“I Thought the Ambition Would Go Away”: Emily Guarnotta on Motherhood, Mental Health, and Redefining Success
Emily Guarnotta had every reason to believe she was ready for motherhood. She is a psychologist. She had spent years studying how people cope, adjust, and heal, and she had planned for her first daughter, wanted her deeply, and even enjoyed being pregnant. If anyone was equipped for the transition, it was her.
Then the baby came, and the tools she thought she had did not work the way she expected.
On this episode of Success, Rewritten, Emily talks openly about experiencing postpartum depression as a mental health professional, why she still could not bring herself to ask for help, and how that experience quietly rewrote what success and ambition mean to her. It is a conversation for any parent, and really any ambitious person, who has watched a major life event reshape the assumptions they were running on.
The transition she thought she was ready for
Before kids, work was a big part of Emily’s identity. She had spent a long time in school, first college, then graduate school, then the long road to getting licensed as a psychologist. She loved the work and drew energy from it, and she describes herself the way a lot of high achievers will recognize: ambitious, goal-driven, always moving.
So when she got pregnant, she assumed her training would carry her through. Her anxiety even eased during pregnancy, which she later learned is common as hormones level out. She felt equipped, and she expected the journey into motherhood to be relatively smooth. “It was eye-opening when that wasn’t the case,” she says.
When the baby blues didn’t lift
The first sign that something was off came fast. Most new moms experience the baby blues, those transitory couple of weeks of mood shifts, irritability, and anxiety, and Emily had that. What worried her was what came after.
When the blues should have started lifting on paper, she was still sitting with a low mood, depression, and anxiety. Over the first year it intensified rather than faded, layered with the stress of going back to work and the demands of breastfeeding. She remembers sitting in the car two weeks postpartum, googling “when do you feel normal again after having a baby,” and holding onto the twelve-week mark Google gave her like a finish line. Twelve weeks came, and the finish line moved.
The thoughts new moms rarely say out loud
One of the most validating parts of the conversation is Emily’s honesty about intrusive thoughts, the distressing thoughts or images that seem to come out of nowhere in the postpartum period. What if I drop the baby. What if the baby stops breathing in the middle of the night.
“About 90% of new moms experience them,” she explains. They can feel impossible to control, and they carry a wave of anxiety and shame with them. Sometimes they pass on their own, and sometimes they are a sign of an anxiety disorder that deserves treatment. Either way, Emily’s point is the one so many new parents need to hear: having them does not mean something is wrong with you.
Why a psychologist still couldn’t ask for help
Here is the part that reframes the whole conversation. Emily knew the clinical language and could have named exactly what was happening to her, and she still buried it for months. “I was afraid that I would be looked at differently by other people if I admitted that I was struggling,” she says. So she trudged forward until, at about eight months postpartum, she realized she was living in survival mode with no end in sight.
Even then, asking was hard. When she finally started looking for a therapist, she hit the same walls everyone hits: finding someone who took her insurance, who could see her after work, who fit her schedule. And when she made the call, she could not quite say the words, reaching instead for something softer like “I’m overwhelmed,” because it felt less exposed than naming postpartum depression out loud. If someone who does this for a living waited that long, it makes sense that the rest of us hesitate too.
What actually helped
Emily’s recovery did not come from one thing. It came from a few, layered over time. She went back on medication at her six-week postpartum visit, an SSRI to help with the mood symptoms, after an agonizing internal debate about whether it was safe while breastfeeding. She tried a couple of therapists before she found the right one, which is common and worth knowing in advance. And when she found her, the biggest shift was simply being believed. “Just her validating my experience was just everything,” Emily says.
The other quiet turning point was realizing how many other moms had gone through the same thing, women who had looked, from the outside, like they had it all together. Learning that they had been struggling too was painful, but it also dismantled the story in her head that she was uniquely broken. As she puts it, there is “not something that’s inherently wrong with me or that I’m broken.”
How postpartum depression became Phoenix Health
Once Emily started feeling better, she wanted to understand what had happened to her, and what she found was a gap. In her four-year doctoral program, perinatal mental health got roughly one class, one day. It simply was not part of the curriculum, a story she has since heard from countless other clinicians.
So she went and got the training herself through Postpartum Support International, earned the certification, and started pointing her practice toward the families she now understood from the inside. When COVID pushed therapy virtual, care became far more accessible for new moms, and Emily leaned in. That evolution became Phoenix Health, now a team of about ten licensed therapists providing care across several states and supporting families through infertility, loss, pregnancy, postpartum, and the early years of parenting. Her larger goal is accessibility, from taking insurance and Medicaid in more states, to partnering with a dietitian for the nutritional depletion so common in this period and building group support for parents at every stage. “When we take care of parents,” she says, “we know the children directly benefit from that.”
When ambition doesn’t disappear
The line that opens the episode is the one that lingers. “When I became a mom, I thought that the ambition would go away, and it didn’t.”
For a while that surprised her, and she paid for it. She put enormous pressure on herself to keep the same pace she always had, and that pressure fed her postpartum depression. Looking back, she wishes she had let herself ease off and trusted that the drive would still be there when she had room for it again. And it was. Her daughters are 5 and 8 now, more independent and even interested in her work, and the ambition she once felt she had to fight is something she gets to use again. That is the reframe for the ambitious parent: the drive is not gone, it is waiting. Feeling disrupted or even confused about your ambition in a new season is, in her words, “completely normal.”
Protecting the things that keep you standing
A few practices anchor Emily now. Self-care is non-negotiable, and she means it literally, putting exercise and ten to fifteen minutes of morning meditation on her calendar because, as she says, “if it’s not on the calendar, it’s not gonna happen.” Her family protects that time because they have seen what it gives back. “You can’t sacrifice yourself and still be a good partner and a good mom,” she says.
She and her husband treat the division of labor as an ongoing conversation rather than a one-time deal, checking in on who is carrying what before resentment has a chance to build. And she leans on mindfulness the way she would lean on medication, describing her daily meditation as an anxiety pill that resets her nervous system. It does not have to be formal, she notes. Two minutes of deep breathing, five minutes with your face to the sun and your feet on the ground. The point is giving yourself something that recenters you every day.
Never too early, never too late
If there is one thing Emily wants anyone on the fence to hear, it is this: “It’s never too early, never too late to seek help.” You do not have to be in crisis to deserve support, and exploring it does not commit you to anything. The fear is what keeps us delaying, and the delay is what makes everything harder. “Don’t do what I did,” she says. Reach out earlier. Most of these experiences are temporary, and with support, they get better.
It is a fitting note for Success, Rewritten, a reminder that redefining success sometimes starts with the hardest, plainest thing: admitting you need help, and letting someone give it.
If you or someone you love is navigating pregnancy, postpartum, or the transition to parenthood, support is available. Learn more about Phoenix Health and Postpartum Support International.
Watch the full interview with Emily Guarnotta on YouTube, or listen on any podcast platform. Here’s Spotify, and Apple podcasts. And let us know what you think! We’d love to hear your feedback and questions.
