Her Story
About Gabriela
I have been working in mental health with families and children since I graduated college in 2011, giving me over 12 years of experience in different settings. The last 3 years have been mostly focused on perinatal mental health, working with pregnancy and postpartum populations. I am a certified perinatal mental health coach and work remotely for Family Well, while also building my own private coaching business. My work involves partnering with OB clinics and midwife clinics to provide extra mental health and wellness support to their patients through virtual one-on-one coaching sessions. I educate clients about the difference between baby blues and more serious conditions like postpartum anxiety or depression, help them create postpartum plans with proper support systems, and teach them how to ask for help and set boundaries with family. I cover topics including feeding, sleeping, newborn care, intrusive thoughts, identity shift changes, and relationship changes that come with having a baby. During pregnancy, I focus on pregnancy wellness and preparing for labor and birth to help mitigate birth trauma. I provide coping skills, education, and resources to empower women during their transition into motherhood, which I refer to as matricence, and I typically stay with clients until their baby's first birthday. In my private practice, I extend support beyond the first year and offer workshops for preparing for birth and postpartum, as well as nature-based mommy and me classes, because I believe being outside in sunshine, fresh air, and nature is medicine for our nervous system. I am bilingual and provide services in Spanish to address the lack of resources for Spanish-speaking populations.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Gabriela
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say just do it, even if it's little, right? Because I felt that way at first when I was like, okay, I want to support women. It was like, oh, but how am I going to do this financially, or even because I was a stay-at-home mom with my kids at first, so it just feels like there's a lot of barriers to get there. But I would just say start little, even getting a group of friends that has the same age as your kids and just planning walks every day. It starts little, giving the support to other people. It starts just in your community, in your family, checking in with that one friend who just had a baby. All of that makes a difference. And then the more you get educated, there's a lot of free webinars and workshops and trainings out there. There's a lot of scholarships too, like Postpartum Support International and other agencies that offer trainings have scholarships. I was able to get my certification through, I was able to pass my exam through a scholarship that they gave me, so you just kind of have to look and talk and network and get in there with, start talking to other moms, because a lot of moms have a lot of information, they have a lot of advice and connections. We just have to get together and start talking, and even if we start little, you build on it little by little, and then you can, you know, it takes time to build something, but you can do it, you just gotta kind of get yourself out there.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
What I do see is that there is a lot of lack of information, education, and resources sometimes, so we can say, like, hey, yes, we recognize that this person may need coaching or therapy or something for their postpartum journey, but then accessing all of that is hard. And I feel like that goes into systemic issues of companies not understanding family leave laws or breastfeeding laws. There's a lot of things that give women lack of access for those things that we really need in our perinatal period. I do see that in working with moms, like, hey, my boss is, like, you know, work is really male-dominated, so they don't really understand that I may need to leave early or that I may need to take time to pause. So there's a lot of barriers to help women get what they need when there are environments where they can get that. I feel like that's my biggest thing when it comes to that.
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