You’re Allowed to Struggle: What Postpartum Mental Health Month Gets Right — and What We Still Don’t Say Out Loud
By Maggie Seymour, Resident in Counseling | The Well, The Plains, Virginia
May is Postpartum Mental Health Month. And every year, awareness campaigns remind us that postpartum depression is real, that it’s common, that it’s treatable. All of that is true. All of that matters.
But there’s a version of the conversation we’re still not quite having — the one about how disorienting it actually is to become someone new. Not just a parent. A different self. One who doesn’t fully recognize herself yet.
If you’re in that place right now, this post is for you.
What We Mean When We Say “Postpartum Mental Health”
Most people have heard of postpartum depression. Fewer have heard that postpartum anxiety is actually more common — and that it often doesn’t look like sadness at all. It looks like scanning. Catastrophizing. Lying awake running through every possible thing that could go wrong. It looks like love wound so tight it tips into terror.
And then there’s postpartum rage, which almost no one talks about. You know that flash of anger that arrives out of nowhere and leaves you wondering what is wrong with you? There’s postpartum OCD, postpartum PTSD following a traumatic birth, the relentless depletion that doesn’t have a clinical name but grinds you down just the same.
These aren’t signs that you’re failing. They’re signs that your nervous system has been through something enormous and that it needs support.
The Story We Tell New Mothers
There’s a story we tell new mothers, and it goes something like this: you will be tired, but it will be worth it. You will feel a love you’ve never known. There will be hard moments, but mostly it will be beautiful.
Some of that is true. And some of it makes it harder for women to say what is actually happening — because if it’s supposed to be beautiful, and it doesn’t feel beautiful, the obvious conclusion is that something is wrong with you.
So you go quiet. You say you’re tired when you mean you’re drowning. You smile in the photos. You wait for it to pass.
Sometimes it does. And sometimes it doesn’t — and the waiting just means more time spent suffering alone.
What Actually Helps
You deserve to hear this clearly: postpartum mental health struggles are not a character flaw, a parenting failure, or evidence that you weren’t ready for this. They are a clinical reality, and they respond to treatment.
What helps looks different for different people. For some, it’s medication. For others, it’s therapy — work that addresses not just the symptoms but the identity shift underneath them, the birth experience that may have been traumatic, the relationship changes, the grief for the self that existed before.
Trauma-informed therapy, in particular, can be powerful here. Approaches like EMDR can help process a difficult birth without requiring you to retell every detail. Somatic work can help a body that has been through labor, delivery, and the relentless physical demands of early parenthood start to feel like home again. IFS-informed work can help you get curious about the parts of you that are struggling — rather than fighting them or trying to push through.
You Don’t Have to Wait Until You’re Barely Holding On
If you’ve been wondering whether what you’re feeling is “bad enough” to ask for help, that question itself is usually the answer. Maternal mental health isn’t about pathology, at least it shouldn’t be. It should be about wellness, about supporting mothers as they become mothers, whatever that looks or feels like for them.
You don’t have to be in crisis to deserve support. You just have to be a person who is struggling and who would like to feel better.
That’s enough. That’s always been enough.
Maggie Seymour is a Resident in Counseling and Licensed Graduate Professional Counselor based in The Plains, Virginia. She offers individual therapy, EMDR, IFS-informed therapy, somatic approaches, therapy intensives, and telehealth throughout Virginia, Maryland, and Washington D.C. All services are provided under clinical supervision.
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