You love them completely and you are running on empty:
Therapy for parents of young children
You love your children in a way that would frighten you if you looked at it directly, and you are also more depleted than you have ever been in your life. Both of those things are true at once, and holding them together is a good part of why this season is so hard to talk about. The love is the reason you don't feel entitled to complain, and the exhaustion is the reason you can barely stand up.
The days with small children blur into an endless relay of needs — feeding, dressing, refereeing, soothing, the tantrum in the parking lot, the fourth request for water after lights-out. And somewhere in the middle of it the person you used to be has gone quiet. You snap more than you'd like. You cry in the car. You count down to bedtime and then feel guilty about counting. And the loneliest part is the suspicion that everyone else is somehow managing this without coming apart.
They're not, for what it's worth. What you're describing is one of the most common experiences I sit with, and it has recognizable parts (burnout, the mental load, the anger that arrives out of nowhere, the sense of having misplaced yourself) none of which mean you're doing it wrong or loving them less. It means the job is genuinely enormous and you've been carrying it with less support than any human was built for.
What we work on together
We usually begin with the depletion itself, because it's hard to think clearly about anything else while you're running on fumes. Parental burnout has a particular flavor, the exhaustion that sleep doesn't touch, the emotional distance that creeps in where warmth used to be, the flat sense that you're going through the motions of caregiving without much left over. It overlaps a great deal with burnout in other parts of life, and the route out is rarely "try harder"; it's finding where the demands and the resources have fallen out of balance and doing something real about the gap.
A large piece of that gap, for most parents I see, is the invisible one: the mental load. Not the visible tasks so much as the management of them, who's tracking the shoe sizes and the library-book due dates and the fact that the pediatrician appointment needs rescheduling. That load rarely gets divided the way the visible chores do, and it doesn't lift when someone offers to "help," because you're still the one holding the whole list in your head and handing pieces of it out. We get concrete about that here, because naming it is the first step to actually redistributing it rather than quietly delegating it back to yourself.
From there we tend to work on whichever of these threads is loudest:
The anger and irritability that seem to come from nowhere and land on the people you love most, followed by a wave of shame.
Feeling touched out, the very physical sense of having no square inch of your body or your attention that belongs to you by the end of the day.
The strain all of this puts on your relationship, where you and your partner can end up two exhausted managers negotiating logistics rather than people who like each other.
The guilt that narrates the whole thing, and the isolation of feeling this way in a culture that insists these are supposed to be the best years.
The quiet grief of a self that's gone missing, the interests, the friendships, the version of you that existed before you were anyone's parent.
Some common questions
Is this burnout, or am I just a tired parent?
Every parent of young children is tired, and tired is not a disorder. What tips ordinary exhaustion over into burnout is usually a mix of three things: an exhaustion that rest doesn't seem to repair, a growing emotional distance from your kids where you used to feel present and warm, and a sense of ineffectiveness, that whatever you pour in, it's never enough and you're faltering at the one job that matters most. When those settle in and stay for weeks rather than passing after a good night's sleep, that's worth taking seriously. You don't need to be completely nonfunctional to qualify for support; catching it earlier tends to make it far easier to turn around.
Why am I so angry, and where does the rage come from?
This is one of the things parents are most ashamed to say out loud, and one of the most common. The sudden, disproportionate anger (sometimes called "mom rage," though it isn't only mothers who feel it) is almost never a sign that you're a cruel person underneath. It's usually what chronic depletion, unmet needs, and no room to recover look like when they finally find an exit: a nervous system with nothing left in reserve reaches its limit fast, and small things detonate. We work on both ends of it, understanding the anger as a signal about what's gone unmet, and building in the recovery and boundaries that keep you from living permanently at the edge.
I feel touched out, and I don't recognize myself anymore.
Both of those are real, and they often travel together. Being touched out is the very physical result of being needed by small bodies all day with no boundary around your own. And it's a big reason so many parents crave the moment everyone's finally off them, sometimes to the confusion of a partner who wants closeness. Underneath it is often something larger: the loss of the person you were before, whose time and body and attention were once your own. That grief is legitimate. Rebuilding even small pieces of a self (an interest, a friendship, an hour that belongs to no one else) is genuine, load-bearing work here, not a luxury to get to later.
This is putting real strain on my relationship.
It usually does, and it doesn't mean the relationship is broken. When two people are this depleted, they tend to shrink into co-managers of a household (trading logistics, keeping score, too tired to be generous) and the closeness that made it worth doing together gets crowded out. A lot of that strain traces back to the uneven mental load and to how hard both of you find it to ask directly for what you need; if either of you notices a pattern of over-giving and then resenting it, the work often connects to people-pleasing and boundaries. This can stay individual work, and a session or two together can help when you keep having the same fight in different clothes.
Does needing this mean I'm a bad parent?
No: and the fact that you're asking is itself evidence of how much you care. Guilt is the background music of parenting young children, and it has a way of turning every ordinary limit into proof of failure. But you are not a bad parent for being at the end of your rope; you're a human being carrying something large, and getting support for yourself is one of the more loving things you can do for your kids, who mostly need you steady rather than perfect. If any of this reaches back to the earliest months, the anxiety, the low mood, the intrusive worry of the newborn stretch, or a bond that didn't arrive the instant you expected it to. It connects to the wider work of perinatal therapy, and it's worth knowing that trying to be the perfect parent tends to backfire precisely because it turns ordinary care into constant self-evaluation, and no one can be warm and under assessment at the same time.
Reading on pregnancy and prenatal anxiety
Postpartum Anxiety Is Real (and It's Not Just the Baby Blues)
Intrusive Thoughts After Having a Baby: Why They Happen and When to Worry
Also under Perinatal & Postpartum
What happens next
You pick a time for us to meet directly on my calendar. Fifteen minutes, free, video or phone. You don't have to have the words ready or fill out long forms, I understand the first step can be difficult.
We meet virtually and talk about what's going on. I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right fit, and if I'm not, I'll point you toward someone in my network who is.
If it feels right, we schedule your first full session, usually within a week. I see clients at my office in Edmonds on the waterfront, or virtually across Washington State.
