Specialized Therapy For Pregnant and Postpartum Women in Marina Del Rey, CA
Stop being the Default Parent for every household crisis. When you are the one responsible for the "everything," it is easy to disappear into the background of your own life. Reclaim your identity with a tactical clinical framework designed for the high-pressure reality of motherhood in Marina del Rey and Silicon Beach.
If you're in Marina del Rey — or somewhere nearby in the South Bay or West LA — and you've been quietly wondering whether what you're feeling is normal, I want you to know something right away: you found the right place. I'm a licensed therapist who specializes in working with California moms, and I work exclusively online, which means wherever you are in the state, I can meet you there — usually from your car during school pickup, your couch after bedtime, or a quiet corner of your home that finally has the door closed.
I built my practice specifically around maternal mental health because I know how hard it is to find support that actually gets it — that understands the specific, layered, relentless experience of being a mom in a high-achieving community where everything looks perfect on the outside and feels like it might be falling apart on the inside. Whether you're navigating pregnancy, or you're postpartum and something feels off — this is the right place.
You don't have to figure out if what you're feeling is "bad enough" to deserve help. If you're here, reading this, that's already enough of a reason to reach out.
Postpartum Depression and Anxiety in Marina del Rey: What It Actually Looks Like
Let me be honest with you: postpartum depression doesn't always look like what you've seen in public health campaigns. It doesn't always mean you can't get out of bed or that you're not bonding with your baby. For a lot of the moms I work with — smart, capable, high-functioning women — postpartum depression looks like rage. It looks like resentment. It looks like going through the motions beautifully while feeling completely hollow underneath.
Postpartum anxiety, which is actually more common than postpartum depression, can look like lying awake at 2am running through every worst-case scenario. It can look like hyper-vigilance — checking the baby monitor seventeen times an hour, Googling symptoms until your hands shake, feeling like something terrible is about to happen even when everything is fine. It can look like irritability that comes out sideways at your partner, your older kid, yourself.
If any of that resonates, I want you to hear this clearly: you are not a bad mom. You are a mom who is struggling and who deserves real support. Postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety are medical conditions — they're not character flaws, they're not weakness, and they are absolutely treatable. I've watched moms go from barely surviving the day to genuinely thriving. That is possible for you too.
Prenatal Mental Health: Because Pregnancy Is Not Always the Glowing Part
There's this cultural expectation that pregnancy is supposed to be a happy time — that you're glowing and grateful and decorating a nursery with a smile. And sometimes it is. But for a lot of moms, pregnancy brings its own wave of anxiety, grief, identity confusion, or just a profound sense of being overwhelmed by what's coming.
Prenatal anxiety is real. Prenatal depression is real. The identity shift that happens during pregnancy — the slow dissolution of who you were before into who you're becoming — is one of the least-talked-about and most disorienting experiences a woman can go through. I work with moms throughout the full perinatal arc, from early pregnancy through the postpartum months and beyond, because the mental and emotional journey doesn't start when the baby arrives. It starts long before.
Whether you're navigating pregnancy, or you're postpartum and something feels off — this is the right place. You don't have to wait until things get worse to ask for help.
The Invisible Load: What Nobody Talks About in Marina del Rey
Marina del Rey is a beautiful place to live. It's also a place where the pressure to have it all together — the career, the body, the relationship, the Instagram-worthy life — is quietly suffocating a lot of moms who would never say that out loud.
The Invisible Load is what I call the mental and emotional labor that moms carry that nobody else sees. It's remembering to schedule the pediatrician appointment, tracking whether the birthday gift was shipped, noticing that the coffee is almost out, knowing your child's teacher's name and your partner's boss's birthday and every minor logistical detail that keeps a family functioning. It's exhausting. And it's almost entirely invisible — which means it often goes unappreciated, unacknowledged, and unshared.
In my work with moms, I take the Invisible Load seriously as a clinical issue — because chronic, invisible overwhelm has real mental health consequences. We work together to name it, articulate it, and figure out what needs to change so that you're not running on empty every single day.
