A photo of yellow and pink rose, representing the changes of pregnancy and postpartum

PERINATAL MENTAL HEALTH

Birth Trauma/Difficult Birth Experiences:

Unfortunately sometimes births do not go as planned. Maybe you had wanted a home birth but ended up needing to give birth in the hospital. Or maybe you had a medical condition arise like pre-eclampsia or HELLP syndrome. Or maybe there was fear for your health or the health of your baby during the birth process.  

Even if you and baby are perfectly healthy now, these scary or traumatic experiences can stick around. You might think about the birth more than you are wanting to. After all, you’re just wanting to focus on bonding and carrying for your baby. Your birth experiences might make it difficult to think about getting pregnant again, when you’ve always planned on having more children. You feel ready to move on but it seems like your mind and body won’t let you. 

I work with parents to process their difficult birth experiences using Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing therapy (EMDR).  This technique helps process the difficult birth in a way that does not require telling your story in great detail, although you’re always welcome to tell your story. After processing a difficult birth, many people feel calmer in their bodies, spend less time thinking about what happened, and feel more present in their day to day lives.

You don’t have to define your birth as “traumatic” to benefit from support. 

If your birth was scary or difficult, no matter what that looked like, I’m here to help.

Perinatal Anxiety and OCD:

Maybe you’re someone who’s always run anxious but then it’s gotten worse with pregnancy or after a baby arrives. Instead of experiencing anxiety sometimes, now it feels like most of the time. Or perhaps getting pregnant or having a baby may have brought on anxiety and fears that you’ve never experienced before. Your old ways of coping aren’t working like they normally do.

You might be experiencing:

  • Anxiety keeping you up at night, even when baby is sleeping

  • Reading every parenting book and feeling overwhelmed with choosing the “best” or “perfect” way to parent

  • Scary or odd thoughts about bad things happening to those around you

  • Spending hours googling to try to feel less anxious, but you find it never really helps

For perinatal OCD, I often offer Inference Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (I CBT) to reduce distress. I CBT is a collaborative, gentle approach to deconstructing OCD, explore why it’s shows up the way it does, and gain awareness and agency for when OCD is trying to run the show. If you’re not sure if you are experiencing OCD or more general perinatal anxiety, I’m happy to sift through that together.

The good news is that therapy can help.

We’ll work together to develop a plan to address your anxiety or perinatal OCD,.

  • Whether your difficult birth was a month ago or years ago, I’m happy to help.

  • You can learn more about my approach to EMDR here.

  • Nope! This can be part of our work together. I am able to assess to see if you meet the criteria for an OCD diagnosis.

    Knowing if your intrusive thoughts and anxieties fits into OCD patterns can be a helpful to guide our work together. Many modalities for general anxiety or panic do not work well for OCD. If you do have OCD, you will likely benefit more from using approaches that were designed for OCD in particular like I CBT.

 

I’m here to help. Let's work together to determine what the best course of action is for you. Let me become a part of your support network.

I enjoy supporting all families on their pregnancy and postpartum journeys including those in the LGBTQIA+ community.

Do you think you could use some support during pregnancy or postpartum? Contact me for a free 20 minute consultation.