4th Trimester Preparation: Podcast Episode #234

 Kristin Revere and Dr. Diane Speier chat about how to best plan and prep for the postnatal phase.  They discuss everything from communication to support options in this informative episode.  Dr. Speier is also the creator of the Digital Doula 2.0 app. 

Hello, hello!  This is Kristin Revere with Ask the Doulas, and I am thrilled to chat with Diane Speier today.  Before emigrating to the UK, Diane was the founder and director of the Family Tree Center for Parents in New York, offering classes, groups, and workshops for prospective and new parents for 20 years.  Diane became a certified childbirth educator and started attending births as a doula in 1978.  Diane is the author of the book Life After Birth: A Parent’s Holistic Guide for Thriving in the Fourth Trimester, drawing on her 45-plus years of experience with helping parents make a smooth transition from pregnancy to parenthood.  The book is unique in applying energy medicine to the postpartum period for the enhanced wellbeing of new parents.

Welcome, Diane!

Oh, I’m so glad to be here with you, Kristin!

Yes, I’ve looked forward to our conversation!  I am all about talking about resources and support for that postnatal phase, and I’m also very curious about how you got into doula work because in 1978, doulas were not known the way they are now, and there weren’t the number of training organizations.  It was a very new industry.  So I love that you have been supporting families in so many different ways as an educator, author, and as a doula over these years.

Well, I didn’t know I was being a doula when I was doing it.  It ended up being that some of the people who were my clients in my birth education classes wanted me to be there with them, and I just started attending these births and being in a supportive role.  Also, you know, assisting and supporting the partner to be engaged in a way that was very meaningful and purposeful but that was just something that came from the connection I had with my clients and the trust that they had in me.  So I think what it was, beginning maybe 1990, Penny Simkin came up with DONA International – or it wasn’t even international at that stage.  I was sort of grandfathered in, and I’m not part of a list or anything in that sense, but the fact that I had been doing it for so long –

You were one of their early doulas, unofficially.  I love that.  Wasn’t it the 80s that it officially started?

Well, I don’t actually know.  Maybe I’m wrong, but maybe I became aware of it in about 1990, and then I came to live in the UK in 1998.  But at that point, I was doing birth doula work and I was doing postpartum doula work and appearing on lists and things when there were local and regional kinds of articles about doulas and stuff like that, and it was – you know, I feel that it was a privilege to be able to do doula work with people, whether it was during the birth or afterwards.  I mean, there’s definite connection that’s established between a doula and a mother when she’s giving birth.

Absolutely.

And although it’s different when you’re coming into the home and you’re helping out and you’re assisting with people, it’s not quite the same, but I love the aspect of getting people on their feet and helping them to manage what was going on in the household and creating space, holding space so they could just spend time with their babies, learning what they needed to know in order to be a parent.  And my doing all the other tasks and things to create that space for them.  I really enjoyed it.  It was something that felt very empowering.

The second ten years of my teaching birth education was the methodology that I called birth empowerment, and I really am very dedicated to the idea that birth can be an empowering experience and that the transition to parenthood can also be an empowering experience.  And I think that’s the underlying theme of Life After Birth, the book that I wrote.

Yes.  I love how everything progressed very organically from education to doula support to becoming an author, to be able to reach an even broader audience.

Right.  And I’m even going further than that now because I’m in the process of developing an online course that’s called Eight Keys for Thriving in the Fourth Trimester, and that, I’m hoping, will be an even greater audience for understanding that people are very engaged with planning their birth experience, but they don’t really give much thought to planning what happens afterwards.

Exactly.  I feel the same way.  I feel like we should plan for the postpartum phase as much as we do for – and I don’t even want to say people are overplanning for their birth itself.  Now, let’s put into the time, say, decorating a nursery and registering for items and getting everything put away and washed.  That’s the kind of dedication that I would like to have for the postnatal phase.

