A six-month professional certification program for birth and mental health practitioners, led by somatic psychotherapist Anna Siebert.
If you're a doula, midwife, birth educator, lactation consultant, psychologist, counsellor, social worker or any practitioner who walks alongside women in the transition to motherhood, you have been witnessing matrescence your entire career.
You've sat with the woman who says she doesn't recognise herself anymore. The one who loves her baby and grieves her former life in the same breath. The one who is exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't fix. The one whose relationship has changed in ways she didn't expect and doesn't know how to explain. The one who needed a village but instead got a referral and 'that must be hard'.
You've held it, with your experience, your instincts, and whatever you've been able to piece together from your training.
This program hands you that map: the framework behind the work you already do, the science of why some approaches land and others fall flat, and the clinical skill to make this passage positively transformative for the women you support.
Anna x
Matrescence is the physical, psychological, neurological, and relational transition a woman undergoes as she becomes a mother. The term was coined in 1973 by anthropologist Dana Raphael, who drew a parallel with adolescence, another profound developmental passage that we have a name for, cultural frameworks around, and some tolerance for the difficulty of.
You bring clinical and relational experience, so we skip the beginner foundations and go straight to the framework, language and self-knowledge that let you apply what you know to this transition with full confidence.
We go into the actual science of hippocampal restructuring, grey and white matter changes, polyvagal theory and the biological basis of coregulation, then practise turning it into language a client can take in. You'll understand why what you observe is happening.
Before you hold a client's dissolution, you need some relationship with your own. You'll examine your nervous system, your experience of being mothered, your matrix of support and your patterns in the clinical relationship, then carry that self-knowledge straight into your client work.
Women in every culture across human history have crossed this threshold, and modern Western life offers almost nothing to facilitate it. You'll learn the anthropological, mythological and neurobiological story of the passage so you can hold this space for clients in a way that works.
Anna's own diagnostic tool for working out where a woman is in her matrescence, and how to support her from exactly there.
You'll learn how to follow the cyclical rhythms within your client and her story, and how and when to intervene or let her system find its own way. You'll be able to assess which pieces are missing for her, and support her to find what she needs to fill those gaps. You'll discover how this works within your scope of practice, and how to integrate it into your existing work.
Each module combines self-paced learning with live 90-minute group sessions on Zoom.
You'll learn: What matrescence is and why naming it is important; the practitioner as a regulated, resourced container; your own nervous system and the three autonomic states and freeze, applied to your professional patterns; resourcing practices and your matrix of support; natural cycles as a framework for your rhythms and your clients'; the evidence for village-based maternal care and what its collapse means for the women you support; your own experience of being mothered (and where your healing work continues).
What this does for your practice: You arrive at every subsequent module with a clearer understanding of your own patterns and what you need to stay present in this work; resourcing practices that work; and the gentle beginnings of empathic neutrality.
You'll learn: The heroine's journey and the universal underworld story that explores why dissolution is the mechanism of transformation, and why the practitioner who rescues a client from the struggle is cutting open the cocoon; the Karpman drama triangle and its empowered alternative, understood through polyvagal theory, applied both to your own patterns and to the women you support; midwifing the birth of the mother.
What this does for your practice: You can work in the liminal, holding dissolution as the necessary mechanism of becoming, and staying with a client's struggle without ending it.
You'll learn: The full neurobiological account of matrescence and the biological basis of coregulation; why isolation in new motherhood is a biological emergency; grief frameworks; attachment and intergenerational transmission; mental health challenges and when to refer.
What this does for your practice: You can explain what is happening in a mother's brain and body in plain, warm, non-clinical language; you can hold ambivalence and grief without rushing toward resolution; you understand exactly when the normal range ends and referral begins.
You'll learn: The hormonal landscape across pregnancy, birth, and postpartum; postnatal depletion; the cyclical pause of postpartum and how to support women to surrender into the biological void rather than fight it; the role of pleasure, ease, and rest in the postpartum body; the body as a site of identity change; infant feeding as a somatic and identity experience.
What this does for your practice: You meet the depleted mother as a woman whose biological needs have gone unmet. You can open conversations about rest and pleasure that change what clients give themselves permission to receive, and you'll hear the feeding conversation as the identity territory it is.
You'll learn: The critical cultural lens: the virgin-whore split, the many-armed invisible mother, and the ideological construction of maternal self-sacrifice; partnership transformation without taking sides; the mother's relationship with her own mother: reparative dynamics, enmeshment, absence; friendship rupture and structural isolation; social media and the comparison trap as clinical phenomena; the motherhood penalty; and how to help clients build their own village when you cannot be it.
What this does for your practice: You understand the cultural water your clients are swimming in and you stop inadvertently colluding with the system producing their distress; you can hold relational complexity without importing verdicts; you have practical tools for helping clients map and build genuine community.
