Hope Affirm Thrive. Your Roadmap Through IVF

Hope Affirm Thrive. Your Roadmap Through IVF I founded Hope Affirm Thrive to support women toward their dreams of parenthood.

With my comprehensive, evidence-based resources, you’ll unearth renewed confidence and strategies to help you take control and emotionally thrive through your IVF treatment.

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 s...
17/05/2026

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 treatme...
09/05/2026

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.

08/05/2026

💡 The Work-Life-IVF Balance Hack You Didn’t Know You Needed

Feeling like your brain is in overdrive between work deadlines, IVF appointments, and, oh yeah, life? 💻🔬😵‍💫

Let me introduce you to Square Breathing—a simple, sneaky stress-busting trick you can do anytime, anywhere (yes, even in the clinic waiting room or before that big meeting).

Here’s how it works:
1️⃣ Inhale for a count of 4 (imagine drawing one side of a square).
2️⃣ Hold your breath for 4 (draw the second side).
3️⃣ Exhale for 4 (third side complete).
4️⃣ Hold again for 4 (square closed!).

✨ Repeat this cycle 4-5 times or until your heart rate starts to chill out.

Why it works: Square breathing helps regulate your nervous system, giving your brain a quick timeout from the stress spiral. 🧘‍♀️ It’s like hitting “refresh” on your mental browser—no deep dive into mindfulness apps required.

Give it a try the next time:

Your clinic calls with test results. 📞
You’re stuck in traffic after an appointment. 🚗
You’re bracing for that "Have you tried relaxing?" comment. 😒
Let me know in the comments how it worked for you—or if you’ve got a favorite stress hack of your own. We’re all in this together, and balance is possible. 💛

08/05/2026

✨ Neurodivergent. Fertility treatments. Stressed. Sound familiar?
Chronic stress doesn't just mess with your mood—it can derail your entire fertility journey. My evidence-based program isn't about toxic positivity. It's about real, science-backed strategies that work with your unique brain.
Imagine feeling supported, understood, and equipped—not just emotionally, but biochemically.
👉 Tap the link. Your body, brain, and future self will thank you.

08/05/2026

✨ 3 Steps to Set Yourself Up for IVF Success ✨

Starting IVF can feel like a whirlwind—so many decisions, so much uncertainty. But did you know the choices you make before treatment even begins can have a huge impact on your journey?
That’s why I created this FREE guide just for YOU:

“3 Game-Changing Tips to Maximise Your IVF Success.”
Inside, you’ll learn how to:
✅ Make simple, effective lifestyle choices that are within your control
✅ Build a strong foundation to boost your chances of success
✅ Save time, stress, and potentially thousands in treatment costs

💡 Don’t leave your IVF success to chance.
Preparation is everything. Start this journey with clarity, confidence, and purpose.

📥 Download your free guide today—link in bio!
Your future family starts with the steps you take today. 💛

We spent 5 hours in PCH ED last night. Charlie had barely eaten or moved in days. Pale, woozy, dehydrated, 1kg down. The...
08/05/2026

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.

Logging on from my cosy office in South Perth today for EMDRAA 2026 🌿And honestly? The timing couldn’t be better.A study...
01/05/2026

Logging on from my cosy office in South Perth today for EMDRAA 2026 🌿

And honestly? The timing couldn’t be better.

A study published just weeks ago in Human Reproduction found that 41% of infertility patients met criteria for PTSD or Complex PTSD — 9% for PTSD, 32% for CPTSD. Nearly half. And that’s before we talk about what happens when the care itself compounds the trauma.

Here’s what that means in plain terms:
IVF is traumatic. Full stop.

Not “difficult.” Not “emotionally challenging.” Traumatic in the clinical sense. Repeated loss, bodily autonomy handed to a protocol, hope and grief cycling on a two-week timer. For many patients, each new cycle arrives carrying the full weight of every previous one.

EMDR was built for exactly this. It doesn’t ask you to talk your way through it. It helps your nervous system process and file what happened so the next injection, the next scan, the next two-week wait doesn’t land like the first wound all over again.