You know, there’s a book out there that I’m not very in favor of that actually says that’s what you need to do to plan for your postpartum experience is get those things set up, and it’s like, wait.  That’s just material stuff.  That’s not the reality of – what kind of emotional changes are we going to go through?  What kind of role changes are you going to go through?  What kind of relationship changes are you going to go through?  That – we need to really discuss it because it leads to something called baby shock.

Exactly.

If you’re in the hospital, you go home with the baby – or even if you’re in the birth center – come home with your baby, and it’s almost like, what now?  And if you have that information and you also have resources, then you can feel more in charge of the experience, even though it’s going to be hairy for a while, even though they’re going to be heated exchanges and stuff.  And if you know that, 92% of couples experience increased conflict in the first year after a baby is born.  Then you’re not going to think that there’s something wrong with you or there’s something wrong with your marriage because the two of you are fighting now on any number of things.  It’s that kind of information that I’m dedicated to spreading out there and providing in an online course, and ideally, people would engage while they’re still pregnant so that it’s in advance and they can be prepared.  But it’s also something that somebody who has a newborn baby can dip into from time to time because each lesson takes about five minutes, and they can be gradually gathering up this information that’s going to help them feel stronger and more confident and more competent as they transition to this new experience.  I’m kind of excited about that.  I think it’s going to launch in April, and we’re just getting the recordings done now.  There are eight modules for this.  They cover the whole shebang of what could come up and how you can be prepared and how you can do things that will help you feel better.  It also incorporates a whole energy medicine piece, as well.

When I did the training – I did the first year of the training ten years ago.  I finished eleven years ago.  And I didn’t continue, but there were so many little techniques that would be so useful that right away, I thought, I can definitely add this into the book that I was writing.  And I talked with the people who were the – it’s from Eden Energy Medicine and Donna Eden and her husband David Feinstein and I.  We had a meeting together and I shared with them what I wanted to do because Donna wrote a book called Energy Medicine for Women, and there was virtually nothing in there about birth and what happens after birth.  So they were so excited that I was now going to apply the principles of what I had learned towards new mothers and partners too.  It’s not exclusively for the women.  And then I came to the second year in 2022.  We finished a year ago.  And I haven’t really had anything in yet, but there’s more content to come, and I can include that in the online course.  So I’m just excited that there are opportunities to provide additional resources for our new mothers.

Yeah, it’s so excellent!  I’m curious, since you do live in the UK, how are you adapting to other cultures with that fourth trimester preparation?  It can be so different, say, in Europe compared to the United States.

It is different.  I’ve been here for almost 26 years now in July.  When I first came here, I was working on my Ph.D. actually.  I got my Ph.D. based on the account from my clients, my birth preparation clients, over a course of 20 years.  I initially thought I might do some kind of comparative, but it wasn’t feasible in terms of comparing what had happened for 20 years in New York before I came here versus what I might be encountering here.  So we changed it, and it became a feminist retrospective ethnography of my professional practice.  And so what I did was, particularly when it comes to midwifery care – so midwifery care in the United States only represents somewhere around 8% of births that take place.  But in the UK, for instance, the midwife is the first point of contact.  So maternity care is essentially designed for midwifery care and the person would only encounter and obstetrician if there was some level of complications.  So it’s completely different than the obstetric model of the United States.

So I did a master’s dissertation on midwifery as a case study because I needed to learn how they were different.  But the thing that really struck me as not as good as the American system is that you have midwives that see you in the community before and after the birth, and then you have midwives that are due for the birth.  So the majority of people have babies in the hospital.  I think maybe 2 or 3% of people have home births here.  And you go into the hospital.  You don’t know the midwives.  You’re seeing them for the first time.  They don’t know you.  And so I think the fragmentation of care is not right.  In America, if you decide to have a midwife with you, she’ll be there the whole – or someone from their practice will be there from the beginning right through to the end, and I think that’s better.

