Former “Dancing With the Stars” champion Shawn Johnson opened up about her experience with postpartum depression and the toll it took on her marriage.
Shawn Johnson on Postpartum
The Olympic gymnast and husband Andrew East sat down with therapist Sreela Roy-Greene for the Thursday, May 21, episode of the “Mind If We Talk?” podcast. Johnson, who shares three children with the former football star, revealed the severity of her experience with postpartum depression.
“We had a wonderful system in place. Andrew came up with these like non-negotiable things that I would have to do every day, as far as like getting sunlight. We’d have to watch a funny movie, and it was really, really sweet,” she recalled. “I had very typical challenges with both the first and second, as far as like figuring out new identity and trying to figure out the new rhythm of life, all of that.”
It wasn’t until her third child, son Barrett, that she “really understood postpartum depression.”
“Our third baby is the greatest blessing, and he’s amazing, but he was just so different than the other two,” Johnson explained. “He wasn’t eating. He wasn’t sleeping. He was a colicky baby. There were like so many things that I had never dealt with. And I didn’t realize as I was taking care of him that I was losing control of myself.”
She continued, “And I remember having like a really out-of-body experience. And I remember telling this to Andrew after I had gotten through it, but I said… I could feel myself drowning, but I didn’t know how to help or ask for help for myself because I knew it was my job to figure out how to help my baby first.”
Johnson went on to say that she felt misunderstood “the whole time.”
“By the time I could help our baby, I had lost control to where I didn’t even know how to work myself back to normal with where I was,” she added. “It caused so much tension between us because I didn’t know how to ask for help, and I didn’t even know what was wrong.”
“I don’t want to say it got bad, but we were disconnected, and I was cold, and I was distant. And I remember you sat me down and you said, ‘We’re going to go to therapy.'”
Shawn Johnson’s Loving Family
In addition to son Barrett, whom they lovingly call Bear, Johnson and East share daughter Drew, 6, and son Jett, 4.
The happy couple tied the knot in 2016 and have shared their lives on social media and through their podcast, “Couple Things.”
“It’s the greatest thing ever. People try to prepare you for it and they try to tell you all of the cheesy things, and you roll your eyes. Then you have a kid, and you’re like, ‘I totally understand.’ It’s absolute chaos,” she said during a 2022 interview with Morning Honey. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I don’t know if I am doing anything right but yet it’s the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my life. Way better than the Olympics!”
