If you’ve found yourself in survival mode in motherhood and quietly wondering whether this exhausted, irritable, disconnected version of you is just… who you are now, I want you to stay with me for a minute.

Because I hear this more than almost anything else in my work with mothers. Not in those exact words, but in the way it sounds when a woman who has never struggled to hold herself together starts to feel like she doesn’t recognize herself anymore. snapping at people she loves. The flatness where there used to be feeling. The fog that makes simple things feel enormous. The exhaustion that sleep doesn’t touch.

And underneath all of it, this quiet, creeping thought: maybe this is just me now.

You are not new to hard. You have navigated hard before — professionally, personally, in ways that required you to be capable and composed and keep moving regardless. This is different now that you’re a mom. And the fact that it feels different matters.

I’m Vanessa — a therapist of 15 years, a wellness coach, a woman of color, and a mom who hit her own wall in early motherhood. In my work, I sit with many women of color who are somewhere in the postpartum season or the early years of motherhood — women who went from feeling like the one who had it together to wondering what happened to her. 

And what I want to offer you in this post is not another explanation of why motherhood is hard. You know it’s hard. What I want to offer is a different way of understanding what’s actually happening, in your body, in your identity, in the pattern you’ve been living inside and why this is not your permanent state.

Survival mode is not your personality, even if it feels like that right now. But there’s a reason it’s started to feel that way.

First: Your Body Was Supposed to Do This

Before we go any further, I want to say something that I think matters more than most people realize: survival mode in early motherhood is not a malfunction. It is not a sign that you are doing this wrong. It is your body doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Becoming a mother is a dysregulating event. I don’t say that as a criticism — it is biology. And when we actually look at everything that happens in a woman’s body during this time, it makes complete sense that her entire system shifts into a different mode of operating.

Think about what is happening all at once. 

Your brain is literally restructuring itself, a process many call matrescence, the neurological and psychological transformation of becoming a mother. The brain reorganizes in ways that make you more alert, more attuned to threat, more responsive to your baby’s needs. 

At the same time, your hormones have undergone one of the most significant shifts of your life. Your body is physically recovering — from pregnancy, from birth, from the demands of feeding and holding and being touched constantly. Your sleep has been fragmented and interrupted in ways that have a measurable impact on your cognition, your mood, your ability to regulate.

And, your identity is changing in ways nobody fully prepares you for. And your entire life, your rhythms, your routines, the way you understood yourself and your days, all of it changed.

That is not one stressor. That is a cascade of simultaneous, compounding changes landing on your whole body at the same time. And your body’s response is to shift into a heightened, alert, survival-oriented state, and that is adaptive. It is evolutionary. It is your body rising to meet the moment.

So as you can see, it’s not a problem that you went into survival mode. The problem is what happens when you stay there, and why so many mothers unknowingly do.

What Survival Mode Was Never Meant to Be: Permanent

Survival mode has a job. It is meant to get you through. It is not meant to become your baseline.

But here is what happens for so many women: the initial season that required survival mode doesn’t have a clear ending. There is no moment where your body gets the signal that the acute phase is over and it is safe to come down. Especially when the support that would allow that transition — real rest, nourishment, nervous system safety, someone actually holding you while you hold everyone else — was never fully there to begin with.

And for many women, that missing support is not a personal failure or an oversight. It is structural. 

The institution of motherhood, the cultural and systemic expectations placed on mothers was not built around what women actually need. It was built around what women are expected to produce: children who are fed, cared for, developing well. The woman herself, her recovery, her restoration, her identity beyond caregiving, has historically been an afterthought at best. And the systems that might have supported her with adequate parental leave, accessible maternal healthcare, community, village, etc are either insufficient, inaccessible, or simply absent.

For women of color, these gaps are wider and the weight is heavier. The expectation to keep going without showing the cost is not just cultural pressure, it is a survival strategy that has been passed down through generations of women who genuinely could not afford to stop. Which means many women of color enter the already-demanding landscape of motherhood carrying an additional invisible load that the institution was never designed to acknowledge, let alone address.

So the body stays where it is; on alert, bracing, and running on whatever it can find. And the longer it stays there, the more it costs. 

Chronic survival mode draws down your body’s resources in ways that compound over time. The nutrient and mineral stores that were already depleted by pregnancy and postpartum — the iron, the omega-3s, the B vitamins, the vitamin D — continue to run low because there is no space for real restoration. Stress hormones that were meant to spike and settle stay chronically elevated. Your brain, which reorganized itself to stay vigilant and attuned, never gets the conditions it needs to settle into something more sustainable. Your emotional range starts to narrow. The things that used to bring you joy start to feel far away or inaccessible. Your sense of yourself, who you are outside of the demands of everyone around you, starts to shrink.

I think it’s important for women to know that you did not cause this, nothing you did caused this. This is what happens to a whole body that has been giving without receiving for long enough. It adapts. It contracts. It does what it has to do to keep going in motherhood.

