Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Bringing together local businesses and neighbors of Bergen County
Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Ep # 162 - Mothers, Minds, And Real Support
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The stories we tell new parents rarely match what their nights feel like. With licensed clinical social worker Brittany Gallagher, founder of The Mom Chat, we get honest about maternal mental health, the pressure to be thrilled, and why the most common birth complication in the U.S. is psychological, not physical. Brittany works across family planning, pregnancy, postpartum, and early motherhood, and she explains how education and validation cut through shame while practical therapy tools restore a sense of control.
We talk about real-world accessibility—sessions from a car during nap time, babies on laps, flexible scheduling—and the modalities that help most: cognitive behavioral therapy, exposure and response prevention for OCD, inference-based CBT, and trauma-focused EMDR. If talk therapy has helped but not fully moved the needle after birth trauma or medical stress, Brittany shares how bilateral stimulation in EMDR can reprocess stuck experiences and reduce the emotional charge.
The conversation widens to include dads, who also face perinatal mood and anxiety disorders yet often carry stigma and silence. We unpack how unspoken stress strains relationships, and how normalizing support for men strengthens the whole family. Brittany also brings deep experience supporting parents of children with disabilities, offering guidance on special education navigation, behavior strategies, and the layered grief that comes with adjusting expectations while advocating for your child.
You’ll walk away with language to name what you’re feeling, frameworks for getting help before a crisis, and a reminder that you don’t have to do this alone. If this conversation resonates, share it with a friend who needs the nudge, subscribe for more local stories that matter, and leave a review to tell us what you want to hear next.
The Mom Chat Therapy & Wellness
Brittany Gallagher
12 Lincoln Blvd., Suite 203
Emerson, NJ 07630
201-378-3564
brittany@themomchattherapy.com
themomchattherapy.com
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Doug Rohan.
Doug Drohan:Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Good Neighbor Podcast, coming to you live from Bergen County. We've got a beautiful, sunny, snowy day. If you guys like snow, this is like one of those great bluebird days if you're a skier or a sleigh rider or cross-country skiing. It's just a great day. We're going to have a chat today with uh Brittany Gallagher, who isn't too far from where I am. And uh she is the owner of a business called the Mom Chat. So we're gonna have a chat between a dad and a mom. Um Britney, welcome to the show.
Brittany Gallagher:Hi, Doug. Thanks so much for having me.
Doug Drohan:Yeah, so um, you know, I didn't say what it is, but the mom chat is about therapy and wellness. You basically help mothers, um, whether it's pre-Mom or you know, during pregnancy and certainly right after it, postpartum and uh and beyond. And I guess, you know, it's it's built on your experience um of you know maybe what you went through when you were pregnant and you had uh you know a baby. And and uh so why don't you just you know, why don't we back up a little bit and uh talk about you know who you are and uh you know you're a therapist by trade, I guess, but let's uh you know let's dig into that.
Brittany Gallagher:Absolutely. Yeah. So um I am also a Bergen County native. Um so happy to be here uh sharing a little bit about the mom chat, which is I'm a licensed clinical social worker and um have my own private practice, which is turned into the mom chat, and have a little bit of a community on social media as well that I've created over the past couple of years. Um but really my focus in my clinical work is, as you mentioned, in maternal mental health. I'm a trained perinatal mental health therapist, and so the majority of the work that I'm doing is with women, like you mentioned, throughout all different stages of motherhood, whether it's the very beginning stages, family planning, pregnancy, um, and then into the postpartum and you know early motherhood stages. I myself have three kids um ranging ages two to eight. So I'm still kind of in that toddler early elementary stage with my kids. Um but really, you know, the the reality is the number one birth complication today in the United States actually is uh maternal mental health and women struggling with their mental health during and in the years after they have children and are in just really one of the, if not the biggest transition of you know, a person's life becoming a parent. So my job is to provide support, education, you know, really uh educating people of what is maternal mental health. I think that's like one of the biggest misconceptions is you know, we hear sort of these horror stories of women who struggle with, you know, postpartum depression, anxiety, psychosis, things like that. But the reality is um, you know, mental health has no boundaries, it can affect anybody. Um, and lots of times, you know, women are experiencing a mental health crisis for the first time um in their life, you know, after having a child. And so it's something that, you know, they're really maybe not accustomed to, not used to, not sure what's going on. So that's a big piece is the educational component as well.
