Everyday Motherhood: Challenging Maternal Perfectionism Through Psychotherapy

FULL PROGRAMME

09.00 EDT
Introductions

09:05
Letticia Banton
Thinking differently about everyday motherhood
Scene-setting for the day, this brief session will use recent research to provide an overview the societal and psychological pressures mothers may face today, including the lasting significance of COVID 19 and the impact of intersectionality on maternal mental health. It will outline the nature of psychological support currently offered and highlight the need for innovation through the field of psychotherapy and affiliated disciplines, introducing the talks that follow.

Learning objectives

• To gain an overview of some of the challenges mothers face today and how these may present in the therapy room
• To explore the link between mothering, intersectionality and mental health
• To understand the impact COVID-19 has had on mothers
• To briefly review maternal mental health care, the role of psychotherapy and affiliated disciplines

09.20
Mary Kay O’Neil
Mothering Alone: A plea for opportunity
The primary purpose of this presentation is to emphasise a UNICEF report (2006) statement – “The lives of women are inextricably linked to the well-being of children. If they are not educated, if they are not healthy, if they are not empowered, the children are the ones who suffer.” Mary Kay will focus on the findings of her research book Mothering Alone. The women, in the study, hampered by limited resources, are contrasted with women from different decades, in literature, biography and clinical experience who had sufficient internal and external resources to raise their children alone.

This talk will summarise the three parts of Mary Kay’s book. Part 1. focuses on the history and shifts in societal attitudes toward single motherhood, on maternal tasks, as well as on the influence of relational and other experiences on the women’s decision to give birth and mother alone. Within a psychotherapeutic context. Part 2. explores three characteristics basic to maternal growth and effective mothering – resilience, autonomy, caring. Part 3. considers what has been learned from these mothers, in the light of current psychological understanding, and outlines society’s role in providing the opportunity for women mothering alone to become successful mothers.

Learning objectives

• Discuss psychological and social challenges faced by women mothering alone without sufficient resources.
• Identify the factors that contribute to the psychological development of effective mothering and society’s responsibility to provide opportunity.
• Identify characteristics of effective mothering.

10.00
Q&A

10.20
Break

10.40
Valerie Bryant
Standing at the water’s edge: A revisit of attachment theory and resilience in Black motherhood
This talk deconstructs traditional ideas of early attachment and offers a study of contemporary neuropsychology and anthropologic studies to explicate multiple maternal networking attachments. The new studies provide a context and functionality of extended Black family structures vis-a-vis many mothering attachments. The intersectionality of culture, race, social class, and gender are embodied in “many mothering” attachments as Africans carried the spirit and culture of Mother Africa with them to Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Many mothers resisted the mandate to forfeit their identities and culture. Instead, multiple maternal attachments spanned across generations, family roles, structures, and boundaries to orchestrate the care of black and brown infants and children.

This talk examines multiple maternal attachments intrinsic to Black mothers’ and daughters’ psychic soma experience and their influence on psychotherapy. Therapy creates a relational space for the emergence of resilient many-mothering identifications that facilitates the discovery of deeper subjectivities, agency, connections, and meaning.

Learning objectives

• Summarise contemporary neuropsychology studies of mother infant attachments that dovetail with anthropologic research.
• Examine the interrelatedness of historical, cultural, gendered, somatic, and psychic manifestations of many mothering attachments.
• Examine Black mothering attachment themes in psychotherapy in the context of this population’s trauma, resilience, and resistance.

11.25
Q&A

11.40
Break

12.00
Talia Molé
Motherhood Phoenixing: Queering motherhood to birth thriving futures
Motherhood Phoenixing is a collaborative exploration aimed at centring queer motherhood as a social practice dedicated to recognising queer mothers and their mothering as legitimate. Furthermore, in making visible BIPOC LGBTQ+ mothers, we witness how their matrilineally inherited motherhood serves as a radical remembrance and reclaiming of ancestral matriarchal practices, kept alive through oral traditions and inherited/intergenerational memories. This life-sustaining and interconnected queer mothering contests and distances itself from hegemonic patriarchal knowledge productions and ways of being/relating. This enables a shift towards, what Matriarchal Studies posits as, a matriarchal paradigm in service of thriving futures.

Learning objectives

• Explain how historically othering and delegitimising of mothers/motherhoods/mothering, which sits contrary to the hegemonic mother figure (white, protestant, cis-gender female, abled, heterosexual), may inform a specific patriarchal project in the US.
• Situate the reproductive justice movement and its significance in the struggle for bodily autonomy in the US.
• Evaluate the various lived experiences of mother/motherhood/mothering stemming from BIPOC LGBTQ+ communities, such as those from the House|Ballroom community in NYC, NY, and how motherhood as a social practice informs them.
• Consider how the exercise of briefly suspending the predetermined biological relationship attributed to mother/motherhood/mothering informs the notion of motherhood as space and how it inspires the recognition and creation of these spaces.

12.45
Q&A

13.00
Discussion and Q&A with all speakers

13.30
End