And then when it came to doula work – when I left the academic realm – because I was there for about twelve years altogether – I registered with the doula UK organization.  And it’s not that different from what DONA does.  And I spoke.  I presented at conferences in 2017, 2018.  I did that for a while, but I did stop.  My last birth, my last childbirth doula role, was a very complicated one.  It was a woman having her fourth baby, and we certainly expecting things to move quickly.  And we had one false alarm, and I drove out there; about an hour drive away, and I came back home.  And then the next time when she was actually in labor, we went there, and I think the thing that was really not very helpful was that she had her three other kids sort of wandering around demanding attention.

It’s hard to do the work of labor when you’re parenting!

Exactly.  So we were all there trying to facilitate this amidst all of that.  Birth pool was filled, but she didn’t get into it, and she petered out, as will happen, because the children were there.  So we went to sleep, and I went to sleep, but the next day I had another job that I had to be at at 10:00 in the morning.  And I couldn’t really cancel it, so I had to leave.  And sure enough, after I left, her labor started to go, and she gave birth.  So I missed it, and I thought, okay, that’s it, I’m too old for this.

The on call life is hard.  I’ve been on call, and I have a partner most of the time unless it’s a repeat client, so I have a shared call model, but it is challenging.  I’ve been a birth doula for over ten years, and yeah, that part of it.  And you don’t want to miss a birth, but sometimes things happen.

That’s right, and in this case, if I’d just stayed there, it would have been three days total.  You know what, I still need my sleep, and I still need – I slept on the sofa that night, but I thought, okay, I can’t manage different things happening, when they start to sort of overlay each other.  It becomes too complicated to do.  That was in 2018.  That was the end of my actual doula work.  And I have not done postnatal doula work here, come to think of it.

Okay, so it was only the US that you did the postpartum?

It was only in the US that I did the postpartum, yeah, and I did a lot of it.

Now, in the UK, do they utilize postpartum doulas, or is it more relying on family or nannies?

They do, but they do it in a different way.  I’m trying to think; maybe I did do.  But my way of doing it was that I would come in, like, three days a week for a couple of hours each day for a couple of weeks, and they did it in a more open ended way here.  It wasn’t sort of any kind of schedule.  It was just like, over a period of six weeks, we’ll come in, and I never quite understood how that worked.  But they were sort of curious about the fact that I had this sort of scheduled out routine, which I think, if I’m honest, I think that the knowledge that I was going to show up at a certain time was very comforting for my moms.  And they all knew Diana will be here at such and such a time, and I’ll ask those questions then.

But in addition, I ran a mother and baby class for 20 years, as well, and that was a very rich kind of environment for the mothers because they also scheduled their life around those two classes a week that they would come to my classes.  And I really feel so strongly about the need for community for the postnatal period and the fact that there really isn’t that – when I started teaching this class, it was about 1981 in New York.  I went around to the pediatricians, and I said, oh, I’m going to start this class for mothers and babies, and they said – one of the doctors sat with me and said, I think it’s a great idea because when you’re in the suburbs, it can be so isolating.  When you’re in the city, you can walk down to the park and there’s a park bench, and someone else can sit down and you can start talking.  He said, in the suburbs, you don’t have that kind of experience, so this is exactly the kind of thing that we would really encourage.  So I was like, okay, I’ve got the blessing.  And I did it for 20 years.  I actually continued it here after I came for a couple of years, and I found that the mothers of young babies were not that different here than they are in New York.

Makes sense.  We all have the same needs to connect and to share our own experience and stories because I find that after delivery with well-meaning family and friends, it’s all about the baby, but the mother can sometimes get lost in the process and lose her identity, her former self and so on, and no one really wants to, say, validate what she went through, help her process the birth.  It’s all about, oh, this baby’s adorable, you should be so thankful that you have this healthy baby, and people wanting to hold baby.

And that’s completely wrong.  That was one of the motivations for writing the book was the fact that she does – she sort of vanishes into the background, and all eyes turn to the baby.  For nine months, she was being celebrated because she was creating life, and then boom, she has the baby and she’s like chopped liver.

