The Real Reason You’re Struggling After Baby: It’s Not Just Hormones
Episode 291
This raw, unfiltered episode dives straight into the real challenges of postpartum life—beyond the hormone talk and clinical labels. Dr. Nicole lays it out: bringing a baby into the world doesn’t just shake up your body, it shakes up your entire life, surfacing old wounds, unresolved traumas, and deep-seated beliefs. She breaks down how physical symptoms can be signals from your subconscious, not just medical issues, and offers a powerful invitation to see postpartum as a chance for deep self-reflection and generational healing. This is for every mom (and dad) who’s ever wondered, “Is this just hormones, or is there something deeper going on?” #PostpartumTruth #GenerationalHealing #ConsciousParenting #IntegrativeYou #MindBodyConnection #BreakTheCycle #MomLifeUnfiltered #HealingJourney #EmotionalWellness #ParentingRealTalk 3 Key Takeaways: Postpartum is a Mirror: Having a baby brings unresolved emotional wounds and subconscious patterns to the surface—don’t ignore what’s coming up, it’s feedback for growth. Symptoms Are Signals: Physical issues (from thyroid to gut to heart) often reflect deeper emotional conflicts or misalignments, not just “bad luck” or “bad genes.” Healing is Generational: Processing your own stuff isn’t just for you—it breaks cycles so your kids don’t inherit your unhealed trauma. Invest in yourself, and you invest in your family’s future. Quotes: “When you bring a baby into the world, everything shows its face. All the shit that you haven’t processed, all the shit that you brushed under the rug… everything shows its face.” “Your kid is literally a little mirror of all your shit that you haven’t dealt with. So if you can fix yourself as a parent, your kids will be way better off.” Find Integrative You Radio On: Website Youtube Apple Spotify 2 Doctors Committed to Innovating the Healthcare Experience. Integrative You Radio is hosted by husband-and-wife duo, Dr. Nicole Rivera and Dr. Nick Carruthers. With their voracious curiosity for Integrative M
Topics: integrative, postpartum, healing, baby, hormones, family, unknown, symptoms
Key takeaways from this episode
- ## The Real Reason You’re Struggling After Baby: It’s Not Just Hormones
- Postpartum as a Mirror:** Becoming a parent often brings unresolved emotional issues and subconscious patterns to the surface, serving as critical feedback for personal growth.
- Symptoms as Signals:** Physical health concerns, from gut issues to heart problems, can be manifestations of deeper emotional conflicts rather than isolated medical problems.
- Generational Healing:** Addressing your own unhealed traumas can break cycles, preventing them from being passed down to your children, thus investing in your family's future well-being.
- The Subconscious Unleashed:** Pregnancy and childbirth can powerfully expose unprocessed emotions and past traumas that were previously ignored.
Pull quotes
This is the place where you become limitless. **Unknown:** We are covering the latest and greatest topics, of course, in a disruptive fashion around integrative medicine, mental health, and human behavior.
We will be sprinkling in some truth bombs for our healthpreneurs, so they can join us in our mission to evolve healthcare.
If you are health curious and growth focused, you are in the right place. **Unknown:** But buckle up, because this is real, this is raw, and this is disruptive.
Transcript
**Unknown:** Welcome to Integrative U Radio, hosted by Dr. Nick Carruthers and yours truly, Dr. Nicole Rivera. This is the place where you become limitless.
**Unknown:** We are covering the latest and greatest topics, of course, in a disruptive fashion around integrative medicine, mental health, and human behavior. We are also covering how those topics affect the human and family dynamics. We will be sprinkling in some truth bombs for our healthpreneurs, so they can join us in our mission to evolve healthcare. If you are health curious and growth focused, you are in the right place.
**Unknown:** But buckle up, because this is real, this is raw, and this is disruptive. This is Integrative U Radio. What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Integrative U.
**Unknown:** You got Dr. Nicole riding solo. As I mentioned in previous podcasts, we are surviving over here. But it brings me to a very important and also relevant topic, um, which is postpartum.
