Therapy for Parents-to-Be 

The loss of a pregnancy or infant can be one of the most emotionally devastating events a person can experience. It may feel like no body really understands- not even your partner really understands, because they're grieving in their own way. Though well-meaning, your friends and family may not know how to comfort you or to help you express your grief.

Whether your loss occurred early or late in your pregnancy, or during/after birth, your feelings are real and valid. Those feelings need to be expressed. In therapy, you are welcomed to share their story, process your feelings and work through your grief.

Therapy can also help you manage the complicated feelings that occur while navigating trying to conceive or subsequent pregnancies after loss. Though your feelings of sadness, despair, guilt, anger and disbelief can feel isolating, you don't have to hold them alone.

Despite that it's rarely talked about, being pregnant frequently brings up complicated feelings. Your body is changing, your hormones are shifting and you are preparing to take on new responsibilities as a parent. Alongside the joy and excitement, many women also experience a huge range of thoughts and emotions, including depression or anxiety, fear of labor, or ambiguity around parenthood or pregnancy.

Pregnancy can also bring up old memories or feelings from your past. A high risk or unplanned pregnancy, or experiencing significant physical discomfort can also be a risk factor for developing mental health symptoms.

Counseling can help you increase your ability to tolerate uncomfortable emotions, bring soothing to your distress, and allow you to enter motherhood with a greater senses of groundedness and calm. Getting help for these issues before baby arrives can often reduce the chance of problems in the postpartum period.

You want to be a parent. You assumed conceiving and having a baby would be easy (after all, why would you have taken precautions for so many years beforehand if it wasn't?) But you've now been trying to conceive for longer than you anticipated. Your anxiety and fears are mounting, and you worry your life dreams are slipping away.

It can be hard to figure out how to hold hopefulness for the future alongside your grief-- maybe you've had multiple miscarriages, or maybe you're grieving the joy you dreamed of for this period. The cycle of hope and disappointment from repeated fertility trials is wearing, and it can feel hard to shake the feelings of depression and uncertainty. You may wonder if you are to blame, or you may feel angry, powerless, or overwhelmed.

You might be a parent already, but secondary infertility has now left you confused. Perhaps you desperately want to open up to someone about what you’re going through, but you worry that no one in your life will understand. The emotional, physical, and financial burdens of infertility often take a toll on relationships and marriages. As a result, you may be feeling alone during a time when support and emotional care are especially important.

Counseling can help. Counseling gives you the chance to safely explore your feelings, reconnect with your own identity outside of your experiences with infertility and manage your stressors so that your struggles do not feel so overwhelming.

Building a family through adoption or foster care brings its own unique set of issues. It can feel like an emotional roller coaster as you wait for your child, or navigate the various bureaucratic systems that are suddenly intimately involved in your family. Often the adoption and foster parenting journey brings numerous losses along the way, and it is important to work through the effects these losses may have on you, your marriage, and your family. Understanding your expectations of adoption or foster parenting and unpacking what it means to grow a family through non-traditional means will aid you during the process and prepare you for any challenges that arise as you parent.

Pre-adoption and foster parent counseling can also help you to prepare to meet your future child's emotional needs and to understand the complicated feelings and issues that adopted and foster children face. For your child, adoption or foster placement has stemmed from a loss or trauma. Pre-adoption or foster parenting therapy allows you an unbiased, nonjudgmental space to tackle these potentially heavy topics. It can also be helpful to understand how your own history may impact your parenting. By addressing unhealed memories, grief, and loss, you can enter parenthood with a greater capacity to meet the needs of your children.