Collaborative Care in Postpartum: Supporting the Whole Mother

One thing I see again and again in my work with postpartum families is how much support new mothers truly need and how rarely they receive it in a coordinated way.

Many of the parents I work with come to me for feeding support or craniosacral therapy, but underneath those concerns there is often something deeper: anxiety, overwhelm, uncertainty, and the enormous emotional transition into becoming a parent. Feeding challenges and physical tension rarely exist in isolation. They are often connected to sleep deprivation, identity shifts, nervous system overwhelm, and the simple reality that modern parenting can be very lonely.

This is where collaborative care becomes essential.

Collaborative care means that families are supported by a network of providers who each bring their own area of expertise, while working together to support the whole parent–baby relationship. Instead of trying to meet every need through one type of care, families benefit from a team approach that addresses both physical and emotional wellbeing.

In my work, that might look like supporting a baby’s feeding and regulation through bodywork while another provider supports the emotional experience of early motherhood. When providers communicate and refer thoughtfully, families often feel more supported and less alone in navigating challenges.

Many of the mothers I work with are deeply devoted to their babies but struggling with anxiety, self-doubt, or overwhelm. They often worry about whether they’re doing things “right” or feel unsure how to trust themselves in this new role. These experiences are incredibly common, but they’re also often hidden beneath the surface of day-to-day parenting.

Support during this time isn’t just helpful—it can be foundational.

Physical support can help babies feed more comfortably and settle more easily. Emotional support can help mothers feel more grounded and confident. When these pieces come together through collaborative care, families often feel more steady and supported as they navigate early parenthood.

I’ve been grateful to connect with Maya LeaJames, a Conscious Parent Coach, whose work focuses on supporting mothers through the emotional and psychological transition into parenthood. Her work complements the physical and feeding support I provide, and together this kind of collaborative care can help mothers feel supported in a more complete way.

To help introduce Maya and her work, I asked her a few questions about supporting mothers through the transition into parenthood.

A Conversation with Maya LeaJames | Conscious Parent Coach

Can you tell us a little about your work and what led you to support mothers?

Absolutely, thank you. I am a conscious parent coach and I have been doing this work for four years. I support ambitious and self-aware mothers to close the gap between the mother they’ve become, the one who’s snapping and quietly suffering through motherhood, and the mother they’ve always wanted to be, the calm, confident, and joyful one.  

What led me here was my own desperate need for this work in my own parenting. I spent over a decade teaching Leadership and Spanish in public middle schools before becoming a mother, and I genuinely believed I was prepared. I was well educated in psychology, child development, and communication and I had built meaningful relationships with young people for years. And when I became a mother I realized very quickly that none of that had prepared me for what the transition into parenting actually felt like. The mental load, the anger and resentment I felt toward my partner, the sleep deprivation, decision fatigue, and the experience of being needed and touched every single hour of the day was overwhelming and completely depleting. I loved my son more than I had ever loved another human being, and I was also more lost than I had ever been. Both of those things were true at the same time, and I had no idea how to hold that.

My son was a toddler when I had a moment of clarity that eventually led me to the work that both transformed my family and shifted the entire trajectory of my life into serving parents in the capacity that I do today. I was returning from work one day and as I parked my car in front of the house, I took a deep breath to prepare myself for an evening of power struggles and toddler meltdowns and I caught myself deeply contemplating just driving away and never coming back. That was when I knew I needed support.

I turned to what I had always done: research. I read parenting books, and consumed podcasts like my life depended on it, and two years later I had all the same behaviors and significantly more shame. When I discovered parent coaching and experienced what it actually did for me, I knew I had found the work I was meant to do in the world.

What drew you specifically to working with women during pregnancy and postpartum?

Honestly, I love working with new mothers because I feel so strongly that we need to do a better job as a culture of preparing women for the intensity of the identity shift that comes with the transition into motherhood. Oftentimes, motherhood is where old familial and culturally-conditioned patterns of martyrdom, people pleasing, prioritizing selflessness or meeting other’s needs over your own are revealed to women through their anger, resentment, and self-doubt. 

