Couples Therapy for New Parents | Online Across Ontario
Life shifts in big beautiful ways when we become parents. Priorities change, chaos becomes normal and a good night's sleep takes on a new meaning. Within all this change our relationship can feel left behind, leaving you feeling disconnected, lonely and hurting.
Becoming a parent can bring so much joy. It also deeply impacts our relationships, with ourselves and with our partners as we shift into new roles as co-parents. We might notice the intensification of old conflicts, new patterns of conflict, and changes in connection and intimacy. You are not alone in this experience. Research with 134 couples at one year postpartum found that parenting stress affected relationship satisfaction largely through its impact on each parent's mental health.
This is a season of life where support matters, you don’t have to do this alone.
How can couples therapy help?
Couples therapy is time carved out to have difficult conversations and a space for reconnection. Together we will shift through the conflict you are getting stuck in, better understand how the past may be impacting your present dynamic, and support you in rebuilding emotional and physical connection.
Some of the topics we might explore are communication, conflict and intimacy.
There is evidence that relationship-focused support during this period makes a difference. In a randomized controlled trial of 90 couples expecting their first child, brief relationship and co-parenting programmes led to less decline in relationship satisfaction, and participante reported less perceived stress through the transition.
Strengthening your relationship is good for everyone. At twelve months, parents in those same programmes rated their infants as less easily distressed and as showing fewer behavioural difficulties. The programmes tested were brief: four sessions, six hours in total.
What about sex and intimacy after a baby?
Postpartum sexual health is one of the most common concerns new parents have, and one of the least likely to come up. A review in Obstetrics & Gynecology notes that it is often not discussed during prenatal or postpartum care at all. If no one has asked you about this, it isn't because it doesn't matter.
Relationship disconnection in new parenthood can be physical as well as emotional, and the two are usually tangled together. The physical impacts of childbirth, hormonal shifts through postpartum and breastfeeding, and the toll of sleepless nights all have very real effects on desire. Mayo Clinic has a plain-language overview, and pelvic floor physiotherapy is worth asking your health care provider about. Suddenly one of the ways we used to connect as partners is lost, and the impact of that is felt in the relationship.
For the partner who didn't give birth, this stretch can be confusing in its own way. You might not know whether or when to initiate. You might feel rejected, and then guilty for feeling rejected. You might be carrying your own exhaustion, and your own quiet grief for the relationship you had before. That experience deserves room too.
As our roles shift from being solely romantic partners to co-parents, we can lose a bit of ourselves, our own identity, and the connection to our own desire. Esther Perel describes eroticism as something distinct from sex: not an act, but our relationship to our own aliveness, and closely tied to how deserving we feel. That is often what has gone quiet, well before anything shifts between the two of you. The intensification of new and old conflict can narrow it further.
Couples therapy is a place to explore all of the elements that might be shaping sex and intimacy right now, the physical, the emotional, the practical, and the parts that feel hard to say out loud. None of it has to be worked out on your own.
What’s the next step?
Schedule a free 20 minute consult.