It's Not Just Hormones. It's D-MER.

It happens in the seconds before your milk comes in.

A wave. Not pain. Something harder to name — dread, immense sadness, a hollow kind of homesickness. Rage. Emptiness. You are sitting down to nurse your baby or hook up to the pump and suddenly you feel like something terrible is happening. You don’t know why.

And then, just as quickly, it passes. Your baby is still there. You are still there. The feeling is gone before you can really explain it to anyone. So you don’t.

Most moms don’t. They say they’re fine. They chalk it up to hormones. Some of them stop breastfeeding without ever finding a name for what they were experiencing — never knowing it had one.

It does. It’s D-MER.

Now you have a name for it. Here's everything else you need to know — what causes it, how long it lasts, what actually helps, and exactly what to say to your provider to be taken seriously.

This is a paid guide from the This Is Motherhood library. Subscribers get the full clinical library: guides on postpartum anxiety, intrusive thoughts, mom rage, birth trauma, postpartum psychosis, and more. Less than a therapy copay.