures.

My Mum is 71 and she feels very, very sad about her "failure" to bf her four children. I would call it a kind of grief.

She takes some solace from seeing her daughters bf, and has been unfailingly supportive throughout.

I recognise the feelings you describe. I felt them all when I failed at bf my ds (gave up at 4 weeks). I have mostly forgiven myself (and I had rubbish advice from midwives, so I have placed some blame elsewhere, which helps). However I do feel some guilt and probably always will, because I didn't seek out the help from NCT or LLL that I should have. Whether or not they would have helped me, I don't know, because I didn't ask, and that's why I feel guilty.

I don't feel guilty about not BF due to the lack of support from the NCT. When DS was born and I was trying to BF him, around 8 NCT BF counsellors (can't remember their names) had come to see me. They asked if I had given formula and I told each and every one of them that the Drs and nurses had given him 1 or 2 bottles of formula as he was away for between 3-5hrs having AB's due to him having GSB. Well, all the NCT BF counsellors looked down their noses at me and I didn't get one pick of help. I had a similar thing happen with DD too just over a year later.

About 5m later I went to a post-natal get-together organised by the woman who did a few of the AN classes. When she saw me FF she came over, looked down her nose at me and told me I wasn't giving my DS the best I could. I asked her what she thought was best for my DS: for me to continue BF and leave DS without a mum, at 6m, for the rest of his life OR to give him formula and DS have his mum still here in 20yrs time? She walked off and said snottily "Your DS's needs come first" so I guess that she'd rather I committed suicide for the sake of DS getting more BM .

The thing is, it's all well and fair telling mums that breast is best and the government insisting on bringing BF rates up, but how do they propose to keep up the BF rates if people don't get the support they may need from organisations like NCT and LLL etc?

niminy, you say 'we need to differentiate between women who did not bf and never wanted to, and those who wanted to, tried and failed.'

I agree - but I'd go further. The whole thing is far too complex to divide women into 2 distinct groups ie i) women who don't bf at all because they did not want to and ii) women who don't bf for as long as they want to.

There is overlap and nuances and obfuscation and denial and mixtures of feelings and motivations. I mean, what about the women who do not want to bf at all, and yet do so for a short time, or the women who really do want to bf but don't start to do it for their own reasons? And there are many more 'categories' and types!

It's for this reason that I disagree with you when you say, ' Anwyay, the experiences of these two groups will be sharply different.'

Of course the 'embodied grief' idea is speculative. But you go on to describe something that is indeed primal in your word - an experience of self-judgement and disappointment compounded with real or imagined judgements from other women but which also affects the body and its functioning. Why is it difficult to believe that the bodily experience (of not breastfeeding) would not add fuel to that emotional and psychological fire? I assume you don't reject the whole idea of body/mind/unconscious influencing each other in many ways?

You say, "As to what bf organisations can do. I think principally, they can take it on the chin, that the way bf is promoted by them is a causal factor in such feelings." I do recognise that breastfeeding promotion can make bad feelings worse - and the bf organisations I know are sensitive (massively sensitive) to this.

I don't know of any organsation that says 'every woman can (and should) bf', though I am sure there are individuals anywhere and everywhere that might say that,

Your next point is interesting: "Secondly, if they are serious about helping women who failed to bf, they need to set up a dedicated service (much as maternity units have dedicated midwife counsellors). The job should not be left to bf counsellors who see their role as helping women to bf. " I understand your thinking, but just as midwife counsellors (assuming you mean the postbirth ones? Whose work has evaluated poorly, by the way.....) are also midwives who do 'normal' midwifery work as well, breastfeeding counsellors can (and do) talk to women who feel bad they stopped breastfeeding.

You say "In my case, my baby screamed and squirmed away from the breast. The LLL counsellor simply walked away and went to talk to people who just needed a little help adjusting a latch." If you are talking about an LLL peer counsellor, she would not be qualified to work with you, experiencing that issue. She should have explained that, of course - walking away in silence is not good! She should have reported your difficulty.

Avenged - I am really sorry you felt so let down by eight NCT breastfeeding counsellors. I am amazed you live somewhere you can actually be seen by 8 of us - I don't know where in the UK that would be! We are not that numerous! Perhaps you have mistaken who they were. I don't recognise the idea that they looked down their noses at you, but as we are not qualified to give medical advice it may have been they felt your concerns were outside their remit.

Any remark passed to you about not giving the best you can should be reported - it's not acceptable at all, and I can understand your anger. I have never come across any NCT colleagues who would think that or say that.

Perhaps you are mistaken about what NCT and LLL do? They are not part of the govt - NCT and LLL are charities.

niminypiminy, I am so sorry you feel this way. Women are put under so much pressure to breastfeed. You sound like a genuinely lovely person, definitely NOT a failure.