The Maternal Mental Health Conversation Is Missing the Mother
Maternal mental health is an increasingly urgent conversation around mothers, maternal well-being, and the support women need in pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. But maternal mental health is more than symptoms.
Becoming a mother transforms a woman’s emotional well-being, sense of self, relationships, and connection to the world around her. What if something essential is missing in the conversation?
Take a breath. Pause. You have landed here for a reason. Feel this energy gently inviting you to receive.
This is not a conventional conversation about maternal mental health. I’m going to challenge some familiar assumptions about motherhood, mental health, and what happens to a woman when she becomes a mother. If you’re willing to look beyond the familiar framework, you’re welcome here.
Motherhood is a portal: a profound physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual transformation that changes a woman from the inside out. It is not simply a role she takes on or a transition she moves through. It is a threshold that invites a mother to heal trauma and unresolved emotions and remember her feminine power and wisdom to become the best version of herself.
Maternal Mental Health Is More Than Symptoms
We have become much better at talking about maternal mental health and postpartum mental health. We recognize that pregnancy, birth, and becoming a mother can affect a woman’s body, mental and emotional well-being, relationships, and sense of self. We also have a growing language around matrescence, the profound transformation of becoming a mother.
But I believe we are still looking at only part of the picture. When a mother is struggling, we naturally look for symptoms, assess what she is experiencing, and determine what kind of maternal mental health support or care she may need. Those things matter, but a woman can be experiencing something far larger than the symptoms we can name.
Becoming a mother is not simply a phase that requires adjustment. Your experience of yourself and the world around you changes. You have brought new life into this planet and your understanding of love, life, purpose, mortality, and what matters changes. This transformation deserves a place in the maternal mental health conversation.
Becoming a Mother Is More Than a Transition
Matrescence has given us an important way to describe the profound physical, psychological, emotional, and social changes that happen when a woman becomes a mother. But I believe motherhood goes deeper still. I don't see motherhood simply as a developmental phase, a role, or a rite of passage. I see motherhood as a portal.
A portal is a threshold. You enter it as one person and emerge changed on the other side. This is one reason motherhood can feel so disorienting. Because something fundamental has shifted, even when nobody around you has the language to describe it.
The motherhood portal opens parts of a woman that have remained dormant, forgotten, suppressed, or unresolved. It brings her closer to deep love and wisdom, but it also brings old wounds and inherited patterns to the surface. This is not a flaw in motherhood. It is part of what the portal does.
The Spiritual Dimension of Motherhood Is Missing
This is the part of the conversation I believe we are missing most. Being spiritual doesn’t mean being religious or weird. For me, spirituality is our connection to the body, to other humans, to the planet, and to something bigger than ourselves—whatever you call it: God, Source, the Universe, or something else.
Motherhood can radically alter those connections. It can open questions about life, death, creation, purpose, love, and the mystery of existence itself. These questions are not “strange.” They matter and belong in the conversation about maternal wellbeing.
When we remove the spiritual dimension from motherhood, we remove a fundamental part of the woman's experience. We are then left trying to understand an extraordinary transformation through frameworks that may not be large enough to contain it.
Motherhood Doesn't Only Awaken the Light
There is another part of spiritual motherhood that we don't talk about enough: the shadow. When the motherhood portal opens, it can expose what has been buried. Trauma can resurface. Fear can become louder. Anger can emerge. Patterns carried through generations can suddenly become impossible to ignore.
The shadows can be a side effect of the portal opening.
This is why I don't believe spiritual motherhood should be packaged as another version of the “blessed, grateful, glowing mother” narrative. There can be profound love alongside crippling fear, expansion alongside grief, connection alongside disorientation, and awakening alongside experiences that feel terrifying.
When a Spiritual Awakening Goes Sideways
This is where I want to be particularly direct. We use words such as anxiety, depression, and psychosis to describe serious experiences that can happen during pregnancy and after becoming a mother. I believe these experiences can have psychological and spiritual dimensions.
A spiritual awakening is not always experienced as peace, light, or expanded consciousness. When an enormous opening happens without the awareness, grounding, support, or tools to navigate it, the experience can become scary and overwhelming. A spiritual awakening can go sideways.
This does not mean that professional mental health care is unnecessary. Psychological and spiritual understanding do not have to exist in separate worlds. We can acknowledge the seriousness of some maternal mental health experiences while also asking whether something deeper is happening underneath them.
I Know This Territory Personally
I know how it feels. I have experienced what society would label postpartum depression and anxiety myself. Looking back, I can see that there was far more happening than a set of symptoms. Motherhood had opened something in me that I didn't yet know how to understand or navigate.
That experience became part of the reason I began exploring motherhood differently. Through my own experience and my work with mothers, I kept returning to the same deeper question: What happens when a woman enters the motherhood portal without understanding what she is moving through?
We Need a Systemic Shift in How We Support Mothers
I don't believe the answer is to expect every midwife, doctor, therapist, or maternal mental health professional to become an expert in spirituality. That isn't the point. What I would like to see is a systemic shift in collective awareness: an understanding that motherhood has a spiritual dimension.
This would become part of the wider ecosystem of maternal and perinatal mental health support. It would mean having referral pathways to practitioners who have themselves gone through the portal, who deeply understand its shadows, and who have specific tools to help women move through this transformative experience.
We don't need every practitioner to understand the portal. We need the system to know that the portal exists and know where to send a woman when she needs someone who does. That is the systemic change I want to see because mothers deserve support that can hold the whole experience.
The Motherhood Portal Changes Everything
Motherhood is not simply something that happens to a woman when a baby arrives. It is a threshold. It changes the way she experiences her body, her relationships, her purpose, her intuition, her connection to the planet, and her relationship with something greater than herself.
It can open extraordinary wisdom but also deep shadows. And I believe we need to become much more comfortable talking about both. The maternal mental health conversation cannot be complete if we only ask what symptoms a mother is experiencing.
We also need to ask deeper questions. This is the beginning of what I call the Path of the Spiritual Mother—a deeper exploration of what happens when motherhood becomes a portal into remembrance, healing, and transformation.
Key Insights About Maternal Mental Health and Motherhood
Motherhood is a profound transformation, not simply a transition into a new role.
The motherhood portal can awaken both deep wisdom and deep shadows.
Maternal mental health has psychological and spiritual dimensions that can exist simultaneously.
Experiences such as anxiety, depression, and psychosis can be understood through more than one lens.
A spiritual awakening can become overwhelming when a woman lacks tools to navigate it.
We need a maternal support system that recognizes the spiritual dimension of motherhood.
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Send me the free guide →You’ve landed here for a reason. You have felt the calling. The world is transforming, and so are you. In times of rapid change, you need a refuge that reminds you who you are. The Empress Mama Circle is a sanctuary for spiritual mothers rising together.