SAFE HOUSE MIDWIFERY SESSIONS
Safe House Sessions are for ‘midwifing the midwife’.
They offer something rare: time and space for a long conversation about your career, where the focus is totally on you and what you need.
If there’s anything on the following list that you want to talk about I would be thrilled to provide you with the time and space that’s needed:
Placement as a student, learning fast while still being yourself
Adjusting to being newly qualified
Clinical skills
Time management and getting proper rest around the immense challenges of shiftwork
What restorative rest is
How to build an art form into your life which gives you energy and motivation back
Enjoying assignments
Getting your humanity into your care when you’re run off your feet
Making friends and building community as a student and qualified midwife, even if you are introverted
Hard clinical situations (though of course, think carefully about what you reveal re confidentiality)
Bullying, what the research says, and the experiences of student and qualified qualified midwives and how they have dealt with it
Your future career, discussions around the kind of role that might fit you within the NHS
How to follow your own path and projects around this, how to achieve career goals outside the NHS
How to grow a thick skin as an anxious, introverted, soft midwife (not that I’d know anything about this personally or anything)
Some of What We’ll Explore Together in a Safe House Session:
Your role, your working environment, how your personality fits within that
The practical steps and tools you can use
The larger issues that are being revealed by your current situation
The pain caused by the current situation, and what it looks like to take a creative approach to solving it
How to find your way back to your real work as a midwife
Ways in which you are currently loving your career, and how to find more of that
How to find the more specialised support you may want in the long-term
What this part of your midwifery journey means in the context of your career and life
What Makes a Safe House Session Safe?
I understand talking to anyone about your profession can be a daunting thing to do. What I will say is that you are a student or a qualified midwife, and you are wise enough to make your own decisions around what to tell me. I will act according to my professional status. But otherwise I am there to serve you.
In terms of logistics of how I make these sessions safe:
I ask that you don’t book if you work in Cambridgeshire; this ensures no conflict of interest
I have fornightly clinical supervision sessions with a UKCP registered psychotherapist; this helps me support you, but I won’t discuss anything with them about you unless I am concerned about your wellbeing
I don’t have to record the sessions. though I can if you want. I’ll send you a link that you can download a copy from. It will be securely held, and then deleted my side after a week.
Ready to Book?
See Ellie’s Availability Here or use the form below.
The whole story behind Safe House Sessions can be found below…
A Risky Time for Baby Blues
It was 1st July 2022, and I had just finished writing my most recent book. After four years of slogging through the project, the final email with the typescript had gone off to my editor, Helen. The house was covered in post-it notes, brown paper, and chapter outlines blue-tacked to plastic boards. My partner had suffered through two minor breakdowns and one cancelled holiday, and I never wanted to see another Harvard reference again. But it was done.
The finality and relief of the moment made me think about the book launch for my novel, back in 2018. It was such a great night. My whole family made it. My core group of mates, who I’ve been tight with since secondary school, came in from different places and stayed over with Jenna, my anaesthetist buddy who’s based in London. We had Thai food and played with her super friendly cat. The next day I went back home to see Jason, who I was in the intense early stages of falling in love with. Oh, and did I mention it was my birthday? It was a perfect transition to being thirty. I had so many good emotions I didn’t know what to do with them.
Back in the present, as I tidied up my house, shoving the book outlines behind the sofa and hoovering up little bits of paper, my mind went back to my midwife writer friend, Becky Reed (who wrote Birth in Focus). She also had come along to the London book launch. At some point she had grabbed me by the shoulder and said just remember you might get some baby blues for a few days after this. It’s a risky time for it.
I was genuinely surprised by this. I had self-published a book before and had various pieces of writing in midwifery magazines and so on. I had a blog. I hadn’t experienced those feelings before and thought it was perhaps a little OTT that Becky, a hugely experienced midwife, would talk about a book in the same way as having a baby. So though I did sit up and take notice, I also said to her, ‘cheers, I think I’ll be fine’ and put it to the back of my mind.
A Long and Bumpy Six Months
Cut to the biggest, longest period of serious migraines I’ve ever had. I’ve written about this before; I didn’t know I was experiencing migraines at that point, as the type I get are not the typical pain/aura kind. They are vestibular, meaning they affect my inner ear.
