We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lizzie Langston. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lizzie below.

Lizzie, appreciate you joining us today. What’s something you believe that most people in your industry (or in general) disagree with?

Oh this is fun :)

What I believe that is unconventional and a little woo-woo is: We have over-clinicalized postpartum depression (and depression in general.

While I do recognize that there are severe and intense cases of a diagnosis of depression that definitely need supervision and medical support, I believe that depression, specifically postpartum depression among new or veteran moms, is something that is often situational and spiritual, and not as much medical.

I have helped dozens of women over the last five years as a postpartum advocate, teacher, healer and life coach. Women come to me sometimes days postpartum, sometimes years after having their baby, with the intuitive feeling that mainstream medical is not where they are going to find their answers and healing.

This is often not even what is comfortable for the mamma, but she is feeling led to and drawn toward learning about trauma stored in her body, learning about generational patterns, and learning about forgiveness and letting wounds release and leave her.

I’ll give you an example through a story of a client of mine, we’ll call her Stacey.

Stacey had given birth to her second child, a boy, about 12 months before coming to work with me. She found me through listening to my holistic and quite spiritual podcast, The Postpartum Coach Podcast. She listened to my stories of my postpartum mental health crises, and how I was led out of mainstream medical system and into holistic and trauma-informed healing modalities. She heard me talk about things like clearing out generational trauma postpartum, and how depression and anxiety in our motherhood are not simply symptoms, but signals that our body is talking to us.

She knew that her body was talking to her through her irritability, painful intercourse and inflamed back and pelvic pain postpartum. In our sessions, she explained to me that she had already been to her ObGyn with this pelvic, back and hip pain and her OB did not know why this pain was present. She had had some severe birth trauma, including an intense postpartum hemorrhage as well as the use of forceps, against her desire and will, to get her baby out and into this world.

She remembered seeing her husband also feel powerless and frozen as the medical team went against her birth plan to do what they decided would be the best course of action to bring her baby earth-side.

Her OB had sent her to a series of specialists, all of whom were not able to give her a reason for the intense back, hip and pelvic pain she was still feeling, not to mention her emotional ups and downs that accompanied her symptoms, even a year after her birth.

I listened to her tell her story, and I began to feel energy from her subconscious mind coming into my aura. Her body knew who I was, and it was now talking to me as she was in my presence. I began to have the sense, not through words but through warmth and a knowingness, that her pelvic pain was stored emotion. I was not sure what the emotion was related to, but I knew that her body would tell us if we asked.

I prepared my client by explaining to her what feedback I was getting from her body, and that she too could learn to listen deeply, and to interpret her body’s pain signals and other ‘symptoms’ as signals from her subconscious mind.

I taught her that she could learn to trust her body more than anyone else, and that her body did not want to keep this pain. It was ready to release it.

Often my clients’ symptoms (e.g. physical pain and/or emotional unsteadiness of many kinds) will come to a head right before they hire me. This intensity is typically what drives them out of conventional medicine, and into my realm of spiritual, energetic healing.

That day in our session, I guided Stacey through a series of questions that she gently asked her body for answers to. She asked slowly, one at a time, eyes closed and supremely focused. I calmly reminded her during this process that it was safe to believe and notice anything that came to her mind in answer to these questions; that it didn’t have to make logical sense or even feel like it was coherent. Stacey was not in a trance, but she was in a meditative state of curious exploring any information coming to her mind in response to the questions to her body.

Little by little in that session, and in the sessions that followed, Stacey received answers:

Her pelvis was tight and hurting because there was a part of her that was so angry with the course of action the doctors chose in the hospital. She was angry that what they did led to her hemorrhage, and how arduous that recovery was; how scary that had been. She felt anger and desperate sadness that her husband had not stood up for her birth plan, or demanded answers or asked for an explanation of why they chose to use forceps and other decisions they had made in a quick moment.

Slowly, as she heard her inner feelings for the first time, as she safely and gently processed them out loud for both of us to hold with love and understanding, her pelvic pain subsided. Her back began to feel more normal for her.

