Can Therapy for Overwhelmed Moms Help? What is mom therapy?
If you are a mother, you know what it feels like to be overwhelmed. It isn’t always crying (or hiding) on the kitchen floor while the kids run around the living room.
Sometimes it’s smaller things, like snapping over something tiny and then feeling horrible about it for the rest of the day.
Spending too much time thinking about the schedule, when the reality is you can’t make everything happen on your own, but you have to. So everyone is late, and you spend all day with your heart racing.
It’s feeling touched out and needing quiet, but never being able to get it, and feeling guilty about those needs.
It’s feeling like you go from morning to night taking care of everyone else but not having time for yourself or what you need.
Feeling like it’s all impossible no matter what stage you're in postpartum or teen, but doing it all anyway. No matter how you try, you always feel like it isn’t enough, and you don’t know how to be enough for the little one or ones in your care (even if they aren’t little anymore).
The pressures of being an overwhelmed mom
As a mom, it feels like you can never do enough. Add any trauma, anxiety, depression, or extra needs, and it feels almost impossible to keep up with all the things that are supposed to happen every week.
The guilt that comes with feeling like you are never doing enough is with you no matter what decision you make.
Whether it’s deciding whether or not you’re breastfeeding, or whether or not you should go back to work.
Every decision feels like it comes with guilt: do you prioritize providing financially or connection with your child? Either way, you aren’t able to do everything, and this culture tells women they should be able to do it all completely on their own or at least just with the help of their spouse.
Social media contributes to these feelings.
You go on and see moms who seem to have it all and seem to be doing it all.
Their kids appear to be perfect little angels who listen on the first time. Their houses are spotless, and they cook healthy home-cooked meals for their kids every night.
And somehow have the time to make money and do everything else.
The reasonable side of your brain knows that all of it is fake. That there is a mess behind the camera, even if it’s emotional and not physical.
But it’s hard for the comparison voice in your head to remember it’s not real. And those images add to the critical monologue you might have running all the time through your mind.
On top of all that, the expectations aren’t just in your head.
Society has some pretty high expectations of women and can be pretty critical when they don’t meet those expectations.
In the Good Housekeeping Great Expectations Study, the researcher proved that women are judged far more harshly for a messy room or house than the men who live in those houses or rooms.
Even if the room belongs to a single man, a single woman is judged much more harshly.
These high expectations extend way past housekeeping and into every other aspect of your life as a mom.
The majority of parenting expectations and blame for children’s behavior, either good or bad, rests on the mother’s parenting, and very rarely is the father blamed. This emotional labor is a heavy burden no matter how much you love your family.
The expectation for a woman to both contribute to her family's income and also be home, present, and available for their child when needed is also high and also unreachable for most women.
Mothers are also expected to put effort into their bodies and appearance, but in a way that it doesn’t get in the way of all of their other responsibilities. And last but not least, they bear the burden of their relationship with the other parent.
The ironic part of all of this is that the weight of all these expectations weighs on your relationships. The relationships with both your kids, your spouse, family, and friends. It particularly puts relationship stress on the relationship between you and your partner.
What moms really need
Often when our culture talks about what women need, they’re really talking about more things for women to do. Take a bath, meditate, do yoga, go to the gym. All of the self-care stuff.
But for many of the women who seek therapy for overwhelmed moms, the last thing they need is more to do.
They actually need more support.
What does support actually mean? You see this everywhere without much of an explanation, and there are a few pieces to helping provide mothers with more support.
Community-
We often talk about community support, but what I’m talking about here is that moms need community.
They need other moms who are in the same parenting stage that they are in.
Moms they can text at 3 in the morning when their baby won’t latch. Moms who might also be up, but at the very least will understand how they are feeling.
This type of community provides validation that what they are feeling and experiencing is normal. In this post-COVID era, it is harder and harder to find this support in real life.
Support-
Whether it’s support from family, friends, or paid/government help, moms need more than just a you’re doing a good job, or more systems.
They need actual support.
