New Mothers' Psychology: The Emotional Challenges of Becoming a Mother

Becoming a mother is in one sense the most natural thing in the world. Billions of women have made the transition. Our bodies have been evolved to handle the process and evolutionary psychology suggests that, just as human beings are born "wired" to learn language, human beings may have also evolved a certain innate structure of psychological preparedness for typical human experiences such as motherhood.

While individual women may have very different experiences of the process, psychoanalyst and infant researcher Daniel Stern (1995) suggests that one can find several typical themes which tend to emerge. These themes are complex and can all be experienced positively or negatively or with many shades of feeling in between.

Four Maternal Themes

Life-Growth: Can she sustain the pregnancy and maintain the life and growth of the baby

Primary relatedness: Can she engage with the baby authentically and ensure the baby's psychic and emotional development?

Supporting Matrix: Can she provide and organize the physical and psychological support systems that will let her care for her baby properly.

Identity re-organization: Can she transform her self-image, needs and behaviors in order to facilitate the mothering function?

Life-Growth theme:

What is at stake under the concerns of this theme is the question of whether the mother will succeed as healthy natural human animal or whether there will be a failure of vitality and generativity.

One way of looking at the intensity of these concerns about the physical survival of the infant is that evolutionarily they reflect the central necessity to ensure the survival of the species.

This theme generates a common package of fears in new mothers. In pregnancy these fears appear as worry that:

• She will miscarry
• The baby will be stillborn or die soon after birth
• That the baby will be deformed or defective

After birth there are common worries that the baby will:

• Not feed well, not thrive, not develop normally
• More intensely: the fear that the baby will die:
  • Stop breathing, be suffocated,
  • Die of SID (cribdeath)
  • Die by accident or through negligence.

These are fears regarding the welfare of another person that the mother will often never have felt before and they are very potent, sometimes leading the mother to be very anxiously over-protective.

Primary Relatedness

In this theme the central preoccupation is about how well the mother can relate to her baby. Can she enter into what Winnicott (1957) called the state of "primary maternal preoccupation" in which she becomes extremely sensitized to her baby's needs and able to respond adequately to them? Can she "read" her baby's non-verbal signals correctly? Can she empathize with the baby's feelings and experiences? In short, is she a "natural" mother in terms of her feelings?

The fears generated by this theme include

• Worry about being unnatural, inadequate, ungenerous, or lacking in some of the basic repertoire of human feelings towards the baby.
• Worry that the baby's development will be hampered by these real or imagined deficits.

Supporting Matrix

The third theme concerns the mother's ability to provide and manage a physical, emotional and social environment within which she and the baby will be safe and able to carry out the tasks of Life-Growth and Primary Relatedness.

The main function of the supporting network is to safeguard the mother and buffer her from the demands of external reality so that she can concentrate on establishing her relationship and skills regarding the baby. The husband or partner has always played a large role in this regard and has come to play a greater and greater role as the nuclear family has become more and more isolated from extended support systems.

A second function of the supporting matrix is to foster the mother psychologically and to help educate her about the care and needs of her baby. This help is needed and appreciated to different degrees by different mothers depending on their existing skills and confidence.

Typical fears which arise in the context of the Supportive Matrix theme are:

• Will the surrounding environment criticize or abandon her?
• How much will she have to bend to other's expectations and risk losing self-esteem, autonomy, independence or dignity in order to retain their support.


• Will others in the environment out-compete her for the baby's love, for example: the father or grandmother.


• Will her role as mother will do damage to her relationship with her husband.
• Will he flee, withdraw or look for attention elsewhere?

Mother's mother

Traditionally this supportive network would have been comprised of female community members and the extended family, especially the woman's own mother.

It has long been recognized that becoming a mother often evokes a re-organization of a woman's relationship to her own mother.

As a woman begins to organize her thoughts and feelings about becoming a mother herself it is almost inevitable that she will compare and contrast her experience, aspirations and choices to those of her own mother. As a result her relationship to her own mother is often brought into question again or for the first time.

Does she identify with her mother and see her as a positive model, or is her mother the model of what she tries not to be? The totality of her own experience of having been mothered becomes a major influence on how she reacts or chooses to behave as a mother herself.

Identity Reorganization

The fourth theme concerns the new mother's need to transform her vision of herself. This may create tensions:

• As she shifts her identity in a very primal way from "daughter" to "mother", the woman may feel an intensified identification with her own mother which may be positive or negative.
• The shift from "wife" to "parent" also often evokes fears and feelings of guilt and responsibility towards her partner for reallocating so much of her attention to the baby.
• If the woman stops working the shift in her status and the changes in her daily life style may be dramatic.

It is usually necessary to re-organize life in practical ways. New decisions have to be made in terms of activities and behaviors which had previously been self-defining. New choices have to be made about allocation of time and investment of energy. In practical terms the changes and demands of motherhood often unhook a woman at least temporarily from aspects of life through which she has previously defined her identity and created satisfaction and self-esteem and there may be a period of adjustment before she is able to integrate her old and new visions of herself

Needing support and understanding

It is one of the most intriguing aspects of the experience of becoming a mother that a woman finds herself in the complex position of being a bit on both sides of the experience.

• As a new mother, she craves, needs, and hopefully receives, empathic support, care and understanding just like her baby does.
• Like the baby who is trying to make sense of and structure a chaotic new world of experience, the new mother also faces the challenge of experiencing and de-coding the chaotic communications and behaviors of her new baby.

When is help needed?

When one or all of these themes becomes particularly preoccupying or distressing, when the need for a supporting matrix is not sufficiently met, or if there are anxieties which prevent a new mother from adapting either her identity or her behavior sufficiently to fulfill the normal needs of her baby it may be a reason for real concern.

In such cases it may be advisable to turn for help to a professional resource such as a social worker, health care worker or psychotherapist who can help to place these concerns in perspective and offer practical help, information or support.

Motherhood is a transformative experience

Knowing that these four themes and the concerns that they evoke are common experiences can help a woman work through the process of becoming or being a new mother and help her to understand that having these feelings occasionally is part of the normal expectable process of her transition to a new psychological position.

References:

Stern, D. (1995) "The Motherhood Constellation" in The Motherhood Constellation: A Unified View of Parent-Infant Psychotherapy, Basic Books, Chapter 11 pp. 171-190

Winnicott, D. W., (1957) "On the Contribution of Direct Observation to Psychoanalysis" in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, Hogart Press