Within a few weeks, she could sit in a chair for her desk job and not be in pain; intercourse began to feel good and fun again.

Her pelvic pain miraculously went away, and she even held a baby shower for a friend after all of her birth trauma, and was able to be happy for this friend and celebrate the birth experience that her friend was hoping to have.

…..So many times we throw terms and labels on a set of ‘symptoms’, we clinicalize and therefore, to some extent, intellectualize the signals (what we call ‘symptoms’) from our subconscious mind. We go straight to medicating in order to feel better as soon as possible, and in so doing we often inadvertently mask the most important voice of our body, yelling, sometimes screaming for us to focus our attention inward, on listening and self-nurturing.

I myself have found great comfort and relief by using antidepressants before; after my second baby and during my very first depressive episode of my life, I was so so grateful for some pills. They offered me relief and hope…. But by the time I had my next baby, my antidepressants were no longer effective, even after increasing to the max dosage with my doctor’s supervision.

While this was very scary, I asked for guidance. I opened myself up to something greater than me; I instinctively knew, like my clients, there was an inner journey that it wouldn’t be prudent for me to continue to try to ignore.

And on that journey of going inward, listening to hurts and pains from years back and doing my best to work with my body to release them, I was able to find my most authentic self within, and bring her to the surface. I was able to unearth the real Her within me. I was able to not only find relief from depressiveness and anxiety, but also to learn a whole new way to live and be with myself and my body in this existence.

In other words, I was able to rise in consciousness and experience self-actualization. This, I believe, is what ‘symptoms’ like depression and anxiety arrive to help us do.

Lizzie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

How I Got Into This Work:

I was the kid in high school who my peers asked, “Lizzie, are you on drugs? What did you eat for breakfast this morning? ….Why are you so happy?”

I had nailed the happy girl mojo, and I was good at it. I was genuinely happy…. But I cannot say that I was genuinely myself.

All my life, without realizing it, I always had social motivations to be a certain way. What my mental health crises did in 2016 and 2018, after giving birth to my second and then third baby respectively, is they pulled me deeply inward.

When you’re depressed, your world gets quiet. You withdraw. You aren’t sad though… You’re silent. Numb.

The anxiety of course is very loud–totally different and the two symptoms kind of happen on and off together.

But when I was depressed postpartum, my identity broke: I was no longer the ‘happy girl’ I’d been in high school, college, and before having kids.

So here I was, 26 years old, mature enough and confident enough in who I was to make the vast commitment of becoming a mother, and yet insecure and clueless in who I was in postpartum depression and anxiety. …It was like I had reverted to having just been born myself, only I was socially aware enough to realize and feel deeply the embarrassment, the shame, and the desperate humiliation of not living up to my role as mother, wife and parent to these kids. (Because, you know, moms don’t just lay on the couch numb and lifeless while their kids play around them.)

My name is Lizzie Langston–and I was rebirthed through two mental health crises in my 20’s to become my authentic, true self and who I was called to be in this incarnation: a healer, medium and life coach for postpartum women.

Postpartum is actually a time of a lot of darkness. Onlookers often don’t anticipate this, and some women don’t feel it (because it’s not their time), but essentially when you have a new baby, your previous identity is shattered. You’re no longer a maiden, you are a mother. A huge archetype change. Completely new life phase in many ways.

Even if Baby is not your first, you are no longer a mother of one, but a mother of two (or three, four, etc.). And while this transition of more kids is simple math, it is not simple for your ego, or sense of identity. Every time a woman has a baby, her sense of identity is completely torn down at its foundation, and rebuilt. This process lends itself to emotional states such as anxiety and depression.

My role as The Postpartum Coach is to help women stay in their body as this process occurs, and to learn not to be afraid or feel a victim of the changes in their functioning, but to work with the symptoms as signals. To re-learn to listen to the body, to seek to understand what it is trying to communicate.

