'I feel guilty for feeling like that'
One fifth of breastfeeding women report an aversion response.
The benefits of breastfeeding are widely recognised, and many women find it an enjoyable and bonding experience. Women also often face challenges that can make it difficult to breastfeed, such as sore nipples or mastitis.
Women sometimes also experience more complex breastfeeding challenges, such as a breastfeeding aversion response – negative feelings that last throughout the feeding session and conflict with the woman’s desire to breastfeed.
Women describe these feelings as overwhelming, uncontrollable and confusing. For some mothers it can be visceral, like “fingernails down a chalkboard”. One woman described it as “intense”:
“…it was both a mental and physical feeling like you want to throw your child off. You just can’t feel this feeling like you’ve got something crawling underneath your entire skin, that’s why this felt like you wanted to rip your skin off and just, you know, escape it.”
Such descriptions make it clear breastfeeding aversion response is different from breastfeeding pain and dysphoric milk ejection reflex, which are both negative breastfeeding sensations that typically happen only during the first few minutes of the feeding session and then stop.
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