Groups:
We have been privileged to listen to many women’s stories. And we are responding by offering integrative, holistic groups for strong, continuous support while honoring how emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being impact physical health. In doing so, we hope to provide a space and place with others for healing and integration. We deeply respect the ability of growth and change throughout all phases of life. Meaningful connections, trusted social support, and a sense of community contribute to solid grounding from which self-exploration can expand.
Fertility Support Group
Time: Mondays weekly from 2-3:30p
Building a family can bring up a mixture of emotions. It often awakens and creates yearnings about the pregnancy, birth, and motherhood experience. When your path does not follow your expectations or hopes, then the uncertainties can easily feel confusing, consuming, and overwhelming. These normal feelings are often compounded if you experience anxiety because of your unique path towards trying to get pregnant. This group creates a safe, supportive space to share fertility or other experiences and to explore opportunities for healing that may surface during this time.
Then pregnancy again brings with it expected and unexpected changes. Endured stress may intensify pregnancy or postpartum challenges because of prior fertility concerns, birth difficulties or losses, or other painful past experiences. Often the anticipation, relief, and acceptance experienced after conceiving can be intertwined with other emotions, such as anxiety, sadness, anger, guilt, and exhaustion. Heightened awareness about pregnancy and postpartum is normal—you are used to monitoring changes you sense in your body and being. Pregnancy, birth, and mothering often bring up our life stories, for better and worse. There can be deep connections and family dynamics that are stirred, apprehension from the unknown, and uncovered truths that shape our integration of woman and mother with each pregnancy. This group is also designed to share common pregnancy and new motherhood concerns. Our hope is to support you fully engaging in an empowered journey to stay connected with yourself, baby, and others in your life. Understandably, so often women going through the fertility journey withdraw from other women who are pregnant. And when these women get pregnant they withdraw from their fertility journey. We want to create a space that allows for a different, more healing experience. Therefore, we offer women to begin the group at any point in this journey and continue throughout trying to get pregnant, birth, and/or the first year postpartum.
Mother Support Groups
2 separate groups times: Mondays weekly from 10-11:30a / Mondays weekly from 12-1:30p
Children continually offer new and experienced mothers opportunities for personal growth- at times, beckoning us to pull from our deepest reserves and most compassionate selves. Emotions difficult to fully understand or cope with are common given all the presenting demands during various life transitions and phases. Changing family dynamics may look different than hoped or expected. Curiosity about how to best parent while integrating self-care, along with a shifting identity as a mother and a woman often arise. Exploring and balancing feelings such as joy, anxiety, isolation, and lack of control with any pressures to “do it all” can be intense. And the significant choices that present can be challenging, such as staying home or working (or a combination thereof) to adequately supporting educational/social/personal development to remaining connected in a world with friends with and without children. This group creates a safe, supportive space to share experiences and to explore opportunities for healing that may surface at any stage of being a mother or step-mother, pre- to post-empty nest, to pre- to post-menopausal.
Group Leaders:
These groups are co-facilitated to anchor a collaborative, comforting environment as you gain clarity and security with experiences and decisions presented throughout your journey. Every group will be co-led by the same psychotherapist and at least one medical healthcare provider- all of whom are mothers and value integrative models of healthcare and wellbeing. These groups are meant to complement and support other established relationships with conventional and alternative care providers on your team.
Group Structure and Dynamics:
Groups meet weekly for 90 minutes. Time for sharing experiences, thoughts, or feelings will be available in each group and some groups may include guided exercises, activities, or discussion of educational topics.
- Women may join the Fertility Support Group while trying to get pregnant or during pregnancy and are welcome to continue in this group up to one year postpartum. There is the option of transitioning into the Mother Support Group after one year postpartum.
- Women may join the Mother Support Group any time after becoming a mother and continue as long as is helpful.
Who Should Consider Joining:
Any woman who experiences or anticipates heightened feelings surrounding motherhood—whether in heterosexual or same-sex marriages or partnerships or who are single. Some stressful issues that can be relevant to your experience may include:
- Previous fertility issues or treatments
- Previous miscarriage, stillbirth, or loss of a child after a live birth
- History of depression, postpartum depression, and/or anxiety
- History of sexual abuse or emotional or physical abuse or neglect
- History of addiction issues
- Body image struggles
- Chronic medical conditions
- Chronic medical or developmental issues with previous children
Spirituality & Grief Group
Time: Mondays weekly from 4:00pm – 5:30pm
So often it is described as just feeling “off” about something. And then there may be a well of tears, or a lashing out in anger, or an overwhelming sinking feeling. Too often then, the feeling is too hard to describe so we push it down, numb out and settle back into routine until somehow it gets stirred again and the whole experience starts over. This is often unresolved, unspoken grief that needs a place to be expressed, held, healed. Then we might we be able to truly surrender and integrate a space to do something different.
In our Becoming: Spirituality and Grief group, we offer a space to process through what we carry with us that seems to have us mired in a place from which we want to be free. What is going on in our lives, our nation, and the current world pandemic is calling us to re-evaluate so much of how we live and interact and all our expectations of our life we envisioned. And what of our spiritual lives in the midst of all this practical shifting? Join us as we explore how to find some sense of peace and belonging in the shattering of life around us.
This group is open to women who identity with the struggles of grief and how it intersects with our spiritual journey. We meet weekly for 90 minutes with time for sharing and reflection, often guided by an opening reading to center us into our time together.
Other Services:
Individual Services
Services are available outside of group by appointment with practitioners involved with CircleSpace. If interested, please contact the practitioner directly. Contact information can be found on the “Who We Are” page.
- Individual and couples adult psychotherapy and counseling
- MIdwifery, primary, and gynecologic care
- Naturopathic care