Exactly.  It’s like, what about me?

Yeah.  So my book was really to pay attention to the mother and her experience and then also put it within the frame of the whole family.  It’s not just the baby.  It’s the mother and it’s the partner.  Everybody’s having an experience that we need to really validate and confirm, and this is what I feel we need to really give.  It’s just not fair.  I never thought it was fair, in all my years of doing it.

And nothing’s changed.  It’s still not fair.

It’s just unfortunate.  My daughter-in-law is pregnant at the moment and due in June, and they were about to move.  I think they’re very caught up in getting all the logistics done before we sort of sit down and talk about it.  But when I was talking with her on one of our Facetimes, and she was saying, well, what would you like to do?  Would you like to just come and sort of meet the baby and see the baby after it’s born, or would you like to sort of do your whole doula thing?  And I said, well, I’m quite happy to come and do that for you, and I explained to her what that might include.  I haven’t heard back from them yet as far as that, but I think it’s going to be determined by my son whether or not.  But at this point, I have to buy tickets for my flights and find myself an Airbnb, so I can’t wait too much longer.  But it is a real disservice to childbearing women that their experience after the birth is just not appreciated and not centered in terms of the family experience.  We will all write books and celebrate and get the message out that, yeah, it was a big experience to have a baby and to go through the whole childbirth experience, and we really appreciate how challenging the new mothering experience is for you, and people will want to see your baby, but do yourself a favor, and wait.  Because that’s the thing.

You can’t get that time back.

No, that’s right.  And it’s so exhausting when they come.

Exactly.  You can’t predict when baby will wake or need a diaper change or need a feeding.

And if people come to your house, you feel like you need to play hostess and the rest of it.  So no, I say take that time during the fourth trimester to create your little babymoon, your little bubble of who’s in the family.  Of course, there may be older children, as well.  And save those visits for later when you feel stronger and you’re kind of getting your act together.  The exception to that is, if people bring food.

Exactly, or offer to help.

Right.  They cannot come empty handed.  So if they bring food, that’s okay.  If they say, I’ll do the laundry or I’ll wash the dishes or I’ll do the shopping, that’s okay.  But to just come and say googoo, gaga – no.

Yes, where you feel like you have to have snacks for the guests and entertain them when you’re recovering from a major life occurrence, no matter how you give birth.

That’s right.  Absolutely.  Wait on that.  So if I were to describe the modules of my online course – I took it from one of the chapters of my book where I called this the postpartum wellness plan, and wellness was an acronym.  The W stood for we, which is about dealing with relationship stress that happens after birth.  The first E was for energy medicine, so I’m introducing something that’s not well known and yet so easy to do.  Anybody including a child can do it.  And then the first L is for loving kindness because I think one of the things that I have a podcast – well, actually, it was Instagram Live last night – talking about the fact that a lot of times after women have their baby come, they’re very self-critical, and I’m not doing this right or there’s something wrong with me or whatever.  And understanding the premise of loving kindness is that you’re extending your good wishes out to the world out to a person that you love, out to somebody who is neutral, out to a patron.  But also, to yourself.  Bringing that love back to yourself.  May I have physical happiness, mental happiness.  May I have ease of well being.  And a lot of people find that difficult to do and challenging, but it’s still something we need to foster, that you’re okay.  We’re okay.  And this is hard, but I’m okay.  And I can love myself, even though I’m going through a difficult and challenging time now.

The second L stands for less is more, and that’s what we were talking about with less is more – less visitors.  Less stuff.  Less paraphernalia.  Less social media.  Less all of these things that impact on us in sometimes a very profound way.

The N stands for new normal because normal has changed.

That’s not talked about enough, the fact that you can’t go back.  It won’t be the same.  The new normal – that’s everything.

