Anxieties Surrounding the Pregnant Woman

At the start of a pregnancy, a woman is often forced to endure the unjustified anxieties of those around her, even when nothing about her condition warrants it. The situation is different for those with a high-risk pregnancy: in that case, it is the gynecologist who advises, at least for the first few months, preventive measures to support the pregnancy (staying calm, limiting car trips, not carrying heavy loads, stopping sports activities, limiting sexual intercourse).

As Lara puts it: «Ever since I got pregnant, my parents have started treating me like my sister, who gave up trying for a baby after three miscarriages. Even though I'm doing fine, my family, especially my parents (who are very eager to become grandparents!), would like to keep me under a glass bell for the whole pregnancy! I am an adult, independent woman, now also carrying the responsibilities of a mother-to-be, and yet at times I have felt treated like a child, someone to be forbidden or allowed even the most obvious things. Their way of behaving, even though it comes from affection, is still unacceptable to me, since I am not used to answering for my own actions.»

While pregnancy can make a woman feel «grown up», invested with greater responsibility as the mother of her child, on the other hand she often regresses into a state of dependence on the people around her (husband, parents, and so on). Which attitude prevails depends on each woman's personality and, as already mentioned, on the reactivation of situations experienced in childhood. While some women find it very gratifying to be the object of attention and care, even at the cost of their independence, for others it is unbearable to feel constrained by other people's concern and anxiety.

But what lies behind an unjustifiably anxious attitude toward someone?

To find out, we must remember that in every emotional relationship, opposite feelings blend together at a deep level, feelings of love but also of hate, of which one is often unaware.

To acknowledge the existence of ambivalence, one must accept that part of our mind escapes the awareness of the mind itself. This is what happens in the unconscious, which follows different rules from those of logic and rationality, and which, for instance, allows opposites to coexist.

Based on all this, it becomes possible to understand that an anxious person is trying to defend themselves against their own unconscious aggressive impulses toward a particular object by projecting them outward: situations of real or imagined danger, from which the object (in this case, the pregnant woman) must be kept away, come to stand in for their own aggression, the very aggression from which they wish to protect her!

The excessive attention directed at a pregnant woman, under the pretext of shielding her from difficulties, thus stems from the very same root as the «sadistic» acts that sometimes, instead, cause her distress (traumatic stories about pregnancy or childbirth, insinuations about her health or her baby's, and so on).