In the very early season of motherhood my biggest challenge was actually my relationship with my husband. We moved into a new house six weeks after I gave birth and I really didn’t expect to feel so cast adrift from having a new home. What I didn’t realise I needed was all the things that made me feel safe and secure, and my old home (where my son was born) was one of those comforts. I was already feeling really destabilised by this new life and role, and not being in the cocoon of the home I knew so well compounded the stress that both my husband and I were under.

"Actually being present with all that emotion and learning how to self regulate my own nervous system became the biggest work of that time – and continues to be for me now"

As my children grew into toddlers, the challenges (unsurprisingly) changed. It became clearer and clearer to me as time passed that I really needed to do more inner work to deal with my own childhood history. Because, suddenly they had these wills and extreme expressions of their own emotions and actually being present with all that emotion and learning how to self regulate my own nervous system became the biggest work of that time – and continues to be for me now.

My experience growing up was that there wasn’t a safe space for me to have full emotional expression as a kid and there wasn’t a lot of me feeling seen or heard. So to be able to give that to my children, I’ve had to do a lot of inner work to really rewire and change the blueprint that I was given from my own childhood.

On the moments when the professional and personal worlds collide

Of course it’s hard to take my professional hat off and I think when you train in a field like psychology it’s difficult to not have your worldview not influenced by what you know on a professional level. I’m constantly analysing my actions but on the flipside I can also recognise when I’m beating myself up and in that offer myself some self compassion.

One of the things I’m an advocate for is that vulnerability is a strength for us as women and mothers and moving away from the idea that being “strong” means having no weaknesses or emotion and not making mistakes. Because of this, in my practice I do self-disclose some of my own experiences when I feel like it’ll be helpful in normalising experiences. I really value my own vulnerability and I try to share that in spaces that are safe for that. It’s so important that you have safe spaces where you can just say what you need to say – bad or good.

"One of the things I’m an advocate for is that vulnerability is a strength for us as women and mothers and moving away from the idea that being “strong” means having no weaknesses or emotion and not making mistakes"

The other “psychologist” thing I personally do is practise a lot of nervous nervous system somatic work on myself, particularly around anger. Breathwork is key to my practices and is so wonderful to have in terms of helping to reset my nervous system and helping to regulate in the moment when I’m distressed.