The Default Parent Dynamic — And Why It Leaves You So Depleted
Are you the one the kids always call for? The one who knows where everything is? The one who can't be sick because if you go down, the whole operation goes down? That's the Default Parent dynamic — and it's one of the most common things I work through with moms in my practice.
Being the Default Parent isn't always a choice. It often develops gradually, through a thousand small moments where you just handled it because it was easier, or faster, or because the alternative was a fight you didn't have energy for. But over time it accumulates into something heavy — a resentment that sits just below the surface, a loneliness that feels embarrassing to admit because you technically have a partner.
In therapy, we work on this directly. Not just the feelings around it, but the actual patterns — what's driving them, what's maintaining them, and what would need to shift for the dynamic to change. I'm not here to tell you to communicate better and leave it at that. I'm here to actually help you work through it.
Nice To Meet You!
I’m Alexa.
✨ Licensed Therapist
✨ Mom of Two
✨ Human who has been through my own journey healing from Postpartum Depression + Anxiety
Mom Rage Is Real — And It Doesn't Mean You're a Bad Mom
Mom Rage is one of the most common things moms bring into my practice, and it is almost never actually about what set it off. It's not about the sippy cup left on the counter or the partner who didn't notice the dishwasher needed to be unloaded. It's about what's underneath — the depletion, the invisible labor, the relentless demand of being needed by everyone while nobody is asking if you're okay.
Mom Rage is often a sign of postpartum depression or postpartum anxiety in moms who don't fit the conventional picture. It's anger that's actually grief in disguise — grief for your former self, for sleep, for the version of your relationship that existed before kids, for the career or body or freedom that felt like yours alone.
I work with moms on Mom Rage not by teaching them breathing exercises to suppress it, but by actually understanding what it's trying to tell them — and then working on the underlying conditions that are generating it. When you address the root, the rage loses its grip.
Reclaiming Your Identity as a Mom in Marina del Rey
One of the most common things I hear from moms is some version of: "I don't know who I am anymore." Before kids, you had a clear sense of yourself — your ambitions, your social life, your body, your sense of humor, the things that made you you. And then motherhood arrived and restructured all of it.
The Perfectionism Tax is what I call the invisible cost that high-achieving moms pay when they try to excel at everything at once — career, parenting, partnership, health, social life — without ever letting anything be merely good enough. It's exhausting in a specific way that feels almost shameful to admit, because from the outside everything looks like it's working.
Identity reclamation is a real, concrete part of the work I do with moms. Not just processing feelings, but actively figuring out who you are now — which parts of your old self you want to bring forward, which parts have genuinely changed, and what you actually want your life to feel like. Not what it's supposed to look like. What you actually want.
That work is slow and it takes courage. But it's also some of the most meaningful work I get to be part of.
Why Virtual Therapy Actually Works — Especially for Moms in the LA Area
I know virtual therapy might feel like a compromise. I want to gently push back on that. For moms — especially moms of young kids — virtual therapy is often genuinely better, not just more convenient. Here's why.
Removing the commute removes one of the biggest barriers to consistent care. For Marina del Rey moms navigating the 405 and Lincoln and the general madness of West LA traffic, getting to an in-person appointment adds 45 minutes minimum to a session that's already 50 minutes. That's almost two hours out of a day that already has no margin. Virtual therapy fits into the actual architecture of your life.
It also means you can be consistent even when life gets complicated — the baby is sick, the nanny cancelled, the school called. You can still show up for your session from wherever you are. Consistency is one of the most important predictors of good outcomes in therapy, and virtual care makes consistency dramatically easier for moms.
I'm licensed to work with clients throughout California, so whether you're right on the Marina or in Playa Vista, El Segundo, Venice, or anywhere else in the South Bay or West LA, we can work together.
