Leslie Ann Costello (2025). Helping Mothers, Helping Babies. Somatic Perinatal Psychotherapy.
Devon Station Books, 226 pages, ISBN 9781739017071
Bioenergetic Analysis • The Clinical Journal of the IIBA, 2026 (36), 152–153
https://doi.org/10.30820/0743-4804-2026-36-152
www.bioenergetic-analysis.comThe second book we recommend is Helping Mothers, Helping Babies by Leslie Ann Costello also published during 2025. This book is a true manual that can be of assistance to colleagues who work with new mothers. The author, thanks to her extensive experience in this field, considers a wide range of situations requiring help. “The physical changes during pregnancy and childbirth, sleep deprivation, mental confusion, and pressing social, financial, and identity issues are challenges for everyone. If a person is already stressed or struggling, these issues can be highly destabilizing.” But where there are also forms of depression or previous traumas, a scenario opens up that can be much more difficult, and therapy time can also represent a break from having to deal with a thousand needs and the power to rely on someone, at least for a while. Body therapy, with the many experiences it can offer, certainly has great potential to transform what appears to be a hopeless destabilization into an opportunity to begin repairing the new mother’s early experiences, helping her find a better balance for herself and adequate care for her newborn. Therapy is also the only place where women can talk about their difficulties and unhappiness in a world that fails to accommodate these feelings because it is focused on the joy of new birth. “The new mother is bombarded with messages about how happy she should be, how wonderful her life is, and how precious it is to be a mother. The profound disconnection between her experience and social expectations contributes to the feeling of being adrift in a hurricane.” And in the meantime, she has a helpless child to care for.
It is important for the therapist to be able to work with the here-and-now of the needs expressed by the clients, knowing that what happens in therapy not only bears fruit in the present but will also be useful in creating a better relationship between mother and child, both in the perinatal phase and in the future. Therefore, the child will also benefit from his mother’s therapy experience.
Maria Rosaria Filoni