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Year: 2022

Thea BakerBlog2022
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Birth trauma awareness

Birth trauma awareness

As I write this, it’s the end of 2022’s ‘Birth Trauma Awareness Week’ and I’ve been super interested (and excited) to see this topic getting much more attention than in previous years.  So, I thought I’d reprise a blog I’ve updated and refreshed about this incredibly important topic.  Of course, I happen to think all trauma is important to talk about, but birth trauma especially so because I think it’s been ignored and misunderstood for too long – considered “just what happens when you give birth” – and honestly, it’s something we can do so much to both prevent and treat.

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Feelings are for feeling

Feelings are for feeling

In my line of work, I spend lots of time navigating three different but equally important ‘compass points’ of a person’s inner world; thoughts (and as a psychotherapist working with the kind of modalities that I practice this is more about the meaning or beliefs we have around certain events or experiences), physical sensations and feelings (or emotions).  Different people struggle to articulate or connect to different parts of these compass points, for a whole host of different reasons, but it’s kind of like the start point of any of the process-work that we do.  Before we can move through (heal if that’s your language) from our various traumas we need to have an awareness of how it’s affected us.  And to do that we need to have to i) have the words for the thoughts, sensations and feelings and ii) connect to them or as I would say, really know them and how they show up for us as individuals.  So, I thought I’d spend the next few weeks shifting through these three areas:

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My favourite resources: April – June 2022

My favourite resources: April – June 2022

This one is a week or so late!  I try to publish this review at the end / start of each new quarter but because I was busy travelling to the UK and catching COVID it kind of slipped my mind…anyway, here’s my latest brain-dump of all the things that I’ve been consuming lately.

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The power of rest

The power of rest

I have just returned to the Practice after 2 weeks leave visiting family in the UK and attending a trauma conference in Belfast…oh and catching COVID (of course) to keep things interesting!  It didn’t quite go as planned, thanks to the COVID bit, but it was amazing to go on a plane again (something I used to take for granted) and even more splendid to go back to England and see people and places that are so special to me.  I took a really hard-line with myself and the degree of contact I was intending to have with the Practice and everything that might need tending to while I was away.  I had communicated my leave with my clients (obviously) and spent time with them to make sure we had a plan for while I was away.

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Why a special interest in women’s mental health?

Why a special interest in women’s mental health?

I’m up to my knees in some more post-graduate studies at Deakin University in Melbourne which is all in preparation for a PhD and, in alignment with the central focus of my work in private practice, it’s very much centred on women’s mental health.  I was reminded this weekend, while I was doing some research for my Uni work, around the gender differences in mental health spaces, and thought it might be good to highlight some of them as a bit of an explanation around my I’m so passionate about this space.

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Polyvagal theory and trauma

Polyvagal theory and trauma

The experience of trauma is a whole-body one.  Many distressing symptoms of post-traumatic stress are felt in the body, such as a tightening sensation in the chest, a lump in the throat, sinking or dropping feelings in the stomach or a state of chronic fatigue or exhaustion.

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Losing and grieving

Losing and grieving

According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), grief is a normal response to loss.  It can be in response to a disaster or traumatic event or can be in response to a loss in terms of expectations, losing a loved one (human or animal), losing a job, relationship, sense of identity or home.  “Grief can happen in response to loss of life, as well as to drastic changes to daily routings and ways of life that usually bring us comfort and a feeling of stability.” (https://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/) Common grief reactions include:

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Trauma is not what happened to you

Trauma is not what happened to you

Last week I shared a bit of a recap on trauma, which was something of an introduction to trauma.  This week I want to expand that conversation a bit to provide a framework or a lens through which we can hopefully make sense of what we mean when we use the term trauma.  Trauma is an interesting word because the official dictionary definition of it looks like this:

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Trauma Recap

Trauma Recap

Helping clients deal with and heal from their traumatic experiences is at the very heart of the work that we do at Thea Baker.  Starting with a little Assisting clients to understand what trauma is and how it is impacting their lives is probably the first step for many of them because oftentimes they have accessed our mental health care system (I’m writing from an Australian perspective here, though believe this to be indicative of many other ‘western’ countries) they have had their symptoms assessed and have probably come out the other side with a clinical diagnosis.  This starts with a presumption of their being something wrong with a person.

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Mindful May

Mindful May

I think that mindfulness sometimes gets a bit of a bad wrap and because I was looking for a little bit of alliteration-based inspiration this week, at the start of the new month of May, I thought I’d spend some time looking at all things ‘mindful’.

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