What Working Together Looks Like
I work with a small caseload intentionally — because I believe good therapy requires real attention, real relationship, and real continuity. When you work with me, you're not getting a rotating roster of providers or a therapist who's seeing 40 people a week and can't remember your story. I know you, your kids' names, what happened last week, what you're working toward.
Sessions are 50 minutes, held via secure video. We meet weekly, which I recommend particularly for the first phase of our work together — consistency is where the real progress happens. My rate is $275 per session, and I'm a private-pay practice, which means no insurance billing, no prior authorizations, no restrictions on how long we can work together or what we can address.
Starting is simple: you fill out a brief intake form and we schedule a consultation where we talk about what's going on and whether working together feels like a fit. I don't do hard sells. If it's not the right match, I'll tell you honestly and help you find someone who is.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Do you offer in-person therapy in Marina del Rey?
My practice is fully virtual, which means I don't have a physical office. All sessions are held via secure video. For most of the moms I work with — especially those managing kids, careers, and the chaos of West LA life — virtual therapy is actually more sustainable than in-person, because there's no commute, no parking, and no 45-minute window carved out before and after an already-packed appointment.
How do I know if what I'm experiencing is postpartum depression or postpartum anxiety?
Postpartum depression often shows up as persistent sadness, emotional numbness, irritability, rage, difficulty connecting with your baby, or a deep sense that something is wrong that you can't quite name. Postpartum anxiety tends to look more like excessive worry, racing thoughts, physical tension, difficulty sleeping even when the baby sleeps, and a sense of dread or hypervigilance. Many moms experience both at the same time. If you're unsure whether what you're feeling "counts," please reach out — I'd rather have a conversation and help you figure it out than have you white-knuckle through something treatable.
Do you take insurance?
I'm a private-pay practice, which means I don't bill insurance directly. My rate is $275 per session. If you have a PPO insurance plan, you may be able to submit for out-of-network reimbursement — I can provide a superbill (an itemized receipt) that you can submit to your insurance for potential partial reimbursement. The percentage covered varies by plan, so I recommend calling the member services number on the back of your insurance card and asking about your out-of-network mental health benefits.
What if my parents or in-laws don't think I need therapy?
This comes up more than you might think. There can be real pressure — especially from older generations — to push through, to be grateful, to not "make a big deal" of something that's supposed to be the happiest time of your life. That pressure is real, and it can make it harder to take your own needs seriously. But here's the thing: getting support makes you a better parent, a better partner, and a more sustainable version of yourself. You don't need anyone's permission to take care of your mental health. And what happens in therapy is private — this is your space.
How long does therapy take?
That really depends on what you're working on and how long things have been building. Some moms come in with a specific postpartum episode and feel meaningfully better within a few months. Others are working on longer-standing patterns — perfectionism, relationship dynamics, identity — that take longer to untangle. I don't put arbitrary time limits on our work, and I don't keep people in therapy longer than they need to be. My goal is always to work myself out of a job.
Are you only for moms with babies?
Not at all. I work with moms at every stage — pregnancy, the newborn phase, toddler years, and beyond. Postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety can emerge anytime in the first year or two after birth, and the Invisible Load, Default Parent dynamics, Mom Rage, and identity reclamation are issues that moms navigate for years. If your youngest is three and you're finally ready to address the thing you've been pushing down since they were born, that's exactly what I'm here for.
Ready to Start? Book Your First Session.
If something on this page landed for you — if you recognized yourself somewhere in what I described — I'd love to talk. The first step is a brief consultation where we get a sense of what's going on and whether working together feels like a fit. It's low-pressure, it's private, and it's the first step toward actually feeling better.
I work with moms throughout California, including Marina del Rey, Venice, Playa Vista, El Segundo, Culver City, Santa Monica, and across the South Bay and West LA. Virtual care means geography is rarely a barrier — wherever you are in the state, we can work together.
Book your first session today. You've been taking care of everyone else. Let's make sure someone's taking care of you. I can’t wait to connect and support you during this season of motherhood!