We hope that any visitors to this page find comfort in knowing they are not alone in their perinatal experience no matter how difficult or traumatic.
There is support and help out there.
Recovery and healing from perinatal trauma, anxiety and depression is possible.
My wish is that the services I offer provide hope for those who are currently struggling to cope.
My desire is that some of the content here provides validation, clarity and even peace of mind to those parents who need it most right now.
The truth is that for many of us this whole parenting stage (often referred to as perinatal) and even the prenatal part before is hugely challenging to our emotional health and wellbeing.
Difficult and traumatic fertility journeys can leave people reeling from what is often a time marked by loss, desperate longing and anxiety.
The taboo of miscarriage and loss in society leaves those impacted isolated, unsupported and vulnerable to anxiety, low mood and depression.
IVF pregnancies can also still be fraught with anxiety, depression and low mood.
When we do become pregnant our own experiences as a children can begin to loom large. From nowhere out of the shadows of our past, voices can provoke fearsome questions such as ‘can I be the parent I want to be?’, ‘will I repeat our dysfunctional family history?’, ‘can I keep my child safe?’ and even ‘will my child hate me?’
30% of all parents describe their birth as traumatic.
Recovery, sleeping, feeding and bonding are difficult for many parents. The early days of parenting can be testing in ways that are rarely acknowledged by society or by our health service. There is little public service support for difficultly with feeding, sleeping or bonding, let alone any problems with physical recovery from birth.
It’s fairly rare for parents not to have been touched by some perinatal difficulty or trauma along route to creating their family. Miscarriage, IVF, hyperemesis, childhood traumas resurfacing, traumatic births, difficulty feeding, reflux, sleep deprivation, birth injury, baby loss and NICU stays are just some of the traumas that people withstand in their quest to become parents.
And that takes a toll on emotional health and wellbeing.
It impacts on our relationships with ourselves and with others.
It effects confidence and self esteem.
Trauma symptoms can leave parents struggling to cope with flashbacks, recurrent thoughts about what happened, nightmares, partial memory loss, low mood, irritability, hypervigilance and even a sense of detachment.
Caring for young children, recovering from birth, feeding and bonding can be challenging enough without the additional load of coping with anxiety, trauma symptoms, low mood or depression.
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