This is very scary for the ego mind of my clients, which really wants to keep identity and keep a sense of control on reality. But the reality always was and very much is: there is not and never will be and has not actually been control all along. Another reason mothers fear mental health symptoms (aka signals during a call to inner healing), is because our mainstream medical system has basically scared us into wanting medication as soon as possible. Our medical system sees pain not as a signal, and symptoms not as signals and communication from the body, but as health ‘noise’ needing to be quieted down. This is the result of a collective separation between mind and body, between the ego and the spiritual center: the heart. As a collective, we have forgotten how to listen to the body, and to hear what it says in its own language: the language of sensation.

So my role is to help my clients to be present with and learn to listen to their body, and to manage and nurture the ego, or identity, as it dies to give way to my client’s rebirth. It’s a beautiful, spiritual and deep process that really actually happens if you open up to it! And yes, they heal! Their mental health calms down totally and they often feel so much better than even before all of their ‘symptoms’ arrived.

What Sets Me Apart From Others

One way I approach postpartum mental health that is different than others, is I believe that the individual’s subconscious mind has a ‘healing system’. This executive healing system is in charge of notifying your consciousness of if and when and how it needs and wants to heal, usually through things like pain, inflammation, and also emotional signals such as depression and anxiety. The timing of when these signals are sent is always for your highest and best interest, and the best interest of the collective and the planet, too.

I believe that at any given moment, your executive healing system essentially has a list of your healing priorities. The role of symptoms like depression and anxiety–postpartum or any time–is to signal to you that your attention is needed in your internal world. Your healing system//subconscious mind is trying to communicate that your psyche, your nervous system, your spirit, and/or your body needs nurturing attention to release and unburden itself of stored emotion, or trauma. It is in this process that we get to know the wounded parts of our psyche, without which we will never be whole.

So, in other words, I see depression and anxiety as a gift. They are invitations, if we are listening and interpreting them through this spiritual-emotional lens, to know ourselves at a deeper level. To go into the waters of stillness and to rebirth, if we are willing to.

I also think medication can be extremely useful and helpful in this process, because the individual does have the right to choose when and how intensely they dive into this process. It is so important that people know they can choose, they can opt out, they can save this work for later. They have the final say, and there is no shame at all in choosing to use medication as part of your healing journey.

What I Am Most Proud Of

I think what I am most proud of is my creation of my own intellectual property, my three-step process specifically designed for the mental & emotional wellness of postpartum women: Calm your Body, Calm your Mind, Calm your Life™.

When I found life coaching, I didn’t know of a single postpartum coach. And, I felt that mainstream basic coaching tools were not trauma-informed enough for women who had almost died giving birth, or who were checking in to the ER because of intense panic attacks. I was craving somatic, body-centered coaching, but also loved the simplicity of life coaching models. And then naturally, I brought in a lot of spiritual gifts and heart-centered work because that’s just who I am.

My process is awesome because it is quick, simple and can be applied in the moment: calm your body, then calm your mind, then your life will be calm.

It meets mammas where they are when they’re experiencing mental health woes: in their head. And yet, the byproduct of applying this process is that your brain settles down, you aren’t terrified of the sensations in your body and you get calm. You get calm both in the moment, as well as overall. My clients tell me that through really exploring and using this three-step framework and the powerful yet simple tools within in, they find a deeper side to life and to their body that the didn’t know before. They experience more presence, which translates into cleaner contact with their deepest desires for pleasure, for self-expression, for play and fun! All of which definitely make motherhood and partnership so much more fulfilling. I think the cherry on top, though, is watching women find themselves. When they learn to calm their mind and body, then their mind and body stop being disconnected and at odds. When they go through their days with more of a connection to their body, their inner truth and life path becomes revealed and they start getting intuitive hits on what is next for them: a Master’s Degree? Start a business? Become a therapist? It’s like watching popcorn pop, the way these women begin to blossom and open into themselves. It is so rewarding and honestly never gets old.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I was 800 miles away from my newborn and two toddlers. It was February 2017, I was five months postpartum with my third, and I wasn’t functioning.

There I was, in my fuzzy socks sitting on a couch in our upstairs townhome loft, surrounded by mostly-unpacked moving boxes. Our first home was now under contract. We were moving.