**Unknown:** And, uh, the main thing that I wanna bring you in this podcast is, is the question of, is this postpartum, you know, hormone imbalance, postpartum depression or is this transition, and is this a feedback to look at parts of your life that aren't working? Because I'm gonna tell you right fucking now, is that when you bring a baby into the world, everything shows its face. All the shit that you haven't processed, all the shit that you brushed under the rug, all the family members and the people that did you wrong, and even the misalignment with your partner, spouse who you've reproduced with. Everything shows its face, and not always are we ready to go there.
**Unknown:** We're not ready to acknowledge that. And we also live in a world where we're told that our body goes awry, our, our body will fail us at times, and that it takes a focus off of really sitting back, thinking, reflecting, and asking questions as to why this is occurring in our lives. Because the longer that I do this work in the healthcare arena, the more that I realize is that symptoms are there solely as a feedback. I wouldn't say that that's necessarily new information, but even in the most extreme situations, the most extreme symptoms, the most extreme diagnoses, this is all our body's way of saying, "Get your shit together.
**Unknown:** Get your mind right and, and, and go there. Go there. Go to the place that you don't wanna go." Because the longer that you ignore it, you deflect it, the more problems you're gonna have. This could be with your health, this could be just straight up chaos in your life.
**Unknown:** You know, and it's actually funny because I was having a conversation with my mom about, you know, a similar topic, and I ended up quoting from one of Q's movies, uh, The Demon Hunters, and I was just, like, laughing. I was like, "You know, these movies, they always have some, some level, some sprinkle of wisdom in them." But there was a part in the movie that, you know, they, they broke out into their, their song, as many of those movies do, and it's like, you, you can only fix it when you face it. And I think that when we go through this major life change of having a child, having one, having, you know, our second, having our third, is that there is always a level of transition that goes along with that, and there is a level of showing us parts of ourselves, parts of our past, parts of our lives that need to be processed, that need to be addressed, that need to be, uh, collapsed, that need to be really just make decisions about, essentially. A-and I say that especially for those of us that are in the present navigating things that are difficult.
**Unknown:** So essentially, I invite you to sit back and think about what is coming up for you in this postpartum period of your life. What did come up if you have already had kids? Because was it really just depression? Was it really just your hormones crashed?
**Unknown:** Yeah, that's of course a possibility. But chances are there was something already there, and then as your hormones shifted or plummeted, it just brought something deeper to the surface. And what I find really interesting is that our dreams very often tell us what our subconscious is trying to process. So I wanna get really specific and help you guys understand because I know that for a long time I didn't really even understand this idea of conscious, subconscious, like what the fuck does that all mean?
**Unknown:** So essentially, you know, when I, I had this personal response, and I've heard this response a million times, of when we do our testing with people, we're going about it in a very strategic way that we are able to uncover what are things that are trapped in the subconscious, what are trapped in the background programs of that person's brain and that person's life, and what are the cycles that keep coming up that are creating pain, illness or even chaos.And when we say, you know, we, we provoke questions to really discover, you know, where did this start? Where did it come from? What did it stem from? What was the experience in the past?
**Unknown:** And they're like, "Yeah, but that was so long ago. Like, I don't think about that. How would that be playing a role in X?" And I know that that was my very response when this was brought to my attention. But that's the exact point, is there are things that we've experienced in our lives that made an impact on us.
**Unknown:** Some were good and some were, quote-unquote, bad. Dr. Nick being here would say nothing is bad. But what I mean by that is there are experiences that move us into protection mode.
**Unknown:** There are experiences that make us question our identity. It makes us think that we should people please. It makes us think that falling in love is scary. It makes us think that, you know, taking a risk is scary, that, you know, uh, bad things happen to good people.
**Unknown:** There are experiences that we have. There are people that say things based off of their own pain, experiences, and trauma that impact us. They, they go into the back of our memory, so we don't think about these things every single day, but they actually influence how we look at life. They influence the decisions that we make.
