Why Is It Valuable for Therapists to Explore Motherhood?
82% of women in the UK will give birth in their lifetimes1, and many others will also become adoptive parents, step parents or care for children in other ways. Mothering is somewhere in every piece of therapeutic work. Being mothered (or not) is our first relationship, and it is a template that sets expectations for interpersonal relationships throughout the rest of our lives.
All of our clients have mothers, but their relationship with her can be one of the closest and most supportive they experience or the most hurtful and painful. It is a relationship filled with expectations, which can make its impact so much greater than many others. Furthermore, the absence of a maternal relationship can have major consequences when compared against these expectations. And for our clients who mother, that role carries huge weight, laden with conditions of worth, expectations and judgment. It’s time-consuming, exhausting and seemingly endless.
This section of the website is aimed at therapists and other professionals who would like to reflect more on how mothering comes into their work. Articles will look at how mothers are impacted by mothering and also how mothering impacts the world around us. I hope it will also be useful to anyone seeking to explore their own experiences of motherhood.
However, these aren’t articles written to tell readers what the experience of mothering is. There are as many different experiences of mothering as there are mothers, and a key goal of this website is to create a space to explore those individual stories. Instead, I aim to offer a framework and possible tools to hear those stories fully, empathically and openly.
The articles are grouped under two main themes – Person-Centred Perspectives on Motherhood and Mothering in Context. You may wish to explore the articles by these themes or by the path suggested below.
How Might Person-Centred Theory Help Us To Understand Mothering?
In my years working with mothers, I have found a person-centred approach to be a perfect framework for offering a supportive environment to explore the transition to and experience of motherhood. This is explored in the Person-Centred Perspectives on Motherhood theme.
The first article in this theme explores this and gives an overview of how beautifully I have found a Person-Centred Approach to fit my work with mothers:
When doing this work, I have heard many mothers describe their struggle in finding congruence in their transition to motherhood and their feelings of having lost touch with themselves.
This is explored in this article on maternal congruence:
What Wider Contexts Also Shape Our Experience of Motherhood?
Everything we do takes place in context, and mothering, as well as supporting mothers, is no exception. Culture and society place huge expectations on mothers. Some of these expectations are felt extremely keenly, but so many are also hidden and insidious. This wider context is explored in the Mothering in Context theme.
I explored some of these themes in the creative synthesis for my dissertation research, and this is shared here:
I hope you find these articles valuable. have many notes for more articles within these themes and they will be added as they are uploaded to the website. If you would like to hear when a new article is published, then please subscribe to my mailing list here or by using the form at the bottom of this page.
Warmest wishes,
Heather Rai
- Office for National Statistics. (2025, April 2). Childbearing for women born in different years, England and Wales: 2023. Office for National Statistics. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/conceptionandfertilityrates/bulletins/childbearingforwomenbornindifferentyearsenglandandwales/2023 ↩︎