This means someone doing the dishes for you, cooking dinner, or providing backup when they need it.
This needs to be available for all moms, but it’s most important for moms who have no family, single parents, and can’t afford to hire help. It also needs to come without judgment.
Identity outside of motherhood-
Women need the ability to continue engaging in their interests and life outside of being a mom.
This might look like their partner taking a shift without complaint so the mom can do something they love. Or someone bringing the child down to breastfeed while they are in the middle of a competition or a game.
Identity shifts after becoming a mom can contribute to isolation.
This support is important because moms who feel like they are more than just a mom are less resentful of parenting duties and carry less stress even when parenting is hard.
Self-compassion-
With all of the expectations and critical energy aimed at women and mothers, it can be very hard to give yourself some grace when things don’t go the way you think they should.
But this is the biggest hurdle and one of the easiest ways to help an overwhelmed mother feel like herself again.
Encourage her or yourself to give yourself credit for everything you do, even if it isn’t done well, because I guarantee you are doing more than you give yourself credit for.
These are all things that most mothers need more of, and we don’t get a lot of in this day and age, parenting in a bubble.
How having a neurodivergent child contributes to overwhelm
Parenting is a lot. When you have a child whose nervous system is constantly overwhelmed and running on overdrive, it’s a whole different level of a lot. One that the parenting advice out there was never made for.
Everything takes more time and more patience.
You learn to read your child’s nervous system, watching for signs that the situation is becoming too much.
Trying to keep your nervous system regulated in the face of an impending explosion.
In many ways, your world revolves around helping your child have a good day and helping when things get bad.
You are co-regulating another person on top of parenting twenty-four hours a day.
On top of that come the calls in the middle of the day, the evaluations, therapies, school meetings. You are constantly advocating and putting out fires. Learning systems that you’d never thought you’d have to navigate.
This is all invisible labor. It can be even harder when your child only lets themselves really let go when they are with you.
On top of that, few people understand your child, and without a support network, being a parent becomes even more overwhelming.
The overwhelm you’re experiencing isn’t just in your mind, it’s a response to a heavier load with less support and understanding from others.
How being a neurodivergent mom makes a difference
Being a neurodivergent mom adds an invisible layer. The sensory experience of being a parent, constant unpredictability, being at the whims of other people's schedules and needs. All of this can push you into dysregulation.
The extra executive functioning mental load that comes with parenting is a lot harder to manage when you are also managing other nervous systems, schedules, and appointments.
Parenting is often when the mask starts to slip.
All of this adds up to burnout where your nervous system is exhausted and shutting down.
Leaving you unable to access the skills you used to rely on. Making every single day that much harder to get through.
Does therapy help overwhelmed moms, and how?
One question I often get is, can therapy actually help? While it can’t add hours to your day or make appointments for you, or fix the broader culture. It also can’t change who your child is.
But it can change your mindset, your priorities, and your stress level around all of it, and that actually makes a difference.
Therapy will help you understand your child more and know how to help them. It gives you skills to help you with emotion regulation, learn to set boundaries, and help with communication including learning to stop overexplaining.
A well-regulated mom helps you to be the mom that you want to be instead of getting overwhelmed.
Therapy gives you perspective and helps you step out of survival mode at least for one hour a week.
How trauma can contribute to overwhelm, and how trauma therapy can help
Sometimes the overwhelm isn’t just about what’s going on in the moment. Becoming a parent brings up all of the things from your past, both big and little, which can contribute to your overwhelm and damage your mental health.
When that is part of what’s going on, coping skills and mindset shifts can only do so much.
Trauma therapy, like both ART and Brainspotting, works differently. Instead of just managing the symptoms of overwhelm, it helps you process exactly what’s underneath it. It is available both as online therapy and in-person in Roseville, California.
It helps the trigger no longer feel like a trigger.
You don’t have to carry all of this alone or keep pushing through. If you are anywhere in California, reach out, and I can help you get to a better place. Together, let’s figure out what kind of support will help. Both support groups and individual therapy are available.
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