**Unknown:** They influences the fears that we have. So we're all operating out of a set of values, what's important to us, who we are at our core, what makes us a, quote-unquote, good person, but we're also operating out of our voids and our fears, our beliefs. You know, if we believe that having money makes you a shitty human, it makes you greedy, it makes you mean, it makes you stuck up, it makes you think you're better than other people, it inflates your ego, then chances are you're going to look at people with money in a certain way, and you're actually going to feel a lot of guilt and shame if you were to acquire money. So chances are you're gonna deflect money out of your life, and then you're gonna call that a struggle.
**Unknown:** "Oh, I'm so... I just can't get the right job. You know, I have a lot of bad luck," so on and so forth. So I'm not derailing.
**Unknown:** I'm actually trying to give examples, so this makes sense to you guys. But I will tell you, when you go through this major, major, major life change of introducing a baby into the world, your, all your subconscious shit comes to the surface, whe-whether you understand it or acknowledge it or not. So I'm here to bring this to your attention, and I really want to actually give you some tangible tools so that you can start asking yourself better questions. Or you can explore this deeper if you work with a coach or a therapist.
**Unknown:** Not most therapists will actually know what the fuck you're talking about if you're gonna bring this podcast to the session, but aligning yourself with someone who maybe does. So as I mentioned before, you might be having dreams. You might be having dreams of people that, you know, you lost in your life. You might be having dreams about certain themes.
**Unknown:** Write them down. Write them down in the morning, so you don't forget them. And then start to look at the collective theme of the, the dreams that you've had. Is the theme loss?
**Unknown:** Is it fear? Is it lack of feeling safe? Because it's telling you something, and your dreams are... at night is when you process your subconscious shit.
**Unknown:** So very often, your dreams are telling you something. You can use AI nowadays to actually help interpret your dreams, which is kind of fucking cool. In addition to that, there are sometimes women that start to have wacky symptoms after having a baby. And if your symptoms are more in your bladder, your uterus, your pelvic bowl, you're having a lot of pain, you're having, uh...
**Unknown:** you have a urinary tract infection, you have a u-uterine infection, you have things going on in that arena, your uterus won't go down, um, you still look pregnant, you know, six, seven, eight months after the baby, this is a center. These are organs that are actually associated with safety, protection. And so either having a baby has brought up s- like some bad sexual experience that you had, or it's bringing up that you never felt really safe when you were a kid. And, and I'm not saying because you were beaten up or anything like that.
**Unknown:** I'm saying that there was a lot of financial instability in the house, and you didn't... like your house didn't feel safe. Like, am I gonna lose my home? My parents are always stressed and struggling and talking about how they can't buy food.
**Unknown:** That is a subconscious program that runs in the back, even though you've maybe moved on with your life and now you're a successful human being. If you're having issues more in the gut, maybe you had a hernia, maybe you had a splitting of your abdomen, dia-diastasis recti, maybe you're just having stomach pain and discomfort more in that lower abdomen, this has a lot to do with instinct and protection as well. So this is like, I wanna protect my baby at all costs, and I'm gonna... I wanna protect them against things that have happened to me.
**Unknown:** And so now, instinctually, you're... all of a sudden, you have anxiety or you're... you, you have a panic attack, and you're like, "What the heck? I've never had this before.
**Unknown:** Oh my God, it must be my postpartum hormones." But it actually is because now you wanna protect your baby from the very things that you experienced that you presume to be bad. If you have things that your blood sugar is crashing, you're getting lightheaded, dizzy, you're having pain in your right side abdomen, maybe you have a weird gallbladder attack, maybe you can't digest fats all of a sudden, which is gallbladder, this could be more identity. That's the center associated with identity. Identity, you just had a fucking baby, and maybe you're like me.
**Unknown:** You were a powerhouse business owner. I wanna build empires. I wanna have a franchise. I wanna do all these things, and it's like, now I'm like, "Do I want any of that?"me, I want to, I want to be a good mom.
**Unknown:** Can I be a good mom? Can I be still be a, a business badass? Can I still be a teacher? Can I still be this?
**Unknown:** Can I still be a doctor? It is very, very normal to question all of those things. And sometimes you'll actually experience physical symptoms when you're having a major battle around what you want to do and what you should do. That is the question you should always be asking yourself, no matter if you're postpartum or not.
