The Mama Voice Workshop
The workshop is a peer to peer style model. Yes, I am a mental health professional, but first I am a woman with a story of my own. I lead the workshops with an open heart and as an open book. When society, friends and relatives don’t quite understand the depth of your heartache, the Mama Voice space does and it is a beautiful space to be seen and heard.
The Mama voice workshops are for any woman of any age (I know several women in their fifties and sixties who have attended the workshops) who has experienced loss, trauma, or heartache in the perinatal period. This means the period of time spanning trying to conceive, being pregnant, during labour and delivery and up to 12 months post birth. It encompassing experiences such as difficulties trying to fall pregnant, miscarriage and pregnancy loss, stillbirth and postpartum stressors. It is for those who have adopted or fostered a child too. It is for any woman who has a maternal experience weighing heavily on her heart and is designed to be a step in the healing process.
What exactly do we do in the Mama Voice workshop? This is not an acting workshop. It is not a writing workshop. Nor is this a storytelling workshop in the traditional sense. This is a space to voice our heartaches, to be vulnerable and to afford ourselves and each other radicle non-judgment. It is not an entire healing experience in itself, but rather a place to start, or continue our healing. As mothers, we tend to put ourselves last, pushing down our heartaches for the sake of our families, for duty, and a need to complete the day to day. This is an opportunity to pause and reflect, laugh and cry, together, with other women who truly understand the isolating nature of perinatal heartache.
A huge barrier for women not reaching out for help after a perinatal loss or trauma, is the stigma attached to these experiences and the lack of understanding we receive from family and friends. We don’t talk about miscarriage, for example, until we’ve experienced it and only when we start talking about it do others reveal their losses. Miscarriage is a grief that goes unseen and unwitnessed and we tend to suffer in silence. Sometimes our partners don’t understand the depth of the loss and struggle to provide support. Sometimes our mothers, who havn’t healed from their own perinatal heartaches, make it about themselves.
Sometimes society will tell us ‘at least you know you can get pregnant’ and ‘you can just try again’. All these reactions and placations push us further into our sorrow. We need community and togetherness to heal and to be with others with lived experience who truly understand. This is one of the major aims of Mothers Unleashed. To create a space for women to come together and connect. I’ve seen this happen, and, I’ve seen Mamas become life-long friends after attending a workshop.
We open the workshop by creating a space of radical non-judgment and move through several exercises designed to help us find and sound our voices around our experiences. It is completely in your hands how much or how little you participate in each exercise, and I encourage participants to listen to themselves and honour what it is they need in each section of the day. There is zero pressure and zero expectations.
Please note this is an adult’s only event. I would love the opportunity to meet the babies of the participants in the Mama Voice workshop, however, to get the full benefit out of the day we need minimal distractions… and babies are notorious for being brilliant distractors! I intend for this time to be about you and for you, and this is why it is for Mamas only.
Who this workshop is not for: This is not a crisis service. This workshop is not for someone who is currently in the heart of their crisis, currently suicidal or currently cycling bipolar.
Participants might still be in the midst of the experience, experiencing depression, anxiety or more, but they cannot be in crisis.