We were moving because I had postpartum depression so intensely that I was scared to be at home alone with my kids. My mind had begun showering me with terrifying, scary and intrusive thoughts. I was scared of myself, to be frank. So my husband, three kids three-and-under were going to move in with my in-laws for the unforeseeable future, while I tried to figure myself out.

This was not my first time with depression, anxiety and intrusive scary thoughts. Back in 2016, with the birth of my second child (first daughter), I had also slipped into this non-functional numbness. That time I had sought medication as a solution through my ObGyn, and luckily, it worked. Side-effects were minimal and my hope was just enough.

But this time, I’d moved my antidepressant dosage to the max with the approval of my doctor, and to no avail. I’d felt off since Christmas, but it was a low I couldn’t bear. So my husband found a job, we took the kids up to Denver to be with the in-laws, and the they sent the two of us back to our home for a few last days of packing sans kids. While the main reason we were alone in our empty house was to pack, all parties involved, including me. also knew that this was a trip for me to try to get my head straight sans kids.

I’d attended the local postpartum support group that was free at the hospital. Despite being run by highly educated therapists, social workers and interns, it was quite fluff. Don’t get me wrong, the intentions to help us moms was written all over these sweet hospital employees’ faces. But at the end of the day… it was an overall pat on the back. No tools to move the needle. Validation only goes so far.

I’d also worked with a therapist through my beloved birth center at the time. Unlike my first labor and delivery of my first child in the hospital with an epidural, my third birth at the birth center I’d chosen was into warm water, surrounded by women, unmedicated by choice and even complete with a serendipitous landing of a favorite song from I wrote for my babies, playing the moment my third son was born. This birth was a slice of heaven (and a blessed reprieve from more birth trauma that would ensue five years later with my fourth).

The therapist at the birth center was also highly qualified, came recommended by my midwives. She was fit and happy; she looked like she lived a healthy life. I remember our first session, just crying and crying. She agreed with me that what I’d been through was hard. She was a little frustrated with my previous OB and providers like I was; it felt good to be so validated by her own emotional response. However when it came to helping me day-to-day, her best strategy was to make a list of supplements and daily activities I needed to be doing, such as yoga, walking, and St. John’s Wort, and sign it. She said to show it to my husband and make sure that he help me and let me do all these things.

It was well-intentioned but a little awkward. See, I didn’t want my husband to have to take care of me. I wanted to be able to take care of myself. And, his lack of support or permission to take care of me was definitely not the problem. It was my own internal functioning that seemed to be broken. Not just a lack of actions of basic self-care such as getting dressed, eating a decent meal and showering, but racing thoughts. Constant anxiety and worst-case-scenarios running through my mind.

So, after therapy, drugs and a support group, it was me and my fuzzy socks in my soon-to-be-sold house, husband packing and me staring blankly at the wall. In that moment, as hubby was downstairs somewhere (or possibly at the gas station grabbing an energy drink). I took the liberty of closing my eyes, which were just beginning to fill with the first wells of hot tears, and speaking out loud to Universe:

“God, Universe, if you’re out there, I need help. I really need help. I have tried everything. And I’ve been suffering. I feel so lost. If you will help me find a path to healing, whatever it is, I promise I’ll help other moms through these feelings. Nobody should suffer like this.”

As snot began dripping down my nose I got up to grab a tissue. It was then that I remembered suddenly a life coaching podcast my sister-in-law and mother-in-law had both recommended. “We think you’ll really like it,” they’d said. I think it was part intervention attempt and honestly, part loving concern.

I remember thinking, what’s life coaching? Sounds fluffy…. But since I was open and had officially just told the Universe I would go where it led, and this one popped into my mind so soon after the prayer-thing I’d uttered, I went ahead and looked it up.

“Be Bold” was the name of this thing, and the blonde who ran it looked just too happy. The thing is, when you’re depressed, peppy happiness can be a real turnoff. It’s strange, but it’s almost too big of a jump up the emotional scale or whatever. Nevertheless, there was a bit of laundry to fold and boxes to pack, what excuse did I have? So I looked up an episode about how your thoughts create your feelings or something, and pressed play.