Pregnancy and postpartum is often the first time a woman is confronted with the gap between who she thought she would be as a mother and who she is actually showing up as in the hardest moments. That gap is where so much shame lives. And shame that goes unaddressed in those early months and years doesn't disappear, it just compounds. It shapes how a mother relates to herself, her partner, and to her child over time. My deep desire is to work with mothers to heal these patterns from the root and as early as possible because the impact of doing it early is profound and far-reaching in ways that ripple through the entire family and throughout their entire lives.

What are some of the most common challenges you see mothers facing during early parenthood?

The most common challenge I see mothers facing in early parenthood is a deep sense of personal failure when they believe they’re not living up to the expectations they had for themselves from before motherhood. This shows up as self-criticism and grief when breastfeeding is a challenge for example, when their child doesn’t hit milestones right away or when they are so sleep deprived that they begin to hate and resent how much time and care goes into keeping their child alive. The resentment they feel toward their partner or towards other parents who they perceive as “handling it better” can feel confusing and isolating. There’s also their loss of identity that can be really heavy, nuanced and comes with a process of grieving for the self that existed before. Underneath all of these challenges is the pervasive, exhausting belief that the way they are feeling means something is fundamentally “wrong” with them, that they are failing at the thing they wanted most in the world.

Many of the families I work with experience anxiety or overwhelm during the postpartum period. What are some ways this tends to show up for mothers?

In my experience, postpartum anxiety and overwhelm show up most often as urgency and control. A very common coping strategy for overwhelm is hypervigilance, desiring for things to be done a specific way, with the assumption that there are “right” and “wrong” ways for baby care to be done. In motherhood, this can feel like a spike of anxiety or fear when, for example, a partner does something differently, so she controls these intense feelings by struggling to hand anything over because it feels so unsafe for her to let go, which can lead to even more overwhelm and even burnout. Postpartum anxiety can also show up as irritability that feels out of proportion to the moment, difficulty resting or sleeping while the baby sleeps, and a constant sense of dread that something is about to go wrong. A lot of mothers describe this as though they can never fully relax or exhale, as they’re always bracing for the next problem they’ll need to deal with.

Why do you think the transition into motherhood can feel so emotionally intense for many women?

The portal into motherhood is emotionally intense because it is emotionally, physically, and socially intense, all at once and overnight.

Your identity shifts in a single moment. Your body has just accomplished something extraordinary and is now recovering while simultaneously sustaining another life. Your relationships are undergoing shifts and pressures that nobody warned you about and that can feel genuinely shocking to experience.

In our western culture (I’m in the USA), we prepare mothers for everything a baby will need once they're earthside, and do very little to prepare parents for the immense, life-altering transition into parenthood itself. I always say that parenting is the hardest job on the planet, and it is the only one that comes without a manual, training, or even mentorship. We celebrate the pregnancy, and then send parents home with a whole baby, a thumbs up and a “good luck!”

And then in those dreary, sleep-deprived first days at home, everything surfaces at once. Your relationship with your own parents, your relationship with your partner, and the version of yourself you thought you knew. All of this shifting and changing while everyone around you is insisting that this is the “happiest time of your life.” The dissonance of that alone can be quietly destabilizing.

What I also think is true is that becoming a mother brings up everything that was never resolved in your own childhood. The way you were parented becomes suddenly, viscerally present in the nervous system patterns you developed as a little girl to feel safe and are now running the show in your parenting, and often in ways you aren't fully aware of. The emotional intensity of the postpartum period is not just about what is happening right now, but also about everything the present moment is waking up inside of the mother.

How can emotional support change a mother’s experience during postpartum?