Doug Drohan:Yeah. Now, you know, everybody, when you have a kid and you know, being a dad, I remember someone saying to me, my son was a few weeks old, like, isn't it the greatest? You know, isn't it uh amazing? And you feel almost like this pressure that if it isn't going great, you know, you don't want to say anything. And I remember saying something like, Yeah, you know, all he does is, you know, eat, uh, cry and poop. You know, there wasn't much to it. Um, and then it was kind of like eight weeks in, nine weeks in. I was away on a business trip, and uh I came back and it was the first time he smiled at me. And then I was like, Okay, yeah, you have me at hello, you had me at hello. But going back to that uh comment, like, isn't it the greatest? Oh, you're gonna love being a mom, it's the most amazing thing. And then if you're not feeling that, I imagine there's a lot of societal pressure. Um to, you know, you're supposed to, it's supposed to be great, supposed to be the most amazing time of my life. You know, what's wrong with me? That type of thing. And and um, I'd imagine that's kind of the you know what people come to you for is trying to understand that.
Brittany Gallagher:Absolutely. Yeah. You know, there's just there's so much that's still not spoken about when it comes to pregnancy and postpartum and you know, parenthood in general. And to your point, you know, we get a lot of the, oh, it's the best time, you should be so happy, it's amazing. And that really adds like an extra layer of judgment and shame or guilt that you know individuals experience who might not be having the best time of their life. And the reality is that's a small piece of it. But to your point, there's lots of other challenging parts, and you know, validating and recognizing those pieces of the puzzle as well is so important so that you know women in particular that I work with, but parents in general know that, you know, their experience is valid, everyone's experience is different, and you don't have to go through it alone.
Doug Drohan:Right. Now, when you went to school, and I know you studied at Ruckers, um, did you have this sort of uh niche in mind and in terms of when you became a licensed clinical social worker that you were going to focus on moms? Or did this kind of mature as your career evolved and as you became a mom?
Brittany Gallagher:Exactly. Yeah. So this really sort of developed very organically. When I first graduated, I actually worked in um mental health in the hospital setting. So with very chronically ill individuals. Um, and then I transitioned into public education. So I worked in New Jersey public education for over a decade, working with children with social, emotional, developmental, learning challenges. And once I actually then I had my three kids while I was within the school system, and I just never ended up returning after I had my third child and got back into private practice. And that's really where I transitioned to focus on maternal mental health, you know, certainly in my own experience, but really just also seeing what other people were going through, friends, family, you know, and just being in this mental health space and what a need there was, um, you know, just for more providers that are in, you know, and specifically trained in maternal mental health. There's really just such a need out there for that.
unknown:Yeah.
Doug Drohan:I mean, are there a lot of people trained in maternal mental health, or is it still sort of a um niche?
Brittany Gallagher:Yeah, you know, yes, it's it's definitely very, you know, specific and niche, but there are, we have um what's the postpartum support international, which is sort of like our end all be all in the maternal mental health sphere. They have a certification program that, you know, you licensed therapists and other types of medical providers, doctors, nurses, doulas, right, that they can all pay in this training. Um, but it's really to be geared very specifically toward this period of life and such a big transition, but also identifying, you know, within this transition, there are lots of other sort of more niche, right? Like things, um, family planning, IVF, you know, families who have to go a different route in order to start a family, birth trauma, um, you know, all adoption, and there's all just so many different sort of um areas that branch off from maternal mental health in general as well.
Doug Drohan:Yeah, yeah. So, what types of uh therapies do you incorporate? Um, you know, you know, and this is gonna sound really old-fashioned, and it is because it goes back to, you know, I think people's first, well, people of a certain age, I'll put it that way. Before getting therapy was more accepted, you thought of a psychoanalyst like Freud. I'm laying on a couch and you're gonna analyze my dreams. But you don't, you don't, your approach is more cognitive, right? It's more about CBT and and and that approach.
Brittany Gallagher:Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think most therapists today will say they have a pretty eclectic approach, which is very common. You know, that's it's pretty rare that you're gonna meet a therapist that has one modality of therapy that they utilize, and that's it. So, you know, I'm trained in cognitive behavioral behavioral therapy. Um, but therapy is just performed in such a different way. To your point, yes, I have a couch, but it's very rare that, you know, mom is laying down on the couch. I would say, you know, 75% probably of the moms that I see were doing virtual sessions, they're in their car, they're taking a break at work, you know, they're feeding the baby. Sometimes that I have moms, they bring their kids in if they have to. I want my goal is to make support as accessible as possible. So, you know, incorporating some cognitive behavioral therapy, some um, you know, I have some training for individuals who have obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, and there are, you know, two gold standards of treatment for that. One is exposure and response prevention therapy. And then a newer, very effective therapy is inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy. So I also utilize those modalities, and I'm super excited because I'm gonna be starting my EMDR training having on another great mode of therapy, um, specifically for trauma and things like that. It's kind of like when, you know, you're in talk therapy and it's helpful, but it's just not quite getting you to where you need to be. This can be a really great modality for that.
