A Strong Back 2: Part 1
For a new mother whose body has weakened from pregnancy and giving birth, strength is almost non-negotiable and therefore inevitable, no matter how long it takes.
A Strong Back 2 is dedicated to those that are intimately acquainted with early motherhood. This is a personal story, not medical, counseling, or parenting advice. See full disclaimer below.
“Do a body scan… What stands out in your body?” The therapist opened with a usual request.
Facing me from her laptop, the therapist sat in her home in Southern California, her radiant pink and purple hair beaming through the screen. Her two pups were barking and racing outside the closed door, so loud that my mind’s eye could see them rummaging through the house for their mama (but also so endearing that I would give them plenty of belly rubs). “Sorry about that… Can you hear me okay?” Her voice softened with a slightly embarrassed smile.
“Yes, no worries. My son might need me if he wakes up from a short nap, so I might have to step away for a bit. His naps are still inconsistent, since we gave up on sleep training.” I explained to the therapist, a mother herself. She understood and nodded.
At the time, she was a student trainee working towards gaining her practicum hours and completing her master’s degree, so she could start her internship years as an associate therapist. With a long and formidable journey ahead before she could practice independently as a licensed therapist, she had endless paperwork, thousands of hours of clinical and continuous education experience, and several exams awaiting her in the next few years.
I knew this journey well before even embarking on it, so well that it successfully intimidated me and derailed me from graduate school. After losing a child and giving birth to a second one within two years, I exhausted all leave of absence requests, and withdrew from my master’s degree in counseling psychology. As my family mourned the loss of our daughter and then welcomed the birth of our son, my starry-eyed, twenty-something dream of calling psychotherapy my life’s work was - not without mixed feelings - overpowered by the daunting prospect of a protracted and low-income road to licensure. Years-long commitment to graduate studies and supervised clinical practice was replaced by years-long grief, pregnancy, and postpartum haze, intermingled with a high-stress, high-paying tech job and the loss of that tech job shortly after giving birth.
Counseling professors frequently emphasize the vital role of self-care in this line of work. Supporting others during some of the most vulnerable points in their lives requires that a clinician stand on solid ground herself. It also demands the capacity to tolerate a level of comfort with both intimacy and separation. Without filling one’s own cup before pouring into others’ or balancing between mutuality and boundary, burnout seeps in quickly and prevents a clinician from doing the very work she feels called to do.
Theoretically sound but practically unattainable, supporting others while practicing self-care was the opposite of what I could offer during those leave-of-absence years. I needed continuous support from others when self-care felt particularly tiresome. Over the course of three years, I switched from a Taiwanese American cognitive behavioral therapist, to a psychodynamic-focused grief counselor for couples, to a perinatal mental health specialist who nudged me towards EMDR, to an art therapist working with postpartum moms, and eventually to the student trainee who supported me for four months before she graduated.
Across nine years, I’ve done talk therapy with clinicians of various orientations and years in practice. Surprisingly, the pink-and-purple-haired student trainee with the least amount of clinical experience struck me as the most fitting for my then postpartum, post-layoff self. I wondered if it was the season of life I was in or the level of mind-body awareness that somehow clicked with the mind-body approach of the student trainee? Or the unspoken connection between two cross-cultural millennial Asian mothers living in the United States? Or a shared, multi-industry background, and chipper but also grounded personality? Whatever it was, it took nine years to arrive at a therapeutic relationship that felt like a good fit, even though brief.
“Definitely sore shoulders and upper back, sore neck… My chest is tight. A strong back, surprisingly, since I’m sitting on the floor right now in a butterfly pose,” I responded after a deep breath in and out.
I did surprise myself when I said “a strong back,” and not only because we’d focused the beginning of every mental health counseling session on the physical. Being hard on myself is familiar and comfortable, and the medical system that I’d been in and out of for a few years tends to skew towards one’s deficiencies rather than strengths. Postpartum months didn’t help either, as the entire body took a few giant steps backwards from pregnancy, labor, and delivery. Up until several weeks before the therapy session, my lower back had also taken on months of the physical toll of rocking a growing baby to nap and sleep every single day and night. (Infants that age take two to three naps every day, and for a while, my son had rejected my husband’s or my mom’s attempts to sway him to sleep.)
But this time, I truly felt strength in the lumbar. As I talked, I deliberately sat up more and shifted my torso slightly forward to support sitting on the sit bones instead of the tailbone. A nice and tall sitting posture is the kind of knowledge transmitted not only by prenatal yoga, but also by the meandering road to recovery from a dreadful disc herniation two years before. It is the wisdom gained through pain. And by taking care of an infant and exercising the muscles and joints every single day, the postpartum body also builds itself back up slowly but surely to a certain level of stamina. For a new mother whose body has weakened from pregnancy and giving birth, strength is almost non-negotiable and therefore inevitable, no matter how long it takes.
Part 2 coming soon in December 2025.
Disclaimer: The content of this essay is based on personal experience. It is for storytelling and informational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. I am not a medical professional, and any decisions about your specific situation, diagnosis, treatment, or health care should be made in consultation with qualified medical practitioners.
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