They are a little like being on a boat unexpectedly, or your head being shaken up and then released. I thought I was tired, lazy, or perhaps depressed, which shows my mental state during that period. But just after the novel got published, I started to clock that I had a medical issue going on. It was a long and bumpy six months of early relationship stuff with Jason and all the shenanigans that involves, and I thought I was going slightly mad. It did all improve in the end, with a year’s worth of strong anticyclic antidepressants to treat nerve pain. After this period of medical help, I was able to wean off this drug and move to lifestyle changes. Right now, I am much more able to deal with the migraines as an expected way of my body communicating with me. Sometimes they are even a gift. But at the time they were bloody awful and basically, Becky turned out to be right: after a book is done, I am vulnerable to withdrawal.
My current book, the Bloomsbury education guide, must have been a very strange project for my editor, Helen. I didn’t know until late on, but she was pregnant while working on it. I sent the final typescript on her last day before maternity leave. The goal of making that last day carried me through gracefully to the end. But as soon as I got a confirmation email from Helen and the work was done, I started to descend into listlessness and, yes, a little bit of a migraine.
This was basically because I knew the next project I wanted to do - it had been smacking me around the head for ages - but I had no idea how to get it off the ground, and no faith that it would work. I knew I was going to be in purgatory for a while.
A Visceral Fear
I am not good at moving slowly. I dislike the transitions that happen when a significant shift needs to occur. It is immensely frustrating and a little frightening when I don’t have a big project on the go and rolling forward. That’s actually why I like writing books - they give you somewhere to hide. You can’t finish the whole thing in a day, no one would expect you to. So it’s acceptable to make a tiny bit of progress each day. That’s the kind of project I live for.
I have been considering starting a one-to-one listening service for midwives and students for years. I’ve done the personal statement/interview thing since 2012 and have an established practice around this kind of support, and I enjoy it.
But for a long time now, I have been getting fed up with referring people struggling with midwife life over to the Facebook group. I love the moderators and experienced midwives who keep the group afloat and knit together our blend of hopeful kindness/activism/midwifery info. Still, Facebook is an AWFUL environment for having real conversations. It just is. Drama floats to the top based on algorithms, and it can be a competitive place for aspiring midwives to be.
Don’t get me wrong, I have been on and off Zoom with students and newly qualified midwives who have needed help with various aspects of their professional lives for years now. I have also been there for plenty of people in real life. But I have never put up anything formal where I offer my time and energy this way.
When I sent off the final typescript email (while playing a live recording of Pinch Me by Barenaked Ladies, a perfect choice for that moment), I knew the time was coming. I was about to be launched off into a waiting period of several months before the book was out, and I had very clear instructions from my head and heart that now was the time. I also had a real and visceral fear that I simply wouldn’t be able to figure out how to offer one-to-one sessions, and I would fail. And actually, it has taken more than six months to solve the challenges, so maybe I had a point with the dread.
In many ways, writing the book was a way of testing the water. I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but writing a book for a big publisher like Bloomsbury can make you feel like you have some credibility.
Also, broaching subjects like failure in practice, bullying, trauma and grief, and mental illness and so on are a bit of a downer in some people’s point of view. Sneaking them into an education guide with lots of overtly positive and helpful information seemed like an excellent way to Trojan Horse it to begin with…
The problem with all of this is that I’ve spent so much time pussyfooting around the issue. The novel, the Facebook group, all the application support midwife stuff, the Bloomsbury education guide - these things were not a waste of time. I really enjoyed them, and they were probably an essential part of the process.
But they were not exactly what I wanted to achieve. And they have been so TIME CONSUMING. I am amazed by how long I will spend on side projects to avoid doing what I know is really important. Like 10 years+. We will pour so much time and energy into avoiding the thing we want to do most in the world.
I guess what I was waiting for was a feeling of steadiness, knowing I was on an even enough keel to do things well.
The Safe House Letter Set
The closest I have got to this service so far - and it is super close, and I’m really proud of it - is The Safe House Letter Set. This was a series of physical letters to be opened over January 2023, one by one. They were on the subject of trauma, joy and restoration in midwifery. I wrote the letters after a particularly hard clinical event, as I was recovering and this project was about letting other midwives stroll around the head of someone in that state, and tracing the path to resolution. It felt scary as hell to reveal so much about who I was, and the anxiety I felt while releasing the project into the world was intense. But as the feedback started coming in, I realised it had been the right thing to do.
Another big shift over this time was getting psychotherapy. I have had counselling before, which has been critically important for my emotional well-being and development as a human being, let alone my work as a midwife. But I’ve been interested in the work that psychotherapists do for a long time. I found a psychotherapist I already knew in a significant way, and who I happen to think the world of. That gave me the safe space I needed to complete such a vulnerable project.
