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What Looks Like Dysfunction May Actually Be Protection: Motherhood, Shame, and KAP
- Meredith Futernick-Gerak (she/hers), LPC, LCPC, LMHC, LPCC, ACS
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
More than one in five perinatal people are diagnosed with a mental health condition during pregnancy or within the first postpartum year (American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 2023).
Motherhood Is Not Pathology
When we look more closely at the emotional landscape of motherhood, it becomes clear that so much of what gets labeled as disorder is happening inside a much larger context. Many moms are navigating inadequate social support, limited paid leave, inaccessible or unaffordable childcare, physical depletion, feeding demands, sleep disruption, and the emotional labor of caregiving.
And then there is the "Good Mom" mythology that says:
"Good moms are selfless and naturally patient."
"Good moms know what to do and love every moment."
"Good moms do not feel rage, resentment, boredom, grief, ambivalence, or regret."
But real moms feel many things.
We feel devotion, tenderness, protectiveness, and love.
We also feel irritable, trapped, depleted, ashamed, and alone.
When there is no safe place to tell the truth about that complexity, many moms turn against themselves. The internal question becomes, “What is wrong with me?” instead of, “What does this part of me need?”
What Looks Like Dysfunction May Actually Be Protection
In parts work, symptoms and behaviors are not problems to eliminate. Instead they are viewed as protective strategies. Internal Family Systems (IFS) describes the mind as composed of parts; many of which take on protective roles in response to pain, fear, shame, or unmet needs (Schwartz & Sweezy, 2020).
The Mom Parts Method applies this lens specifically to the terrain of motherhood. When Good Moms Feel Bad offers a compassionate, IFS-informed framework for helping mothers understand guilt, anxiety, anger, shame, grief, ambivalence, and other often-suppressed experiences through a non-pathologizing lens (Tomich Sorci, 2026).
Many moms are not only suffering from what they feel; they are suffering from what they believe their feelings mean about them:
A mom may feel rage and think, “I am a bad mom.”
She may feel resentment and think, “I don't deserve to be a mother.”
She may feel numb and think, “Something is wrong with me.”
She may feel grief and think, “I am ungrateful.”
With the Moms Parts Method, we can begin to understand these experiences differently:
Maybe the rage is protecting a mother who has had no room to rest.
Maybe the resentment is carrying the truth that her needs have been buried..
Maybe the numbness is helping her survive overwhelm.
Maybe the grief is honoring a loss she has not been allowed to name.
What looks like dysfunction may actually be protection.
This is not just theoretical for me.
My own entry into motherhood was not exactly the magical transition I had imagined. After 55 hours of labor at home, a planned home birth became an urgent hospital transfer and emergency C-section at the height of a global pandemic. I remember how quickly my expectations about motherhood, my body, and myself began to unravel.
Even in the presence of the most intense love and gratitude; there was also shock, depletion, grief, and dissociation. I did not have language for all of that at the time. When I "passed" the test that said I did not have Postpartum Depression when leaving the hospital, I figured I was good to go.
There was no question about how much I loved my baby. And I also felt this deep sense that something in me had broken. I spent many months feeling disoriented and paranoid. And like so many mothers; I felt the pressure to be nothing but grateful, functional, bonded, strong, and okay. There are parts of me that feel guilty for naming this experience, even 6 years later!
When I think about maternal mental health now, I do not only think about symptoms. I think about the nervous system impact of being pushed beyond capacity. I think about the pressure to keep going when something inside is still trying to make sense of what is happening.
And I think about how often moms are asked to locate the problem inside themselves, rather than inside the impossible conditions surrounding them.
Because motherhood itself is not the pathology. The problem is NOT that mothers are too sensitive, too dysregulated, too angry, too anxious, too much, or not enough. The problem is that moms are often asked to do the work of care inside systems that do not adequately care for them.
Shame, Grief, and the Parts That Work So Hard
The Mom Parts Method suggests that many moms’ internal systems organize around two "inescapable vulnerabilities": shame and grief.