What happens is, people were sort of very – they’re focused on looking backwards instead of looking forward.  And what we need to do is embrace the fact that it’s changed.  Everything’s changed.  And wonderful things can be ahead of us, even though we’re not having that experience of what we were before children came into our lives.  So I thought that was important.  I think the second E stands for expectations and the need to manage them because we can have realistic expectations or unrealistic ones, and we can have helpful ones or unhelpful ones, but we need to manage them, and we need to – because we end up dealing with internal expectations of our own and then external expectations.  We can have other people’s ideas about how you should be doing things.  So here’s where I have them confront the whole word “should.”  People are talking to you about “shoulds” – stop listening.

Yes, agreed.

It’s their story.  It’s not yours.  So, yeah, expectations are important to monitor.  And then also there are two S’s which stand for self-care and support.  And I’m not talking about self-care in the sense of finding yourself at a spa, but doing day to day things, everyday things, that are taking care of yourself so that you can take care of your baby.  And the support goes to the whole idea of community.  The community of new mothers is what I saw from my exercise classes all those years, how women would create these sort of cohesive groups, and then I would bump into them in elementary schools ten years later, and they’d say, we’re still friends.  It would make me smile.  It really would.

So yeah, these are the modules, and I think that if someone has all of these things addressed, then they can make a real smooth transition into and right through the fourth trimester and really feel ready to take on the world when they emerge.  So that’s my intention, and I’m looking forward to launch.  And I’m actually going to start it as a very reduced course so that people are kind of beta testing it, so that people can give us feedback about each module as it comes up.  What worked, what didn’t work, what would you like to see more of.  We’re going to drip it out every couple of weeks and allow that time for people to review it and send us back some feedback if they feel it’s important, and we’ll really fine tune it into something that really is the best we can possibly do.

That’s what I did with our online course, Becoming a Mother.  We did some live launches, three live launches, and then used feedback from the early students in the course and then adapted it by the time it went evergreen.

Maybe I’ll get it out before my new grandchild arrives.  I’ll get the first few sessions out before then, yeah.  And you know something, I’m getting on in my years now.  And people at some point said to me, aren’t you tired of this?  When I went through menopause and past menopause.  And I don’t get tired of it.  I don’t get tired of it.  It’s just something I feel – it’s almost in my DNA, that I feel so drawn to helping this very vulnerable stage in a person’s life so they can feel more confident about what they’re doing.

You said you’ve been doing this for about ten years; is that right?

Correct.

Do you notice any changes in terms of mothers’ anxiety levels?  Is that enough time to be able to say?  Because if I were to compare what I hear and what I read now in the 21^st century versus when I finished teaching in New York in 1998, I feel like the level of anxiety has jumped.

Yes.  It’s so much higher.  I started teaching classes after my son was born, so that’s 11 years, and I became a doula 10 years ago.  Yes, I have noticed, especially since the pandemic, that anxiety is heightened.  There’s more fears going into childbirth.  We happen to teach HypnoBirthing, so we address some of those fears, and it is very mental and using some of the visualization, positive self-talk that you discussed.  So I feel that method helps, but not all of our doula clients align with that or choose to take a childbirth class.  But there is a lot more fear, a lot more anxiety.  I don’t know if it’s the reliance on social media and being on all of the time with work.

I think that’s a good point.  I think that’s really a good point because I think that you’re getting above the water level, gliding across the water, and paddling like crazy underneath the water, and so you see a very skewed version of what somebody else’s experience is, and then yours – the reality doesn’t seem to match up.  I think that’s a form of pressure; would you agree?

I would absolutely agree.  On a previous podcast, I had discussed a bit about how social media can be good and bad in many ways.  There’s that filtered Pinterest, Instagram perfect life, and then you’re getting into the comparison game.  But I also appreciate social media and some of the vulnerability that moms are sharing and showing that their house is a mess or that they’re struggling to make it easier for some of their audience.  Say they’re a celebrity or an influencer and people are following them, and they’re going through real struggles and sharing those.  Then I feel like that can be helpful.

