Matrescence and psilocybin

What is matrescence?

Matrescence is the developmental transition into motherhood. The anthropologist Dana Raphael named it in the 1970s, and the psychologist Aurélie Athan brought it back into the conversation decades later. It was built to rhyme with adolescence, and that is the whole point.

Think about what we allow adolescence to be. Awkward. Hormonal. Disorienting. Years long. We expect a teenager to be someone new on the other side of it, and we do not pathologize the mess in the middle. We call it growing.

Matrescence asks for the same grace.

Your body changes. Your brain changes, literally, structurally. Your hormones change. Your relationships change, with your partner, your mother, your friends, your work, your own reflection. Your sense of who you are changes, and it does not change all at once or in a straight line. You can love your child completely and still grieve the woman you were before her. Both things are true at the same time.

So much of what gets labeled as something wrong with you is actually this. Not a malfunction or a problem, but a becoming.

The language we use

There is so much talk about mothers getting back to themselves, getting their bodies back, feeling like themselves again. I think that language sits in direct contradiction to the reality of becoming a mother. The truth is that we do not return to our previous selves. So why do we keep speaking as though we should?

What the numbers say

About 1 in 6 women experience postpartum anxiety, and 1 in 8 experience postpartum depression. Globally, meta-analyses put depression closer to 1 in 5. And right now there is no established definition of postpartum anxiety and no category for it in the DSM, which is exactly why the numbers scatter so much.*

All of this is to say: I believe postpartum anxiety and depression are far more common than most of us realize.

I also think it is common for women to suffer silently. To feel shame about what they are experiencing. To feel like there is something wrong with them, that they should be happy, that if they are anxious or depressed it must mean they do not love their baby, that they are not a good mother.

None of that is true.

How heartbreaking. And how understandable, that a woman would experience anxiety or depression after such a major life event. Especially in a modern world where mothers are so often isolated, living inside the nuclear family model instead of in community the way we once did. Many are doing this without much support. Many are separated from their babies before they are ready, back at work with their bodies still healing.

Anxiety and depression are symptoms that make sense to me.

Making sense of them does not mean you have to carry them alone, and it does not mean real depression or anxiety should be waved off as just a phase. It means there is a name for the ground shifting under you, and having the name changes how you stand on it.

So if you are in it right now, in the fog and the tenderness and the strange grief of it, I want you to know: nothing has gone wrong. You are in the middle of one of the biggest developments a human being goes through. Be as patient with yourself as you would be with a fifteen year old finding her feet.

A note on psilocybin, and on timing

I want to be careful here, because this is my work, and I do not want to hand anyone a solution to a season she is still living through.

Psilocybin is not for the thick of it. If you are pregnant or weeks postpartum, this is not the moment. There is very little research on psilocybin during lactation. If you are breastfeeding, we can talk about it together and bring your provider into the plan. And if you are in acute distress right now, the right next step is a provider you trust, not a ceremony.

But matrescence is long. It does not end at six weeks, or at a year. Later, when a mother has some ground under her feet and feels ready to look at what she has been carrying, this work can be a real support. I have worked with mothers with children who are 3-4 and even older.

In supported, intentional settings, psilocybin has shown genuine promise for depression and anxiety. Randomized studies of psilocybin-assisted therapy have found meaningful reductions in depressive symptoms, and people often describe lasting increases in self-compassion, emotional openness, and a felt sense of connection: to themselves, to the people they love, and to something larger than themselves.

I want to be honest about where the science stands. Research focused specifically on the postpartum period is still in its early days, and this work is not a substitute for medical or mental health care. But self-compassion, perspective, and reconnection are, I believe, exactly what so many of us are reaching for as we find our footing in motherhood.

In a season when so much attention is necessarily pointed outward, turning inward can be rare and necessary. Whether that means a full psilocybin journey or simply a conversation, it can be a chance to meet what you have been carrying with compassion instead of judgment, and to begin knowing who you are now, on your own terms.