To my surprise, this made really clear sense. Not only did it make sense, but these tools handed my power back to me. Had I really not noticed how my own thinking was playing a role? No, I apparently didn’t have the skill of hearing my own thoughts much.

As I listened, suddenly my own thoughts about my children, and the way those thoughts invoked really. heavy, negative emotions in me was apparent to me. I was making connections: when I think the thought, “My kids are literally a threat to my survival”, (a regular thought for my overwhelmed self). I feel anxious and trapped.

When the sensations of anxiousness and ‘trapped’ are in my body, I am a whole different person. And it is so hard to survive. Like, survival feels like a threat.

OH. MY. GOODNESS. Thoughts create feelings!!! Feelings are what I’m struggling with right now! They are literally my problem! This is my way out.

I became a life coach six months later with The Life Coach School. Deep in my heart, this was part of healing me, and it was also keeping my promise I’d made to the Universe: I will help other moms.

The resilience isn’t in applying the tools, it’s the moment I took healing into my own hands. The moment I stopped complaining about how the system was failing me, and started to look outside of it, trusting I could find something equal to or better.

I’m in love with helping the moms to this day.

I was enthralled with the coach school’s tools, but after bringing them home and testing them on clients, and as I continued my own healing from birth trauma in therapy. I knew I needed heavier-duty tools for the moms. I didn’t want to go to school to be a therapist and delay my work in the world for moms, but I wanted to see more of a full picture, nervous system and body–not just mind.

I started reading books, hiring more people to learn from and eventually landed on a Trauma-Informed Certification for Life Coaches, run by both a coach and a therapist with more than a decade of experience working with humans with trauma.

This breathed life, confidence and momentum into my work. My conscience knew I was the real deal: I’d had the experience and received the training.

Hour by hour in my little office upstairs, between homeschooling kids, feeding a baby and actually being present with my house and motherhood, I served clients. I coached for about 1,200 hours over four or so years, joined an expensive-as-hell mastermind for coaches and went all in on my promise. Serving postpartum moms.

I ended up needing to provide for my family full-time during the pandemic while my husband was unexpectedly and temporarily ‘retired’ like many people were during 2020. This meant I had to quadruple my income to pay our family’s monthly basics, and I did.

I didn’t do it alone of course, many women in my online coaching community and my fellow certified coaches at The Life Coach School met with me the week we could see that my husband would soon be laid off. They met with me on Sunday evenings, and I prayed some more to the Universe real ardently, pulling in all the blessings I’d ever asked for that hadn’t come yet, to come in the form of income for my family during this unprecedented time.

As a postpartum coach for women, I don’t want to take people’s suffering away. I think emotional pain, such as anxiety and depression, is a signal our body gives when it wants us to nurture ourselves. It plays an important role in self-awakening and who am I to take that? But I do want women to have the spiritual context for the lows and hardships they experience postpartum. I do want them to know that if they’re willing to lose who they thought they were, and love themselves even in what they perceive to be weakness or a mental health challenge, that their True Self is waiting on the other side of their symptoms. And that through what people call ‘postpartum depression’ or ‘maternal mental health’ problems, there can actually be a portal to healing within the psyche and body. There is a chance for real self-connection and self-actualization, if you are willing to listen for it and follow it. You can find it, you can experience this.

Ultimately, if I could choose my legacy, it would be to lift the idea that depression and anxiety are ‘mental’ health problems that have to do with brain chemicals, and to replace it with the idea that these symptoms are signals that speak of a pain within the nervous system, psyche and soul. I want people to view these symptoms from a holistic lens so that these difficult experiences that end up opening people to their true selves and so that ultimately our collective consciousness can rise, resulting in more peace, more unity and more love than our planet has known.

However, if my mental health challenges taught me anything, it’s that surrendering my path to the Universe always makes my journey ten times better than I could ever desire or imagine for myself. So my ultimate desire is for whatever the Universe sees fit to be my legacy. :)

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I promised the Universe that if I could just find some sort of path to healing from my postpartum depression and anxiety, then I would help other moms in theirs.

