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Pathway
Identity shifts, flatness, intrusive thoughts.
Not feeling like yourself after birth can come from recovery, sleep loss, hormone shifts, grief for your old life, or postnatal depression and anxiety. These articles help separate common adjustment from signs that extra support would be useful.
In the first week or two after birth, many new parents experience a wave of emotion that seems to arrive from nowhere. Tears at small things. A sense of being overwhelmed.
There's a story told about the moment a parent first holds their baby. In this story, something fundamental shifts. A rush of love, profound and immediate. A feeling of recognition, of completion.
There is a word — not widely known, but slowly finding its way into the conversation — for the psychological transformation a person undergoes when they become a parent. It's called matrescence.