If you are a woman of color in the postpartum season or the early years of motherhood with small children, who has been actively trying to recover from postpartum, to regulate, to feel better, or just trying to enjoy life after kids more, and you still feel depleted no matter what you try, then this post is for you.

Most of the women I work with who identify with the above will tell me they are exhausted by the sheer amount of energy, time, and resources it takes just to try to be well in motherhood. And I am not talking about just any kind of exhaustion. I am talking about the kind that sleep does not seem to touch. The kind where you wake up already behind, drag yourself through the day, and wonder what happened to the version of you that used to hold it down no matter what.

So you try therapy, journaling, breathwork, morning routines, saying no to things — and none of it seems to stick. You still feel depleted or reactive, and sometimes both. And because you are the kind of woman who questions things, you have started to wonder if the problem is you.

Let’s set that straight right now.

I truly believe it is not you. What I do believe is that most moms are missing a step. One that, in my clinical experience, tends to make everything else more effective and sustainable when it is addressed first. Without it, the work often hits a ceiling, no matter how hard you try.

I am Vanessa, an integrative perinatal mental health certified therapist and wellness coach. I work with women of color navigating matrescence, postpartum, and the early years of motherhood, and I am a mother who has lived all of this from the inside. I have been in practice for fifteen years, with a focus on women of color specifically — because the tools most of us get handed were not built around our body, our history, or our reality.

And that matters for why they are not working.

This post is going to tell you what is actually happening, and where to actually start.

Your Tools Are Fine, It’s Your Foundation That’s Not

Think about a car that keeps running out of gas no matter how many times you fill it up. You keep stopping at every gas station, trying to fuel more efficiently. But the car still stalls. Still leaves you stranded. And you cannot figure out why, because you are doing everything right.

Until someone looks underneath and finds a hole in the tank.

That is the real problem. Not that the car has no gas, or that you are a bad driver. There is a hole in the tank, and until it is found and plugged, nothing you pour in will hold. The gas drains out before it can do what it is supposed to do.

That is what is happening to so many women of color in the postpartum years and early motherhood. The tools you have been trying, like breathwork, therapy, journaling, morning routines, setting boundaries, etc., those are the gas. They are real, and they have value, but they cannot hold in a tank that is still leaking.

You get handed tools:

Breathe like this
Journal like that
Set a boundary
Practice this calming exercise before bed
Take the rest

And all of those tools are genuinely good for you. The problem is that every single one of them asks something of your body that you may not have to give. They ask for energy, focus, a nervous system that can respond instead of react or shut down. They assume a foundation that is already in place.

But when your tank has a hole in it, those tools become one more thing being asked of a body that has already given everything it has. They have a harder time sticking and working effectively. Not because of you, and not because the tools are wrong. But in my experience, when the foundation underneath has not been addressed, the tools tend to hit a ceiling, no matter how consistently you use them.

So let’s talk about the order, and where we start first.

The Order Nobody Told You About

In my work with clients, and in my own life, I have developed a framework for understanding why some mothers see the work start to hold and others stay stuck — even when they are doing all the right things.

What I have come to see, over fifteen years and informed by neuroscience, physiology, nutrition science, and psychology, is that for most women I work with, there is a sequence that tends to matter. It’s not necessarily a rule, but a pattern I have watched again and again: when we start by rebuilding the foundation first, everything else becomes more effective and more sustainable.

The framework I use — what I call the Rooted Method — draws from several disciplines and has four parts. Most mothers are only ever offered two of them.

And for mothers of color who arrive already carrying depletion they may not even recognize in themselves, that foundational work is almost always what needs to come first.

That gap is not a sign that the work was wrong. It is usually a sign that something foundational was not yet in place.

This sequence has four parts.

Capacity comes first. Not as a rigid rule, but as a starting place, especially when nothing else has been holding. Before anything else, we look honestly at what is draining you. The absence of margin. The missing village. The mental load carried alone. The hypervigilance that never turns off. The financial pressure running underneath everything. Capacity is a real, measurable, ever-shifting state of what your body can give and hold in this season of your life. Until we address what is actively draining it, or if we use the car analogy, find the leak, whatever we pour in has a harder time holding.

