Ever feel like you became a mother and somehow lost track of who you were before? 

This could be matrescence, which is the psychological, hormonal, and identity shift that happens when you become a mother, and it's every bit as significant as adolescence, just with a lot less cultural recognition and a lot less support. 

What actually is matrescence? 

Matrescence is the process of becoming a mother, not just the physical event of birth, but the ongoing transformation of identity, relationships, body, and sense of self that comes with it. 

The term was coined back in the 1970s, but it's only recently started entering everyday conversation. Which is strange, because almost everyone who becomes a parent goes through it. You're not just adding a new role to your life. You're being fundamentally reshaped by it, your priorities shift, your relationships change, your body is different, your sense of who you are gets rewritten in real time. 

Nobody tells you this part. We talk endlessly about the baby's development, milestones, growth charts, sleep regressions, but almost nothing about the parallel transformation happening in the mother. 

Why does it feel so destabilising? 

Because it genuinely is a kind of rupture. You're grieving a former version of yourself while simultaneously trying to build a new one, often with no sleep, very little time, and an audience of people asking how the baby's doing rather than how you're doing. 

It's common to feel a confusing mix of things at once, fierce love and resentment, gratitude and grief, confidence and total disorientation. None of that means something's wrong with you. It means you're in the middle of one of the biggest identity transitions a person can go through. 

For some women, matrescence also surfaces things that were already there, old beliefs about not being good enough, old patterns from your own upbringing, old trauma that suddenly feels very close to the surface. Becoming responsible for a tiny, dependent person has a way of bringing your own childhood right back into the room. 

This is one of the most common things that comes up in sessions, and it often catches women by surprise. You expect motherhood to be hard in the obvious ways, the sleep deprivation, the logistics, the loss of time to yourself. What's less expected is how much it can dredge up about your own upbringing. 

Holding your baby when they cry can bring up memories of not being soothed yourself. Setting a boundary with your own parents can stir up old fears of being "too much," or not being allowed to have needs. Watching your child reach for you can highlight exactly how present, or absent, your own caregivers were. Even small, ordinary moments, bath time, bedtime, a tantrum in the supermarket, can unexpectedly activate something much older than the moment itself. 

This happens because becoming a parent puts you back in close proximity to your own experience of being parented. You're not just learning how to care for a baby; you're constantly being shown, by comparison, how you were cared for. If your own childhood involved being criticised, unseen, parentified, or left to manage big feelings alone, those old wounds don't stay neatly in the past, they tend to resurface right when you're least resourced to deal with them. 

This is often why insecurities feel so loud in early motherhood. A passing comment from a relative can hit far harder than it logically should. Doubt about whether you're "doing it right" can spiral into something closer to shame. Many women describe being blindsided by emotions that don't seem to match what's actually happening, and that mismatch is usually a sign that an old wound has been touched, not that something is wrong with you now. 

Why doesn't just "giving it time" fix it? 

Time helps you adjust to the logistics, the routines, the sleep, the new rhythm of life. But matrescence isn't only a logistical adjustment. It's an identity and nervous system shift, and those don't resolve just because the practical stuff gets easier. 

If your transition into motherhood involved a difficult birth, unmet expectations, loss of autonomy, or moments where you felt unheard, unsafe, or unseen, those experiences can get stored in the body in a way that talking it through once doesn't fully shift. You can intellectually understand that you're "doing fine" and still feel a persistent sense of unease, grief, or disconnection from yourself that doesn't lift no matter how much time passes. 

What does EMDR actually have to do with becoming a mother? 

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) helps process painful memories. A lot of what makes matrescence so hard isn't just physical exhaustion. It's the unprocessed moments sitting underneath it, the birth that didn't go to plan, the comment from a relative that still stings, the moment you felt completely out of your depth and no one was there, the loss of the identity you used to recognise as yourself. 

EMDR works by helping your brain finish processing those moments, rather than leaving them stuck in a kind of loop. Instead of just talking about what happened, EMDR uses bilateral stimulation (like guided eye movements) to help your brain do what it does naturally during processing, only for memories or beliefs that got "stuck" along the way. 

This can be useful for: 

• Birth experiences that still feel raw, confusing, or hard to make peace with 

• A persistent sense of failure or guilt, even when logically you know you're doing okay 

• Old beliefs resurfacing, like not being good enough, not being safe, or having to do everything alone 

• Identity grief, mourning who you were before, while still finding your footing in who you're becoming 

• A nervous system stuck on high alert, long after the immediate crisis has passed 

What does it actually look like in a session? 

EMDR doesn't require you to recount every detail of what happened over and over. You don't need a tidy narrative or even full clarity on what's bothering you, often the body knows before the mind has the words. A trained therapist will help you identify what feels most "stuck," then guide you through a structured process to help your brain reprocess it, at a pace that feels manageable. 

For many women, this means the memory or belief that used to bring up intense guilt, fear, or grief starts to feel more settled, not erased, but no longer running the show in the background. 

You don't have to wait until things feel unbearable.

Matrescence doesn't need to look like a crisis to be worth supporting. If you've noticed you're not quite yourself, if a difficult birth still sits heavily, or if you're carrying guilt and grief you can't quite name, that's reason enough to reach out. 

If this resonates, we'd love to support you through it. Reach out to find out more about our EMDR and specialised peri-natal, postpartum and matrescence counselling services.