About Olive.
I live in rural Northumberland with my partner and our two children.
My background is in visual and community arts. I studied Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh and later completed a post-graduate degree at Goldsmiths University in Community and Participatory Arts.
After having my first child in 2015 I began to move away from my work as a community artist to retrain as a birth and postpartum doula. My experience of birth had shown me how impactful the continuous accompaniment and holding from someone who understands the physiological process of birth could be. In 2017 I completed my doula training with Nicola Goodall of Red Tent Doulas.
In 2018 I completed my training as a breastfeeding counsellor with La Leche League, knowing that many women were struggling with breastfeeding due to lack of knowledgeable and evidence-based breastfeeding support.
I’ve worked as a doula for the last 7 years, both independently and in partnership with Independent Midwives. This work has taught me so much about understanding and supporting the body’s physiological processes, particularly understanding how to create the right conditions and environment for birth to unfold in its own timing.
I bring this respect and trust for each client’s physiological healing process to my work as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. I am aware of the resilience each person has (even when life can feels at its hardest) and trust in their body’s propensity and capacity to move towards healing.
Somatic Experiencing™ (SE) has played and continues to play a hugely important role in my own life, and having experienced how impactful it is I know how much this work can support our own vitality and agency in the world even when life can be far from easy-going
In 2020 when the first lockdown took place I had two children under 5. I was already chronically frazzled and overwhelmed by years of mothering young children on top of an already dysregulated nervous-system. Being stuck at home and deprived of contact with my support networks of family and friends was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I ended up developing chronic migraines and chronic-fatigue symptoms that left me largely bed-bound.
I knew very little about the Autonomic Nervous-System at the time but it began to dawn on me that my symptoms were related to it since I could move from feeling relatively fine to intensely fatigued in seconds in a situation I found stressful.
Within five months of SE sessions I’d experienced such an improvement in my energy and health that I had stopped experiencing debilitating fatigue and related symptoms and no longer had regular migraines. I also had a new awareness of my body and no longer felt like I lived completely through my head. The constant background anxiety and adrenaline I’d always experienced as a normal part of life had begun to subside. I was able to choose to slow down, switch-off and listen to my body, rather than be forced to do this through health symptoms. I experienced a lot less stress around situations that I would previously have found highly activating and overwhelming and reduced sensory sensitivities.
I continued with my own SE™ sessions and in 2022 I began to train as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner knowing the value it could offer to others. By this point I was finding myself working increasingly with mothers of young children, who were well beyond the toddler stage but reported feeling always switched on, frazzled, overwhelmed, on the cusp of burnout and often on edge. Experiencing guilt, failure, shame and eternally split between being a mother and meeting their own needs outside of mothering was a common theme.
My youngest child has multiple neurodivergences which creates added layers of complexity, demands and intensity within daily life. SE has been an invaluable way for me to continue to take care of my own nervous-system through all of the daily challenges.I’m certain that the regulation that SE has enabled me to develop over time is what enables me to be flexible and adaptive in potentially high-stress situations, supports me to be able to still access my vitality and life-force energy and has prevented me from becoming chronically overwhelmed and burnt-out again (as is so often the fate of parent-carers).
As I’ve continued to train in SE my work in this area has grown and integrated with the support I offer to mothers, including one-to-one work and group courses. This autumn, I’m starting to offer group courses aimed at other parent-carers of neurodivergent children.
I will be a fully-qualified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) at the end of November 2024 and am currently insured to offer Somatic Experiencing to clients at my current training level. I continue to have regular SE sessions with my own SEP practitioner, knowing how much this work contributes to my vitality, resilience, and wellbeing. I also receive regular supervision in the work I do with clients.
I am a registered member of the Complimentary Therapists Association .