Journal · Postpartum · Ten minute read

You have people. That is the part that makes no sense to you.

The full room

Someone brought lasagne. Your mother-in-law came for four days and folded everything. There is a group chat that pings all afternoon with hearts and questions about the latch, and a friend who texts how are you REALLY and means it. On paper you have what everyone says a new mother needs. You built some of it yourself, on purpose, because you knew this would be hard.

And you sit in the middle of all of it and feel like you are behind glass.

People come and hold the baby and admire the baby and ask what he weighs now. They ask whether he is sleeping. They do not ask about you, and when someone does, you hear yourself say oh we're good, tired, but good in a voice that comes from somewhere near the ceiling. Then they leave and the house is loud with a quiet that has weight to it, and you stand at the counter with a cold cup of tea wondering what exactly is wrong with you, because you have help, and you are still this alone.

Nothing is wrong with you. You are having the correct response to something almost nobody names: you can be surrounded by love and still be starving for a specific kind of attention that no one in the room is offering. Not company. Not competence. Being seen — the sense that someone knows where you actually are.

When you went quiet

Here is what I would want to ask you, if you were sitting across from me. Not do you have support. Rather: when did you last say a true thing out loud, and did anyone stay for the end of it?

Most mothers I sit with go quiet somewhere in the first months, and they go quiet for good reasons. There is nowhere to put it. The birth did not go how you thought and you have told the story eight times in a flat, chronological voice. You are frightened of how much you resent your husband for going to work and being able to leave. There are thoughts you have at 4am that you would not say to anyone, ever, because you cannot risk seeing someone's face change. The love is enormous and some afternoons you cannot feel it at all, which terrifies you more than anything else on this list.

So you say fine. You get expert at fine. And every time you do, the distance between what is happening inside you and what anyone in the room knows about gets a little wider — until you are lonely in a way that has almost nothing to do with how many people are present.

Where the pain went

Pain that has nowhere to go does not evaporate. It goes into the body, and the body does something intelligent with it: it turns the volume down.

That is what the numbness is. Not absence of feeling — the management of it. Your system worked out, correctly, that there was no safe moment to fall apart. There is a baby who needs you every ninety minutes. So it dialled you down to a level where you could keep functioning, and you have been running at that setting ever since.

You might recognise it as any of this. Watching yourself do the bedtime routine from slightly outside your own body, competent and absent at once. Getting to nine o'clock and realising your jaw has been clenched since the afternoon. Scrolling for an hour you did not decide to spend. Feeling nothing much when he laughs, and then feeling a lurch of guilt about the nothing much. Being unable to answer what do you need — not withholding, genuinely blank, as though the question is in a language you have lost.

This is dissociation, and it is not a diagnosis to be frightened of. It is a survival strategy that worked. The trouble is that it is not selective. You cannot dial down the grief and keep the joy at full volume; the dial only moves one way. The same setting that stops the pain flooding you is the one making it hard to feel your son, your body, your own wanting.

And it needs somewhere to go. Not a moment stolen from the day — an actual place. Which is what nobody offers you, and which is most of what I do.

What you've already tried

You have almost certainly tried harder. More organisation, earlier bedtimes, gratitude lists, a walk, a shower, going to bed at nine. You have tried asking for help, which took more out of you than the help gave back, because asking required knowing what you needed and you no longer do. You have tried the app that tells you to breathe.

Some of you have tried therapy, and it went one of two ways. Either you sat down and gave a very articulate account of your childhood, your birth and your marriage, and left with excellent insight and precisely the same feeling in your chest. Or you spent fifty minutes reassuring a kind person that you were coping.

None of that is a failure of effort. Effort is the one thing you have not been short of. It is that all of it was aimed at the wrong level. You have been trying to think your way out of something that is not, at this point, living in your thoughts.

Why the body, and not more talking

Insight is not the same as change. You can know exactly why you brace when the baby cries and still brace. You can trace the resentment to its origin and still feel it rise at 6pm. Understanding happens in one place; bracing happens in another.

Somatic therapy works at the level where it actually lives. Our experiences do not only get stored as story — they get stored as posture, breath, held tension, impulse. Your body is carrying an account of the last year that you have never told anyone, in a language of clenched jaw and shallow breath and shoulders that will not come down. That is not a metaphor. That is where the material is.

So we go there. Slowly, with mindfulness, and with your consent at every step. I do not ask you to relive anything. I ask what you notice right now — and then, instead of moving on, we stay. That staying is the whole technique. Feeling that has been held at arm's length for months does not need to be excavated. It needs a witness and enough time, and it begins to move on its own.

And it works partly because it happens with another person in the room. The loneliness is not incidental to the injury; being met is not the pleasant setting in which the treatment occurs. It is the treatment.

What the work looks like

Fifty minutes, weekly, by video. You do not have to arrive composed or know what you want to work on. Most sessions start with me asking how you are and you being allowed to answer that honestly, possibly for the first time that week.

The early weeks are unglamorous and they matter most: we are building a room your body believes is safe. We slow down. I check often. Nothing goes deeper than you have said yes to. It is common to spend the first month or two mostly learning that you can stop performing here.

Somewhere around the second or third month the real material tends to surface, usually sideways — you will be telling me something ordinary about the school run and your throat will close. That is the work arriving. We follow it. This is the phase where things sometimes feel worse before they feel better, because feeling comes back before comfort does. I will tell you when we are in that phase so you are not alone in wondering.

What clients usually notice first is not insight. It is sleep, or that they cried at the right time, or that they got through the witching hour without leaving their own body. Later: saying the true thing to a partner and surviving it. A pause between the toddler's provocation and their own reaction. Being able to answer what they need. Something a mother or grandmother carried, set down and not passed on.

It is not fast. Bodies that learned to brace for a year do not unlearn it in three sessions, and I would rather tell you that now than sell you a version of this that does not exist. But it is not endless either, and it does not require you to fall apart to work. It requires an hour a week with a door on it, and someone in the room who is not going anywhere.

If this is your life right now

If you read the first section and recognised yourself more than once, I wrote this for you.

I offer a free twenty-minute call. You can tell me as much or as little as you like, ask me anything, and I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person for what you are carrying — and if I am not, who I would send you to instead. There is no pressure in it and nothing to prepare.

You were never meant to do this alone. Not because you are failing at it, but because no one ever was.