Jerrica Danhoff Built a Therapy Practice for Moms Who Feel Everything
Interview by Heather Anderson
Jerrica Danhoff is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist based in Oakland, offering in-person sessions there and virtual therapy throughout California. She specializes in supporting highly sensitive mothers through pregnancy, postpartum, birth trauma recovery, and the early years of parenthood, using trauma-informed methods that include Brainspotting, a short-term bilateral stimulation model, and nervous system regulation work. She's also a mother to an almost three year old daughter, an experience that shapes how she shows up for the moms she works with.
How did you find your way to work with highly sensitive mothers specifically?
I found my way to this work through years of working with families, parents, and kids. I have a background in early childhood and play therapy, and I've always loved teaching parents hands on skills through filial therapy. But it was becoming a mom myself, to my now three year old daughter, that really shifted things. Going through my own matrescence (that whole transition into motherhood) showed me firsthand how much support mothers and birthing people need, and how little of it actually exists. That gap is what I built my practice around.
“Birth trauma isn’t defined by the medical outcome, it’s defined by your experience: your emotional, physical, and spiritual reality.”
What does it actually mean to be a highly sensitive person, and what happens when one of them becomes a mother?
There are a lot of ways to answer this, but at a high level, being highly sensitive means you're a deep feeler and a deep thinker. Highly sensitive people have real strengths: deep empathy, a depth of processing information, and the ability to notice subtleties in the environment that others miss entirely. Those are beautiful things. They can also lead to becoming more overstimulated, and that's a huge piece of what shows up in highly sensitive mothers. Feeling touched out, feeling overwhelmed, just by matrescence itself and everything shifting hormonally, and then going into postpartum on top of that. HSPs tend to need more sleep, and you are definitely not getting adequate sleep when you're caring for a newborn. So a lot of this work is learning your nervous system, what it needs, and understanding that a highly sensitive person's nervous system needs more care, more understanding, and more support than someone who isn't HSP.
What do moms usually say in a first session, and what do you wish they knew before they ever reached out?
So many moms come in feeling like they're not good enough. Worried they're somehow harming their child's attachment, or that they're just not doing enough. And something I don't think people talk about enough is how many people come into therapy having intrusive thoughts. That doesn't mean it's a thought you want to act on, or ever would, but having that experience can feel incredibly overwhelming and isolating. It can feel like something is wrong with you when it's actually very common. I talk a lot about the ‘both __, and __’ in my work with this population. You can both love your child dearly and wholeheartedly, and be tapped out and need a break. Guilt tends to follow right behind that feeling, so I think it's helpful to name both things at once. You can feel this way, and this is really hard, and you are not the only one who feels that way. What I wish every mom knew before reaching out is exactly that: you're not alone, and this is a real transitional period. It's normal to feel the way you feel.
Birth trauma is something a lot of women carry silently, sometimes without ever calling it trauma. What actually counts as birth trauma?
Birth trauma really comes up when a person has experienced feeling powerless, feeling dismissed, or feeling not truly seen at any point in the experience. It's not just the act of birth itself, it's the whole arc, the labor, the decisions, any moment along the way. If it was an emergency C-section, or some kind of intervention that happened fast and unexpectedly, there often isn't time to process what's happening while it's happening. If your baby's life was at risk, or your own life was at risk, or there were complications that felt scary or destabilizing, of course there can be birth trauma there. I think of birth trauma as experiences of pure overwhelm, things feeling chaotic and emotionally painful. Afterward you might carry lingering fear, guilt, numbness, or distress that shows up any time you recall the birth. That's activating, and it's information. Your body is telling you something needs tending to. On my website I say that birth trauma isn't defined by the medical outcome, it's defined by your experience: your emotional, physical, and spiritual reality. If some part of what you went through still doesn't feel okay, that's worth paying attention to.
You use a short-term bilateral stimulation model for healing birth trauma. What is it, and why does it work when talking alone sometimes doesn't?
The method I use was developed by a therapist and it's a really integrative model. Bilateral stimulation is an aspect of EMDR therapy, and it involves tapping back and forth with your hands or sometimes different tools, depending on what works for your nervous system. It supports the nervous system in processing overwhelming memories and eases emotional intensity, which is helpful when we're working with difficult birth memories, C-section trauma, or postpartum distress. Another piece of it is identifying your resourcing guides, supportive and protective figures or images that help you feel grounded and safe as you revisit your story. We go through the whole story with a lot of pausing. It's slow on purpose, because we're bringing in those resource guides for support along the way. Depending on what happened during the birth, it usually takes about three to six sessions to move through the full story. The other piece is somatic awareness, bringing gentle attention to your body's sensations, emotions, and cues, to help your system release what's felt stuck or overwhelming.
