The Centre for Perinatal Counselling and Psychotherapy provides one-on-one sessions with a Counselling Therapist. You may choose to include music as a component of the therapeutic process. Counselling sessions are currently being offered virtually due to COVID restrictions to clients across the province of Nova Scotia.

“What if I drop the baby? Am I failing as a parent? Everything just feels so hard. Maybe I shouldn’t have had this baby.”

If these thoughts sound familiar, you may be experiencing some of the normal fears and concerns associated with the transition through the perinatal period. If these thoughts and the associated feelings are beginning to impact your ability to complete activities of daily living or to interfere with your ability to care for yourself and/or your children, you may be experiencing a Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorder.

The transition to parenthood can be challenging.

For some parents, some exercise, a healthy diet, and support from family and friends are enough to get them through the initial adjustment period. For others, talking to a therapist who specializes in dealing with new parenthood issues can provide comfort, relief, and perspective.

Giving birth is a highly vulnerable event in a person’s life.

A variety of factors can lead a person to experience giving birth as traumatic. The birthing parent’s previous experiences with trauma, their perception of control during the birthing process, and the way they were treated by their care providers, are all critical factors in understanding a birth experience perceived as traumatic by the birthing parent.

The most important thing to remember is that if you experienced giving birth as traumatic, you had a traumatic birth, and it is OK to want to talk about it.

Bereavement is the process of recovering from the death of a loved one. Grief is a reaction for any form of loss. Both encompass a wide range of emotions, such as fear, anger and deep, deep sadness.

Grief and bereavement take many forms and can stem from a wide range of experiences during the perinatal period, including fertility treatments, miscarriage, stillbirth, termination for medication reasons, early infant loss, grief over the loss of your previous identity before becoming a parent, a birth experience that was drastically different from your expectations, as well as the loss of the dreams and visions you had for what your experience as a parent would be like.