Going Back to Work Feels Overwhelming: Postpartum Therapy in Washington, DC for Career Transitions After Baby
For many new parents, the return to work arrives with a particular kind of dread. Not just the logistical kind, but something harder to name. If you are approaching this transition and finding it more emotionally difficult than you expected, postpartum therapy for career transitions in Washington, DC, can offer a space to slow down and make sense of what you are experiencing. Because what often makes returning to work so disorienting is not the job itself. It is the quiet, unsettling recognition that the person returning is not quite the same person who left.
You Are Returning With a Different Psyche
The workplace tends to operate on an assumption of continuity. There is an implicit expectation, rarely spoken, but deeply felt, that you will return more or less as you were. "Back to normal." Ready to pick up where you left off. But the postpartum period involves profound psychological reorganization. Becoming a parent reshapes identity, priorities, emotional availability, and internal expectations in ways that cannot simply be set aside during business hours.
Many postpartum parents return to work and notice they feel less able to focus singularly on tasks, more emotionally sensitive to pressure or conflict, and less capable of compartmentalizing the way they once could. These are not signs that something has gone wrong. They are signs that something significant has happened. That your psyche has reorganized itself around a new attachment, a new identity, and a new understanding of what matters. The pain often comes from the mismatch: the world expects continuity, and internally, there is none.
Separation and What It Stirs
Returning to work also means leaving. Every day. At a time when the bond between parent and baby is still forming and consolidating. Daily separation from an infant carries emotional weight that logistics alone cannot address. Even when childcare is safe, carefully chosen, and trusted, separation can stir guilt, grief, and anxiety that feel disproportionate to the circumstances. For some parents, leaving feels like a kind of betrayal; as though going to work is evidence of insufficient love or devotion. And yet, the guilt can run in the opposite direction just as painfully.
Some mothers feel relief at returning to work, even a quiet longing for the structure, identity, and adult engagement that a job provides. Then they feel ashamed of wanting those things. The conflict between these two experiences can feel unbearable: guilt for going, guilt for wanting to go. These feelings are not irrational, and they are not unique to you.They often carry older meanings and absorbed ideas about what a good mother does. We internalize notions of self-sacrifice and question who is allowed to have needs. Exploring those meanings, rather than pushing past them, is often where real relief begins.
The Loss That Is Harder to Name
For many mothers, returning to work brings a particular loss that often goes unspoken: the loss of a certain kind of relationship with the baby. During maternity leave, a mother's sense of being indispensable to her infant is both deeply gratifying and quietly burdensome. She is the one who knows the baby's cries, who soothes most reliably, who is needed in a total and irreplaceable way. Returning to work requires a reckoning with something real: that the baby can, at whatever age, be kept alive and cared for by others. That she is not the only one.
This recognition is, in some ways, a developmental step for both mother and baby. But it does not feel like a milestone. It can feel like being replaced. The mix of relief and loss in that moment is something many mothers carry quietly. They are often uncertain whether they are allowed to grieve something that is also, objectively, a good thing. In postpartum therapy, there is space for exactly this kind of complexity; for feelings that do not resolve neatly into one another.
The Internal Pressure to Prove You Are Back
Alongside grief and guilt, many postpartum parents return to work carrying an internal pressure to demonstrate that nothing has changed. They want to appear committed, competent, and professionally unchanged. Because anything less feels like confirmation of a fear they have been holding since the pregnancy began. This pressure can show up in recognizable ways: overworking, avoiding asking for accommodations, or minimizing exhaustion to colleagues. It can also mean pushing through difficulty rather than acknowledging it.
Some parents cannot bear the thought of being seen as less serious, less reliable, or less present than they were before. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this kind of pressure rarely originates in the workplace alone. It often echoes earlier experiences: dynamics in which love, approval, or belonging felt contingent on performance. The postpartum return to work can reactivate those patterns at a moment when internal and physical resources are already depleted.
The Weight of Doing Two Jobs
During pregnancy, there is one job, and during maternity leave, there is one job. Returning to work introduces something qualitatively different: two jobs, running simultaneously, with no clear endpoint and no model for how to hold both. The dread many parents feel about this is not catastrophizing. It is an accurate perception of an enormous demand. And it often stirs questions that extend beyond scheduling: How will the parenting partnership adapt? Who adjusts more? Can the relationship hold the weight of this new structure? These questions, when they go unaddressed, can quietly accumulate into resentment, disconnection, or a persistent sense of being alone in what should be a shared endeavor.
Returning to work is not just a career transition. It is a relational one, too.
How Postpartum Therapy Can Help
Postpartum therapy for career transitions in Washington, DC, is not focused on helping you manage your time or optimize your schedule. It offers something different: a space to understand what this transition means to you specifically. This includes your history, your relationship to work and identity, and the particular way becoming a parent has changed you. In specialized postpartum therapy, there is room to explore the grief and guilt that accompany daily separation and the internal pressure to maintain continuity when everything has internally shifted.
You can also explore what was lost and what was gained in becoming a mother. Therapy also offers room to think about the parenting partnership. We can explore how responsibilities are being negotiated, where friction is building, and what that friction might be expressing. Working with a postpartum therapist in Washington, DC, provides a place to hold all of these feelings, including the ones that feel contradictory or difficult to admit out loud. The goal is not to reach a resolution or to feel better quickly. It is to understand your own experience more clearly, and to find steadiness from that understanding.
You Are Not Behind
Returning to work after having a baby is not a test you can pass or fail. It is a moment in which you are being asked to be two things at once, professionally capable and deeply changed, and the tension between those two realities is real.
If that tension feels overwhelming, it is not a signal that something is wrong with you. It is a signal that something significant is happening. You are not behind, rather you are becoming.
Find Postpartum Therapy for Career Transitions in Washington, DC
If returning to work has felt more emotionally complicated than you expected, you are not alone. Many new parents experience this as one of the most disorienting moments of the postpartum period. It is often marked by guilt, grief, identity confusion, and a quiet sense of loss that does not have an obvious name. Specialized postpartum therapy in Washington, DC, can offer a supportive, nonjudgmental space to understand what you are carrying and receive care that meets you where you actually are. Getting started may look like this:
Schedule a consultation to talk openly about the emotional weight of returning to work and what this transition has stirred.
Begin postpartum therapy for career transitions in Washington, DC, focused on identity, separation, guilt, and the psychological complexity of becoming a working parent.
Develop greater emotional clarity and self-understanding during a season that is asking a great deal of you, in every direction at once.
Working with a postpartum therapist in Washington, DC, can offer consistent, thoughtful support as you navigate this transition. Reach out to learn more about care designed to help you feel more grounded in yourself, not just more productive.
Additional Counseling Services with Nina Van Sant in Washington, DC
Alongside postpartum therapy in Washington, DC, I offer individualized counseling for people navigating a wide range of emotional concerns and life transitions. This includes support for infertility-related stress, psychoanalysis, and work with adolescents as well as older adults. I also support expats and international professionals adjusting to relocation, cultural transitions, and the emotional complexity that often accompanies major life changes.
Therapy is a collaborative process rooted in depth-oriented exploration; focused on building emotional steadiness, deepening self-understanding, and creating changes that feel authentic and lasting.