Racik Perinatal Counseling, PLLC
Renee Racik, MA, LMHCA
Perinatal Mental Health Counselor and Coach
renee@racikperinatalcounseling.com
360-287-4646
Online in the Seattle Area
Monday-Thursday 9am-3pm
Exclusive Fertility, Pregnancy and Postpartum Coaching
Let's partner up to provide you with comprehensive support on your journey to becoming a parent. With 25 years in the perinatal field, there are many tools and resources I'd like to share that can make this journey a bit easier, and to help you maintain your peace of mind on the rollercoaster of emotions and experiences that occur along the way. It's been shown that managing stress and keeping a positive mindset influences your receptivity for conception, helps maintain a healthy pregnancy, facilitates attachment, helps to manage fears around birth, and allows clarity for a supported postpartum experience.
What is the difference between coaching and counseling?
Fertility, Pregnancy and Postpartum Coaching
is a wellness coaching service which provides more options and services for the goal oriented person who feels they could use consistant support anywhere on their path to parenthood. The difference between therapy and coaching is:
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Therapy focuses on healing the past, and coaching focuses and on meeting your future goals
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The difference can be compared to the difference between archeology and architecture
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Coaching support is accompanying you on the journey in companionship, while providing information, education, resources, and strategies
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25 years of professional doula and perinatal experience to support your process
Coaching and therapy can be similar to each other, however, coaching is not therapy. Coaching focuses on designing the life you want to live, and helping you build the scaffolding to get there. Coaching is not intended to treat mental health issues or heal trauma. If serious emotional or mental issues come up in our sessions, I will encourage you to address those in therapy. As a therapist I can recommend which kind of therapy might be a good fit, and can make referrals to therapists that can help. However, I cannot be your therapist. If you sign up with me for coaching, you are a forever coaching client, and vice versa. If you are my therapy client I cannot see you for coaching. This keeps the scope of practice clear, and boundaries of each role upheld.
That being said, coaching and therapy can overlap in some content areas. The most common area of overlap is the realm of negative or limiting beliefs. Often our big goals and dreams are interrupted by unconscious limiting beliefs. If progress is stalled or resistance is strong, it is often necessary to uncover and address what is lying underneath, and those are usually limiting beliefs. Taking a look at these beliefs can look and feel more like therapy, as both can be solution focused and strengths based. Yet the intentions are different. In coaching we explore the limiting beliefs so you can progress towards your goals, rather than therapeutically uncovering old hurts as a way of treating a mental health condition.
Perinatal Coaching will best serve those who are feeling alone, for whatever reason, and want to have a knowledgeable someone to share the journey with. A someone who can guide, teach and point the way when feeling lost or in struggle. Coaching is a wonderful option for the single parent, a military spouse, or anyone who wants to gift themselves with ongoing, supportive and meaningful connection during this special time of your life.
Similarities & Differences..
Preparing the Way:
Fertility Coach
It starts with the egg, so they say..
There is the practical side of tending to the womb and egg quality by doing all the things- taking nutritional supplements, checking hormones and getting the physical questions answered. Then there is the emotional body tending by supporting feelings of pain and loss, as this is not what you expected. Together we can incorporate what has been, and give you skills to move forward in confidence.
Together we'll get your head in a positive state by dismantling beliefs, and opening to the possibility of getting what you have longed for.
What if your baby comes true? Who would you be without a story of struggle? How do we "live into" a new reality with our words and actions, and truly open to receive our deepest longing.
Coaching can help to uncover thoughts in your subconscious. Common ones like, "my body is broken, and working against me," or, "I am broken." There is a way to reframe them, and inherent in their discoveries are opportunities for healing. With healing comes new possibilities created by updating our thinking. By aligning with your deepest values of what you know to be true, we will hone your mindset for optimal receiving, build your community and resourcefulness, and craft a courageous path forward.
In the Middle:
Pregnancy & Birth Coach
Pregnancy brings our awareness of being an embodied human, home, like none other.
Pregnancy can feel like a liminal state of being while in the in-between, connected to our creative nature, in elemental bodies made of earth and sky, while a human forms in your middle. This can be a time of asking existential questions.
What is your relationship to experiencing awe? How are you relating to creation and source energy, that which we all come from? What is your relationship to your human nature? How is it being in your pregnant body?
We will explore that which is alive for you in this vast arena of pregnant awareness, your sensitivities, all your yes's and no's, and how to be with with it all. You will learn to navigate emotions, hormonal shifts, and the ongoing changes that are occurring in your body and your developing little one's. Perhaps it all feels too overwhelming- don't worry, I've got you. I will provide resources, information, tips and tricks and helpful lists of go-to's.
Birth and postpartum planning is also part of this time of forward facing. I offer activities and tools to help you define what your wants and needs are, to come up with a working plan and how to develop skills for resiliency when the plan deviates. You will be emotionally shored up for the journey, with all that you need to go in with confidence and support.
The Initiation: Postpartum Coach
Postpartum is a time that brings out the best in everyone.
Your baby is here and overwhelm is real. It is natural to be in survival mode with the transition to parenting a newborn. Together we will take inventory of how this is for you, and use what energy is available to clarify your needs, and then strategize to get them met, like yesterday.
Postpartum is a multi-faceted time that brings out many well wishes and good intentions and offers for help. And while intentions are high, the lived experience of parental sleep deprivation and hormonal upheaval coupled with the immense responsibility of caring for a brand new human's needs, can reduce our capacities, to say the least. Speaking straight, this time is usually a crash course in accepting our vulnerabilities and utilizing our coping strategies, and just getting through in survival mode.
However, the gift this time is that the hight stakes brings a powerful clarity. Your heirarchy of needs will be crystal clear, and we will tend to everyone's needs until we are sailing in smooth waters. We will work toward thriving, and in the meantime, your body will recover and you and your babe will be fed and cared for, and everyone will make it through the initiation that is birth into parenthood. With the support of coaching guidance, you can allow yourself to be vulnerable while resting and bonding with your new little one. This is your time to be cared for, and supported by those that love you. Coaching will put together a team who can track all the to-do's for you, so you can be present with yourself and your family.
"When your mindset shifts into possibility, when your nervous system is more regulated than not, when you have sacred space for yourself, and a community of support, YOU are unstoppable."
-Ashley DeBello
