BIRTH Story

NEW MOTHERHOOD is often depicted as a BEATIFIC and BLISSED-OUT EXPERIENCE. Writer SARAH HOOVER’s JOURNEY couldn’t have been further from it. In her new MEMOIR, she offers an unflinching LOOK at her STRUGGLE with severe POSTPARTUM DEPRESSION—and how she EMERGED from it.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARIO SORRENTI

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk studied first responders and their trauma. After a person suffers a traumatic incident, the brain pumps hormones such as oxytocin through the body, which elevates mood and alleviates fight-or-flight responses once they’re no longer advantageous. A side effect of oxytocin is that it dulls the memory. What Dr. van der Kolk found was that when first responders came off the field and immediately described what they had seen to other professionals—the gold standard protocol for the Red Cross at the time—it prohibited the flood of memory-dulling chemicals and kept the first responders in an adrenalized state, inscribing their trauma in the amygdala, the primal part of the brain from where the fight-or-flight response originates, rather than moving it…

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Harper's Bazaar (Digital) - 1 Issue, December/January 2025

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