Post is Sponsored By: Bloom Womens Counseling
There is nothing quite like being a parent, but no one tells you how challenging some of the days are going to be. New parents can experience a variety of feelings including postpartum depression, anxiety, and adjustment struggles. Long sleepless nights may make you feel unprepared for the days ahead. Parents with older children struggle to navigate their child’s changing bodies, worry about their children’s safety, and may even experience issues within their marriage or other relationships. For all these reasons (and more), mental health therapy during the parenting years can often be a crucial tool to help parents maintain their optimum level of functioning.
Here are some ways mental health therapy can help you in your parenting journey:
Provide a Non-Biased Listener: Oftentimes parents find themselves seeking the advice of others on how to handle various aspects of parenting. However, whether the advice is coming from a well meaning family member, friend, neighbor, coworker, or the like, the advice can be biased. Everyone has an opinion about how parenting can, and should, be done. Maybe they advise you to do something a certain way because that is how they did it, maybe that’s what they read in a book, who knows! But one thing is for sure, no one wants to hear that their parenting advice might be wrong. Cue a therapist. Therapists can help by providing a non-biased listening ear. This allows you to vent your frustrations without fear of judgment, and can also provide potential strategies for ways that you can approach difficulties. Ultimately, if you decide that the strategies suggested by the therapist aren’t for you, that’s no problem as the therapist is ultimately there to support your decision making process.
Can Help You Understand Root Causes: Parenting can trigger unresolved issues from your past. Whether your own childhood was difficult, or you have unresolved trauma from other areas in your life, raising children can highlight those issues. While the science behind this is too dense to cover in this article, if you are noise sensitive, over stimulated, over touched, or struggle to regulate your emotions around your children there might be something in your past worth examining in a therapeutic setting. Resolving these issues can ultimately help you personally, and while parenting.
Mental Health Therapy is not Just Selfcare, it’s Healthcare: Selfcare is a “buzzy” word in therapy, and social media. Often, it is related to getting your nails done, massages, and bubble baths, but taking care of your mind is one of the best places to spend your selfcare dollars as just a few sessions can have a life-long impact. What’s more, mental health care is not only good selfcare, it’s good health care. Science shows that when we are depressed we are less likely to exercise, eat well, and take care of our physical health, making the correlation between mental health and health care even more important to emphasis. How can you take care of your children, if you are so sad you can’t get out of bed? How can you teach your children the value of healthy eating if you don’t have the motivation to cook healthy meals? One can not be truly healthy if they are neglecting their mental health.
In summary, finding a mental health care provider with whom you are comfortable can change the trajectory of your parenting years. The impact of addressing mental health needs can not only affect your life for years to come, but also the lives of your children. If you are looking for a therapist to walk with you on your journey through parenting and mental wellness please call our office.
Bloom Women’s Counseling, Consulting, and Wellness, LLC. at 419-326-5732, or visit www.bloomwomenscounseling.com for more information.
We are currently accepting new clients and would love to work with you!