Doug Drohan:So, do you want to? I mean, EMDR, it's it's eye movement. Um, can you explain the the um kind of the science behind it?
Brittany Gallagher:Sure, yeah. Well, in a nutshell, and granted, take this with a grain of salt as, you know, I'm just gonna be getting into this um type of modality. So I'm really in the learning stage, but it's really this um belief and idea that you know the way things are processed within the brain and using bilateral stimulation, right? So it's like whether you sometimes in an EMDR session, the therapist might have the client looking at a light and it's going to go from side to side. Sometimes they might be holding something in their hand that actually has like a vibration feeling, but it's hitting the brain in a bilateral way, which is known to help um reprocess trauma and you know, more life stressors in a different way.
Doug Drohan:Okay, okay. Um, so it's interesting now. You know, I um the name of your company is, you know, mom the mom chat is like your Instagram uh handle. And obviously you you work with moms. And I mentioned, you know, when I was a dad, um, you know, the initial comments from my friends like, oh my god, it's the greatest. And so my son is is great, he's healthy, you know. We're blessed with uh having a healthy kid. Um, but nobody addresses dads, yeah. You know, like do men go through issues like this? Do men suffer from anxiety, depression, um, you know, feelings of maybe inadequacy, or God forbid, you know, your son or daughter um has some disabilities, whether it's uh autism or something like that, like you know, and and I say this on a lot of a lot of my shows that I have because I feel like um men are underserved when it comes to men's mental health. And it's probably because two things men are not as willing to talk about it. Like I don't sit around with my poker friends or my buddies having a beer talking about our anxiety or the way we feel the stresses of having to keep up with the Joneses, or I'm at a point in my life where I thought I'd be further along, you know. Like because there's a suicide problem with men in middle-age in suburbia, like in Bergen County, you know, where for whatever reason, divorce or other things. So I don't want to go off topic because that's you know, you focus on moms, but I'm just I'm making a point that it'll be great if there was a dad chat. Well, you know, like maybe maybe it it you hear from the moms who say, Hey, you know, my husband could use some help. Do you, you know, and it doesn't have to be called the dad chat, you could just say, Hey, I want to have your husband come in, we'll talk about it.
Brittany Gallagher:Yeah, a hundred percent. I know, and I appreciate you bringing that up. Funny enough, I have tried to get my husband on social media under the dad chat, and he we he does have a handle, but he is not active on there. Okay. But you're right, you know, the the men, and it is very much um underreported. The support is there, and men actually can experience what we would consider um perinatal mental health mood and anxiety disorders as well. So even though they're not the one carrying the baby, they're still going through this major life transition, and men can experience postpartum depression, anxiety, all different types of things. The support is actually out there. It's just to your point, there are definitely some barriers. There's still a lot of stigma, you know, when it comes to men receiving mental health support. It's getting better, I think, generally in our society, but there's still a stigma. And to your point, too, you know, you're hanging out with, you know, your guy friends over poker, whatever. It's not the typical conversation that comes with that. And it's not. And the mom chat, that name came from my real life mom chat, right? I have a group of 12 girls that we all went to college together. And as each of us started to become a mom, that chat got bigger, bigger, bigger. And we talk, it's the funniest thing because we could go from talking about you know, Tylenol to clothing to what's going on, who's got a cult. Like, we just talk about everything. So much support there. And to your point, you know, and sometimes I say to my husband, I'm like, Well, why don't you guys ever talk about this stuff? You know, talk to your talk to your dad friends about it.
Doug Drohan:Um, but yeah, so I I have like one friend, one or two friends, you know, individually we could talk about stuff like that. But for the most part, yeah, it's not something a group would ever sit around and um, you know, yeah.
Brittany Gallagher:And I have worked with men in my practice, and I'm I certainly don't discriminate in regards to the clientele that I work with. It's just um oftentimes there's a little bit of that resistance there. Um, and you know, it's really trying to break down. And and the educational piece there too is I think the biggest thing too, especially when it comes to therapy and kind of overcoming, you don't have to like wait until you're really struggling. And to your point, you know, the suicide rate for middle-aged men, it's very high. And a lot of times people think of therapy and you know, different types of mental health support that you really need to be suffering, you need to be, you know, clinically depressed, anxious. A lot of the women that I work with are not in that boat, they just need an outlet, they need extra support, they need tools and strategies to be functioning at a better level.
