Maternal Mental Health Therapy in California
When becoming a mom changes everything - including who you thought you were.
What You’re Going Through
You expected motherhood to be a hard adjustment. But you didn’t expect to feel like a stranger in your own life.
Maybe you're drowning in the mental load. Did you remember what the pediatrician said about that rash? The lactation consultant's call? Switch the laundry? All the invisible stuff no one else notices.
You're mourning your old life—the spontaneity, freedom, career momentum, and relationships you used to enjoy. Or maybe you’re struggling with how different this feels from what you imagined.
Isolated instead of connected. Anxious instead of confident.
The hardest part? You don't recognize yourself. You used to make confident decisions —now you second-guess everything. You felt competent at work—now you're lost at home. Will you ever feel like "you" again?
Then there's the guilt. Brutal, relentless guilt for having these feelings when you "should" be grateful. For wanting space when you're supposed to cherish every moment. For feeling lost when everyone says you've "found your purpose."
None of this makes sense. But it's completely normal.
This isn't about not loving your baby. It's about grieving one life while building another—and needing support to do both with compassion.
How Therapy Helps
Maternal mental health therapy creates space to honor both your love for your child and your grief for who you used to be and how life was. We work together to understand that these feelings can coexist—and that feeling them doesn't make you selfish.
What does it even mean to be "you" when you're responsible for keeping someone else alive? Through therapy, you learn to tell the difference between what everyone else expects from moms and what actually fits for you. We work on setting boundaries around the mental load, communicating your needs, and nurturing the parts of yourself that existed before "mom" became your primary identity.
We'll use approaches like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to help you reconnect with your values and honor them within your new reality. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) techniques help you challenge those "should" thoughts that keep you stuck in guilt and perfectionism. And mindfulness techniques help you stay present with your real-life reality instead of getting caught up in expectations about what motherhood is supposed to look like.
Pro tip: These skills become very handy when we hit those toddler tantrum years.
If there's trauma from your birth experience, postpartum complications, or the shock of how dramatically your life shifted, we can work through that using trauma-informed approaches to help you actually breathe again instead of just surviving.
This work is about integration—not choosing between being a good mother and being yourself, but finding a way to be both.
What Gets Better
You start to see that loving your child and missing your old life aren't contradictory. They're both true—we can have space for both.
You learn to advocate for your needs without guilt—asking for help, taking breaks, and maintaining friendships that matter to you.
You unsubscribe from the "perfect mom" myth and start figuring out what kind of mom you actually want to be. You find ways to share the mental load instead of carrying it all alone.
You begin to recognize this new version of yourself—not as broken or diminished, but as someone who's expanded to hold more complexity and strength than you knew you had.
Let's be real, the overwhelm doesn't disappear, but it becomes manageable. The identity crisis becomes an identity evolution. You start to trust that you can be a good mother and still be fully yourself.
You're not broken. You're transforming.
