Why seeing a therapist during pregnancy is helpful
People typically end up in therapy when they are overwhelmed by painful symptoms.
When causes cannot be understood. Why are they fearful? Why are they unsure? Why after getting pregnant, are they so fearful of not being ready? Why is fear of birth overshadowing pregnancy?
The goal of therapy is to go beneath the surface ‘presenting problem’ in order to locate and treat what is really at stake. Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis and its twin, psychotherapy, deserves his place in 20th-century psychology because of his subtle grasp of the hellish way symptoms can become disconnected from their real causes. On the surface, we might have the urge to buy baby products with manic intensity, but therapy over sessions, we may realise we are unconsciously longing to rid the sense of not belonging in our current setting, bequeathed to us long ago in our own childhood.
It is not a coincidence that you are feeling pressure, anxiety or fear surrounding the transition from pregnancy and mothering. In physical medicine, the decisive factor behind bodily suffering is often unexpected; pain in a toe might be linked to a problem with the abdomen. Therefore applying this principle to mental suffering, it is possible that our current emotional troubles are usually symptoms of problems located in the rarely visited parts of our mind.
Therapy is the discipline that promises to guide us back to our troublesome past so that we can address the real causes of our sorrows, and have the chance of a more liberated, less anxious and more helpful future.
Click here to contact me for a free, no-obligation phone call. My clinic is conveniently located in Arana Hills in Brisbane North. Also available for zoom appointments if required.
