Welcome To Your Maternal Space…
Psychological therapy with space for you, not just the role of being mum
Here’s A Little Bit About Me
Hi, I’m Abby
I’m Abby, a BABCP-accredited Cognitive Behavioural Therapist and trained in EMDR, and I created Maternal Space to provide psychological therapy for women experiencing anxiety and overwhelm in motherhood.
Becoming a mum can change so much — your priorities, relationships, identity and even your sense of how safe the world feels.
For some women, anxiety seems to arrive with motherhood. For others, there may have been a difficult pregnancy or birth, medical complications, or time with their baby in neonatal care that has made it much harder to trust that everything is okay.
And sometimes there isn’t one obvious reason. You may simply know that you’re thinking, checking, anticipating and worrying far more than you want to be.
Whatever has brought you here, my starting point is to understand what is happening for you.
My approach to therapy…
I don’t expect you to arrive knowing what type of therapy you need.
We’ll start by making sense of what’s happening — what you’re thinking and feeling, what triggers the anxiety, what you find yourself doing in response to it, and whether there are experiences or beliefs underneath it that might help us understand why the worry has become so persistent.
From there, we’ll work out together what might be most helpful.
I draw primarily on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), and acceptance-based psychological approaches.
That might involve helping you respond differently to worry and uncertainty, reducing patterns such as repeated checking or reassurance-seeking, or processing distressing experiences that still feel very present.
Therapy isn’t about becoming a mum who never worries.
It’s about helping worry have less influence over your life — so that you can make decisions without analysing them endlessly afterwards, feel less compelled to keep checking that everything is okay, and have more space to be present with your child and yourself.
My professional background
I am a BABCP-accredited Cognitive Behavioural Therapist and EMDR practitioner. I am also a Registered Mental Health Nurse and Independent Prescriber.
I qualified as a Mental Health Nurse in 2011 and have since developed a broad clinical background across NHS mental health and psychological services.
My experience includes psychological therapy, Health Psychology, complex trauma and maternal and perinatal mental health.
I currently work within NHS maternal mental health and neonatal services. My neonatal work is a newer part of my clinical practice and is further developing my understanding of the psychological impact that a difficult or medically complicated start to parenthood can have on mothers and families.
My background in Health Psychology has also given me experience of working with the relationship between physical health and psychological wellbeing — something that can be particularly relevant when anxiety becomes focused on health, symptoms, risk or uncertainty.
I bring that wider clinical perspective into my work, while recognising that no two women’s experiences of motherhood or anxiety are the same.
Why maternal mental health?
My interest in maternal mental health is both professional and personal.
My own experience of the perinatal period gave me an appreciation of how easily worry can begin to take up space during a time you desperately want to enjoy. It helped shape my interest in supporting other women through this stage of life.
So much of motherhood naturally becomes focused on the baby…
Are they okay?
Are they feeding or sleeping as they should?
Is that symptom normal?
Am I doing the right thing?
Have I missed something?
There can be remarkably little space for the mother herself.
How are you coping with carrying that responsibility? What happened to you during pregnancy, birth or afterwards? What are you frightened of? And how much of your day is being taken up trying to make absolutely sure that everything is okay?
Maternal Space was created to make some room for those questions too.
Looking for some online support right now?
Browse my blog page and you’ll discover some gentle support to help you in this moment.