**Unknown:** Is this what I think I should be doing, what I need to be doing, what I have to be doing? Or is this what I want to do, what I get to do? And I'm not saying that life is like sunshine and rainbows, and you only do what you want to do. But if most of your decisions are based off of have tos, need tos, shoulds, you're, you're living in someone else's value system.
**Unknown:** You're, you're doing things for other people. You're doing things for other purposes. You're doing things to please other people, society, religion. Like you're living with a lot of guilt and shame, no mat-no matter how you want to swing it.
**Unknown:** And if you look at David Hawkins' Map of Consciousness, guilt and shame is literally the lowest vibration emotions that you can possibly experience. When you live in a place of guilt and shame, you will literally have complete chaos in your life. You will have, quote-unquote, "bad luck" because you're in a shit place. What do you...
**Unknown:** W-when you're in a shit place, you just bring more shit into your life. So everything will feel like it's falling apart all the time. I love when my blur goes in and out, and you can see my dog. That's my dog's ass.
**Unknown:** So chest, having pain in your chest, this is heart. Sometimes this change is because your heart is more open than it's ever been. But your heart opening, now that you brought this beautiful little human into the world, sometimes showcases heartbreak, heartache that you haven't processed. And this is not to say that anything is more important than others.
**Unknown:** You know, heartache, heartbreak could be from like the high school boyfriend, the high school girlfriend. It could be a dog. It could be a bird. It could be, you know, a, a, a parent.
**Unknown:** It could be... A-and it could be someone who has actually passed away. It could be someone that you feel like betrayed you, really did you wrong. Everything is relevant.
**Unknown:** Like nobody's problem is more important than others. I know that, you know, I've been to Joe Dispenza before, and there's people in there that have gone through some serious shit in their lives, and you hear people saying like, "Well, my problems aren't as bad as that. I shouldn't, I shouldn't have issues, or I shouldn't feel this way." And it, it... That's...
**Unknown:** This isn't a fucking competition. If something hurt you or created a wound for you or affected you in a deep way, good or bad, like that, that's just your... That's, that's you. That's your experience.
**Unknown:** No one else's experience is more superior or more intense. Um, so just fucking let go of that. Throat. If all of a sudden your thyroid fails, so common.
**Unknown:** Oh my gosh, so, so, so common postpartum. "I don't know what happened. I have Hashimoto's now. I don't know what happened.
**Unknown:** My thyroid went to shit. I'm so tired." And it's like, but am I-- "I didn't know because I thought I was just tired from the baby." Okay, let, let, let's look at this i-in a different lens. So your thyroid just went to shit. What is this center associated with?
**Unknown:** This is speaking up, speaking your truth, being heard, communicating properly. So many people are in relationships where... And, and this is not anyone's fault. Nobody teaches you any of this shit.
**Unknown:** But you're in relationships that, you know, y-things are, are pretty good. We, you know, we fight a little, but, you know, that's normal. That's what couples do. But then you have a baby, and you really start to see the misalignment because the...
**Unknown:** You start to see people's values in a deeper way, and this creates a lot of turbulence and turmoil, and we either are trying to speak up, we're not feeling heard, or we're like speaking up, and we're just giving up because it's like, holy shit, we are so misaligned. And I know that a lot of you have experienced this, is, you know, things are kind of coasting, but then it's like one parent is like, "I want to breastfeed," or, "I want to make sure that we have the best formula, and I'm gonna... I wanna spend the money on grass-fed and grass-finish and this and that." And the other parent's like, "What the fuck does that matter? Let's just buy the Similac.
**Unknown:** Let's buy whatever. It's not a big deal. I survived on that. Tons of kids have been okay taking that.
**Unknown:** I want to vaccinate. I don't want to vaccinate. I want to circumcise. I don't want to circumcise." Like, you know, you start being, getting faced with big decisions, and you start to really see what the person values, and if one person really values health and spending money on food and spending money on clean products, and they want, you know, BP, BPA-free bottles and all, you know, there's a cost that comes along with that, and the other person is just fighting you tooth and nail, and you're like, "Oh, shit." Then you start, you know, maybe you're having early conversations about education and like, "I don't know.