Shame can collapse a mother into the belief that she is failing, broken, selfish, or fundamentally not enough. Grief can open the door to all the losses motherhood can bring: loss of freedom, identity, sleep, body autonomy, career momentum, ease, intimacy, or the fantasy of how motherhood was "supposed to" feel.
Because shame and grief can feel so dangerous, protective parts often step in.
Some of these parts look like “Good Mom Parts": These are the responsible, caretaking, fixing, planning, researching, organizing, child-centered parts. They help keep everyone alive, fed, scheduled, soothed, emotionally held, and looking okay from the outside.
Other parts may feel more like “Bad Mom Parts”. These are the reactive parts that emerge when the system is overwhelmed: anger, resentment, panic, rage, avoidance, numbness. The ones that want to say "fuck it" and disappear. These are often the parts that moms feel most ashamed of.
But they, too, are trying to help. They may be trying to reclaim a tiny bit of space, power, rest, or autonomy when a mother’s own needs have been pushed away for too long. The goal is not to get rid of any of these parts. The goal is to help moms build a different relationship with them.
The Inner Mom and the Parts That Need Her
As protective parts begin to feel understood, something else becomes more available. The Mom Parts Method calls this resource the Inner Mom. In Internal Family Systems language, this inner resource is referred to as Self-energy: the qualities of calm, curiosity, compassion, courage, clarity, creativity, confidence, and connection.
But Inner Mom also includes the lived skill set developed through mothering: the capacity to show up again and again, to tend, listen, repair, comfort, wait, play, soothe, persist, and begin again. So often moms offer this energy outward to children, partners, clients, friends, family, and communities.
In this work, we ask:
Can that Inner Mom energy be turned toward Mom, too?
Because underneath the protectors are often very vulnerable parts:
The part that desperately needs rest.
The part that needs permission to want.
The part that needs to be held without being fixed.
The part that needs someone to say, “Of course you feel this way.”
Why This Framework Fits Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP)
This is where my work in Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy, or KAP, began to connect so naturally with the Mom Parts Method. In KAP the medicine may create a little more space for the parts of us that usually feel too defended, too ashamed, or too overwhelming to approach directly. With the support of a therapeutic container, clients may be able to relate to these parts with more compassion and curiosity.
Jessica and I have often talked about how motherhood itself is a kind of non-ordinary state. It rearranges identity, changes physiology, and reshapes relationships. It brings old attachment wounds to the surface and intensifies love, fear, grief, rage, longing, and responsibility.
Motherhood can destabilize the system. Ketamine can destabilize familiar patterns, soften defenses, and open doors. In KAP, we are not just giving someone medicine and hoping something meaningful happens. We are creating a therapeutic frame that can help Moms relate differently to their experiences.
The Mom Parts Method gives both clinicians and clients a map. For clinicians, this can be especially helpful because many practitioners receive training in KAP but still wonder, “What do I actually do once we enter the medicine space?”
Mom Parts Mapping offers structure without rigidity. It gives language, movement, and direction while still leaving room for each Mom’s unique experience to unfold.
A More Compassionate Way to Support Moms
The Mom Parts Method and KAP both invite us to move closer to what has been buried, shamed, or misunderstood. They remind us that our "Good Mom" and "Bad Mom" parts are not actually good or bad.
These parts are carrying truths and are trying to protect something vulnerable. And when mothers are supported in turning toward these parts with curiosity, compassion, and care; they may begin to feel less broken, less alone, and less ashamed of the complexity of their inner world.
For Clinicians Who Want to Learn This Experientially
If you are a clinician supporting moms, maternal mental health, or KAP clients; we invite you to continue this conversation with us inside our monthly Mom Parts KAP Labs.
Each lab offers space to explore one specific Mom Parts theme through the arc of KAP preparation, dosing, and integration. Together we look at how protective parts show up, how shame and grief may emerge in non-ordinary states, and how clinicians can support moms in turning toward their inner world with more curiosity.
The labs are part teaching, part reflection, part case-based exploration, and part experiential practice. They are for clinicians who want a framework they can actually use.