Welcome! For those who don’t know me, I’m Michelle – a clinical psychologist, a bereaved parent, and sharer of words. I feel and think deeply, which is reflected throughout my twenty-year career in mental health. I am coming to accept that I work incredibly slowly and methodically and that I should celebrate rather than chastise myself for this. I love tea, cats and cake. I am creative but never allow myself enough time or space to flex this muscle. Moving to live by the sea was one of the best decisions I have ever made.
And here you will find my thoughts and reflections on many things, but if I had to sum it up in one word, it would be:
Integration
I integrate my knowledge and expertise as a psychologist with that of my expertise by lived experience of loss and trauma. I share my discoveries as I try to embrace a life that allows pain to sit alongside joy. There is no ‘all or nothing’ here: I seek an existence in the messy in between.
How this Substack came to be
Back in 2016, life was following a steady path. I was pregnant for the second time (the first ending in an ectopic and emergency surgery the year before) and fully embracing the way in which my expanding body signified my metamorphosis into parenthood. I attended all the classes: yoga, hypnobirthing, NCT, breastfeeding preparation. I read the books. I purchased the things that the mummy bloggers raved as absolutely essential. The bubble of impending motherhood was blissfully ignorant.
And then, with no warning and no found cause, my first daughter Orla was stillborn at full term.
Suddenly, it didn’t matter how hard I worked. How much of a ‘good girl’ I was. How many books I read or how many classes I attended. My old formula for life was abruptly detonated. Life as a mother without a child was a brutal introduction into how unfair and unpredictable the universe can be.
What followed was a terrifying pregnancy after loss just 3 months later. A blessing I never take for granted, yet one that allowed no time to process and assimilate what had happened. Growing, birthing and parenting a live child in the shadow of loss is not covered in any of the books or classes. The distress is unspoken, and in this silence lies the cavities where shame festers and expands.
I felt the pressure to enjoy every moment. I felt the weight of guilt that I wasn’t able to. I struggled alone without help, with other health complications adding to my insurmountable anxiety.
I started a blog (at that time Dear Orla, later becoming From the Other Chair) and regularly shared the realities of this new existence that I had neither anticipated nor welcomed. I became part of a community of bereaved parents, a tender and supportive group of people who have been forever woven into my grief story. I fundraised, I became involved in various campaigns, I even won an award for my blog (something that I cherish but also raises conflicting emotions for me – ‘competitive grief’ is something I wrote about here).
It helped me to survive. Until it didn’t.
At six months postpartum, the armour cracked and I was referred to my local NHS perinatal mental health service (my old blog post about this is here). I was ashamed that I had found it so hard. I was embarrassed that as a psychologist I didn’t know how to cope. But it was a turning point.
Since then, I’ve had a number of periods of therapy, each one teaching me something new about myself and my losses: the losses that people see and those that they don’t.
This hasn’t been a journey of recovery, it has been one of discovery.
Throughout this time, life has continued to throw some unexpected challenges. My work has changed exponentially since leaving the NHS after 15 years and there have been further personal and professional hurdles that I have navigated. I am purposely vague about these later personal losses because they are not things I wish to share in detail, but in summary, for a multitude of reasons, our family will not grow. That we are a one (live child) and done family. By circumstance rather than by choice, and the loss that we contend with as a result is simply:
This is not how we expected life would look.
I didn’t think I had a plan for how I imagined my family to be. But I did. Buried deep within, and only uncovered when it couldn’t come to fruition. When this tiny unconscious idea was not to be conceived.
One of the biggest lessons for me has been how little is within my control. Life happens and we don’t get to choose which curveballs come our way. I have spent many years of life avoiding pain: throwing myself into projects, working harder and doing more, fuelled by the unfounded belief that I can outrun it.
Now I am slowly learning how to do things differently.
What is within our control is how we respond to it. How we learn to live between the light and dark, allowing them to coexist, but not to overshadow the other. How we integrate all of it to live and love the life that we didn’t anticipate or plan.
What you can expect to find here
In 2024, I am going to be spending more of my time here on Substack. For the first time in a long time, I feel genuinely excited about writing again. This is a place where I hope that you can feel part of a community of people living the life unexpected.
You can anticipate hearing from me in a number of ways:
· My weekly newsletter, sharing thoughts and reflections from both sides of the therapy room.
· All The Feels, a monthly summary of the things that have elicited a range of emotions.
· S(h)elf help, my monthly round up of books and other texts that I have personally found helpful and consistently recommend to my clients.
· Therapy Notes, where I answer commonly asked questions about therapy, mental health and emotional wellbeing.
And in the coming months, I hope there will be a growing space for community discussion, shared wisdom and interaction.
I have also transferred the full archive of my blogs which you can read here. These will always be free and accessible to anyone who needs them.
Learning to value myself and my work
As I invest more of my time and headspace here, I have made the decision to switch on paid subscriptions for the newsletter. I aim to keep this at a price point that I hope will be accessible to as many people as possible. My aim is to create a safe and supportive community of people on the same journey of discovery: learning to thrive in a life that isn’t as expected.
I hope you can join me. You are so welcome here.
Michelle x
This is a beautiful introduction to you and your offerings Michelle. So happy to have found your page. There is so much I resonate with here, not least the idea of embracing the life that's happening, rather than the one that lived in our expectations. For me, an unsuccessful fertility journey is what deepened that learning. I also resonate with your integration of the personal and professional. My greatest learnings are not the ones from the textbooks, but the ones from my own messy lived experience. I look forward to reading more of your work.