Picture this: It’s 2am. You’re scrolling your phone while your baby finally (finally!) sleeps on your chest. Everyone else’s life looks suspiciously perfect on Instagram, and you’re pretty sure you haven’t showered in three days. You love your kid fiercely, but you also can’t remember the last time you felt like yourself.
Elizabeth Wellington gets it. The licensed professional counselor and co-founder of Moms Feelin’ Themselves—yes, that’s the actual name of the organization she created with fellow mom Sarah Battani Sams to host The Mom Dance Party—built their now-viral dance events from a place of desperation that so many of us know too well.
When “fine” isn’t actually fine
Wellington’s lightbulb moment came when her first son was 15 months old. She’d recently experienced pregnancy loss and was drowning in the kind of week where even the “normal” toddler chaos felt unbearable. “What I really longed for was a momentary escape, a fun night out dancing with girlfriends, a break from the unrelenting intensity and responsibility of motherhood,” she explains.
But here’s the thing—she didn’t want to go clubbing with strangers or stay out until 2am. She wanted something that didn’t exist: a therapeutic dance experience specifically for moms who needed to remember they were still full humans, not just milk-producing, snack-serving, emotional-regulation machines.
So she called her best friend Sarah, pitched the idea, and got an immediate “Yes! This needs to exist!” That’s how The Mom Dance Party was born—not from a business plan, but from two moms who desperately needed a break that the world hadn’t bothered to create for them yet.
The depression that doesn’t look like depression
Here’s what makes perinatal mental health struggles so insidious: Wellington herself is a mental health professional, and she still didn’t recognize her own perinatal depression and anxiety.
“On the surface, I was functioning well—working out regularly, taking care of myself, doing all the ‘right’ things. I didn’t ‘seem’ depressed,” she says. But beneath that functional exterior? Intense agitation, intrusive thoughts about her son’s safety, and a crushing sense of incompetence and guilt that wouldn’t budge.
“One of the hallmarks of this experience is that these feelings don’t feel like symptoms; they feel like who you are—a bad mom, a failure,” Wellington explains. “That’s what makes it so difficult to recognize and seek treatment.”
So what’s the difference between normal new-parent exhaustion and something more serious? Wellington says to watch for distress that becomes intense, constant, or starts affecting your ability to function. Red flags include feeling trapped in your emotions most of the time, believing you’re just a “bad mom,” or having intrusive, repetitive thoughts you can’t control.
If you’re nodding along right now, text Postpartum Support International’s HelpLine at 1-800-944-4773 or visit postpartum.net. (And no, reaching out doesn’t make you weak—it makes you smart.)
Why your body needs what your brain can’t say
So why dance? Why not just therapy and medication and calling it a day?
“Dance taps into something primal and joyful that talk therapy or medication alone can’t necessarily reach,” Wellington says. “When we move to music, we bypass the thinking brain and connect directly to emotion and intuition.”
And let’s be real—moms spend approximately 97% of their waking hours thinking, planning, researching, and micro-managing every single moment of their children’s lives. The idea of bypassing your overtaxed brain and just feeling something? That’s not indulgent. That’s survival.
Wellington calls The Mom Dance Party “a mental health intervention disguised as a dance party,” and the science backs her up. When moms dance together, movement lowers cortisol (your body’s main stress hormone) and boosts dopamine and serotonin—the same neurotransmitters targeted by antidepressants. Dancing also releases oxytocin, the bonding hormone that helps you feel connected and safe.
“In a room full of moms laughing and moving together, their bodies are literally syncing, co-regulating, releasing stress, and turning it into joy,” Wellington explains. Your nervous systems actually sync up with the women around you, creating collective healing that you literally cannot achieve alone in your living room. (Though we’ll get to the living room option in a minute.)
The part nobody talks about: community is hard
Let’s address the elephant in the room—or rather, the absence of elephants, because building a mom community is weirdly, frustratingly hard.
“What I hear so often from the moms I work with is that building community is so much harder than anyone expected,” Wellington says. Most mom groups involve the kids (so you’re never actually present) and revolve around parenting topics (so you’re never actually off duty).
The Mom Dance Party flips that script entirely. It’s a space where moms can be in community without their children and without needing to talk about them. “A space to reconnect with the woman within the mother, the part of her that still exists beyond that caregiving role,” as Wellington puts it.
When you look around and see hundreds of other women—all moms, all dancing, all fully in their bodies—you viscerally understand that you’re not alone. And that hits different than any Instagram caption or well-meaning text ever could.
What moms actually say after dancing
The feedback Wellington gets is consistent and striking: Moms say they haven’t felt so alive, or so much like themselves, in years. Many report being on a high for weeks afterward and that it “genuinely changed the trajectory of their motherhood.”
That’s not hyperbole or marketing speak. That’s what happens when you give yourself permission to exist as a full person for a few hours, instead of just a caregiver.
Can’t make it to a dance party? Start in your kitchen
If you can’t get to one of MFT’s events (they’re expanding, but not everywhere yet), she has homework for you: “Put on your favorite song, turn it up, and let yourself move, shake, jump, punch the air, just move your body for the joy, for the connection to yourself, and for the fun.”
Do it every single day. Use music and movement as medicine. It won’t replace therapy or medication if you need those things, but it will remind your body that joy still exists, even in the thick of the hardest season of your life.
The bottom line
Wellington wants every struggling mom to know this: “It gets better. It really does. AND the challenge is that you do need to put in the effort to get there, to feel really vital in motherhood. Know that you’re worth it to take care of yourself.”
And if you’re telling yourself you’re a bad mom? Those are just thoughts. They’re not real. You’re an amazing mom. The village doesn’t just show up—you have to create it, and that takes effort, but you’re worth that effort.
Also, for the record, the song that never fails to get the energy going at a Mom Dance Party? Lil Jon’s “Get Low.”
So tonight, after the kids are finally (finally!) in bed, turn up Lil Jon, or Beyoncé, or whatever makes you feel like you again. Dance like the mental health intervention it actually is. Your body will thank you. Your brain will thank you. And the version of yourself that still exists underneath all the mom stuff? She’ll thank you most of all.
Want the full Mom Dance Party experience? Moms Feelin’ Themselves is currently on a national tour. Check out to find a location near you.
About 1 in 5 new moms experience a perinatal mood or anxiety disorder. If you’ve been feeling off for a while after birth, reach out to a perinatal psychotherapist. Find help and resources at postpartum.net.