My Approach
Becoming Mother is a psychotherapy service designed especially for you, as you navigate the incredible journey of matrescence. This is the deep psychological transformation you experience from pregnancy up to about two years after your baby is born, as you step into your new identity as a mother.
I'm here to support you through this unique time. I offer psychodynamic therapy in structured yet manageable blocks of either 6 or 12 sessions. This approach provides a clear path to help you explore and understand the emotional shifts and challenges that come with becoming and being a mother.
What is Matresence?
Becoming a mother is an incredible journey, often filled with immense joy and anticipation. Yet, beneath the excitement, it's also a time of intense emotional and psychological change. This transformative period, known as matrescence, can bring about deep shifts in your mind, body, and sense of self—a journey as significant as adolescence. It's a developmental passage where your inner world undergoes a profound reorganisation, often stirring up powerful feelings, anxieties, and echoes from your own past that you might not expect.
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It's important to know you're not alone if this transition feels overwhelming. Around 1 in 5 women experience perinatal mental health conditions like anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or post-traumatic stress disorder during pregnancy or after childbirth. These feelings are more common than you might think and can make you feel isolated, impacting your bond with your baby and affecting the dynamic with your family.
How Psychotherapy Can Help
The process of matrescence is a psychological and emotional reshaping, where your identity shifts and past experiences can resurface. A psychodynamic approach is uniquely suited to help you navigate this depth and complexity. It delves into the unconscious influences shaping your present, helping you explore how your own history and early relationships might be impacting your feelings and behaviour as a new mother.
This approach offers a powerful space to understand and integrate the often-conflicting emotions of motherhood, process difficult experiences, and cultivate an authentic sense of who you are now. By fostering a deeper understanding of your inner world, psychodynamic therapy can lead to lasting personal growth, increased emotional resilience, and stronger relationships, allowing you to flourish in this new chapter in your life.
Therapeutic Blocks
I offer psychotherapy in either 6-session or 12-session blocks. I understand the challenges new mothers face in committing to long-term engagements, and these blocks are specifically designed to offer a contained, manageable commitment without feeling overwhelming. This structured approach facilitates the development of a strong therapeutic relationship, enabling focussed exploration and fostering lasting change as you navigate the matrescence journey. As your block nears its conclusion, we will review our time together, and you will have the option to renew with an additional 6 or 12-session block to continue your therapeutic work if you so choose.