Yeah, I think it can go both ways.  It’s a double edged sword.  You can find the support that you need, but you can also feel that pressure to perform when you’re just trying to get by day to day.  I think that might be contributing to the state of anxiety that mothers are approaching parenthood with, and how that becomes a barrier to opening up to the possibilities.  Do you think people are having less childbirth preparation these days?

I find that our in-person classes have gotten smaller.  Maybe it’s a lack of time or traveling.  My agency also offers some virtual Zoom classes, some self-paced classes, and then the Becoming A Mother course, so there are a lot of things to choose from, but I do feel like that in-person connection – and I know before I became a doula, I took Lamaze with both of my kids, back to back births, and had a real connection, as you described with some of your postnatal classes, with fellow students, and I’m still friends with many of them.  We organized our own meetups with our babies and later toddlers and found out that a few of us were pregnant at the same time with our second babies.  It was quite lovely.  We intentionally created that community, but I learn better in person, so I always choose in person.  But other people, it doesn’t really work for them, for many reasons.  Maybe it’s childcare if it’s their second baby.

And I find that it’s an interesting thing that now people sort of say, well, I don’t have time.  Yet, 40 years ago, people were saying, oh, I have to get ready for birth, so I’m going to make that time.  And my daughter-in-law said, well, there was this one course that was, like, two hours over the weekend.  Or she can do the HypnoBirthing course.  And I said, well, you’re not going to get anything out of a two-hour class on a weekend, so I would suggest you do a HypnoBirthing.  Do you do the Marie Mongan version?

Yes, we sure do.  I love the original.

I actually did that.  When I was moving back into the birth world after I left academia, I did a course that was taught here of the Marie Mongan version of HypnoBirthing, and because I am also a hypnotherapist.  So I thought, well, this is going to pull together two aspects of my work.  It’s almost a synthesis.  I really appreciated what it had to offer.  So I would – at this stage, I would definitely suggest that.  What do people think they need, two hours to prepare for birth?  But there must be people out there that say yeah.  And then they get to the birth and everything gets completely screwed up, right, because they weren’t prepared for this or they didn’t understand that.

Exactly.  They don’t understand what their body is going through.  They don’t understand the intervention choices or stages of labor.  There’s so many things that can’t be covered in two hours.  I teach a very hands-on Comfort Measures for Labor class, and I tell couples who take it that they’re not going to learn everything that you would in a comprehensive childbirth class, but at least it gets the partners connecting, talking, moving.  Whether they have a doula or not, the partners are learning some hands-on techniques.  But that will not prepare them for what they’re going to encounter in labor.  It might make labor more comfortable, but yeah, there’s so much more.

When I was teaching, I would teach just a class on the first stage of labor, and then a second class on the second stage of labor, and then a class on the interventions, and then another class on what you just described in terms of labor support and what you can be doing together.  And I think that what happens is people come into it – they go into labor and they feel the pain, and that’s all that they focus their attention on.  I have this pain.  They don’t know why that pain is happening, so that whole – I give a whole three hours’ worth of information about what’s actually happening during the first stage of labor.  Your body is contracting and it’s also retracting.  And when you know that, you may be feeling the pain, but you know that there’s a real good reason why you’re feeling the pain, and if you haven’t had that education, you won’t – it’s just pain.

Exactly, and they just want it to go away.  But it’s pain with a purpose, or discomfort is what I like to call it.  I don’t consider it pain because you get a break.

That’s right.  And it’s finite.

Yeah, exactly.  You get to meet your baby.  Again, purpose.

That’s right.  Each contraction gets you closer to that.  I just think that – I still feel that education is really important because having that under your belt when you’re going through labor means that there’s a good reason and there’s a good purpose, pain with a purpose.  And really focusing on the fact that this is a powerful experience, as well, not just a painful experience, but it’s really a powerful experience, getting your baby born.

