Perinatal and Postpartum Therapy, available online for new and expecting mothers
Perinatal therapy supports you through pregnancy, birth, and the first years after, when mood and identity and the body are all in motion at once.
Specialized therapy for mothers and new parents
Perinatal and postpartum therapy covers anxiety and depression in pregnancy and postpartum, birth that did not go the way you were told it would, and the particular disorientation of becoming a parent when your own childhood did not give you much to work from.
Nobody warned you that you would grieve a version of yourself while loving your child completely. I see clients over secure video in California, Illinois, Texas, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland.
What perinatal mental health actually covers
The window runs from conception through roughly the first two years, and the term covers more than postpartum depression.
Anxiety is more common than low mood in this period and gets named less. Vigilance that will not stand down. Checking. A mind that generates detailed catastrophe while your body cannot rest even when the baby finally does.
Mood shifts that arrive without a reason you can point to, in a situation everyone around you is describing as the happiest time of your life.
Birth itself, when it was frightening or dismissive or physically traumatic. That is post-traumatic material and it responds to trauma treatment, which is not what most postpartum support offers.
And identity, which is the part I find people most relieved to put words to. Who you were professionally. Your body, which has done something enormous and is now being evaluated.
This is the work I am most often sought out for, and it is the least-discussed part of perinatal mental health. Your child reaches an age, and something arrives that is out of proportion to a toddler refusing a sock. Rage that frightens you. A flat distance you cannot explain. A pull to do exactly what was done to you, running alongside a vow that you never would.
Becoming a parent puts you in the room with your own early experience from the other side. For people who were parentified, neglected, or raised by someone whose moods ran the house, that is not a gentle experience, and it tends to arrive precisely when you have the fewest resources to meet it.
What helps is treating it as information rather than evidence against you. The reaction has a source, the source has an age, and parts-work can get to it without requiring you to be a finished person first. I will not tell you to break a cycle through willpower while you are sleeping in ninety-minute increments.
When your own childhood shows up in your parenting
How postpartum and perinatal therapy works over video
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We start with what can be used in the next week, inside a day you do not control. Guided imagery and brief somatic practices that fit the actual gaps.
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Brainspotting for birth trauma and for the early history that is surfacing. Parts-work for the reactions that frighten you. This phase moves when your sleep allows it to, and I will not push a timeline.
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ACT for the question of what kind of parent you want to be, separate from what you were taught and separate from what the internet is telling you this week.
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Video is close to essential for this work. You do not have to arrange childcare, pump on a schedule around a commute, or get anyone into a car seat. You can nurse during a session, and you can hold a sleeping baby through all fifty minutes, and neither of those costs us anything clinically. Sessions get interrupted. We pick the thread back up. I have had good sessions conducted largely in a whisper with a monitor light in the corner of the frame.
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I completed Phase 1 and 2 of Perinatal Mood Disorders: Components of Care through Postpartum Support International, which is the standard training in this field.
My work with very young children and their caregivers goes further than that. I completed PC-CARE Phase 1 and 2 at UC Davis in 2025, a parent-child intervention for caregivers of children roughly two and a half to five. From 2023 to 2025 I co-developed and facilitated the Expressive Arts 0–5 "Family Friday" programming at The Chrysalis, part of the Monarch School Project — two years of hands-on work with parents and babies and toddlers in the same room.
For the trauma side I hold Accredited Brainspotting Phase 1 and Integrative Somatic Parts-work Levels 1 and 2 through The Embody Lab. I also teach graduate students at Bastyr University in the Masters of Psychology and Naturopathic Doctor programs.
The thing I did not expect from two years of Family Fridays: how many parents apologized for their child behaving like a child. That told me more about what people are carrying into parenthood than any assessment has.
Questions parentified daughters ask before starting
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No. The perinatal window is a clinical convenience rather than a deadline, and a great deal of this surfaces at two, or four, or when a second child arrives. If your own childhood is showing up in your parenting, that work is available whenever you get to it.
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Yes, and many clients do. Nursing, holding, rocking, pausing to settle someone — all fine, and none of it reduces what we can do.
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My practice is individual therapy, so the work here is yours. I also offer parent coaching separately, using PC-CARE, for caregivers of children roughly two and a half to five, and we can talk in a consult about which one fits. Coaching is available nationwide. I do not take on parent coaching where there is an active court case or a high-conflict custody situation.
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Therapy is available in California, Illinois, Texas, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., over secure video. PC-CARE parent coaching is available nationwide. Three tiers — $160, $200, or $250 per session — and you choose what is sustainable. Out-of-network by design, superbills provided, Thrizer for reimbursement, and the first consultation is free.