Reflections on perinatal mental health and entering motherhood
I’ve known I wanted to be a mom for as long as I’ve been able to remember, and I’ve been preparing for this role my whole life. Growing up I spent countless hours helping care for my sister who is more than a decade my junior, and most of my work prior to becoming a therapist was spent in various childcare roles. In college, I majored in Developmental Psychology and minored in Child Development. I thought I was prepared in every way a person could be to become a mother. After all, I literally studied and trained for this.
But once I became a mom, I discovered that while I was prepared for the mothering part of motherhood – the part that involved caring for a baby – I was entirely unprepared for the way that becoming a mother would change me. It’s not that I wasn’t still myself at the core, but I wasn’t prepared for how my identity, my relationships, my work, my mind, my emotions, and how I related to time itself would shift.
Even with all of my training and experience as a therapist, I still was blindsided by how profoundly it felt like every part of myself was being rearranged. I felt overwhelmed and confused by the fact that I loved motherhood even more than I’d expected, and also I was struggling deeply with a range of much messier and more painful emotions and experiences than just love and joy. So I decided to pursue additional specialized training in perinatal mental health. I needed to understand my own experience better, and I wanted to learn more about how best to support other moms in this very particular and profound season of life.
Here are some things I think are important for new and expectant moms to know, based on both my personal and professional experience:
Symptoms of perinatal depression or anxiety can (and often do) begin in pregnancy. They can also arise anytime in the first year or two postpartum.
Postpartum depression isn’t the only perinatal mental health condition. Perinatal anxiety, OCD, and PTSD are also common, and postpartum psychosis can occur in rare instances.
Perinatal mental health conditions do not always present themselves in the neat and tidy diagnostic categories. And while symptoms often relate to and/or impact your relationship with your baby, every domain of your life can be impacted by becoming a mother, and symptoms can present in any domain of your life.
Whether or not you struggle with clinically significant symptoms of distress that interfere with your functioning, we can expect that this transition will challenge you in ways that you have never before experienced and that you may not have been prepared to expect.
It is critically important to understand and spread awareness about perinatal mental health conditions, and I don’t know any mother — diagnosis or not — who has found this transition to be comfortable and smooth. It is beautiful and rich with the most awesome love you’ll ever know. And it is also so hard.
Motherhood lives in the space of both/and, not either/or. It can be full of big emotions, and those emotions may often seem conflicted or opposing. The good feelings do not negate the painful ones, and the painful feelings do not erase the good ones.
Challenges during early motherhood do involve particular and common themes, and difficulties and diagnoses during this time can present differently depending on the individual. If you are unsure what’s going on for you, know that whether or not you meet criteria for a diagnosis, this is a time of tremendous upheaval and we all need support systems to navigate it.
If entering motherhood has rocked your world in ways you didn’t expect, I’m here to help provide you with evidence-based tools and support in this messy, marvelous journey that is motherhood.
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If you are struggling with sadness, numbness, worry, guilt, anxiety, shame, grief, loneliness, or any other unexpected or uncomfortable emotion, finding yourself distressed by your experience, or finding it difficult to function in important areas of your life, you don’t have to white knuckle it on your own. If you think you may have postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, postpartum OCD, or postpartum PTSD, seeking professional support is important.
If you’d like more information about my services, give me a call at 949-464-7684 or email me at annabelle@caaptherapy.com.
If you are in need of immediate support, call or text the Suicide & Crisis Line at 988 or the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline at 1-833-TLC-MAMA.
