Postpartum Therapy for Women in Tulsa
You can feel like you again, just a new version.
Your body might not feel like it’s your own. There are all kinds of fluids everywhere. You imagined the bond with your baby might be more automatic. You may be wondering, “Is this the rest of my life? Is this how I’m going to feel as a mom?”
You don’t have to or need to suffer for the rest of your motherhood.
You don’t need to muscle through those postpartum struggles you are having all alone. You are allowed to ask for help.
Whether it is a perinatal mental health diagnosis or the hormones of birth and postpartum, you may be feeling overwhelmed and nervous about the future for your child(ren), marriage, and yourself. Adjusting to motherhood (first baby or fourth baby, it doesn’t matter) can be difficult.
Common experiences my clients have are:
Crying more than you’d like. You may not even know why you’re crying.
Scary thoughts that you want to stop.
Sadness and grief about not being the ‘you’ before kids and the loss of freedom & spontaneity.
Making sense of what happened during and after your birth
Feeling alone in your experience of becoming a mom and worried about talking to anyone about how you feel.
You have this idea of what being a parent will look and feel like. There’s idealized versions of the perfect parent that you can make up in your head. You might watch social media and create an unrealistic narrative of others. Then you become a parent. The expectations vs. reality can beat you up. You might be judging yourself for not being good enough or live in fear that you made a wrong decision in a parenting situation.
There can be a day when you are confident and fully believe you are making the best decisions for yourself and your family.
Therapy can help you challenge those unhelpful beliefs about yourself and support you in creating new healthy beliefs and coping skills to be gentle to yourself.
Therapy sessions with me are relaxed yet to the point.
I follow your lead in what you need from our session each week. You may be coming to me with a situation from the past week where you lost your cool with your family and want to react better next time.
Heck, you might feel ready to discuss how much it bothers you that the way you were parented is coming up in your parenting.
You can also come with nothing prepared because I’ll have something in mind that relates to your goals that we set in the first session.
It’s my job as your therapist to always have these goals in mind so that we move toward progress.
You can reach your goals and become the mom you want to be.
In our sessions…
You have time to process what you need, which means talking through the situation, discussing different points of view, and discovering unhelpful thoughts about yourself that impact your communication. I will use the intervention that I think will best help you at the time. These interventions might be ways to calm your mind when you’re feeling anxious, different communication tools to use with your husband, or work through trauma that you’ve tried to forget for years.
We will practice new skills and figure out ways you can realistically use these skills in the next week that will help you experience change.
Overall, we talk about your daily life struggles in the context of the big goals that help you become the mom you want to be. Come with your hair unwashed for the fourth day in a row or on your lunch break at work. Our sessions are your hour each week to release the frustration and learn new ways to keep your cool. We can cuss, laugh, and cry.
You are allowed to prioritize yourself. When you prioritize your well-being, you might find that the people around you will follow suit. Prioritizing change within yourself can encourage positive changes in your family members.
It’s not the easiest work, but it is so rewarding when you think about the progress you have made in just a few months.
Imagine, for a moment, how different your days could be if you weren’t so hard on yourself…
You are gentle and kind to yourself, just like you teach your kids to be to themselves and others. You think back to the immediate postpartum days and weeks, and despite it being difficult, you are grateful for the lessons and experiences that helped you grow.
You feel comfortable in your body and at peace with your thoughts because they aren’t scaring you anymore.
Your relationship with your husband is lightyears from what it is right now. You can tell him that you’re feeling overwhelmed and communicate in a way that keeps the conversation open instead of attacking each other. Y’all are a powerhouse.
You are confident being a mom to your awesome kiddos. You feel good with the decisions you’re making in parenting. You have finally prioritized yourself.