Therapy for Mamas and Papas

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United States
Camarillo, CA
Therapy for Mamas and Papas

I help parents navigate infertility, pregnancy and infant loss, trauma, grief, and the profound transformation of parenthood.

Compassionate, evidence based care rooted in meaning, healing, and human connection.

05/31/2026

One of the most isolating aspects of reproductive loss is not always the loss itself, but what happens afterward.

In the early days, support often arrives quickly. Messages are sent. Meals are dropped off. People check in.

But grief rarely follows the timeline others expect.

Weeks pass. Months pass. The world begins moving again. Yet many bereaved parents find themselves carrying the same ache, the same longing, the same love they felt on the day their baby died.

This is often when the loneliness begins.

Not because they are grieving incorrectly, but because grief is not a problem to be solved. It is an expression of love. And love does not operate on a socially acceptable timeline.

Parents who experience miscarriage, stillbirth, infant loss, or infertility are often left navigating a world that expects healing to look like moving on. But many discover that healing looks more like learning to carry both grief and love at the same time.

If your grief still feels present months or years later, it does not mean you are stuck.

It may simply mean that your love remains.

05/24/2026

Many of you know that I recently lost my daughter in childbirth. Grief and loss are not unfamiliar to me and yet this is an aching I have never known until now. I am sharing about the loss of a child in real time, moving through my own devastation.

What I hope to offer through my journey toward peace is the recognition that you are not alone in your pain. I have felt the collective anguish of mothers grieving for me, but more than that, grieving with me for the darkest heartbreak many of us carry quietly within us. The fear of losing our children. The grief of what has been lost. The unbearable reality that love can be so immense that it changes the shape of us forever.

No matter what pain you are carrying as a mother, know that you are held by the women around you and by those who came before you. There is something sacred in the way mothers gather around suffering and say, I see you. I know this ache.

There is no right way to move through grief.

Only forward.
Only through.
Only with love carrying us where we cannot carry ourselves.

05/14/2026

Grief is not linear.
Grief comes in waves.
Grief has no prejudice.

I have heard all of these things and more over the past three weeks since I lost my daughter in childbirth. And while I think these are all true in some way, I’m finding that grief has taken a different form.

Grief feels like an endless searching. Searching for her body in my mind; to touch, to nurse, to smell, to hold. I wake up each day with the renewed realization that she is not here and never will be again. She is gone and I am not ready to let her go.

I don’t know how or if this grief will ever end. I know that it will transform, become something else. Because it will have to. I will need some greater purpose to survive this endless aching. I will pour it into my clients, my living child and, hopefully, if I can let go of self blame, one day myself. But not today. Today I am still digging, still clawing at the earth to find her.

I search the horizon.
I search the silence.
I search myself for remnants of the woman who existed before grief divided my life into before and after.

Sometimes I think loss turns us into people perpetually reaching toward something we can no longer touch.

Not because love disappears.
But because it has nowhere physical left to land.

05/06/2026

On Maternal Mental Health Day, I am thinking about all the mothers silently carrying more than anyone can see.

The mothers functioning through depression.
The mothers whose anxiety has convinced them danger is everywhere.
The mothers grieving pregnancies, grieving identities, grieving versions of themselves they can no longer return to.
The mothers who love their children deeply and still feel overwhelmed by the enormity of motherhood.

Maternal suffering is often hidden beneath productivity, caretaking, perfectionism, irritability, numbness, isolation, and “doing what needs to be done.”

But surviving is not the same thing as being supported.

Maternal mental health is not just an individual issue. It is shaped by the systems surrounding mothers: access to healthcare, community support, financial stability, parental leave, trauma, partnership, safety, and whether women are allowed to be human after becoming mothers.

To every mother carrying invisible weight right now:
you were never meant to hold all of this alone.

Image 1: Sophie Miller
Image 2: Julia Matthews
Image 3: Lauren Phillips
Image 4: Megan Kitts
Image 5: Katie Jameson
Image 6: Sophie Miller
Image 7: Iko Ojo Mercy
Image 8: Julia Matthews
Image 9: Jana Cuhna

05/04/2026

Stillbirth doesn’t just take something from you.
It rewrites the DNA of your identity.