Completely. I mean that without exaggeration. When a mother has a space where she is not being evaluated, fixed, or told what to do, a space where she feels brave and courageous to be honest about the rage and the resentment and the shame without those things being treated as problems to solve, something in her nervous system starts to calm. She starts to realize that what she is feeling is not evidence that she is broken, that it actually makes sense because it is simply a response she has learned and practiced since childhood. When a woman understands why she is feeling what she is feeling, she gains access to consciously choosing new patterns to practice in a way she didn't believe she had before.

Emotional support in the postpartum period doesn't just help a mother feel better in the moment, it changes the trajectory of her relationship she has with herself, her partner, and her child long term. It is some of the most important work that exists, and it is almost entirely absent from the standard model of postpartum care.

What does support for mothers look like in your work?

The support I offer is completely individualized and personalized to the mother in front of me. There is no single approach that works for every woman, and the postpartum experience is no exception.

My client and I start by getting clear on her vision of the relationships she wants to create, and the values she wants to lead from, and then we take an honest, judgment-free look at what is actually happening for her to determine where the gap is so we can close it. We explore her patterns, her reactions, and the stories she’s telling herself in the hardest moments. We get curious about where those patterns originated, because most of them did not begin with her child, they began in her own childhood, in the ways her nervous system learned to keep her safe long before she ever became a mother.

From that understanding, we build something new. We grow her capacity to pause before reacting, we reconstruct her inner voice by replacing the relentless critic that tells her she is failing with something that actually tells her the truth about who she is. Then we address the root of what is creating the shame and disconnection, rather than managing the surface of it.

This work is not about parenting tips or scripts. Conscious Parent Coaching is about creating sustainable and permanent transformation in the way a mother relates to herself and others, in the ways that change not just what she does day to day, but who she is being in the moments when things get hard. When her identity shifts away from being the mother who’s broken, failing and full of doubt and into the mother who is inherently good, wise, and loving, the connection she has been longing for with her children, her partner, and with herself, stops feeling so far away and becomes her reality.

How do you see emotional wellbeing affecting the parent–baby relationship?

Emotional wellbeing is the foundation of everything in the parent-child relationship and I love to think about it through the lens of fluency, because I think it reframes what emotional wellness actually is and makes it feel genuinely accessible.

As a former middle school world language teacher, I have always understood emotions as a language, one the body uses to communicate whether our needs are being met or not. Just like any language, emotional fluency is something that can be learned at any stage of life. The more fluent a mother becomes in understanding and processing her own emotions, the more her responses to the inevitable ups and downs of parenting begin to match what the moment actually requires instead of what her nervous system fears it requires. Let me paint a picture of what I mean.

A child is playing with a foam sword they got for their birthday. They make a sweeping motion with the arm holding the sword and it makes contact with their sibling's shoulder. The sibling says, "stop."

One mother looks into the living room and her body immediately fills with panic and frustration. Her chest tightens, her jaw clenches, her cheeks flush with heat. She rushes in, takes the sword away, tells the child that's not safe, and insists on an apology. Even long after the moment has passed, the heat and tension are still in her body. She feels on edge and irritable for the rest of the day and she isn't entirely sure why. Beneath the surface, she’s asking herself the question on repeat, “what is wrong with me?”

Another mother sees the exact same moment unfold and she feels a subtle ping of surprise. She pauses, takes a breath and observes and makes the assessment that the sword is foam, that no one is in real danger, and the contact wasn't intentional. As she watches, she hears her child say "sorry" on their own. So she stays where she is, keeps a quiet eye on things, and lets her children work it out. Beneath the surface, she believes, “My children are good children, they are very capable and I’m here to support them if it becomes a bigger issue.”

Same circumstances in both cases, with completely different internal experiences for these mamas with completely different outcomes for everyone in the room.

This is what emotional fluency makes possible, the capacity to feel without being hijacked by what you feel. Emotional fluency is responding with a level of urgency that the situation actually requires, rather than the level your nervous system has been conditioned to bring to it.

