Your Body Isn't the Problem: Body Image Across Pregnancy and the Postnatal Period

There's a version of pregnancy that gets a lot of airtime. The glowing skin, the neat bump, the sense of being beautifully, purposefully round. And for some people, some of the time, pregnancy does feel like that.

But for a lot of people, it doesn't. And the gap between how you're told you should feel about your body and how you actually feel about it can be quietly devastating.

Body image in the perinatal period, across pregnancy and into the postnatal months, is something I work with regularly in my practice. It doesn't always come in through the front door. Often it arrives wrapped up in something else, a comment someone made, a difficulty with intimacy, a feeling of being a stranger in your own skin. But it's there, and it deserves to be talked about directly.

What we mean when we talk about body image

Body image isn't just about how you look. It's about your relationship with your body: how you feel living inside it, how safe and at home you feel there, how much the gap between your body and the cultural ideal costs you emotionally.

In the perinatal period, that relationship gets tested in ways that are hard to prepare for. Your body changes rapidly and often unpredictably. It does things you didn't expect. It may not behave the way you hoped, during pregnancy, during birth, or in the weeks and months afterwards. And all of this happens in a culture that has very specific and very narrow ideas about what pregnant and postpartum bodies should look like.

During pregnancy

Pregnancy changes your body in ways that are profound and, for many people, disorienting. Some of those changes are visible and commented on by others, often without invitation. The bump that appears "too small" or "too big." The weight gain that gets remarked on at family dinners. The unsolicited hands reaching for your stomach.

For people who already had a complicated relationship with their body before pregnancy, this period can be particularly hard. Eating disorder histories can be reactivated. Anxiety about weight and shape can intensify. And because the cultural narrative around pregnancy is so relentlessly positive, it can feel like there's no room to say "actually, I'm finding this really difficult."

In Ireland, there's an added layer. We're not especially good at talking about bodies in a nuanced way. The conversation tends to swing between "you look great" and nothing at all. Which means a lot of people are carrying very private distress about how they feel in their body, with very little language or space to express it.

After birth

The postnatal period brings its own version of this. There's an enormous amount of cultural pressure, much of it unspoken, to "get your body back." That phrase alone is worth sitting with for a moment, because it implies that the body you have now, the one that grew and birthed a baby, is somehow a temporary inconvenience rather than the body you actually live in.

The reality of the postpartum body is that it has been through something significant. It may look and feel very different to the body you had before. There may be a scar, or changes to your pelvic floor, or breasts that feel unfamiliar, or a softness around your middle that doesn't shift the way you expected. And while all of this is normal, normal doesn't mean it's easy to sit with.

I see people in my practice who feel profound shame about their postpartum body, who avoid mirrors, who struggle with physical intimacy, who feel disconnected from themselves in a way they can't quite name. Often they haven't told anyone this. Because it feels petty, or ungrateful. They have a healthy baby. They feel they should be past caring about this.

But your relationship with your body matters. It affects how present you can be, how connected you feel, how much mental and emotional energy is quietly being consumed by a running commentary about how you look.

The Irish "just get on with it" culture and body image

There's a particular flavour to how Irish women tend to carry body image difficulties. The same cultural conditioning that makes it hard to say "I'm not coping" after having a baby also makes it hard to say "I'm really struggling with how I feel about my body."

Complaining about your appearance can feel vain. Admitting you're finding the physical changes of pregnancy or the postpartum body hard can feel like ingratitude. And so it goes underground. It becomes the internal commentary that runs quietly in the background while you get on with everything else.

In my clinical experience, this silence doesn't make the distress smaller. It just makes it lonelier.

When body image difficulties go deeper

For some people, body image in the perinatal period crosses into territory that warrants more specific support. If you are restricting food during pregnancy or postnatally, if you are experiencing obsessive thoughts about your weight or shape, if your distress about your body is significantly affecting your daily life or your relationship with your baby, please do reach out to a professional. These experiences are more common than people realise, and they are treatable.

It's also worth noting that birth trauma can have a significant impact on body image. If your birth experience was frightening, or involved a loss of control over your body, or left you with a physical recovery that has been harder than you expected, the way you feel about your body afterwards may be tied up with that experience in ways that are worth exploring.

A note on the nervous system

One of the things I come back to again and again in my work is the relationship between body image and the nervous system. When we are in a state of chronic stress or threat, our relationship with our body tends to suffer. We become more critical, more disconnected, less able to inhabit ourselves with any ease.

A lot of what I do with clients isn't about changing how their bodies look. It's about helping them feel safer inside it. That shift, from body as object to body as home, is slow work, but it's meaningful work.

How I can support you

I'm a perinatal psychotherapist based in Co. Wicklow, working online with parents across Ireland. If you're pregnant or in the postnatal period and finding your relationship with your body is taking up more space than you'd like, that's worth exploring. You don't need to be in crisis to come to therapy. Sometimes it's simply about having a space where you can say the things you haven't felt able to say anywhere else.

Get in touch if you'd like to find out more about working together.