There is no “going back” to who we were before.
Only learning how to live as someone who has loved, and lost something more precious than the air we breathe.

I don’t move on from her because there is no moving on.
Only moving forward with her woven into every part of me.

Losing you didn’t just break my heart darling.
It broke me into a million tiny pieces that can never be put back together the same. Your death changed the way I exist, how I see everything and everyone.

There is a before.
And there is an after.

And learning how to live in the after
is a kind of work no one prepares you for.
To sojourn on, to persevere. Because as mothers there is no other option than to prevail, forever wounded.

02/08/2026

If you are feeling shaken, angry, sick to your stomach, or unable to look away from the news right now, there is nothing wrong with you.

When stories surface about systemic abuse, exploitation, and the protection of people who cause harm, many nervous systems respond as if danger is immediate. For survivors especially, this kind of information does not live only in the mind. It can live in the body. In memory. In sensation. In old fear that never fully got to leave.

You might notice anger.
You might notice grief.
You might notice numbness, dissociation, or a pull to constantly check for updates.
You might notice old memories surfacing without warning.

These are not signs that you are broken.
These are signs that your nervous system recognizes injustice and harm.

Outrage can be protective.
Grief can be protective.
Even shutdown can be protective.

You do not have to consume every detail to care.
You do not have to prove your empathy by retraumatizing yourself.

If you need to step back, step back.
If you need to talk, reach out.
If you need to be angry, be angry.

Your reactions make sense in a world where systems have not always protected the vulnerable.

You deserve safety, support, and spaces where your story is believed and held with care.

You are not alone in what you are feeling and your outrage is necessary for meaningful change.

12/11/2025

Breastfeeding is often framed as instinctual, effortless, or “what our bodies were designed to do.”
But the truth is far more complex.

There is a mental weight to breastfeeding, the tracking, the timing, the worry, the responsibility that no one else can step into for you. There is a physical weight, the soreness, the fatigue, the hormonal floods that shake your sense of self. And there is the emotional weight, the pressure to get it right, the fear of judgment, the grief when it doesn’t go as planned.

If breastfeeding has felt heavy for you, there is nothing wrong with you.

You are not alone in that experience, and you deserve real support, not silent expectations.

Your body is not just feeding a baby.

It is holding a world.

12/09/2025

Motherhood asks the impossible and calls it normal.
We expect women to hold up entire families and systems while carrying anxiety, depression, grief, trauma, and constant responsibility with no safety net beneath them.

And then we praise their strength instead of fixing the reasons they need it.

Maternal mental health is not an individual issue.
It is a collective responsibility.
When systems fail mothers, we pay the price.

If pregnancy has felt heavy or scary or lonely, you are not the problem.
You are the evidence that change is long overdue.

I believe you.
I support you.
I am with you.

08/29/2025

Children should not have to practice lockdown drills.

Parents should not have to calculate survival odds with every drop-off.

Classrooms should not be crime scenes.

And yet here we are, again and again, because our government refuses to pass the reforms that could and should save lives.

This is not random. This is not inevitable.
This is policy. It is the direct result of leaders who put the gun lobby above children.

Every empty desk, every grieving parent, every child who never comes home is on the hands of those who stall and stall and stall while children die.

It is past time to choose courage over cowardice, lives over profit, children over guns.

If your heart is breaking, you are not alone. Squeeze your babies tight tonight. Tomorrow we fight again.

08/05/2025

It was never just milk.
It was the ache of swollen hours,
the offering of sleep-starved arms,
the quiet pulse of presence
in a world that kept moving.

It was cracked skin and clumsy latches.
It was guilt that came uninvited
and grief that whispered,
“Is this enough?”

It was learning to trust a body
you’d once been taught to silence
a body that fed, and failed,
and tried again.

It was holding still
when you wanted to run.
It was letting go
when you wanted to hold on.

It was love,
in its most undone form
not always gentle,
but always real.

And when it ended
or never began
there was still you.

Still loving.
Still offering.
Still enough.

Address

333 N Lantana
Camarillo, CA
93010

Website

https://www.therapyformamasandpapas.com/

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