You also integrate Brainspotting and parts work. Can you walk us through each one in plain language?
Brainspotting is mainly used for trauma healing. Talk therapy accesses the cerebral cortex, the more surface level part of your brain, but trauma tends to live deeper, in what's called the subcortical brain. Brainspotting reaches that deeper part by using the idea that where you look affects how you feel. We use your eye movements and body sensations to locate what's called a brain spot, a fixed point in the room, sometimes using a pointer if we're in person. When you start talking about something activating, there's usually a spot, all the way left, all the way right, or straight ahead, where you feel it most. We find that spot and mindfully stay there for the rest of the session. I also blend Brainspotting with parts work, using internal family systems, or IFS. If you've ever said a part of me feels this way, but another part feels completely different, that's exactly what IFS works with. We take time to get to know each part, its feelings, its sensations, its experience. I like to describe Brainspotting as taking the highway instead of the back roads. Talk therapy can get you there, but it takes longer. Brainspotting can move faster, which also means it can feel more intense at times, but there's a lot of flexibility in how we use it so you still feel like you're in the driver's seat of your own healing.
Nervous system regulation has become a buzz phrase on social media, but you actually teach these tools clinically. What's one thing an overwhelmed mom reading this could try today?
A lot of nervous system work starts with figuring out where you are. If you're feeling overwhelmed, you're probably in a hyper aroused state, and the work is learning what helps your body come back down into a more regulated window. Everyone talks about deep breathing, and for some people that works, for others it doesn't. Sometimes it's placing your hand on your heart and putting your legs up the wall, feeling the wall support you while you breathe. That hand on your heart actually activates a caregiving response, which matters because moms are so used to giving care to everyone else. For some people it's shaking it out, or dancing it out, or getting one minute alone in the bathroom to sit on the floor in child's pose. It's really different for everyone. Part of nervous system work is mapping your own system: what brings you up when you're really low, and what brings you back down when you're really high. If you're an overwhelmed mom reading this, just try one thing today. Whatever comes to mind first is usually a good place to start.
You see clients in person in Oakland and virtually across California. Does virtual therapy hold up for this kind of deep work?
I've always done Brainspotting both in person and online, and it's just as effective either way for healing birth trauma. Every modality I use, aside from parts of ecotherapy, can be done in person or virtually, with the same results. So whether you're local to Oakland or anywhere else in California, you're getting the same depth of work.
You're also a mom to an almost three year old daughter. How has becoming a parent changed the way you sit with the mothers in your practice?
Since becoming a mom, I have so much more empathy, understanding, and honoring of the experience. The magnitude of the transition into motherhood is something I couldn't fully grasp until I lived it myself. There's a felt sense to everything that swirls around inside you, whether you're parenting a toddler, which is my stage right now, or caring for a newborn, the lack of sleep, the isolation. That lived experience has given me so much more understanding and compassion. It lets me hold mothers from a place of really knowing what it's like to be exactly where they are.
What's next on the horizon for your practice?
One of the things I'm dreaming up right now, still in very early stages, is an embodied birth story workshop. The idea is to give mothers a chance to gently explore their birth experience through movement, witnessing, reflection, and connection. Participants would move only what feels available to them, with choice and self trust guiding the whole process. This isn't about reliving trauma or retelling every detail of a birth story. It's more about noticing what the body remembers, expressing what feels ready to be expressed, and experiencing healing through being witnessed by other mothers. I'm incorporating some of the same approach I use in my one on one work, helping participants find their resource guides first, so it's part resourcing, part movement, part connection and witnessing.
If a mom is reading this and recognizing herself, whether she's pregnant and anxious, months or years past a birth that still weighs on her, or deep in the fog of early motherhood, what's the best first step to take with you?
Reach out and schedule a free 15 minute phone consultation. We'll talk about what you're navigating, what kind of support you're looking for, and see if we're a good fit to work together.
Book a free 15 minute consultation at jerricadanhoff.com
In-person sessions available in Oakland, CA
Virtual therapy available throughout California
Connect with Jerrica Danhoff Instagram.
You can also find her on The M List, The Mamahood's searchable database of mom-recommended resources, or connect and collaborate with Jerrica inside The Club membership for women Founders.