Belinda Horton

I have always worked in mental health, mainly in antenatal and postnatal (perinatal) mental health and distress, as well as some time in adult mental health in the community and child and family mental health in public health. I am super motivated to support and equip pregnant and new parents to be the parents they want to be. It can be really hard to be pregnant and preparing to be a new parent, or to have little children when many old thoughts and feelings come to the fore. My role is to help new parents to understand and settle these conflicting thoughts and feelings so they can be the happy, energetic and present with their baby and children. This is so important for little people to be able to develop and evolve into the best people they can be too. Occupational Therapy is a really broad way of working with people who are distressed or experiencing mental health issues – seeing the person and their family as a whole, what is meaningful for them in all parts of their lives, developing goals in building a fulfilling life and skills to make it happen. Mental Health Occupational Therapists like me also have additional skills in counselling, psychological treatments and other areas of specialty. I have a lot of experience in counselling and supporting pregnant and new parents. My approach is to create a partnership with you to facilitate your health and wellbeing, rather than be an expert of you and your needs or to tell you want to do. I draw on my broad professional, evidence-based knowledge and personal experiences as I listen to your story and concerns from many different perspectives. I try to facilitate your deeper understanding of what is happening for you, how you would like life with your family to be different and how you want to make changes. I am trained in Family Therapy which helps me to bring a rich understanding of what people bring to their experiences of pregnancy, birth and becoming parents from their own childhood and early life – their ‘family of origin’. And then how new parents work together to build their own ‘family of creation’ at one of the most stressful times in their lives. This is really important work but very dificult part of being new parents. I am a The Richards Trauma Process (TRTP) practitioner. I first learnt about TRTP for my own trauma recovery process and could see its power with new parents with distressing and traumatic experiences. TRTP goes beyond counselling to work with the person’s unconscious mind in states of guided deep imagining. It is a structured process that shifts distressing and traumatic experiences that are making life very difficult, out of their unconcsious into their long term memory, creating calm in their internal threat system (fight, flight, freeze) and reducing things like anxiety, depression, PTSD, OCD, addictions including substance use.