Meet Maha

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Maha. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Maha below.

Maha, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

The word “resilience” to me means being able to adapt and overcome. I think various experiences in our lives give us the opportunity to build resilience. For me, I believe it’s a combination of my family system, the environment and country I grew up in, several major experiences in my life, and of course, the incredibly loving and supportive people in my life.

I’m the youngest of five children, and I’m sure having older siblings played a role in my ability to adapt. My parents were both very resilient people – we grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, and my parents had to keep us safe during times of war. Being a parent myself now, I cannot imagine what it must have been like for them to have lived through war, and to have evacuated and moved five children to and from other countries in order to survive. I’m sure that witnessing how strong my parents were, and having to overcome and adapt to major traumatic events in our lives led to me developing the reliance I have today.

As an adult, I also traveled to and lived in several countries and cities, which helped me learn to be self-sufficient and adaptable. Moving, starting all over, building my own practice, losing relationships, creating new friendships, and meeting and working with people from around the world stretched me out of my comfort zone, and expanded my mind. Yes there were painful times, and there were so many joyful ones too. I am so deeply grateful for having so many people in my life that truly care about and love me, such as my family, my husband, and my friends, because I know that resilience does not only come from our ability to adapt, but also from having a support system that holds us through all the beautiful and tough moments in life.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, with four siblings and both of my parents. I went to the same school for most of my childhood, and still have friends from 30 years ago. I studied Psychology at the American University of Beirut, and then moved to London to complete my PhD in Psychology at UCL. I was pretty young when the major wars in Lebanon happened, but I do remember the 2006 war the summer before I left for London. My family and I fled to Kuwait for the month until the war ended, and then I moved to London shortly after that. During my last year of my PhD, I started a two year training in Psychosexual and Relationship Therapy, and that was the beginning of my career as a Sex and Couples Therapist.

I then moved back to Beirut for a couple of years, but felt that I wanted something different. Growing up in a war-torn country, the Lebanese people are such joyful, vibrant, warm, dynamic people, and at the same time, anxious and traumatized. Day to day life in Beirut was starting to feel overwhelming for me. I wanted more peace, stability, and opportunities – a more expansive life. So I made the really tough decision to leave my family again and move to Dubai. I had a wonderful career in the UAE, and lots of friends. I also was lucky to meet my husband Bo there – a New-Yorker who had also moved to Dubai for a new opportunity. After Dubai, we found ourselves in New York, where we got married, and adopted our dog Lexi. New York City was exciting, and also overstimulating for me, so we decided to give Southern California a try. As lovely as it was, we also didn’t quite feel like it was home. And then we found Colorado. For the first time in many years of moving, I finally feel like I found a community.

We had our son, Rayaan, in 2022, it’s hard to believe how time flies! Despite absolutely loving my career for the past 15 years, having a child completely changed me, and I am learning something new about myself everyday now. I always thought I would anxiously await going back to work after having a baby, but I was so surprised to find that I actually deeply loved being a mom so much more than I ever imagined, and wanted to spend as much time with him as possible. Another piece that threw me off guard was how lonely the experience was, especially the first year. Growing up with older sisters, I took for granted the “village” they had in Lebanon when they had babies, and saw my sisters and nephews always surrounded by family.

Having a baby seemed so much easier, until I had my own in a completely different country, with no family around. Though it meant that my husband and I had no intrusion or interference when it came to being with or raising our son, it also meant that we had to do it completely alone. And I am one of the lucky ones that did not experience a full-blown postpartum depression, but I did, and continue to, go through a rebirth and complete shift of my identity. Not only was the sadness and loneliness more prominent than I had anticipated, but I also struggled with allowing myself to do things for myself because I did not want to miss out on even a moment of being with our son, and I did not have the “village” to rely on to go to the gym by myself or go out with a friend child-free. I know one thing, that even though I didn’t have a full village, I have Bo, who is an incredibly hands-on partner and parent, and I have wonderful friends, some who were having babies around the same time as me. Even though those friends are in different parts of the country, being able to text and call each other every day of that first year and share all the highs and the lows of the postpartum experience played an instrumental role in me getting through it.

One night at 2am a few months ago after putting our son back to sleep, I could not shut my brain off. This idea kept popping up in my head, and I had to listen. From 2am until 5am that night, the vision of Raising Parents came to life – a community space for parents to offer connection, education, and self-care, so that they don’t feel so alone during one of the hardest and most transformational times of their lives. As they say, it takes a village to raise a child. But as I say, it takes a village to raise the PARENTS. I knew from my own experience that having other parents/moms to share the emotions, questions, fears, and joys of parenthood is one of the most powerful healing experiences. Never in my life would I have imagined doing something other than the sex therapy that I’ve been doing for 15 years, but this pull is strong.

So I’ve been working on this space for a few months now and am hoping that we will be able to open in the beginning of 2026 in Lafayette, CO. I cannot wait for this new endeavor; as a mom I wish I had a space like that when Rayaan was born. I am also so humbled and grateful for all the support I’ve received from the community throughout the process of creating Raising Parents. From my husband Bo, my friends and neighbors, other moms, medical professionals, instructors, educators, the Boulder County’s SBDC, my mentor at Score, and other businesses, I’m seeing how it also takes a village to build a business.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

One of the biggest parts of my personality is being a connector, and I believe it has been, and will be, one of the most important qualities of this journey. I love meeting and connecting with others, and this is a skill that has helped me build my village, and will help me connect other parents to each other to create their village.

Another quality that I am grateful to have is being a go-getter. This part of me has helped me accomplish and experience all the things I have done so far in my life. When I am sure about something, and my intuition is clearly pushing me in a direction, I am strongly driven to make it happen.

I think that being a Psychologist/Sex and Relationship Therapist also plays a role in me having developed the ability to actively listen to people with deep empathy and understanding. This is something that I just naturally do because I enjoy connecting with others, and I’m sure is partly why I am a therapist to begin with, but it probably facilitates the connections that I make in life, the friendships I have, and the joy I get in getting to know other people.

If someone came to me who is early in their journey, the first thing I would probably tell them would be that every person’s journey is different, so even though it is helpful to learn from others, it is more helpful to truly listen to what works for them. Another piece of advice I would give is to have the courage to take risks, to explore new things, to meet new people, and to step out of their comfort zone. No growth ever happens if there is no discomfort. I think they key is to find the space where the discomfort is not too intense or extreme that it will break you, but that it is tolerable and surmountable that it can lead to growth.

What has been your biggest area of growth or improvement in the past 12 months?

One thing about me that continues to show up needing my attention, especially since having a child, is my tendency to have unreasonable expectations or standards for myself and loved ones. When I was younger, I was significantly more critical towards myself and others, which led to me being a perfectionist. As you can imagine, trying to always do things perfectly leads to anxiety, guilt, and shame. Being a firm believer in therapy, and being a therapist myself, I started therapy since my teenage years, and it has tremendously helped me overcome a lot of my anxiety and build my self-esteem.

As we all know, we can’t just switch off parts of ourselves that we don’t like, and so even though I’ve done a lot of work on this, it still creeps up on me at times, and my husband unfortunately bears the brunt of it sometimes, as spouses tend to in a marriage! For the last year or so, learning to soften with myself and others has been my biggest area of growth. Having a child is like a mirror; every time I say something critical about myself or to my husband in front of our son, I hear myself, and it really hits me, as I never want my son to pick up on this type of negative self-talk and embody harsh standards for himself or others. This is also related to the concept of control, and how having a child forces you to learn to let go of control as you continue to realize how little control you have over certain situations and other people.

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Image Credits

Elizabeth Stanton for some of the images.

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