The thinking behind the OBH Matrescence Framework
This framework did not emerge from a single theory or tradition. It grew, over nine years of clinical work, from an accumulating sense that the existing ways of understanding mothers' distress were not quite enough, that they were capturing part of the picture, but not all of it.
At the heart of everything is the concept of matrescence, a word originally coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael, and brought into contemporary clinical and academic life by Dr Aurelie Athan. Athan's work has been foundational not just to this framework, but to the possibility of this kind of work existing at all. She built the research base. She legitimised matrescence as a developmental stage worthy of serious clinical attention. She created the intellectual and therapeutic conditions in which practitioners could begin to say, with confidence: this is real, this matters, and it deserves to be understood on its own terms. The OBH Matrescence Framework would not exist without her contribution.
What follows is an honest account of the other thinking that has shaped it.
On identity
The Identity circle draws on writers and clinicians who have refused to look away from what becoming a mother actually does to a woman's sense of self.
Susan Maushart's The Mask of Motherhood named the gap between how motherhood is presented and how it is lived, the performance that masks a more complicated, often bewildering, reality. Rozika Parker's Torn in Two gave language to maternal ambivalence, the simultaneous love and resentment that is not a sign of failure but an inherent feature of the experience. Claire Arnold-Baker brought an existential lens, understanding the transition to motherhood as a genuine philosophical disruption of identity and meaning. Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi's Motherself and Lisa Marchiano's Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself added archetypal and Jungian dimensions,the sense that something deep and ancient is being activated, something that culture has largely forgotten how to hold.
Maureen Murdoch's The Heroine's Journey has been quietly foundational. The idea that the feminine experience of transformation involves descent, disorientation, and a return that is not triumphant but integrative, not going back, but not yet formed, runs through the Identity circle in its entirety.
Lucy Jones' Matrescence sits alongside these influences with something none of the others quite provide, a synthesis of neuroscience, anthropology, cultural criticism and unflinching personal honesty that makes the case, comprehensively and accessibly, that the transformation of becoming a mother is profound, physical, and almost entirely unacknowledged by the culture in which it takes place. Her work gave both clinical and human weight to what I was already seeing in the room.
And running beneath all of it is Dr Aurelie Athan's understanding of matrescence as a developmental stage with its own legitimate arc, one that deserves to be named, studied, and met with the same seriousness we bring to any other significant human transition. Her framework gave mine a home to grow inside.
On context
The Context circle draws on decades of feminist scholarship that has documented, named, and refused to minimise the structural conditions within which motherhood is lived.
Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born is the foundational text here, her distinction between motherhood as experience and motherhood as institution is one of the most important ideas in this entire framework. It names something that clinical models so often miss: that a mother's distress is frequently not just internal, but structural. The institution of motherhood, its myths, its demands, its invisibility, is doing something to her.
Dr Sophie Brock builds on that foundation with forensic clarity. Her work on the good mother myth, the way motherhood is ideologically constructed to set mothers up to feel perpetually inadequate, names the mechanism through which unrealistic expectations operate. This is not simply cultural pressure in a vague sense. It is a specific, documented, sociological phenomenon, and Dr Brock has done significant work to bring it into mainstream maternal consciousness. Her insistence that we understand motherhood as a social institution shaped by patriarchal structures, rather than a purely personal experience, is central to how the Context circle is framed.
Dr Andrea O'Reilly's matricentric feminism insists that mothers deserve to be centred in feminist analysis in their own right, not as women generally, but as mothers specifically. Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking gave philosophical weight to the cognitive and emotional labour of mothering, work that is systematic, skilled, and almost entirely unacknowledged. Caroline Criado Perez's Invisible Women provided the data, forensic, undeniable, for what women already know: that they are rendered invisible by the systems and structures around them, and mothers most of all.
Susan Maushart appears here too, in Wifework, her examination of the labour that women perform within relationships, largely unseen and largely unrewarded. And Emily and Amelia Nagoski's Burnout bridged the political and the embodied, showing what chronic, unresolved stress does to women's bodies and minds when the conditions that create it are never addressed.
Lucy Jones is present here too. Her synthesis of anthropology and cultural criticism makes visible the ways in which the profound neurological and psychological transformation of matrescence has been systematically ignored, minimised, and misnamed, not by accident, but as a consequence of the same structural forces that Rich, Brock and O'Reilly have spent their careers documenting.
And Dr Aurelie Athan's work anchors the Context circle in a different way, by establishing, through rigorous research, that the absence of adequate cultural and clinical frameworks for matrescence is not a gap but a failure. A failure with consequences. Her work makes the case that context is not background noise. It is constitutive of the experience itself.
On therapeutic space
The Therapeutic Space circle is rooted, above everything else, in the humanistic tradition, in Carl Rogers' belief that what human beings need in order to grow is not to be diagnosed or corrected, but to be genuinely met. Unconditional positive regard, empathy, congruence, these are not techniques. They are a way of being with another person. They are the foundation of everything that happens in the room.
Karen Kleinman's The Art of Holding in Therapy shaped how I understand the therapist's primary task, not to fix, but to hold. To stay with the experience, to contain it, to resist the pull toward premature resolution. That is what this therapeutic space is trying to offer.
Dana Crowley Jack's Silencing the Self illuminated something I had observed clinically but struggled to name, the way women, and mothers in particular, learn to suppress their authentic experience in order to meet the relational expectations placed upon them. So much of what mothers carry into therapy has never been said out loud. Part of what therapy offers is simply the conditions in which it finally can be.
Dr. Alexandra Sacks' work on matrescence, and the power of simply naming it, reminded me that psychoeducation is itself a therapeutic act. Telling a mother that what she is experiencing has a name, that it is understood, that she is not the first person to feel this way, can shift something significant. The word matters.
Arnold-Baker and Parker appear here again, as they do in the Identity circle, because for me, understanding the identity disruption is part of the therapeutic work itself. I do not leave my knowledge of what matrescence does to a woman's sense of self outside the room. I bring it in. It informs how I listen, what I notice, and how I make sense of what I am hearing. That is a more active kind of holding, presence with knowledge, and it is, I think, what makes this framework clinically distinctive.
And it is Dr Aurelie Athan's work that makes this therapeutic stance possible in its fullest sense. Her legitimisation of matrescence as a clinical concept means that when I sit with a mother and say, this is real, this has a name, this is understood, I am drawing on a body of research and clinical thinking that holds that statement up. The therapeutic space this framework offers is not just warm. It is grounded. And it is grounded, in no small part, in her work.
What this framework is, and is not
The OBH Matrescence Framework is not a standalone theory. It does not claim to have invented new ideas. It is a clinical lens, one that brings together existing bodies of knowledge that are rarely held in the same space, and applies them to the specific experience of becoming and being a mother.
It is interdisciplinary by design. The Identity circle draws on developmental psychology, existential philosophy, and archetypal theory. The Context circle draws on feminist scholarship, sociology, and the emerging science of maternal brain transformation. The Therapeutic Space circle draws on humanistic and relational clinical practice, held within a deep understanding of what matrescence asks of a woman.
Very few perinatal frameworks hold all three simultaneously. And that, I believe, is why so many mothers have been only partially understood.
This framework exists because partial understanding is not enough.
I have been reading, studying, and sitting with what happens to a woman's sense of self when she becomes a mother for nearly ten years. My own experience of feeling lost is what led me to this work, and I continue to learn, every day, about what this transition truly asks of a woman.