Repletion comes second. Once we start to address the drains, we look at what needs to be restored. Repletion means actively restoring what pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and years of caregiving have taken from your body. Dr. Oscar Serrallach, one of the leading researchers on postnatal depletion, found that many mothers remain nutritionally and physiologically depleted for years after giving birth when recovery is not actively supported. Years, not weeks. Nutrients, minerals, hormonal recovery, sleep debt that has never been repaid — when these run low, everything feels harder than it should. Your mood, your patience, your focus, your desire to connect. All of it is affected.

Regulation and reclamation come after. The breathwork, the therapy, the somatic tools, the identity work — these are genuinely powerful. I use them. I believe in them. But research in neuroscience is clear that when the body is under chronic physiological stress, it prioritizes cortisol production over the neurotransmitters that regulate mood, sleep, and emotional stability. A body running a biological deficit keeps firing survival signals even while doing all the right things. This does not mean regulation never helps before capacity is rebuilt — sometimes a mother is too dysregulated to even begin the foundational work, and we start there to get her stable enough to go back and build the foundation properly. But it does mean that regulation and reclamation tend to hit a ceiling, and that ceiling is almost always about what was missing underneath.

Most mothers are handed tools that start at step three or four. Almost nobody mentions steps one and two. So women spend months, sometimes years, doing genuinely good work — work that provides real relief — and still wondering why they cannot seem to get all the way there. That is not a failure of the tools, and it is not a failure of effort. It is usually a sign that the foundation underneath needs attention.

This is the Rooted Method.

And in my clinical experience, when we go back and address the foundational steps first — especially with women who have been trying other tools without seeing them hold — that is consistently where the shift happens. The order is not a rule. It is a clinical pattern I have watched make the difference between work that helps for a moment and work that actually holds.

So What Does Rebuilding Your Capacity Actually Look Like?

Now that you understand the sequence, you might be wondering what rebuilding actually looks like in practice— specifically the first step, capacity.

Because I am not talking about a workout plan or a new diet. I am a therapist and coach, not your doctor, and nothing here is medical advice. But what I am talking about are the basics — the ones that get quietly dropped when a mother is in survival mode, and nobody is tracking them.

Are you eating real meals regularly?

Multiple studies across postpartum populations have found that the majority of mothers, breastfeeding or not, do not meet their daily energy and nutrient requirements after birth, with consistent deficits in vitamin D, iron, folates, calcium, and omega-3s documented across multiple countries and populations. These are not optional extras. They are the raw materials your body needs to produce the hormones and neurotransmitters that regulate your mood, your focus, and your ability to stay regulated.

Are you sleeping in a way your body can actually use? And if the answer is no, because it rarely can be yes with young children, do you have support that genuinely supports you in improving your sleep?

Have you had a conversation with a provider about what your body is experiencing, and did you feel heard in that room?

Many of the mothers I work with have had labs come back “normal” while their bodies were telling a completely different story. Normal range and, replenished and balanced are not the same thing.

Here is a picture that I actually see very often:

A client comes to me two years postpartum. She has been in therapy for several months and is doing genuinely good work. She is self-aware and trying hard. But she is still reactive in ways she cannot explain, still foggy, still running on caffeine with no real recovery underneath any of it. When we start talking about her capacity, her nervous system, what diet and lifestyle practices look like, whether she has had a full thyroid panel or her ferritin tested specifically, whether she has had a single night of unbroken sleep in the past year — the picture shifts. “I didn’t know this was even part of it,” she tells me almost every time.

Most women don’t because we don’t talk enough about all these other pieces of maternal wellbeing. And for women of color specifically, all of this hits differently.

Why This Hits Women of Color Differently

Let’s be real, many of us did not walk into motherhood with a full tank.

We were already carrying the weight of being the one who holds it together, who shows up, who does not let things fall apart. We know the specific exhaustion of navigating spaces that were not built for us. The hypervigilance that does not turn off, ever. The experience of going to a doctor and not being fully heard, and then going again and still not being fully heard.

Dr. Arline Geronimus, a public health researcher, documented what she called the weathering hypothesis: that Black women’s bodies experience accelerated biological aging due to the cumulative physiological cost of chronic stress in navigating racism over a lifetime. This is not metaphorical wear. It is measurable. It shows up in stress hormones, in inflammation, in the body’s ability to recover. And it does not pause when you become a mother.

It stacks.

While the weathering research focuses specifically on Black women, the physiological toll of racialized stress is not limited to one community. Latinas, Asian American women, Indigenous women, and women of color broadly carry their own specific and documented forms of chronic stress — from immigration-related pressure, to cultural expectations of selflessness and sacrifice, to the particular invisibility of being unseen in medical spaces that were never designed around your body or your experience.