And the cruel part is that it does it so quietly that most women don’t realize it’s happened until the gap between who they were and who they feel like now has grown too wide to ignore.

For Many Women of Color, Survival Mode Didn’t Start in the Delivery Room

This is the part I want to sit with for a moment, because it is something that gets almost no airtime in mainstream conversations about motherhood and burnout.

For many women of color, survival mode is not a new experience that motherhood introduced. It is a familiar one that motherhood intensified.

Dr. Arline Geronimus, a public health researcher, developed what she called the “weathering” hypothesis to describe something she observed in the data: that Black women’s bodies age at an accelerated biological rate due to the chronic, cumulative stress of navigating racism, hypervigilance, and systemic inequity over a lifetime. 

This is not metaphorical aging. This is measurable, physiological wear of elevated stress hormones, shortened telomeres, higher allostatic load; the kind of wear that accumulates when your body has been in a state of chronic stress-response for years, because of what you have been asked to navigate in a society that was not built to support you.

That is the body that enters motherhood.

Dr. Patricia Hill Collins, one of the foundational voices in Black feminist thought, introduced the concept of motherwork; the idea that for Black women and women of color, mothering has always been inseparable from survival. Not survival as a metaphor, but survival in the most literal sense: the work of protecting your children, preserving your culture, and keeping your family intact within systems that have historically worked against all of those things. 

Survival is not a new response to motherhood for many women of color. It is a framework that was already present, already embodied, already running in the background long before a baby arrived.

So when we talk about a woman of color transitioning to motherhood and finding herself in survival mode, we are not talking about a woman who simply got overwhelmed by new parenthood. We are often talking about a woman who arrived already carrying a physiological and historical weight that mainstream maternal health conversations rarely acknowledge. Motherhood didn’t create the pattern. It exceeded the capacity of a woman and a body that had already been running lean for a long time.

And that matters for how we understand what healing actually requires for the woman who became a mother.

What’s Actually Being Lost While She’s in Survival Mode

I want to name something that doesn’t get said enough, because I think you might need to hear it named out loud.

Survival mode doesn’t just make you feel tired. Over time, it quietly takes things from you.

It takes your joy. Not in a dramatic, all-at-once way but more like a slow dimming. The things that used to make you laugh, the moments that used to feel light, the version of you who could be fully present and actually enjoying her life, she starts to feel far away. And you might have told yourself you’re just tired, or that this season is hard, or that you’ll feel better when things settle down. But underneath that, there’s a quieter fear: what if this is just who I am now?

It takes your clarity. You used to trust yourself. You used to be able to think through something hard and come to a decision without it costing you everything. Now you second-guess, spiral, freeze. And because you are someone who has always been sharp and capable, this one hits differently. It can feel like you are losing your mind a little. You are not, but it can feel like you’re losing access to it, temporarily, because a body running in survival mode is using everything it has just to keep you upright.

It takes your sense of self. The parts of you that existed before anyone needed anything from you — what you love, what makes you laugh, what you actually want, who you are when the roles fall away — those parts start to feel like memories of someone you used to be. You might grieve her without even realizing that’s what you’re doing. You might catch yourself wondering if she’s gone.

And maybe the hardest part, the one that’s most difficult to admit, is that you can be right in the middle of your life and feel completely unreachable inside it. Present in the room. Gone somewhere else entirely. With your child and unable to feel what you thought you would feel. Living the life you worked for and watching it from a distance, like it belongs to someone else.

That is not a personal failing. 

That is what survival mode costs when it goes on long enough without the right support. And I am naming it not to make the weight heavier, but because you cannot find your way to something you haven’t been able to name as lost.

And here is what I need you to hold as you keep reading: none of this is permanent. Not the flatness, not the disconnection, not the feeling of being unreachable inside your own life. Motherhood changes you; fully, irrevocably, and in ways that are still unfolding. You are not going back to who you were before. 

But you are not meant to stay here either. 

The joy, the clarity, the sense of being grounded in yourself, that reality is not gone. It has been suppressed by a body running on empty for too long. And when that changes, you don’t go back. You move forward, into the woman and the mother you are still in the process of becoming.

What Moving Forward Actually Requires

If you have read this far, and you’re anything like my clients, you might be asking, okay so what do we do about it? You might be waiting for me to tell you to start a self-care practice. To try a new supplement. To meditate more consistently, journal more honestly, rest when the baby rests.

I am not going to tell you that.

Not because those things have no value, some of them do. But because they are tools. And tools require a foundation to work from. And what I see again and again in my work with mothers is that the foundation has been missing. Which is why the tools haven’t been working or don’t stick long enough to make an impact. Which is why you have been trying and trying and still feeling like this.

What moving forward actually looks like, what stepping into the woman and the mother you are still becoming actually looks like, is a different starting point entirely.

