From Play to Perinatal: Reflections on How Motherhood Changed My Work as a Therapist
For the first couple of years as a therapist, my work was filled with floor-sitting, coloring, and the language of play. I spoke in metaphors and feelings charts, built trust through games, and listened to what children couldn’t always say out loud. And then after becoming a mom myself, my work began to change. I found myself drawn toward new moms.
This shift wasn’t sudden so much as it was inevitable. The more time I spent working with clients and going through my own perinatal experience, the more aware I became of the emotional gravity surrounding pregnancy, birth, and the early years of caregiving. I noticed how often the adults in the room were holding everything together while quietly unraveling. I saw how much a child’s world depends on the well-being of their caregivers, and how little space those caregivers are often given to process their own experience.
Working with children trains you to listen beyond words. Kids communicate through behavior, tone, silence, and play. You learn patience. You learn to slow down. You learn that big feelings can live in small bodies.
Most importantly, you learn that context matters. A child’s struggles are shaped by attachment, stress, transitions, and the systems surrounding them. Over time, that awareness naturally expands outward. You expand the lens to include who is caring for them, and how they are processing their own experience. This led me to work with people navigating pregnancy, postpartum, fertility challenges, loss, and the massive identity shifts that accompany becoming, or trying to become, a parent.
New motherhood is often painted in black and white: glowing joy or dramatic struggle. In reality, it lives in the gray. It’s love mixed with grief, gratitude alongside resentment, confidence interrupted by doubt. It is also framed as something instinctual, something you simply step into. But for many, it feels more like a disappearance before it becomes a reemergence. Clients often say, “I don’t recognize myself,” or “I don’t know who I am anymore.”
This is not a failure. It’s a developmental process.
New mothers are navigating a massive transition emotionally, relationally, and neurologically. Their nervous systems are recalibrating. Their priorities are shifting. Their sense of self is being reorganized in real time. They often feel pressure to have it all together. Instead of curiosity, they give themselves criticism. Instead of getting support, they get six weeks of maternity leave if they are lucky.
In many ways, this work is a continuation of what I’ve always done. It’s still about attachment, regulation, and safety. It’s still about helping someone feel safe enough to explore who they are becoming. Now, my work includes identity reconstruction, helping clients process through a traumatic experience that society frames as a normal experience, helping clients grieve parts of themselves that have changed, reconnect with parts that still exist, and slowly build a sense of self that includes motherhood without being consumed by it.
This is not about “getting back” to who someone was before. It’s about discovering who they are now, with more complexity, depth, and compassion than before.
In the journey to becoming a new parent, or being a new parent, progress might look like naming a need, setting a boundary, or allowing conflicting emotions to exist side by side.
It’s not about rushing toward acceptance or gratitude. Sometimes the most meaningful work is simply making space for curiosity and gentleness in the process of discovering an identity. My role isn’t to define that identity, but to help clients find themselves again slowly, honestly, and on their own terms.
I still carry my play-therapy roots with me. I just use different tools now: reflection, normalization, curiosity, and deep respect for how transformative and traumatic new motherhood and the perinatal period can be.
The clients I work with may have shifted, but the heart of the work remains the same: helping people feel less alone, more understood, and more connected to themselves during one of life’s most profound transitions.
And honestly? I can’t imagine doing anything else.
Written by: Olivia Clark-Richards, LPCC, BCN