The worry that arrived with the pregnancy test and hasn't quite let up since
The test was positive, and somewhere underneath the joy you'd hoped to feel, a low current of worry started up that hasn't quite switched off since. You'd expected to spend these months glowing, or at least looking forward, and instead a good part of your attention is spent scanning — for symptoms, for movement, for the thing that might be about to go wrong.
Nobody warns you about this version, because the story we tell about pregnancy is one of anticipation and rounded bellies, not of lying awake running scenarios. And so a great many women arrive at their appointments smiling, answering the questions the way they know they're meant to, while carrying a quiet, near-constant dread that they've half decided is simply the price of caring about this baby.
It isn't a character flaw, and it isn't a sign that you're ungrateful or unfit for what's coming. Anxiety during pregnancy is genuinely common, it tends to be overlooked precisely because vigilance in an expectant mother reads as devotion, and it is very treatable. You do not have to wait until the baby arrives to get help, and you do not have to hand it off to willpower in the meantime.
What we work on together
We start by getting specific about what the anxiety is actually doing, because "I'm just anxious" covers a great deal of ground and the shape of it matters. For many women the center of it is monitoring, the symptom-googling that starts reassuring and ends terrifying, the counting of kicks past the point of comfort, the extra doppler at home that promised peace of mind and delivered a new checkpoint every hour. Reassurance-seeking of this kind feels like safety, but it quietly trains the fear to need feeding more often, and part of the work is learning to loosen that grip without pretending the stakes aren't real.
We also make room for the physical side, because anxiety in a pregnant body is hard to read. A racing heart, breathlessness, a stomach that won't settle. These can belong to the pregnancy, the anxiety, or both at once. Understanding what anxiety does to your body often takes some of the fear out of the sensations themselves, so that a pounding chest stops automatically meaning something is wrong.
From there, the work usually touches several threads, depending on which are loudest for you:
The fear of the birth itself, of pain, of losing control, of something going wrong in the room, which for some women becomes intense enough to color the whole pregnancy.
Health and monitoring anxiety: the appointments that soothe for an afternoon and then wear off, the movements you can't stop tracking, the tests whose results you dread.
The particular vigilance of a pregnancy that comes after a loss, where relaxing can feel almost dangerous.
The relationships around you, and the loneliness of feeling this way while everyone assumes you're happy.
None of this is about talking you out of caring. It's about giving the worry somewhere to go other than the endless loop it's currently running, and building a way of carrying these months that leaves you some room to be in them.
Some common questions
Is this ordinary pregnancy worry, or something more?
Some worry is part of it. Pregnancy hands you a uncertain situation and a great deal that you can't control, and a degree of anxiety about that is a sane response, not a symptom. What tends to distinguish ordinary worry from prenatal anxiety worth treating comes down to how much room it's taking up: whether it's most days rather than the occasional bad one, whether it's reaching into your sleep and your appetite and your ability to be present with people, and whether reassurance lands or wears off within the hour so that you're back to scanning. If the worry has become the weather you live in rather than passing storms, that's the point at which anxiety therapy tends to help. And you don't have to meet any particular threshold to deserve it.
I keep googling symptoms and counting kicks. Is that the anxiety?
Very likely, yes, though I want to be careful, because some monitoring is exactly what your care team asks of you, and that's appropriate. The difference is in the function it serves. When each check buys a shorter and shorter stretch of calm before you need the next one, when the searches start at reassurance and reliably end somewhere frightening, when you're reaching for the home doppler between appointments to prove second by second that things are fine. That's the anxiety wearing the costume of caution. We work on loosening that pattern gradually and collaboratively, never by asking you to ignore what your body or your providers are telling you.
I'm frightened of the actual birth. Can that be part of this?
Absolutely, and it's more common than people admit. The fear can be of the pain, of losing control, of medical settings, of a specific thing you've heard about or been through before. For some women it's intense enough to have its own name and its own weight, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved off with "everyone's a bit nervous." We can work directly with the fear, with what you're picturing, where the images come from, and what would help you feel more prepared and less alone walking into that room. And often that work eases the whole pregnancy, not only the day itself.
This pregnancy comes after a loss, and I can't let myself relax.
Then you already know something most people don't, and the vigilance makes complete sense. When you've lost a pregnancy before, the part of you that once relaxed and then grieved is often unwilling to do that again, so hope itself can feel unsafe and every milestone gets met with held breath rather than joy. This is its own particular experience, and it deserves to be treated as exactly that rather than dismissed as excessive worry. The grief from the earlier loss is frequently still present too, sometimes unspoken for years, so many women carry that grief in silence, and we make room for both the mourning and the fear, because they tend to travel together. You can read more about how I work with pregnancy loss and this whole season on perinatal therapy.
Does my anxiety hurt the baby, and is it safe to treat now?
This comes up in nearly every first conversation, usually laced with guilt, so let me answer it plainly: worrying about whether your worry is harming your baby is itself a very human, very anxious loop, and layering shame on top of the anxiety helps no one. The useful thing you can do is get support for it, and therapy during pregnancy is a safe, appropriate place to start. If it turns out the picture is heavier than anxiety alone, we'll think together about what else might help, and I'll gladly coordinate with your OB or midwife. And because prenatal anxiety and the anxious weeks after birth so often flow into each other, getting a foothold now tends to make the fourth trimester considerably gentler, including the parts nobody quite warns you about, like postpartum anxiety that gets mistaken for the baby blues, the intrusive thoughts that can arrive once the baby does, and the identity shift of becoming a parent. The wider season is on perinatal therapy.
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.
