Blog

A space to share thoughts & ideas related to all things therapy.

July 5, 2025

Understanding Your Reproductive Story: A Gentle Approach to Reproductive Mental Health

My work in reproductive mental health is shaped not only by my clinical training, but also by personal experiences that have deepened my understanding of how complex and emotional these journeys can be. Experiences like navigating uncertainty, fear, and hope in the early stages of parenthood have reinforced for me how important it is to create space for these stories to be heard and supported.

Reproductive mental health is often spoken about in moments of crisis, like fertility struggles, pregnancy loss, or postpartum depression. But there is a much broader emotional landscape that often goes unspoken.

Each of us carries a reproductive story. This is a deeply personal and evolving narrative shaped by our experiences, expectations, relationships, identities, and the messages we have received about bodies, parenthood, and choice. Whether or not you have ever wanted children, and whether your path has felt straightforward or complicated, your reproductive story matters.

What is a Reproductive Story?

Your reproductive story includes more than medical events or timelines. It is made up of meaningful moments across your life, such as:

  • Early messages you received about bodies, sex, and parenthood

  • Cultural, familial, or societal expectations

  • Experiences of menstruation, contraception, fertility, or pregnancy

  • Decisions about whether, when, or how to have children

  • Losses, including miscarriage, abortion, or unmet expectations

  • Shifts in identity, relationships, and sense of self

For some people, this story feels clear and aligned. For others, it can feel fragmented, painful, or filled with unanswered questions.

Why It Matters for Mental Health

When we do not make space for our reproductive story, emotions can remain unprocessed. Grief may feel confusing or minimized. Anxiety can show up without a clear explanation. Shame or guilt can quietly shape how we relate to ourselves and others.

Exploring your reproductive story can:

  • Help make sense of complex or conflicting emotions

  • Validate experiences that may have been dismissed or overlooked

  • Reduce feelings of isolation

  • Strengthen self-understanding and self-compassion

  • Create space to process grief, anger, or longing

This process is not about assigning blame or trying to rewrite the past. It is about witnessing your experience with care and curiosity.

Common Themes That Emerge

In therapy, people often begin to notice patterns within their reproductive story. These can include:

  • Feeling pressure to follow a certain timeline

  • Guilt around choices made or not made

  • Grief that does not feel recognized or “allowed”

  • Fear or anxiety about the future

  • Tension within relationships when desires or experiences differ

These themes are more common than many people realize, and they make sense in the context of the stories we carry.

How Therapy Can Help

Therapy offers a space to slow down and gently explore your reproductive story. This might involve:

  • Naming and honouring significant moments or turning points

  • Identifying beliefs you have internalized about yourself or your body

  • Making space for different forms of grief

  • Understanding how past experiences shape present emotions

  • Reconnecting with your values and what feels meaningful to you

There is no right way to have a reproductive story, and there is no timeline for understanding it.

A Final Thought

Reproductive mental health is not only relevant during major life events. It exists alongside us, often quietly influencing how we see ourselves, our relationships, and our future.

You deserve space to explore that story in a way that feels safe and supportive.

No matter what your path has looked like so far, it is valid, and it is worth being heard.

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December 10, 2025

Why Your Thoughts Feel Like They Never Turn Off

By Nastasia Petrella

Humans have always had the advantage — or disadvantage — of consciousness. With heightened awareness comes constant thought processing. Some of us are vulnerable to rumination, while others lean toward avoidance. Some live inside memories; others live without recall. Both, in their own way, are survival strategies.

And while thinking has always been part of the human experience, something about the pace and frequency of our thoughts feels different today. Many people describe it as the inability to “turn off” their brains, as if such a button ever existed. But the longing to turn something off suggests we’ve known a different mental state before, one that felt slower, quieter, less relentless.

When I imagine turning the brain “off,” I picture technology: the power button on a TV or a laptop. Strangely, I don’t think of the power button on a smartphone — because most of us rarely, if ever, use it. When was the last time you intentionally turned off your phone?

That question led me to wonder whether our thinking patterns now mimic our phone usage: fast, constant, always-on, and whether turning off our phones more often might actually bring some mental relief. Again, not a revolutionary idea, but it raised a deeper question:

Is the reason we can’t “turn off our brains” the same reason we can’t (or won’t) turn off our smartphones?

Then I came across a study from the University of Texas at Austin: even when a smartphone is off but still nearby, it reduces our cognitive capacity. Our brain is quietly working to resist checking it. In other words, its mere presence is mentally taxing.

So if shutting down a phone doesn’t immediately quiet the mind, what will?

This led me to retweak my original question:

Maybe the issue isn’t that we can’t turn off our brains at all but that our brains, like our phones, never stop signaling, pinging, and pulling for our attention.

And just like a phone sitting nearby, the mere presence of a thought is enough to occupy us.

And when I ask myself why our thoughts feel so overwhelming now, more than ever, the answer starts to look a lot like the design of our devices.

Our phones are built to be:

  • always on

  • always updating

  • always refreshing

  • always notifying

And somehow, our inner world has begun to mirror that. We’re absorbing more information in a week than humans once processed in months. We move from app to app, task to task, stimulus to stimulus, with almost no natural pause. We rarely experience the quiet spacing our nervous system relies on.

Our thoughts don’t just arrive anymore, they compete. They stack. They overlap. They interrupt each other. They take on the same low-level urgency as a notification badge we can’t quite clear.

Our brains weren’t built for this pace, this volume, or this level of comparison and input. So the overwhelm we feel isn’t a personal failing or a lack of resilience; it’s the natural response of a system being pushed beyond its original settings.

And just like a smartphone that runs too many apps at once, a mind without rest will eventually slow, glitch, or overheat.

Maybe that’s the real point:
Our thoughts aren’t overwhelming us because they’re stronger than before but because life is asking our minds to operate at a speed they were never meant to sustain.

And maybe that’s why we want to turn off. Not because we’re weak or unable to cope, but because on some level, our mind remembers what it felt like to move more slowly, to think more spaciously, to simply be without the noise.