5 months in, I am still in the early stages of psychotherapy, and a lot of what gets covered is not stuff I would share online. But I am much braver and more able to move towards what I need. And the Zoom sessions I did alongside the Letter Set allowed me to talk candidly and deeply about the emotional challenges of midwifery. The students and midwives who signed up have been incredible, exactly who I wanted to talk to. I’m not sure exactly what it was like for the readers, but lots of people said things like ‘I’m really going to miss opening the letters’, so I’m taking that as a win. The project is still ongoing at this point, and I’m still learning more.
Pinch Me
The song ‘Pinch Me’ that I mentioned I was playing when sending my typescript is by the Barenaked Ladies, an excellent Canadian band I’ve been listening to since I was a teen.
Listening to it recently reminded me of a conversation I’d had with a BBC Radio 4 journalist interviewing me for a project about NHS working conditions. She had asked ‘why did you come back into midwifery?’ She was a bit confused about it since midwifery has so many downsides.
I had fluffed the answer a bit, saying some undeniably true things, like midwifery is a lot of fun, it’s a privilege, and I missed it. But we both knew I wasn’t nailing what was going on for me when I felt the pull to come back.
I’ve realised in the last couple of days that my reason for coming back to midwifery and my reason for putting together this service are the same and can be summed up in the lyric:
‘I could leave but I’ll just stay
all my stuff’s here anyway’.
All my stuff is in midwifery and gets unpacked either in practice or in talking or writing about midwifery. I can’t imagine that changing for a long, long time.
I came back because I have so much work to do. And mostly, I’m really happy here.
The Arena
I went through a phase of learning poems and speeches once. I’m rubbish at it - most of it has faded. But there’s a line from the ‘Man in the Arena’ speech from Teddy Roosevelt which goes:
‘...at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat..’
That is still very much with me. In terms of this particular area, for ten years, I have been dangerously close to living in the cold and timid soul zone when I know better than that. It’s time for me to take what has been developing and make it real.
Safe House Sessions are now up and running
So here I am. Totally yours. I have experience of being a midwife, then not being a midwife, and coming back to the profession again. I have been at the point of failing placements and have pulled through with ‘outstanding’ grade. I have been derailed by medical issues, and had those medical issues teach me how to be a better midwife. I have tried very hard to build a midwifery support business that only addressed the positives.
But that just made talking about what we do in our hardest moments much more interesting to me.
You have a lot of your own answers. Let’s find them together.
If there’s anything on the following list that you want to talk about I would be thrilled to provide you with the time and space that’s needed:
Difficulties in placement as a student, learning fast while still being yourself
Time management and getting proper rest around the immense challenges of shiftwork
What restorative rest is
How to build an art form into your life which gives you energy and motivation back
Enjoying assignments
Getting your humanity into your care when you’re run off your feet
Making friends and building community as a student and qualified midwife, even if you are introverted
Hard clinical situations (though of course, think carefully about what you reveal re confidentiality)
Bullying, what the research says, and the experiences of student and qualified qualified midwives and how they have dealt with it
Your future career, discussions around the kind of role that might fit you within the NHS
How to follow your own path and projects around this, how to achieve career goals outside the NHS
How to grow a thick skin as an anxious, introverted, soft midwife (not that I’d know anything about this personally or anything)
Some of What We’ll Explore Together in a Safe House Session:
Your role, your working environment, how your personality fits within that
The practical steps and tools you can use
The larger issues that are being revealed by your current situation
The pain caused by the current situation, and what it looks like to take a creative approach to solving it
How to find your way back to your real work as a midwife
Ways in which you are currently loving your career, and how to find more of that
How to find the more specialised support you may want in the long-term
What this part of your midwifery journey means in the context of your career and life
What Makes a Safe House Session Safe?
I understand talking to anyone about your profession can be a daunting thing to do. What I will say is that you are a student or a qualified midwife, and you are wise enough to make your own decisions around what to tell me. I will act according to my professional status. But otherwise I am there to serve you.
In terms of logistics of how I make these sessions safe:
I ask that you don’t book if you work in Cambridgeshire; this ensures no conflict of interest
My trust are aware of and supportive of my business and writing (though of course, everything I do and say is mine alone, and not linked to their views or stance on matters)
I have fornightly clinical supervision sessions with a UKCP registered psychotherapist; this helps me support you, but I won’t discuss anything with them about you unless I am concerned about your wellbeing
I don’t have to record the sessions. though I can if you want. I’ll send you a link that you can download a copy from. It will be securely held, and then deleted my side after a week.
Ready to Book?
See Ellie’s Availability Here or use the form below.
“I am so grateful for her time, Ellie is a true inspiration.”