For a postpartum mother, this matters enormously. Her nervous system is already running on depletion on all levels, physically, hormonally, and emotionally. She is recovering from one of the most significant experiences a human body can go through, while simultaneously being needed around the clock by a brand new tiny human who can only communicate through crying (which elicits a visceral and full-body response from most moms). The baseline demand on her nervous system is extraordinarily high. And when emotional fluency is low in that environment, everything, every sound, every feeding challenge, and every moment of uncertainty, can register as an emergency.

A mother who has enough safety inside her own body to meet difficulty without being consumed by it is not just more regulated herself, her baby feels it too. Infants are exquisitely attuned to the emotional state of their primary caregiver. The nervous system of a baby is literally co-regulating with the nervous system of their mother in those early weeks and months, so when mom is regulated, her baby feels safe. When mom is in a constant state of hypervigilance, her baby feels that too as a felt experience in their own body.

Supporting a mother's emotional wellbeing in the postpartum period is not a luxury. It is some of the most important work that exists, not just for her, but also for the child she is already shaping. This concept of collaborative care that you’ve brought to the table here is powerful. We’ve all heard that it takes a village to raise a child and I do believe it’s true, and that our culture should support mothers to receive the wide array of resources and support that they need.

Many mothers feel pressure to do everything “right.” How do you support mothers in building confidence and trusting themselves?

I help mothers build confidence and trust themselves by helping them understand where that pressure came from in the first place. The need to get it “right,” to meet an external standard, to outsource one’s own wisdom to the “experts” and the books and the people around us who seem to have it figured out…  that is all learned. For most of the mothers I work with, these patterns started very early, in a home or a school system where getting it “wrong” had consequences, where approval was conditional, or their own inner knowing was regularly overridden by an external authority figure.

So the work to turn this around doesn’t start with giving them a new standard to meet but rather helping them to trust that they are the authority on their own self and their child. This is a process of unlearning old patterns and getting curious about all the times that they have made wise decisions in their lives that didn’t require an outside source. This process takes time and support, but the moment a mother starts to feel that quiet, steady sense of I know my child, I know myself, I can trust my own instincts, that lingering self-doubt shifts into sturdy, grounded, clarity.

What do you wish more people understood about the emotional side of becoming a mother?

I wish that every mother knew that the hard parts of motherhood are not a sign that something has gone wrong. The anger, grief, and resentment you feel, and the moments of wondering if you’re broken are not failures of love or character, they are a normal, human response to one of the most significant transitions you’ll go through. And these thoughts and emotions are almost always carrying information about something older and deeper inside of you that is ready to be understood.

I also wish more people understood that the shame mothers carry about these feelings is often more damaging than the feelings themselves. Feelings pass, but it’s the shame that we add, “I am a bad mother for feeling this,” that is what gets lodged in our bodies and then shapes our relationships in the long run.

What would you want a new mother who is feeling overwhelmed to know?

That you are not failing. That the gap between the mother you imagined you would be and the mother you feel like you are right now is not evidence of your inadequacy, it is evidence of how much you care, and how little support our culture actually offers for this transition.

I would want her to know that the overwhelm makes sense. That she is not broken. That the feelings she is most ashamed of are usually the ones that make the most sense when you understand where they come from.

And I would want her to know that she does not have to figure this out alone, not through more research or by trying harder, and certainly not through waiting for it to get easier on its own. While the hard parts do shift with time, there’s always going to be hard parts and there is support that actually works to guide you to enjoy motherhood even with those hard parts. I believe with my whole heart that every mother deserves to have support in every way she and her baby needs.

A Final Note on Support

Collaborative care means mothers don’t have to navigate this transition alone, and Maya’s work is a beautiful example of what that support can look like. If you’re finding yourself feeling anxious, overwhelmed, or unsure in early motherhood, having the right kind of emotional support can make a meaningful difference. You can learn more about Maya’s work and connect with her on Instagram at @wholemom.maya where she shares more about her approach and how to work with her.