Pre- and Perinatal Scope of Practice

Within the pre- and perinatal field, practitioners of many disciplines share a set of powerful, and sometimes controversial, ideas about how early experience shapes a life.

This series of four classes invites us to hold those ideas with both openness and discernment. Rather than asking whether pre- and perinatal concepts are simply "true" or "false," we will explore how to work with them responsibly within our own scope of practice.

Recapitulation: Illuminating Lens or Literal Map?

The idea that our earliest experiences of conception, gestation and birth lay down templates that are later re-enacted in the body, in relationships, and often within the therapeutic encounter itself, is one of the core principles in the pre- and perinatal field.

A client comes in stuck — can't move forward in their relationship, their career, their life — and you immediately think about their birth. Maybe it's the way they hold their shoulders, maybe it's a phrase they use, and suddenly you're seeing a birth arrest, a forceps delivery, a cord around the neck.

Sometimes that insight is genuinely useful, but sometimes we have stopped listening to the person in front of us and started fitting them to an already pre-formed model that we are carrying.
In this session, we will consider the difference between the two: when has a focus on birth helped inform and deepen a session, and when has it become something that we have unconsciously imposed.