The problem was, I am a woman with a witch wound. As I got into my work as a postpartum life coach helping dozens on other moms who were coming to work with my via my podcast, The Postpartum Coach Podcast, I could see that the way I solved the ‘problem’ of postpartum depression and anxiety was not conventional. It was not mainstream. It was not clinically approved. And yet, it was working, and often it was working when clinical drugs, specialists and therapists were unable to help these mammas.

There was a deep fear in me that I would be in competition with The Man – the mainstream medical, run by medical schools and medical doctors, with their sterile and singular approaches to mental health. I thought of the way that, during the Burning Times where women and men—but mostly women, and mostly women healers—were burned, drowned and stripped of their basic safety, lands and livelihoods just because people feared their abilities. At one point their knowledgeable and intuitive domain over life and death, over natural methods of contraception and birth, were seen as a direct threat to the developing mainstream medical system.

And so, for those and other reasons, they were not able to practice.

This might seem like ancient history, but those were my ancestors. And as a spiritually connected woman, I felt that fear tied all the way back to that Witch Wound. That persecution by the ego-driven medical system of the heart-centered, spiritual and intuitive medical healers, which I considered myself to be.

So, I actually forsook my calling as The Postpartum Coach for about nine months, and decided I was going to coach coaches on business. How I thought this made sense, I do not know. I was brand new in business. But, I figured I could coach people’s thoughts and help them get into their best decision-making skills, so what I knew of business didn’t matter as much.

Really, this was my fear, but I couldn’t see it at the time.

See, in the postpartum mental health niche, I was so afraid of the fact that my blossoming (and effective) spiritual, energetic and perceptive gifts and way of helping my clients would maybe be reported, or fought against. I remember literally having a fear of a male figure in a white coat; that he would see my instagram posts talking about how going inward and descending to the heart can heal your mental health issues …. I was convinced, in my most fear-filled moments, that some white-coated doctor would report me.

To who? I don’t know.

I’d get sued.

For what? I didn’t know.

That’s the thing though, fear stays just vague enough to not have to be accountable to the light of reason. But nevertheless, it did its job and I was so scared that I switched into a new niche and told myself it was preferable to me.

This worked until the fall of 2019, when I was preparing to give a speech in front of a few hundred coaches, founders and faculty at The Life Coach School’s annual Mastermind conference. It was an honor to be chosen to speak; many coaches had submitted applications and I was one of just a few that were chosen.

As I began to work with a public speaking coach and honing my story for this speech in a weekly public speaking group, I realized that it was all about this moment on the couch back in depressive February of 2018, when I’d been in the depths of postpartum mental health crisis. That moment was still, to this day, despite doing business coaching, the moment I felt the most alive, and the most clear on what my life’s calling was.

The story wrote itself. I delivered it flawlessly (it’s still on youtube to this day, the link is here: https://youtu.be/U2ryMVDoFI4?si=HWH6nJxJVJTxozwT )

One of the most successful and well-known alumni of The Life Coach School, and also a mentor for newer coaches, Stacey Boehman, private messaged me on Facebook messenger after that speech.

“Lizzie, I felt something. I was moved to tears. You don’t need to be coaching coaches. You need to be coaching moms. This is your calling. It’s your ‘blue ocean’ (meaning a less saturated market than business coaching)…. Think about it.”

I didn’t have to think about it. I told her I was scared, but I’d do it.

Just a couple weeks later I signed three clients, all who had been at that speech and were moved by my postpartum story. All were coaches, and all were postpartum moms. Since then, I’ve helped over one hundred women and mothers impacted by racing thoughts, bouts of depressiveness, panic attacks, and just general unsettledness and not feeling normal after having baby. Days, months or years after, the time frame doesn’t matter as much as one’s readiness to surrender to her highest consciousness and go inward for healing.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.lizzielangston.com
• Instagram: @lizzie.postpartumcoach
• link: https://www.instagram.com/lizzie.postpartumcoach/?hl=en
• Facebook: The Postpartum Coach , Lizzie Jensen Langston
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LizzieLangston
• Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-postpartum-coach-podcast/id1457877033 on all platforms