How I Came to Understand This

I was already taking an integrative and holistic approach in my therapy work with clients for years, and before I became a mother myself, I thought I was looking at the whole picture. And then in 2021, after I had my son, I began studying matrescence seriously, and then studying postpartum nutrition, and something shifted in how I was seeing my therapy clients. I started recognizing a gap — not in their effort, not in the therapeutic work itself, but in what we were not always addressing first: the biological piece. The physical foundation underneath everything else.

Women were coming to me already depleted in ways that were measurable and addressable, and that piece was being missed — in my work, and in most of the maternal mental health conversations happening around me. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. And it changed how I work.

What I Actually See When I Do an Inventory

And here is why I start with the body almost every time, because when I actually do an inventory with the women I work with, what I find is remarkably consistent. They are skipping meals or eating whatever is fastest and closest. They are staying up late after everyone is finally asleep, not to rest, but to have the first quiet moment of their day. They are barely drinking water. They are pushing their bodies past reasonable limits in the name of getting things done because things have to get done, and there is nobody else to do them. They are running on caffeine and willpower and the sheer force of being someone who does not quit.

When I reflect this back to them, most of them pause. Because they hadn’t fully registered it. They had normalized it so completely that it stopped registering as deprivation and started feeling like just the way things are right now. This is what survival mode does, it narrows your focus so completely that your own basic needs become invisible to you.

So when I say I start with the body, I say it because the data in my own practice, and in my own life, tells me to. Almost every time.

The Sequence That Actually Works

Coming out of survival mode starts with your whole body. Before the mindset work, before the identity exploration, before the deeper emotional excavation — your body needs to be resourced enough to hold any of that. That means addressing biological depletion in a real, targeted way. The nutrient deficits. The hormonal disruption. The sleep debt that has never fully been repaid. Not a wellness trend. Not a green juice. An honest reckoning with what your body has been missing and what it actually needs to restore its own capacity.

From that foundation, your nervous system can actually begin to believe the tools you’re using to build capacity. Not through pushing your way into composure or managing yourself into calm — but through actually having enough in the tank to respond rather than just react. This is where regulation becomes possible. Not as a skill you perform, but as something your body can actually access because it finally has what it needs — literally.

And from there the deeper work lands. The questions about who you are now. The grief of the woman you were before motherhood transformed you. The expansion into who you are becoming on the other side of this. The reclamation of the desires, the clarity, the groundedness that survival mode pushed to the margins. This is where you stop just getting through motherhood and start actually living inside it — as yourself, in this season, in this version of your life.

This is the sequence I have seen work, in my clinical practice and in my own life. Not because it is a formula, but because it respects the order your body actually needs. You cannot think your way out of biological depletion. You cannot regulate a body that hasn’t been replenished. And you cannot step into who you are becoming while your whole body is still braced for survival.

The path forward is not harder than what you have already been doing. It is different. And it starts with the kind of support that finally meets you where you actually are — not where you think you should be by now.

You Are Not Stuck. You Are Unsupported.

If you have made it to the end of this post, I want you to sit with something for a moment.

You are not in survival mode because you are weak, or resistant, or not trying hard enough. You are here because you have been carrying an enormous amount in your body, in your history, in the experience of motherhood itself without the kind of support that actually matches what you have been carrying. This is because there is a structural gap in how women who become mothers are supported, and it is one that can be addressed.

Here is what I have watched happen when women finally get that support. The body starts to have what it needs. The nervous system starts to settle. The fog lifts. The reactivity softens. She starts to feel present in her own life again. Not the life she had before motherhood because we know that chapter is gone, and something larger has replaced it. But present in this life, this season, this version of herself that is still unfolding. She starts to feel like she is living it rather than surviving it. And the parts of her that survival mode pushed to the margins, her clarity, her joy, her sense of who she is beyond what she does for everyone else start to come back online.

That is not a fantasy. That is what becomes possible when the support finally matches the need.

Working With Me

If you are a woman of color in Texas or Massachusetts in the early years of motherhood, or are postpartum, and you are ready to stop trying to figure this out alone, this is exactly the work I do.

This is not traditional talk therapy. When you work with me, we look at the whole picture of what your body has been carrying, what has been depleted, what your nervous system needs to find safety, and what becomes possible for your identity and your life when that foundation is restored. We hold the biological and the emotional together, because I have never believed you can fully address one without the other.

If therapy feels like the right next step, I would love to talk. I offer online weekly therapy and therapy intensives for mothers of color in Texas and Massachusetts. Book a therapy consultation and let’s look at what has been going on for you, what you have already tried, and what it would look like to have support that finally meets you where you are.

And if you are not quite ready for therapy, or do not live in MA or TX, but you are curious about going deeper into the restoration process — the repletion, the regulation, the reclamation — I also offer coaching through my Rooted program, which was built specifically for depleted mothers who are ready to move forward. You can learn more and explore that option here.

Wherever you are in this, you do not have to keep doing it alone. I got you.