Doug Drohan:It's kind of like having a personal trainer or nutritionist or whatever. You know, it's just and I think you know, I think when you hear it like in uh pop culture, like in Hollywood, they talk about having a therapist like it's having a performance coach, like it's having a batting coach, you know, um, because they recognize you know there are a lot of things that they need help with. Um why do why go it alone? And I think that's where maybe the stigma of therapy has definitely changed over the last 20 years, that it's just hey, you can't do it yourself. Uh, there's no shame, there's no nothing to be embarrassed about. Um, before we go, I wanted to touch on your um, you know, I mentioned it as a dad. If you, you know, you have a child and and you know, this beautiful baby boy that you've looked forward to your whole life, to, you know, the apple of my eye, and I'm gonna coach him in all these sports and uh this, that, and the other thing. And then you find out they have disabilities, you know, they have either learning challenges or you know, they're autistic or whatever it is. Um, tell me a little bit about that focus of your practice.
Brittany Gallagher:Sure. Yeah. So I really pull from my experience working in public public education for it's just about 11 years. I was there. And, you know, so much of what I did obviously was face to face with the students, but because of, you know, working with children who had a range of different special needs, the parents were obviously so involved. And I had really built some strong relationships with the families of the students that I worked with, and really recognizing, you know, there is such a need. Having a child with a disability can be such an isolating and lonely experience. And so having support for parents in navigating, whether it's the special education system, right? Because that was what I did. Um the at the educational piece, working through the emotions that come through that, right? There's so much loss when it comes to parenting in general, but specifically parenting a child with special needs, there's lots of loss, grief, you know, that that goes on. So providing that type of support. The other thing that really unfortunately oftentimes happens is, you know, in raising a child who has different needs, that puts a strain on the relationship between mom and dad as well, right? And you know, working through communication. So a lot of what I do is is much of a supportive counseling, you know, in that space, some parenting support. You know, I have a ton of background in behavioral intervention and just my awareness of, you know, child development and the child brain and all that stuff. So a lot of times it's helping parents with navigating their own experience. But then, you know, what are some tips and tricks that they can also just use with their child as well?
Doug Drohan:Yeah, yeah, that's great. So, how does it work? Is it in-person um therapy? Do you virtual? Do you mix of both?
Brittany Gallagher:Yeah, I do a mix. So I have an office here in Emerson in Bergen County, um, where you know, clients are welcome to come in. I really leave that up to the client. I'm always here. This is my safe space, my home away from home. But I do also provide virtual counseling as well. So I'm licensed to see individuals anywhere in New York, New Jersey, and Florida. Um so, you know, they're they're changing some of the laws and regulations in regards to, you know, where you can practice with, you know, your license and things like that, which is nice. Um, but I really I leave that up to the client, like I said, trying to make it as accessible as possible, whether it's, you know, mom has to bring in baby with her, whether mom's in the car, you know, whatever's going on, we got to make it work.
Doug Drohan:Um, right, right, right. Yeah, that's great. And then how do people reach you? How do they contact you? What's what are the different ways of doing it?
Brittany Gallagher:Yeah, so the best, yeah, the best way to find me. Um, if you're on social media, I have my Instagram handle at the.mom chat. Um, I also have a website, which is uh the momchattherapy.com, and you know, email website, oh, those are all great ways to to connect. Um find me.
Doug Drohan:And are is there a um like a waiting list to get in for a session?
Brittany Gallagher:Or yeah, you know, I'm actually I am at capacity right now, but that's something that's it's a revolving door. It's always changing. So, you know, depending on how long I've been working with someone, schedule changes. There's always different appointment slots that are opening up. Um, you know, right now it's just me. I am the mom chat and I, you know, it's just the practitioner. Um, so you know, who knows? One day maybe getting someone else on board, but for now, uh yeah, yeah, I'm a one. Yeah.
Doug Drohan:Right. Okay. Very good. Well, this was great, Brittany. I I appreciate it. And maybe we'll, you know, we'll walk work on that uh that dad chat thing with your husband.
Brittany Gallagher:Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Doug Drohan:But uh all right, listen, I yeah, that was great having you on. I'm gonna have um Chuck just say a few words and then you and I will be right back.
Brittany Gallagher:Okay, sounds good.
Doug Drohan:Great.
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