**Unknown:** Maybe I want to homeschool." "How... We can't homeschool. What are you... You have to go back to work and this and that," you know.
**Unknown:** A-and there really starts... The, the malalignment starts to show its face, and you're like, "Whoa." And you feel really trapped, and you feel really disempowered, and you're like, "I just reproduced with this person, and now I'm realizing how we are not on the same fucking page on so many levels. How do I navigate this? Or do I just shut my fucking mouth and just get through?" That's not a fun place to be.
**Unknown:** That's a really tough place to be, and it is way too fucking common. And I personally think that this is a huge driving force why so many women have their thyroids go to complete shit after having a baby.So yeah, guys, like I hope this is really opening your eyes to be able to look at things from a different lens, but also don't focus on the wrong thing. You can go put yourself on medication for your postpartum depression, for your postpartum thyroid issue, for your postpartum gut issues, but is that the root cause? Or are you just palliating?
**Unknown:** Are you just band-aiding? That's the thing is people think that functional medicine is only root cause medicine. You can still do band-aids with functional medicine. And personally, I think that when I first started this career, I, I was doing that.
**Unknown:** I was just doing it with natural stuff, natural shit. And so yeah, it's better, but if you really want to address the root cause, if that's your driving force as to why you listen to this podcast, you need to look beyond just physical symptoms, and you need to look at the programs that are running in the background of your life that are making you live in guilt or shame or creating your fears, creating your phobias, creating your depression. Like mental illness th- is there for a reason. It's not bad luck.
**Unknown:** It's not bad genes. It, it-- There is a very specific reason for it, and there's a lot of ways we can go with that conversation, but for the sake of staying focused on this specific topic is that you will have things come to the surface when you have a baby, and you won't always be aware of it. You're just gonna notice you feel off. So I'm inviting you to sit back and take a moment for yourself.
**Unknown:** If you're a mom who's breastfeeding, I f- I did a lot of self-reflection and thinking time while I was breastfeeding because what else are you gonna do? And I sat there, and I, I really started to think as I was feeling certain ways, and I started to ask myself questions to really decipher, "What is this? Where is this coming from?" And I'm not saying that your hormones might not need support. Yeah, that's great.
**Unknown:** But the synergistic approach of let's address the hormones, let's address the biochemical level, but let's also really look at the mind, the mental programs, the subconscious programs, the possible, you know, traumas or experiences that are surfacing to be processed. When you bring those two worlds together, that's where the magic happens. And also, another sidebar is one of the reasons why this happens is because of the idea of transgenerational trauma. So your children will carry trauma that you have not resolved, and if you ha- if your child was born with something, some type of disease or ailment, that is because there was an, a very prominent unresolved trauma that mom was experiencing or reliving during the pregnancy, conscious or unconscious, and that's one of the primary drivers for neonatal issues, children that are born with diseases already.
**Unknown:** It is mom's unresolved trauma programs, experiences. Not to put blame, it's just that's the way that it works. But when you have little kids who already have anxiety, depression, panic attacks, doesn't make a ton of sense. So yes, maybe there are environmental factors causing it, but a lot of times they are expressing what we have repressed.
**Unknown:** And this is not just about mom, this is also about dad because both of your genes came together. And so your shit is gonna come up either during pregnancy or postpartum for you to process as mom and dad so that you can end the fucking cycle, so your kids don't continue that trauma pattern on. They don't continue that energy cycle. They don't continue it.
**Unknown:** It stops with you. This is one of the most important reasons for us as parents to continue to grow ourselves, develop ourselves, to work through our shit. Like everyone thinks like they'll spend all this money on their kids, but they won't spend money on themselves, and I'm just like, "That's just not how it works at all." Your kid is literally a little mirror of all your shit that you haven't dealt with. So if you can fix yourself as a parent, your kids will be way better off.