You'll learn: The matrescence conversation: three approaches, working with resistance; mental health literacy for perinatal practitioners: PMADs, the Edinburgh, the clinical threshold without requiring mental health training to use; the referral conversation as a clinical skill; trauma-informed practice: the neurobiological mechanism of trauma, why birth is a site of particular vulnerability, the shame and impossible paradox of birth trauma, and how to hold a birth story; documentation, records, and mandatory reporting; scope, ethics, and countertransference specific to this work; supervision.
What this does for your practice: You have the clinical language and the ethical clarity to do this work with confidence and integrity, regardless of your professional background; you know what is within your scope, what isn't, and how to refer; you leave the program as a certified practitioner with a supervision plan and a peer network.
This pilot group shapes the program through its feedback.
9:30 to 11am Canberra time, all recorded.
23 Nov · 7 Dec · 21 Dec
11 Jan · 25 Jan · 8 Feb · 22 Feb · 8 Mar · 22 Mar · 5 Apr · 19 Apr · 3 May
Certification is awarded on completion of:
Pilot prices close 30 October. Payment plans are available on every option.
Payment plan: $400/month × 5 months
Enrol in the bundleIncludes all program materials, six months of live sessions, reflective portfolio support, peer network, and Matrescence Practitioner Certification on completion.
Payment plan: $240/month × 5 months
Enrol in MatrescenceTrauma-Informed Birth Debrief Training on its own is $1,500 pilot, $2,000 full price.
If cost is the only thing standing between you and this training, message me directly.
A professional certification in helping a nervous system finish its birth.
Every practitioner who works with new mothers has heard a birth story that stayed stuck in a woman's body.
Weeks or months later she tells you what happened, and you can see it in her shoulders and hear it in her breath. Her body is still braced for a birth that ended a long time ago. This training teaches you to help her nervous system complete what was interrupted.
A trauma-informed birth debrief is a structured, present-focused conversation about one specific event, her birth. It's designed to bring that event to resolution. Over a set number of sessions, you support her to finish the responses her body started in that room and to make meaning of what happened. She walks away more resourced, with a story she can carry.
Keeping the focus on the birth is what makes this work safe to offer, whatever your background. Doulas and midwives get a clear structure for holding the birth story without stepping into therapy. Psychologists, counsellors and social workers get a time-limited, completion-focused protocol for birth, which most mental health trainings don't cover.
You'll leave with a clear understanding of what's yours to work with and when to refer on, including the triggers for referral: suicidal ideation, signs of psychosis, dissociation that doesn't settle with grounding, disclosures of family violence or child safety concerns, and symptoms of PTSD or postnatal depression and anxiety that persist beyond four weeks. You keep a quick-reference card of every red flag, plus a referral map you build for your own region.
Ten core modules, taught in twice-monthly live sessions with recorded demonstrations and reflection prompts in between. Then supervised practice: you start with peer debriefs and progress to clients, supported by group supervision. Supervision is included in your fee.
Dates for the Birth Debrief cohort will be released in 2027.
Registered with the Australian Counselling Association and Somatic Experiencing International.
For ten years I was a doula and childbirth educator. I supported more than 50 births and taught over a hundred couples, and again and again I heard the sentence every birth worker knows: "I don't recognise myself anymore." I held it with experience and instinct, and I knew there was more to understand.
So I went back to study. Since 2018 I've worked as a somatic psychotherapist specialising in trauma, and hundreds of women have sat across from me as mental health clients. Many of them were in the middle of matrescence and few had ever named it for them.
That's where I saw the gap from the therapist's chair. Mental health practitioners meet these women every day, yet matrescence barely appears in their training. Too often the transition gets screened and referred, and the woman going through it rarely even hears that what's happening to her has a name.
Today I lead Soma Women's Wellbeing in Canberra, a multidisciplinary clinic where psychologists, somatic therapists, nutritionists and bodyworkers care for women together.
This program grew out of these experiences, and it's built for practitioners on both sides. If you work in birth, you get a trauma therapist's clinical depth, translated for the bedside and the home. If you work in mental health, you get the perinatal knowledge your training left out. I know where a doula's scope ends and where a therapist's begins because I've worked inside both.
I'm trained in clinical education and certified in individual and group supervision. I teach the way practitioners actually learn, and caring for you runs through every module.
Email hello@somawomenswellbeing.com with your choice (bundle or Matrescence). We'll send your intake form and invoice. Payment plans are available on every option, and your place is confirmed once payment is received.
Pilot pricing closes 30 October · Begins 23 November 2026
Soma Women's Wellbeing · Dickson, Canberra
Anna Siebert · Somatic psychotherapist, doula, childbirth educator