It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

When you were pregnant, what did you imagine about the postpartum time? Blissfully staring into your baby’s eyes? Snuggling in the rocker? All the cute baby outfits?

What about rage, resentment, or hypervigilance? How about mom guilt? The grief for your previous life? What about loneliness and disconnection from your friends, family, partner?

The postpartum period is a incredibly huge life transition, especially (but not only) after the birth of your first child. Your entire life is reconfiguring around this little being who couldn’t care less if you eat, sleep, or shower let alone if you have a social life or a sex life. Society has so many ways of telling us we are doing it wrong and setting unrealistically high and unachievable standards of new motherhood. On top of it all, you don’t even know who you are anymore; your body is different, your hormones are wacky, and your daily routine has completely changed. If you had a good self-care routine before your baby, I’m betting its been pretty challenging to keep it up lately. Mix in marital stress and family expectations and you have a perfect storm for postpartum anxiety, postpartum depression, and other postpartum mood disorders.

Not all of this may apply to you, but some of it might. And you might have other complicating factors based on your own intersectional identity and life context.

I get it. I’ve been through this. I’ve been through the postpartum OCD and postpartum anxiety. I’ve experienced the grief, the rage, the family and marital conflict, and the impossible standards of modern motherhood. I’ve learned a thing or two, and I can help you.

How counselling can help

First, you can bring your babe-in-arms if you need to. Or, if it’s better for you not to and you have access to trusted care, that’s great too. My virtual appointments may work well for you during your baby’s naptimes or if you don’t have access to reliable trusted childcare. Toddlers and preschoolers are better left with a trusted caregiver.

I’m not just going to tell you to sleep and eat, but we will go over these basics to see if there is any way we can help you with those. These are the fundamental building blocks of your mental and physical health, and without them as a solid foundation we can’t strengthen the rest.

We can wade through the complexity of feelings you are experiencing. This may include the obvious ones like joy, love, exhaustion, and fear and the ones that are sometimes more difficult to talk about like resentment, regret, and rage.

We can take a look at patterns in your family-of-origin and your emerging family-of-creation and decide which legacies you want to bring into the future and which ones you want to leave in the past. We can look at any history of trauma or abuse and understand how they might show up for you as a parent.

We can work to uncover your core self who can parent with compassion, curiosity, clarity, creativity, calm, confidence, courage, and connectedness.

We can update your support network, coping strategies, and self-care plan for the new reality you are living in. We can build self-compassion practices so that you can hold your self as tenderly as you hold your baby.

I do all this with a combination of Bowen Family Systems therapy, Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS), Acceptance and Commitment therapy (ACT), mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (similar to CBT), somatic therapy, and narrative therapy.

I’m here to walk through this postpartum period with you. Please reach out, or book an appointment.