Postpartum Anxiety Therapy in Miami
You are postpartum and may be here because…
You are consumed with worry since having your child
You often feel something bad could happen to your baby, your partner, yourself, or your other children
Your chest can feel tight and heavy
You are overwhelmed, nervous, panicky, and on edge often
You have upsetting thoughts about harm coming to your baby or hurting your baby that frighten you
You are having anxiety attacks (they may have started during pregnancy)
Making decisions about how to feed your baby (formula-feeding, breastfeeding) is causing you a lot of stress
You aren’t sleeping well
However you arrived, you are in the right place, this is exactly what we help people with every day.
Keep reading to see how our postpartum anxiety services can help.
Having a new baby can be wonderful AND overwhelming.
We help you put that constant feeling of possible danger in its place so you can enjoy this phase of your life.
How postpartum anxiety can show up…
It’s nighttime and your baby is sleeping. Your mind reminds you of SIDS risk. The postpartum anxiety convinces you to just quickly check on your baby and make sure your baby is breathing right now. You check your baby, you get reassurance that your baby is breathing. You get back into bed but you are still awake. After a short while, the postpartum anxiety convinces you it’s no big deal to just quickly check your baby again. This pattern continues and you find yourself checking more and more. You can’t get restful sleep. The morning arrives and you are exhausted.
The postpartum anxiety constantly reminds you of the unknowns of life. The postpartum anxiety tells you that you don’t know with 100% certainty what happens with your baby when you are not in the room or physically nearby your baby. The postpartum anxiety repeatedly tells you how anything could happen when you’re not there… your baby could suddenly be in serious danger or something dangerous could happen and you may not even know it has happened. Even if you trust your partner, the postpartum anxiety tells keeps telling you anything could happen. The postpartum anxiety works hard to convince you that you shouldn’t leave the baby alone with anyone else, even trusted adults. You just don’t know what could happen if you’re not there, it says.
If any of this resonates with you…
Please know that postpartum anxiety does a good job of getting in the way of enjoying time with your baby and being able to relax, which is crucial during this stressful, transitional time of getting to know your baby and yourself as a mother. It’s not you! It’s the postpartum anxiety. At Natal Counseling, we help you stop postpartum anxiety from getting in the way of living your most fulfilling life as a parent to your new baby.
You can’t get a break from the worry.
Some increase in worry is normal when adjusting to having a new baby and being a parent. When this worry hangs around more often than not and just won’t stop, not even during the night when you’re trying to relax and sleep, it may be a sign of postpartum anxiety. The fears are typically about keeping your baby safe and healthy.
Why Postpartum Anxiety is Common After Having A Baby
As an emotion, anxiety actually tries quite hard to help us. It tries to alert us to threat to keep us safe. By making us feel anxious, it is trying to tell us that there is something threatening that needs our attention so we can stay safe and alive. A new baby is fragile and you are responsible for this little human who is so dependent on you. Threat could be lurking anywhere when we have that level of responsibility. It’s a recipe for anxiety. Postpartum anxiety is trying to keep our baby, our loved ones, and ourselves safe.
Postpartum anxiety can become a problem when our minds think there is more danger present than there actually is. Without our permission, our minds overestimate the amount of danger or even entirely make up a threat and make us anxious! This tends to happen more and more when we are stressed, like when we are learning to take care of a new baby and figure out this parenting thing.
At Natal Counseling, we help you…
figure out how much overestimation is happening,
process the scary emotions that come with these potential dangers that the postpartum anxiety is telling you to worry about,
and come up with a comprehensive plan to postpartum anxiety and danger
so you can get back to living a life you enjoy and soaking up more happy moments with your new family member.
Types of Postpartum Anxiety Disorders
Postpartum Separation Anxiety
It is normal to feel anxious about separation from your child, especially during big transitions like returning to work while your child is taken care of by someone else. When separation anxiety starts interfering with your life on a daily basis and begins to impact your overall health, it can become a postpartum anxiety disorder.
Postpartum Panic Disorder
During panic attack episodes, intense anxiety is accompanied by body symptoms like rapid breathing, shortness of breath, dizziness, chest pain, and some numbness in your fingers and toes. Postpartum panic attacks can be brought on by anything, including fear that your baby could die or that you are losing control as you adjust to life with this new baby.
Postpartum OCD
Postpartum OCD is an often misunderstood and misdiagnosed perinatal mood disorder. Symptoms include unwanted thoughts about or images of harm coming to your baby that seem to come out of nowhere. These postpartum intrusive thoughts cause a lot of distress, can be horrifying to experience, and the person experiencing them just wants them to go away.
The postpartum intrusive thoughts can convince you that you should do certain things (like hide your knives from yourself so you don’t ever end up using one near your baby or check that the stove is off many times so your baby can’t end up in an accidental house fire) to make the postpartum intrusive thoughts go away.
Moms experiencing postpartum intrusive thoughts are often scared to tell anyone they are experiencing them for fear of their child being taken away from them or being deemed an “unfit” mother somehow. This can often get in the way of seeking treatment.
Please know, the best available science supports that moms and parents with postpartum OCD are quite unlikely to ever act on these thoughts.
To learn more, check out our blog post on managing postpartum intrusive thoughts.
What About Postpartum Depression?
People experiencing postpartum anxiety may also be experiencing postpartum depression. Everyone experiencing postpartum anxiety does not experience postpartum depression.
Check out our postpartum depression services to learn more.
No matter what type of postpartum anxiety you are experiencing, please know that POSTPARTUM ANXIETY IS TREATABLE.
Together, we can absolutely reduce the impacts the postpartum anxiety is having on your life.
READY FOR MORE? Schedule a free 20-minute consultation to get started today. We offer same-day consultations so your journey to healing from postpartum anxiety can start today.
We are ready when you are.
Book a complimentary 20-minute consultation to see if we are the therapist for you.