So powerful, yes.  It was one of my biggest moments.  I felt so accomplished, and I’ve never run a marathon, but it sort of feels like that.  I used to be a runner, and really, that visualization.  I felt with both of my births, although they were completely different from each other, were both very empowering for me.

Yeah, all of my births – I have four children – all of my births were very different.  I had a hospital birth with a doctor the first time around because I didn’t know any better in ’74.  And then I had my second child in a birth center in the New York Maternity Center Association, which went out of business and became Childbirth Connection along the way.  But that was the first birth center to open up in the state, and it was in New York, with a midwife.  The third birth was an attempt to have a homebirth, but I ended up being a hospital transfer for a forceps delivery.  And the fourth birth was at home.

All different.  Very different.

Yeah.  The only thing I haven’t done – I haven’t done a Cesarean section, and I haven’t had an anesthetized birth.  I had a pudendal block for the delivery of the forceps delivery because I didn’t want full anesthesia.  But I’ve really sampled a lot of the possibilities in terms of location, anyway.

That’s helpful with your background as an author, creating this app, and understanding different experiences personally and also professionally.

Diane, I could talk to you forever, but we’re running out of time.  So let’s touch a bit about how to connect with you, how to purchase your book, buy your app, how to find the course when it’s out, and of course, your website.

So my website would be www.dianespeier.com.  And the name of the book is Life After Birth: A Parent’s Holistic Guide to Thriving in the Fourth Trimester.  The app is a companion for that.  The sections of the app match the sections of the book, but increase that information and add more and also the links that were in the book in black and white become live links in the app.  And that’s called Digital Doula 2.0.  And it’s available in the app store, as well as in Google Play.

Do you have a chat feature in the app?

We just added a chat feature in the app this past year, and what I want to do – it’s not being used the way we intended, but I changed the app developer in the last year, and I need to sort of follow up on that so that it becomes more communal and we can have group chats in it, and I haven’t worked that out yet.  I’ve had other things going on at a fast pace.

Right, with this course launch.  There’s a lot going on.

Yeah.  And so let me also give you the other website, which is called thrivinginthe4thtrimester.com.  They can get information about the online course there and put their name on the waiting list, but also, there’s a free download there from energy medicine.  We created a digital download called Energy Matters in Postpartum Resilience.  That’s something that people can purchase, but it’s also a bonus as part of the online course.  But then there’s a free download, which is the first part, called the Daily Energy Routine.  And they can get that.  So if they go to Thriving in the 4^th Trimester, that’s where they can access anything related to the online course, as well as some information about energy medicine for free and some to purchase, because the full digital download is a 60-page document, so it’s a little book, and it’s really good.

You can find me on Facebook at Dr. Diane S. Speier.  On Instagram, it’s @drdianespeier.  Did I leave anything out?

Are you on LinkedIn?

I think it’s Diane Speier on LinkedIn.  And you can also find the Digital Doula page on Facebook, as well.  I’ll never get tired of this, and because of that, we should have another conversation down the road, Kristin, somewhere.

Let’s do.  I would love that, Diane.  Thank you for sharing all of your wisdom.  Would you like to leave our listeners with one final tip?

One final tip.  What would I choose?  Look after each other during this very tumultuous time in your life.  Just look after each other so you can be a team, and I like to use the word duet because you’re sort of singing a different part, but the harmony that comes together with that is really a wonderful song.  So look after each other, because people do not know that having a baby really does change the nature of your partnership a lot, which is why We became the first module of the online course.

Thank you.  Excellent advice, and I appreciate all of your time.

And I appreciate what you’re doing, Kristin.  I think it’s really wonderful to see how you are providing resources for the community, as well.

Thank you, Diane!  Take care!

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Dr. Diane Speier

Thriving in the 4^th Trimester

Birth and Postpartum support from Gold Coast Doulas

Becoming a Mother course

All of the courses available from Gold Coast Doulas