Postpartum Couples Therapy in Sacramento
Couples navigating life after baby deserve a specialist who understands this unique time of life. They need someone who understands not just the challenges of this time period, but also the opportunities. As an attachment-focused relational therapist, I help new parents slow down reactive cycles and find the softer emotions underneath. When you can reach each other there, connection returns.
There are opportunities to bond, heal, and play as you expand your roles into new domains of parenthood.
This is time to showcase what kind of love model you can be for your new baby. Not superhuman, without all the ample emotion that comes in this stressful time of life, but someone with skills.
Someone dedicated to keeping your love alive not just for baby, but for your partner, and even yourself.
Couples therapy in the postpartum period can help you to respond to the shifts, not just to blindly react.
You are buidling a legacy here, learning together to honor your feelings, and to make them relational.
What if you could share fears and longings in a safe, compassionate space? What if you could invest in your bond in a way that prioritized your tender hearts?
Receiving support in this time of life makes way for a long term vison of healthy interdependence that can soothe the nervous system and make way for love and connection.
A Gentle, Structured Space for Repair
What To Expect from Postpartum Couples Therapy
Integrity, creativity, and empathy shape the way we will work together. We will utilize bonding opportunities from
…the 8 HOLD ME TIGHT CONVERSATIONS…
from Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, an evidence-based modality.
We will also explore communication techniques from the Bringing Baby Home Curriculum developed by the Gottman Institute.
We will create a space to increase your self compassion as you navigate new identities and grieve old identities.
NOW that' there’s Three:
Let’s Reset Your Couples Bubble.
FAQs
We love each other-we’re just exhausted and snapping at each other constantly. Do we really need therapy?
1
Not every couple who comes to therapy is in crisis, and you don’t have to be. The postpartum period is One of the most neurologically and relationally demanding transitions a couple will ever move through together. Sleep deprivation alone reshapes how your nervous system reads threat, which means the irritability and reactivity you’re feeling isn’t a character flaw. It’s physiology.
What therapy offers isn’t a sign that something is broken, it’s a structured space to stay connected while everything around you feels like it’s shifting. You can get support before small disconnections calcify into larger patterns, and before things feel catastrophic.
My partner thinks we should be able to figure this out on our own. How do I bring them to therapy?
2
It can help to reframe the invitation entirely. Instead of “we need help,” try “I want us to have a place that’s just ours, where we can think out loud together.”
Sometimes it’s easier to ask if your partner is willing to say yes to a 20 minute consultation call, a conversation. You don’t have to convince them that it’s transformative, just that it is safe to try.
One of us is struggling with postpartum depression or anxiety. Can we still do couples therapy?
3
Yes, and often couples therapy is one of the most meaningful supports you can offer a partner who is struggling postpartum. Postpartum depression and anxiety don’t just live in one person; they move through the relationship system. A partner’s isolation, withdrawal, or irritability can leave the other feeling shut out, helpless, or quietly resentful-even when they love each other deeply and want to help.
Our work would be carefully paced and attuned to what each of you can hold. Individual therapy may be recommended alongside our couples work.
What does postpartum couples therapy actually look like? What will we be working on?
4
Every couple is different, but there are a few themes that arise almost universally in the postpartum period: the invisible labor divide, the loss of intimacy and identity, the way old attachment wounds get activated by new levels of vunerability, and the grief of the relationship you had before the baby arrived.
In our weekly or bi-weekly 50 minute sessions, we’ll slow down the arguments that happen so fast, and look underneath. We’ll work towards being a secure base for each other even in the midst of exhaustion, change, and new love.