Find Your Joy

Motherhood is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, transitional periods of a woman's life, so it should come as no surprise that bouts of overwhelm can occur, even for the most secure, mature, grounded, and prepared women. Overwhelm can take many forms and manifest in different ways. But in the context of motherhood, a few things remain pretty consistent. 

For instance, every woman will experience change as she takes a step away from her former life and toward her new life, a life with new routines, priorities, responsibilities, challenges, companions, expectations, and timetables.  Every woman will perceive those changes through her unique conscious and unconscious processing of information given her age, culture, former experiences, education, socioeconomic status, etc. Likewise, every woman ascribes a certain amount of value to the people, places, and things in her life. What we all tend to forget is that people also ascribe value to ideas, events, images, beliefs, roles, personality traits, and even abstract concepts, such as one's "sense of self." 

All this being true, I made the leap to conclude that if we value something, we develop an emotional attachment to it. If we give little value to something, we will not form a strong emotional attachment, and therefore not really miss it should we lose it. However, if we ascribe lots of value to something, we will form a strong emotional attachment to it, and we will absolutely miss it if we perceive it as deteriorating, changing in ways we don't want, or lost. That is, we will experience symptoms related to grief. Grieving is a response to loss. 

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So, I approach all mothers, and this space, with a basic framework in mind. A framework that considers all emotional attachments (to people, things, beliefs, concepts, images, personal attributes, etc.) as similar in the context of what most people value.  We become emotionally attached to what we value. So it stands to reason that If we develop emotional attachments to all things that contribute to our sense of self (i.e., all that we value), then we are likely to experience distress when our sense of self feels threatened; for moms, this threat may come from lack of self-care due to the abundant workload, responsibilities, and obligations typically associated with motherhood. Therefore, my biggest objective is to help moms safeguard, and strengthen, their sense of self so that they can avoid (minimize or eliminate) overwhelm, anxiety, depression and other symptoms related to Maternal Intrapersonal Anxiety (MIA); a term I coined to reflect the often unrecognized, unacknowledged grief that can manifest when a woman feels like she's losing her sense of self. 

I'm honored to be here, to be a listener and a guide, and to help you stay present, grounded in your most authentic self and able to experience motherhood the way you envisioned it.