The details may differ, but the biological cost of navigating a world not built for you does not.

Many women of color arrive at motherhood already running a physiological deficit that mainstream maternal health conversations rarely acknowledge. When you feel like you are working twice as hard to feel half as well, you are not imagining it. You are not being dramatic. Your body has been carrying more than anyone named, and it needs more to recover than anyone told you.

This is why I often say you do not need another coping tool to start with, we need to be refilled.

What Becomes Possible When You Start in the Right Place

I want to give you a real picture of what I have watched happen when my clients start by rebuilding their capacity first, because the beginning matters and is what makes everything else possible.

When the body starts to get what it has been missing, the first thing most women notice is not necessarily joy or clarity or immediately feeling like themselves again. I’ve noticed that it is something quieter than that. It’s the actual space between the trigger and the reaction. Many of my clients report feeling like they have a bit more spaciousness and margin because their biggest leaks have been plugged up.

That is capacity starting to rebuild. Not the destination. The foundation.

And what I have watched happen next is that the other tools — the breathwork, the journaling, the regulation practices, the therapy — start to land in a way they could not before. Not because the tools changed. Because your body finally has something to work with.

This is not about being postpartum in the clinical sense. I work with mothers whose children are three, four, five years old — women who have been told, or who have told themselves, that they are past the postpartum window and should be fine by now. They are not fine. They are depleted. And depletion does not have an expiration date. It persists until it is addressed, no matter how many years have passed since your baby was born.

Four Places to Start This Week

You do not have to overhaul everything, and do not have to figure it all out at once. You just have to start one step earlier than you have been starting.

Here are four places to begin, no matter where you are in your motherhood journey:

Name one drain that has been running in the background. Not everything, just one. Is there something that is consistently costing you energy that nobody is helping you carry? A responsibility that landed on you by default, a relationship that takes more than it gives, a task that only exists because no one else does it? Name it. You cannot plug a drain you have not identified.

Look at where your time actually goes in a day. Not where you think it goes but ,where it actually goes. Mothers of color in particular are often spending significant time and cognitive energy on tasks, roles, and emotional labor that are invisible and unaccounted for. Before you add anything to your plate, it helps to see what is already on it.

Notice what you are doing on empty. Are you showing up for work, for your children, for your household, and for everyone else before you have had water, a meal, or a doctor’s appointment for that persistent headache? This is not a failure of discipline. It is a structural problem. Name what the structure is actually asking of you right now.

Ask what support would actually need to look like to move the needle. Not “more help” in the abstract, but specifically: what would need to change for you to have even thirty minutes of genuine recovery in your day? That question alone begins to locate where your capacity is leaking.

That is rebuilding in practice. It looks small from the outside, but it is the foundation for everything else.

If You’re Ready to Stop Starting in the Middle

You now understand something most people never name: that the reason the work hasn’t been sticking may not be about effort. It may be about where you started. And in my experience, it almost always starts with your body.

But understanding it and actually having the space to work through it are two different things. And I know what it is like to read something that finally makes sense, and then close the tab and go back to managing.

That is exactly why I created the Weekend Therapy Intensive.

It is not weekly therapy, where you spend the first ten minutes catching up and the last five winding down and the weeks in between trying to hold onto whatever shifted. It is a dedicated, uninterrupted day or weekend where we go deep on what is actually happening in your body, what has been keeping you stuck, what needs to shift first, and what the right order of healing looks like for you specifically.

You will leave with real clarity on what has been happening and why. Tools your body can actually use right now. A concrete path forward that starts where you actually are, not where you think you should be. And something I wish someone had given me when I was in the thick of it: the felt experience of being fully seen and supported in what your body, identity and your life have been carrying.

I am now accepting intensive clients for October, November, and December. If you have been waiting for the right time, this is it. Motherhood stays full, and the version of you that is exhausted, stretched thin, and quietly wondering when you will feel like yourself again? She deserves support now, not someday.

If you are a mother of color in Texas or Massachusetts and you are ready to stop trying to figure this out on your own, I would love to talk.

Book your free consultation here — no pressure, no commitment, just a real conversation about where you are and whether an intensive is the right next step.

And if you are not quite ready for that, come find me on Instagram at @matrescenceincolor or listen to the private podcast, where I go deeper into what repletion, regulation, and reclamation actually look like for mothers of color in real life.

You have been trying to heal in the margins. You deserve a container built for it.