Perinatal & Matrescence Counselling, Online

Intended Clients

• Pregnant women are processing emotional and identity preparation for motherhood.
• New mothers (first year postpartum) addressing adjustment, partnership strain, and self-loss.
• Mothers returning to work amid career-motherhood tensions.
• Multiparous mothers adapting to expanded family configurations.
• Partners experiencing marginalisation, overwhelm, or support uncertainty.
• Women reconciling birth experiences divergent from expectations.

Therapeutic Approach

Matrescence—the psychological transition to motherhood, as conceptualised by Dana Raphael and developed by Aurélie Athan—encompasses hormonal, relational, and identity transformations warranting witness and integration.

This practice contextualises these shifts within broader life domains: partnerships, careers, family-of-origin dynamics, evolving friendships, and embodiment changes. Pacing aligns with motherhood's realities, not prescriptive timelines.

Focus Areas

• Identity reconstruction: current self-definition and grief for pre-motherhood identity.
• Partnership renegotiation, intimacy shifts, and infant-induced relational reconfiguration.
• Normalised maternal ambivalence, rarely verbalised.
• Work re-entry: guilt-relief dynamics.
• Family-of-origin patterns resurfacing in parenthood.
• Birth experience meaning-making when divergent from expectations.
• Postpartum body image, physical recovery, and embodiment reclamation.

Scope of Practice

This counselling targets identity, relational, and adjustment dimensions of the perinatal period exclusively. Clinically significant presentations—postnatal depression, severe perinatal anxiety impairing function, intrusive thoughts, PTSD-level birth trauma, or postnatal psychosis—require perinatal mental health specialists or psychiatrists first. Referrals provided transparently, with supportive counselling available alongside.

For pregnancy loss: bereavement counselling.