Therapy for Pregnancy After Infertility in Los Angeles and California
You're pregnant after years of trying, and the happiness everyone expects from you hasn't arrived — what arrived instead is vigilance.
I'm a perinatal therapist in Los Angeles, and I work with women who got here the long way: through infertility, treatment cycles, losses, and waiting rooms.
The pregnancy is finally real. Letting it feel real is the work.
Waiting for it to be taken away
Years of trying teach a nervous system exactly one lesson: hope gets punished. So now that it's finally happening, you don't announce. You don't buy anything. You refer to the baby in carefully conditional language, you hold your breath from scan to scan, and when someone congratulates you, something in your chest flinches like they've jinxed it.
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This is guarded joy, and it isn't ingratitude or pessimism. It's a trained response, built by every month that ended in a single line, and it doesn't dissolve just because the test finally said yes. Bodies keep the rules they learned even after the game changes.
The habits that got you here don't switch off
Trying taught you to monitor everything — and monitoring doesn't retire when the mission succeeds. It transfers. The symptom-checking becomes symptom-checking of a different kind: is the nausea strong enough today, why did it ease up, what does that twinge mean. The internet is still open at 3am; the tabs just changed topics.
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This is the same vigilance loop as perinatal anxiety, running on years of extra training, and it responds to the same treatment: learning to let a spike pass without feeding it a search, bringing your baseline down, and giving your body new evidence that it's allowed to stand down. If there were losses along the way, there may also be specific moments that still replay — and EMDR can process those directly, including during pregnancy, with appropriate pacing.
Nobody warns you about the identity whiplash
Infertility wasn't just a medical situation. It was a world — the forums, the acronyms, the friendships with women on the same awful calendar, the identity of being the one still trying.
Pregnancy evicts you from that world overnight, and the feelings that follow are more complicated than anyone admits: survivor guilt toward the friends still in it, estrangement from the easily-pregnant women who now claim you, and a strange homesickness for a club you'd have given anything to leave.
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You're allowed to grieve the years this took even while carrying what they finally produced. Both of those are true, and in my office you don't have to pick one.
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Getting started
I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and Perinatal Mental Health Certified through Postpartum Support International. Pregnancy and the year after it are my entire practice, and women who arrived at pregnancy the hard way are a significant part of it. I use CBT, ACT, psychodynamic work, EMDR, and mindfulness-based approaches, fitted to the person rather than applied to them.
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I see clients in person in Studio City and by video anywhere in California — useful in a pregnancy already crowded with appointments — plus New Jersey under a separate license. Private pay: out of network, superbills provided, no session cap, and we work on your pregnancy's timeline rather than a benefits reviewer's.
Questions women ask me
I'm finally pregnant. Why do I feel scared instead of happy?
Because your nervous system spent years learning that hope gets punished. Guarded joy after infertility is one of the most common experiences in long-awaited pregnancies, and it says nothing about how much you want this baby. It's a trained response, and training can be undone.
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When does the worry cross into needing help?
When the checking and symptom-monitoring are running your days, when you can't let yourself attach or plan at all, or when dread consistently outweighs everything else. Those patterns respond well to treatment — and treating them now protects the postpartum year, which is when untreated vigilance tends to follow the baby home.
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Do you treat infertility itself?
No. Fertility treatment decisions and the medical side belong with your clinic and its counselors. My work starts with the pregnancy and the person carrying it — the fear, the grief, the identity shift — and continues as long as it's useful.
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Can we keep working together after the baby arrives?
Yes, and I'd encourage it. The vigilance that marked a hard-won pregnancy is exactly the pattern that becomes postpartum anxiety if nobody's watching. Continuity through delivery and postpartum is often where this work pays off most.
This work isn’t just about coping, it’s about change.
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