**Unknown:** Make the investment in yourself, watch your kid transform, and then you probably don't even need to necessarily address anything for them because most of what they were experiencing is all of your shit that's repressed. Hard pill to swallow, but that's the reality of it. I w-- I, I, I really sat back after I really started to, one, learn this and then see it and, you know, I thought about all the kids that I worked with at Integrative Wellness Group, and I couldn't help but feel like, man, I did such a fucking disservice to those people because the problem wasn't the fucking kid. The problem was the parents, the environment, whoever the...
**Unknown:** If they, they were being brought up by grandparents, whomever was the superior in their life, the, you know, th- the they're the guide, they're the mentor, they're the, they're the ones that are, that are dictating the, the culture, the environment, the... They're dictating everything, umIf they are not, if they are not on a path of self-healing and growth, the kid has no chance. Yeah, that's, that's how it goes, guys. So for my mamas that are going through postpartum questioning, "Oh my gosh, what's happening to my body, my mind, my hormones," etc., sit back, check in with yourself.
**Unknown:** What's coming up? Am I depressed? Okay, where do I feel it? What do I feel?
**Unknown:** Have I felt this before? Is this reminding me of something from the past? Where do I feel it? What part of my body?
**Unknown:** Go back to the middle of the podcast where I talked about, you know, if you're having symptoms in certain areas, what that could be correlated with. And just understand that this is an opportunity. It's an opportunity to overcome things that have been running in the background of your life that have probably been, been creating chaos, creating physical symptoms, creating issues, and it's time to process them and let go of them. And you're not just doing it for you, you're doing it for your child as well.
**Unknown:** So don't go and just run to palliate your symptoms and, you know, "Oh, I gotta get on hormone replacement," or, "I gotta get on my thyroid meds." If, if that's the route you wanna go, that's fine, but just do it at least in tandem with your own personal development. And, you know, this can, this can be working with someone. This could be you just working on yourself by asking yourself better questions. This could be you starting a meditation practice.
**Unknown:** This could be you doing a breathwork seminar where you can release some shit that's trapped in your body. There's a lot of ways that you can go about it that are... don't cost much. And then there's, of course, ways that you can go about it where you have someone guiding you through the process who has already navigated something similar.
**Unknown:** They've overcome the obstacles that you have, and that's a different podcast that I've done. But anytime you choose someone to help you through something, you always choose someone who has actually surpassed where you want to go. You don't work with people that are... You don't work with a therapist who's on antidepressants for depression.
**Unknown:** You work with a therapist who has been able to overcome their depression, change their lives, and live a life that is inspiring. If that's where you wanna go, if you wanna live a great life, not be depressed, and have an inspiring life, then you work with someone who's actually living that because they're the only people that can get you there. You can't-- Someone who's depressed on medication can't get you there. So be careful who you take advice from.
**Unknown:** Be careful who you listen to when it comes to your friends. And, you know, I always tell people, "If there's that one friend that you enjoy talking to the most, is it because they actually give you constructive, hard feedback, and they actually help you become a better person, or is it because they just empathize with you and they agree with you?" That's not where growth happens. I-- When I was young, I used to love talking to my friends who would just be like, "Oh my gosh, he is horrible. She is a bitch.
**Unknown:** Blah, blah, blah." You know, peop- people that agree with me. And I felt so great 'cause I felt loved and supported. But at the end of the day, that didn't m-make me a better person. It didn't stop the bullshit cycles that were running my life.
**Unknown:** It didn't stop m-bad relationships in my life. It didn't stop any of that. It just continued the cycle 'cause I gave it more energy. All right, I'm gonna leave it there.
**Unknown:** See you on the next one, guys. We thank you so much for being an avid listener of Integrative U Radio, formerly known as Integrative Wellness Radio. We appreciate all of your support. We love your comments.
**Unknown:** Please visit us on social media as well as our website to see all of the fun things happening behind the scenes and the new amazing content and courses that is being rolled out on a monthly basis. We hope to see you there.
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About Integrative You Radio
Integrative You Radio is a root cause medicine and integrative medicine podcast hosted by Dr. Nicole Rivera and Dr. Nick Carruthers — two integrative doctors who build personalized wellness protocols from your DNA, minerals, hormones, gut, and nervous system rather than from a population template. Looking for an integrative doctor who reads your labs together instead of in isolation? This is the show.
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