Matrescence, Trauma, and the Identity Shift That Nobody Really Prepared You For
Earlier this year, the Peanut App took out a full page ad in the New York Times alerting readers to the concept of ‘matrescence’ or the period in which someone becomes a mother. Those of us in the perinatal space have been familiar with the term for awhile, but as the ad pointed out, most people have no idea that the word exists. And without language for something, it is hard to name it. And even harder to understand what is happening to you.
Becoming a parent changes who you are. Not just what you do, not just your schedule or your priorities or how you spend your Saturday mornings, but who you actually are. Along with your priorities and values, our sense of self reorganizes. Your relationships reconfigure. Things you thought you knew about yourself get complicated, and things you thought were resolved have a way of surfacing again.
The term matrescence was coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973 and has been given more recent clinical attention through the work of reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks. Matrescence refers to the psychological, relational, and identity-level transformation that happens when a person becomes a parent. It is not a disorder, and it is not a failure to adjust. It is a genuine developmental transition, as significant as adolescence, and it has been largely unnamed and underserved in mainstream culture.
When trauma is also part of your history, that transition becomes considerably more complicated. This post is about how those two things intersect.
What is Matrescence?
The cultural script for becoming a parent, especially for women and mothers, tends to go one of two ways. Either it's portrayed as a natural, instinctive transformation that you simply grow into, or it's framed as an adjustment period that mostly involves logistics: feeding schedules, sleep deprivation, figuring out childcare. Both of these framings leave out something important.
Matrescence is an identity-level shift. The self you were before had a particular shape: your work, your relationships, your body, your routines, your sense of what you wanted and who you were in the world. Parenthood reorganizes all of that, often quickly and with limited say in the pace. There is real grief in this, a grief for the pre-parent self that often goes unacknowledged because culture has decided that grief and new parenthood should not coexist. But we’re not supposed to say that. Not really.
The concept of matrescence has been applied primarily to birthing mothers, but the identity-level disruption of becoming a parent extends to adoptive parents, non-gestational co-parents, single parents, and queer parents building families outside default templates. The shape of the disruption varies depending on your particular circumstances and identities, but the fact of identity reorganization is fairly consistent.
What makes this a clinical issue, and not just a philosophical one, is that identity disruption is genuinely destabilizing. When you don't have language for the fact that you're experiencing a developmental transition, the symptoms of that transition, including ambivalence, grief, disorientation, and the loss of a previous self, can feel like personal failure rather than a recognizable process.
How does your personal history interact with matrescence or becoming a parent?
Parenthood has a specific way of reaching back into your own childhood and pulling things forward.
Being responsible for a completely dependent human being, one who needs you for everything and cannot regulate their own distress, has a way of activating your own experience of having been that person. The attachment patterns you developed in response to your early caregiving relationships don't stay abstract when you're being asked, daily, to be an attuned and available caregiver yourself.
If your early relationships were characterized by inconsistency, harm, emotional unavailability, or outright trauma, you likely developed adaptations to survive those relationships. Those adaptations run pretty automatically by the time you're an adult. Parenthood asks a lot of exactly those places. The attachment system that got wired in your childhood is the same system that gets called on when your infant is inconsolably crying at 3 a.m. and nothing you are doing is working.
You are not broken or destined to repeat patterns with your own children. In fact, knowing that this is something that could be contributing to your parenting challenges can help to demonstrate that you are not just a bad parent. But you are healing. And healing in a specific way that is necessary when you become a parent after having a complex childhood. Parenting with unresolved trauma is genuinely hard in ways that go well beyond the the usual challenges of childcare.
What are Specific Ways Trauma Gets Activated in Parenting
Trauma history can surface in parenting in a range of ways. Some of the most common include:
Your child's distress. A baby's cry is biologically designed to be nearly impossible to ignore. For parents with trauma histories, that insistent, relentless need can activate overwhelm, shutdown, or anxiety that goes beyond typical new-parent stress.
Helplessness and loss of control. Infants and young children are fundamentally outside your control in ways that can be genuinely destabilizing if your history involved environments where maintaining control was how you stayed safe.
Your child at a particular age. Many parents find that when their child reaches the age at which they themselves experienced significant trauma, a great deal comes forward. This can be disorienting because the connection isn't immediately obvious.
The physical intimacy of caregiving. For survivors of physical or sexual trauma, the constant physical contact involved in caring for a young child can activate trauma responses, even when the contact itself is tender and wanted.
The reappearance of your own parents. Becoming a parent changes your relationship with your own parents whether they are present or not. Old dynamics resurface. Unresolved grief and anger have a way of finding the moment.
Doing for your child what was not done for you. Providing the attunement, safety, or stability you didn't have can be both deeply meaningful and quietly devastating. Grief and love occupy the same space more often than the parenting books tend to acknowledge.
What is Intergenrational Trauma?
There is a concept in psychoanalytic and attachment literature sometimes called "ghosts in the nursery," drawn from the foundational work of Selma Fraiberg and colleagues (Fraiberg et al., 1975). The idea is that unresolved experiences from a parent's own childhood can be unconsciously re-enacted in their relationship with their child. The ghosts are not the parents themselves, but the unprocessed pain, fear, or grief that gets carried forward.
