Hope Affirm Thrive. Your Roadmap Through IVF

Minister Butler spoke this week about transparency and accountability in fertility care. I’ve spent over a year trying to get any of that applied to the psychological side of IVF - through the Department, my local MP, and the Minister’s office. Still waiting.

New research shows nearly a third of fertility patients meet criteria for Complex PTSD, and most say their care made it worse. This isn’t a fringe issue. It’s a system quietly failing people at scale.

Petition link in bio - every signature helps make this harder to ignore. 🔗

I didn’t win last night.

Frances Bilbao did, and if you don’t know her work at Mums Matter Psychology, please look her up. It was the right result.

But something else happened that I wasn’t expecting.

After the formalities, person after person found me in that room. Aged care workers. Disability services staff. Community service workers. People who had nothing professionally to do with fertility.

And they told me their IVF stories and the stories of people they knew.

Years of treatment. Failed cycles. The grief that doesn’t have a name.

These were not my clients. These were allied health professionals. People who spend their working lives caring for others. Who had quietly carried their own fertility experiences into rooms that never thought to ask.

And then there were the people who already knew. Colleagues who had heard about Hope Affirm Thrive through a colleague, a podcast, a conference presentation, a social media post, a lived experience advocate, a past client. People who had been quietly following the work and wanted to say so in person.

I didn’t expect that either.

That’s what I learned last night.

Fertility is not a niche population. It is not a specialty corner of healthcare. It is in every room. It is carried by the people who work in those rooms just as much as the people who walk through the doors.

Hope Affirm Thrive exists for the person in the waiting room who has been told their needs are too much. Last night I was reminded it also exists for the person on the other side of the door.

Thank you to everyone who found me last night and trusted me with your story. You didn’t have to. I won’t forget it.

And at home in Perth, Rob and Charlie watched the livestream. Charlie was sad for me that I didn’t win.

Sweet boy.

I already won when I had him. Thirteen years of trying will do that.

And congratulations to Frances. The room was better for both of us being in it.

HESTA Super Mums Matter Psychology

In two days I’m flying to a national awards ceremony.

That sentence looks simple. It isn’t.

I have POTS. Standing still risks me passing out. I have MCAS. Every meal at every event is a potential problem. I have hEDS and lipoedema. Travel is physically hard in ways most people don’t see. I’m also Autistic and ADHD. Formal events take a particular kind of preparation that has nothing to do with what I’m going to wear.

HESTA asked what I needed. The Sofitel asked what I needed. A bar stool on stage. Meals planned around my conditions for my entire stay. Softer bedding for the pain.

Nobody made it a problem. They just did it.

I’ve spent years navigating systems that didn’t ask. That told me my needs were too much. This time is different.

I’m a finalist in the HESTA Allied Health Excellence Awards Individual Leadership category. A solo practitioner from Perth who built Australia’s first neurodiversity-affirming IVF psychology program from a practice room and a lived experience that wouldn’t let me look away.

I don’t know what happens on the night. But getting there, actually being able to be in the room, is already something.

For everyone who has ever been told their needs are too much: they’re not. They’re just in the wrong system.

HESTA Super

This weekend I was in a car accident with my husband and son.

We’re all okay. But in the hours that followed, I noticed something I couldn’t ignore.

The version of me from a few years ago would have looked completely different — snapping into control mode, panicking visibly, spiralling into ‘of course this happened to me’, pushing through without any medical care, and lying awake all night replaying every detail.

Instead I sat in the shock. I let my husband handle things. I smiled at my son so he didn’t take his cues from my fear. I cancelled plans without guilt. I went to urgent care, took the medication, booked the physio. I caught the unhelpful thought spiral before it took hold. And I did my bilateral tapping — a few gentle ones for my little one too.

This is what a processed nervous system looks like. Not drama-free. Not perfect. But regulated.

I’m sharing this as both a clinician and someone who has lived it.

If you’re heading into IVF — or already in it — your nervous system is going to be asked to hold a lot. Waiting rooms. Injections. The two-week wait. Results you didn’t expect.

How you respond in those moments isn’t a character flaw. It’s a nervous system pattern, often built long before fertility treatment ever entered your life.
EMDR before IVF isn’t about being ready for things to go wrong. It’s about building a nervous system that can stay present when they do.

This is the work we do in HAT. Link in bio.

(And yes — I’m resting. Physio’s orders.)

💾 Save this if you’re in the middle of IVF and need a reminder that how you’re responding makes sense.

💬 Has a stressful moment ever shown you how far you’ve come? Tell me below.

Today is hard for a lot of people who won’t say so out loud.

If you’re navigating infertility, pregnancy loss, or treatment that hasn’t worked — Mother’s Day doesn’t arrive gently. It arrives in your feed, at brunch tables you weren’t invited to, in the card aisle you can’t walk through.

Grief researchers call this disenfranchised grief — loss that is real, but goes unnamed and unwitnessed by the world around you.

So today, I want to witness yours.
If you’re willing — drop a number in the comments. It can represent whatever losses you are carrying today. There’s no wrong count.

Mine is 10.

Six miscarriages. Three failed embryos. And one grief I rarely talk about — the loss of the mother-daughter relationship I had imagined as I became a mother for the first time, because my mum died well before I got there.

Grief doesn’t always have a certificate or a casserole. But it’s real. And today, it counts.

💙 You don’t have to explain your number. Just know it’s held here. If this resonates, share it with someone who might need to see it today. And use — let’s make these losses visible together.

We spent 5 hours in PCH ED last night. Charlie had barely eaten or moved in days. Pale, woozy, dehydrated, 1kg down. They couldn’t find anything acutely wrong. Sent us home with a “wait and see.”

And then.

An early birthday present this morning. Mum staying home from work. The chance to steal food off my plate.
And just like that, he was back.

Here’s the thing though. That’s not magic. That’s not even a coincidence.
That’s his nervous system finally getting the signal that the threat was over.

For autistic kids especially, the body doesn’t just recover from illness in isolation. It recovers inside a relationship. Co-regulation with a safe attachment figure isn’t a comfort strategy, it’s literally how their physiology shifts out of shutdown and back into healing mode.

The ED visit mattered too, not just medically, but neurologically. Being seen, assessed, taken seriously. That act alone can reduce the threat response enough to let recovery begin.

And here’s where I want to speak directly to my IVF community for a second.

Because this is exactly what I see in the clinic every week.

Your body is trying to do one of the most physiologically demanding things it can do: conceive, carry, survive treatment while your nervous system is running on high alert. Waiting rooms. Two week waits. Injections. Results. Loss. And doing so much of it alone or in environments that were never designed with you in mind.

Chronic stress isn’t just hard emotionally. It is biologically disruptive. It affects implantation, immune response, hormonal regulation. The research on this is not soft, it is robust and it is growing.

And what the research also shows — what I keep coming back to in my work — is that felt safety isn’t a luxury add-on to fertility treatment. It is a clinical variable. Nervous systems that feel held, seen and regulated don’t just cope better. They function better.

This is why HAT exists. Not to add positivity to a hard process. But to address the thing the system keeps leaving out.

Charlie is currently stealing my pizza and telling me about numbers.

But I’ll be back in clinic on Monday because this work matters too much to leave undone.