Therapy for Dads in Chicago
Becoming a father can bring a mix of joy, fear, and major adjustments, and men often might not feel equipped to talk about the harder, more vulnerable, and emotional components.
Common struggles for new dads include postpartum depression and anxiety, which is incredibly common, postpartum PTSD (witnessing your partner’s traumatic birth and delivery, feeling out of control, complications with your partner or baby, a NICU experience), identity shifts, sleep deprivation and its effects on mood and patience, relationship strain with a partner as roles and intimacy change, financial pressure and provider anxiety, feeling disconnected from the baby or guilty about that disconnection, and grief for pre-baby freedom or identity (often accompanied by shame for feeling that grief at all).
It is also common to feel uncertainty about what kind of father you want to be, sometimes in contrast to your own caregiver’s example. You might be asking yourself, what are Big Little Feelings? Who is Dr. Becky?
Many new dads also feel pressure to "hold it together" for their partner and family, and don’t feel justified in having their own intense emotional responses, fears, or anxieties, especially if they feel the attention should be on the birthing person or their baby.
Common Thread Counseling Chicago provides a nonjudgmental space for you to gain insight into your experience, become curious about your emotional responses, talk through the challenging and rewarding parts of fatherhood, and move through parenthood with intention, purpose, and meaning.
Our Approach to Therapy for Dads
Therapy with Common Thread Counseling provides new fathers a space to process feelings without fear of being judged as a “bad” father or partner for having those feelings.
We can help you sort out which of your struggles are situational (sleep deprivation, adjustment stress) versus something that needs more direct clinical attention, like postpartum depression, PPTSD, PPOCD, or postpartum anxiety.
Sometimes the transition to becoming a father can bring up your own ‘stuff.’ This could include childhood experiences, both positive and negative, that have shaped your own development, as well as patterns and cycles that you would like to change as you enter your own journey into parenthood.
We can also explore parenting throughout your child’s lifespan, as each stage (newborn, infant, toddler, school-aged, teenager, young adult) brings its own set of challenges.
Tools we use include:
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to address anxious or catastrophic thinking ("I'm going to mess this up," "I should be handling this better") to help you build more balanced, realistic self-talk.
Interpersonal Therapy (IPT), which focuses on the relational shifts of new parenthood, particularly changes in the couple's relationship and social support network.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) which helps make room for difficult emotions while staying connected to your values as a partner and parent, and psychodynamic or attachment-focused therapy to explore your early attachment experiences and how they might be showing up in how you bond with your child.
A couples-informed lens, which can help you with communication and teamwork with your partner during this transition, as well as solution-focused brief therapy - which is useful for dads who want practical, short-term tools to manage a specific stressor (sleep, conflict, anxiety) rather than long-term exploratory work.
Practical Skills We Help You Develop:
recognizing and naming your own emotional state rather than pushing through it
stress management and grounding techniques for high-fatigue moments
communication skills for negotiating division of labor and emotional needs with a partner
self-compassion for the inevitable mistakes of early parenting
realistic expectation-setting (letting go of the idea that you should instantly feel bonded or competent)
building a support network to proactively prevent isolation
setting boundaries with work or family
Nobody knows what they’re doing when they become a parent.
Common Thread Counseling can help you develop long-term tools and strategies to become the type of father and partner that you would like to be.