This concept has been significantly refined since Fraiberg's original formulation, and the research also points to what Lieberman and colleagues (2005) called "angels in the nursery": the positive relational memories and experiences that parents can draw on and transmit. The intergenerational story is not only about what gets passed down that is harmful. It is also about what can be interrupted, repaired, and given differently.
What the research is consistent on is that awareness matters. Parents who have developed coherent narratives about their own early experiences show more secure attachment with their children than parents who haven't, even when the original trauma was significant (Main & Goldwyn, 1984; van IJzendoorn, 1995). We cannot change the fact of a complicated or traumatic childhood; but we can claim authority over the narrative going forward. And that narrative will probably need to involve compassion for your own missteps.
No parent is perfect; the missing piece for those with strong, sustained parent/child relationships is often more related to the process of repair and growth, not perfection. For many of us, cycle breaking happens through self awareness.
How can I figure out my identity as a mother if I don’t even know who I am because of my own trauma?
One thing is true of kids. They demand our attention and our presence. At this often makes it nearly impossible to keep ignoring our own stuff.
Matrescence already asks you to let go of a previous version of yourself and build a new one in real time, while also being profoundly sleep deprived and expected to make a significant number of consequential decisions. Trauma history complicates that process because the identity you're being asked to reorganize was, in part, shaped by survival. The adaptations you developed, people-pleasing, hypervigilance, self-erasure, emotional shutdown, don't disappear when you become a parent. In a lot of cases, they intensify, because the demands are higher and the stakes feel enormous. In some ways, you might not even feel like you know your true identity.
There's also the specific grief of having your own unmet childhood needs become more visible. When you are working to give your child something you never had, you are simultaneously reminded that you never had it. That grief is legitimate and it deserves space. It doesn't make you a bad parent to feel it. In many ways, feeling it is evidence of doing the work.
For queer parents, single parents, parents parenting outside of traditional structures, and parents who are holding their own complex identities while also being responsible for another person's development, the identity tension of early parenthood carries additional weight. The cultural template for "parent" often doesn't fit, and finding yourself in that role without a script that reflects your actual life is its own kind of disorienting.
Can a Perinatal Therapist Help me Explore my Childhood Trauma?
Perinatal mental health, the specialty that covers psychological and emotional wellbeing in the period surrounding pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood, tends to be narrowly associated with postpartum depression in popular culture. That is a significant part of it, but it is not the whole picture.
Perinatal mental health also addresses the identity-level disruption of new parenthood, the resurfacing of trauma in the context of caregiving, grief and ambivalence about the parenting role, and the relational reorganization that happens when a family changes shape. If you are finding that becoming a parent has brought up things that feel older than the current moment, that is precisely what a perinatal specialist should be able to support you with. Very few of us have never experienced something that impacted us deeply; and most of us, especially women, gender-nonforming folks, and people of color, live through systemic trauma daily. Every therapist should be trauma-informed, especially one that specialises in perinatal mental health.
At Wild Hope Therapy, perinatal mental health is one of our areas of clinical focus. We work with parents in Cleveland Heights, OH, and the Upper Arlington area, and we offer online therapy throughout Ohio. If you are in Columbus or elsewhere in the state and looking for a therapist with specific training in both perinatal mental health and trauma, virtual counseling makes it much more possible to find the right clinical fit rather than the nearest available one.
There is no right path through Matrescence
There is a particular difficulty in the cultural expectation that becoming a parent should complete you, resolve something, or at minimum produce uncomplicated joy. As perinatal therapists, we’ve rarely encountered someone whose story was that simple, especially folks with significant trauma histories. The story of the perfect pregnancy and early parenting experience sets so many new parents up to feel shame and guilt undeservingly. The fact that you are reading a book about how your trauma may impact your parenting is proof that you are a thoughtful and intentional parent.
Matrescence on its own is disorienting, and the thing about pain from the past is it always finds its way out. The vulnerability of early parenthood provides the perfect opportunity for those exact memories and feelings to come up to the surface. The grief of giving your child what was not given to you can at first be activating of some of your most tender wounds. But the beauty of keeping your heart open is the opportunity to heal in a way that maybe wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
You can be a deeply loving, present, good-enough parent and also be someone who is actively working through significant pain. Those things coexist, all the time. Addressing your own history is not a distraction from your parenting, that is what it means to do the work. For many people, it is some of the most important parenting work they do.
You get to want support for yourself, not only as a parent, but as a person. This is their childhood; it is also your experience as a parent, and your life. We’re here to help you untangle that and have the capacity to enjoy the rest of your story.
References
Fraiberg, S., Adelson, E., & Shapiro, V. (1975). Ghosts in the nursery: A psychoanalytic approach to the problems of impaired infant-mother relationships. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 14(3), 387–421.
Lieberman, A. F., Padrón, E., Van Horn, P., & Harris, W. W. (2005). Angels in the nursery: The intergenerational transmission of benevolent parental influences. Infant Mental Health Journal, 26(6), 504–520.
Main, M., & Goldwyn, R. (1984). Predicting rejection of her infant from mother's representation of her own experience: Implications for the abused-abusing intergenerational cycle. Child Abuse and Neglect, 8(2), 203–217.
van IJzendoorn, M. H. (1995). Adult attachment representations, parental responsiveness, and infant attachment: A meta-analysis on the predictive validity of the Adult Attachment Interview. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 387–403.