Untangling the Narrative of Modern Motherhood
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Motherhood often introduces a relentless inner critic that measures your worth against impossible standards of perfection.
You are plagued by thoughts of"what-if" or scary, intrusive images at 2 AM, preventing you from sleeping. You have the constant messaging of “I should have” that haunts you from events that happened throughout the day with your child. You spiral into the worst-case scenarios, unsure what is real or not anymore.
In the stressful environment of Silicon Valley, you are trained to manage the mental load in a work environment, but the mental load of parenting can quickly spiral into a cycle of intrusive thoughts and self-doubt.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is an approach focused on identifying and rewiring the cognitive distortions that can impact our experience of motherhood. Instead of automatically staying with your default thought patterns, we work together to build a toolkit of practical strategies that allow you to challenge perfectionism and navigate the identity earthquake with clarity and confidence.
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We all have intrusive thoughts, but when those intrusive thoughts are mixed with pregnancy and postpartum they can feel a lot scarier and overwhelming. These automatic thoughts can amplify anxiety and lead us into all or nothing thinking about our parenting. These can become even worse when birth trauma and fears of around developmental milestones can increase those intrusive thoughts.
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Behaviors are the building blocks of our habits and routines. In motherhood, it can feel impossible to make big behavioral changes when you are overwhelmed caring for your baby, maintaining a household, navigating multiple children, and engaging in your career. The goals is to find small, manageable shifts in your daily routine rather than big major shifts to make it sustainable and leading towards actual change.
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Motherhood unearths so many ingrained believe and rules we did not know where there before. While using psychodynamic therapy to examine how our past influences our behavior, CBT works on reframing those rules in motherhood, personal, and professional life to reflect your actual reality rather than chasing an unrealistic belief.
During our sessions, you will have a toolkit of techniques to manage anxiety outside of sessions and prevent intrusive thoughts from being in control of your life. This approach supports you by:
Managing Intrusive Thoughts: Learning that these thoughts are meant to be protective instead of literal truths.
Dismantling Perfectionism: Addressing Silicon Valley's lifestyle centered on perfectionism and productivity by replacing "should" statements with flexible, compassionate goals.
Navigating the identity earthquake: Creating a structured mental framework to reconcile your professional identity with your maternal self without losing your sense of personhood.
Evidence-Based Anxiety Relief: Using proven techniques like cognitive reframing to lower the volume on the "What if?" loop that often accompanies any stage of motherhood.
Bridging the Mind-Body Connection: While we use Somatic Therapy to calm the body, CBT provides the structure for understanding the mental triggers that can lead to dysregulation.
Improving Dyadic Connection: By reducing your own mental noise and anxiety, you become more present and emotionally available to respond to your child’s needs with intention and build a healthy attachment.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a practical, goal-oriented form of therapy that focuses on the relationship between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. By identifying and reframing unhelpful "thought spirals"—such as catastrophic "what-if" thinking or intrusive postpartum thoughts—you can develop concrete skills to manage anxiety and change your emotional response to stress.
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Not at all. It is about realistic thinking. We aren't trying to ignore the challenges of motherhood. We are ensuring that your brain isn't exaggerating the threats or minimizing your ability to handle them.
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CBT is top-down approach focusing on changing your thoughts in order to change how you feel. Somatic Therapy is bottom-up approach, starting with regulating the body before addressing your thoughts. Most parents find the most relief when we use both to close the loop on stress.
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CBT is practical and goal-oriented. Many parents find that after just a few sessions, they have a "toolkit" of strategies to manage panic attacks, social anxiety, or the overwhelming "mental load" of parenthood.
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Yes. Guilt is often driven by "cognitive distortions", basically the unrealistic rules we've inherited or created for ourselves about motherhood. We exam those rules to see if they are actually serving you or your family. If not, we work to let them go and create new ones that align to your parenting values
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Absolutely. This is a primary focus of using CBT with mothers and especially postpartum moms struggling with postpartum anxiety. We use specialized tools to help you that intrusive thoughts are just meant to be reminders of how to protect your baby, not actual reality.
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A book can give you the what in a generic format, but a therapist gives you the how in the context of your specific life. In our sessions, we apply these tools to your specific Silicon Valley reality. How your specific job, your specific family, and your specific experience is impacted and the tools are tailored to match that unique experience.