For neurodivergent IVF patients especially, whose nervous systems are already running hot? This isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s foundational.

Days like today, staying sharp, staying connected to the research, are how I make sure my clients get the best of what this field has to offer.

To anyone in the middle of a cycle right now: you deserve support that meets the full complexity of what you’re carrying. 🤍

(Gameiro et al., 2026 — Human Reproduction)

I watched the Four Corners ADHD episode this week and had a lot of feelings. 🌿Some of it was genuinely important journal...
22/04/2026

I watched the Four Corners ADHD episode this week and had a lot of feelings. 🌿

Some of it was genuinely important journalism. The diagnostic deserts, the access gaps, the fact that huge numbers of Australians are going undiagnosed. That needed to be said on national television.

But a lot of it worried me. And I couldn’t stop thinking about my clients sitting in fertility clinic waiting rooms, juggling injection schedules and two-week waits, holding it together on the outside while quietly falling apart inside.

Because so many of them have been here before. Not in IVF clinics. In GP offices and psychiatrist chairs, being told their ADHD was probably just anxiety. Probably depression. Probably the stress of treatment. Given labels that didn’t fit and the very clear message that they weren’t coping well enough. When actually, they were masking better than anyone around them realised.

The episode raised differential diagnosis as a concern. What it never said is that for most late-diagnosed women, differential diagnosis already happened. It went to the wrong place. For years.

Swipe through for my full breakdown. 12 slides. Made to be readable, not just clinical.

If this resonates, share it. The more this conversation reaches people in fertility clinics and the patients sitting in those waiting rooms, the better.

💚 Save this to come back to it.
💬 Did you watch it? What was your reaction?

If you’ve ever rocked in a waiting room for an hour, cried because a nurse was too kind, or handed injection duty to you...
19/04/2026

If you’ve ever rocked in a waiting room for an hour, cried because a nurse was too kind, or handed injection duty to your equally ADHD husband and regretted it immediately — this one’s for you. ��I’m an AuDHD psychologist who spent 13 years going through fertility treatment before my late identification. i built the HAT Program because nothing like it existed — and because i lived every single one of these slides.

The IVF world was not designed for brains like ours. the protocols assume you’ll remember things, tolerate fluorescent lights, make easy decisions, and just relax.

We cannot do any of those things. and that is not a personal failing.

It’s why the HAT Program exists — The world’s first neurodivergent-affirming psychological support program designed specifically for AuDHD and neurodivergent people going through fertility treatment.

If this carousel made you feel seen, save it, share it with someone who needs it, and drop your most relatable one in the comments. 👇

link in bio to find out more about HAT.

Something I have been working toward for a long time is finally real.My research paper on the Hope Affirm Thrive model h...
09/04/2026

Something I have been working toward for a long time is finally real.

My research paper on the Hope Affirm Thrive model has just been published in a peer-reviewed journal — and I am still pinching myself.

This work started with a simple but urgent question: why do so many IVF patients feel like the psychological support available to them just... doesn’t fit? Why do so many people come away from fertility treatment feeling unseen, overwhelmed, and alone in ways that go beyond grief and loss?

The answer, it turns out, has a lot to do with neurodivergence. Our brains. The way we process, feel, and move through the world — and how almost none of the existing support frameworks were built with us in mind.

HAT was built for you. For the person who finds the waiting room unbearable. Who processes information differently. Who has ever been told they’re “too sensitive” or “too much” in a clinical setting. Who suspected there was something more going on beneath the surface but didn’t have the words for it yet.

I built this program as a Autistic and ADHD psychologist with my own 13-year fertility journey. Every part of it exists because I know — personally and professionally — that you deserve better than what has traditionally been on offer.

Seeing it in print, peer-reviewed and published, means the world. Not just for me, but for every patient this research might one day reach.

A huge thank you to my co-author Liam Spicer, who heard me talk about this work at EMDRAA 2025 and believed in it enough to help make this happen. Every underdog needs someone who sees what they see — I’m so glad he was in that room. 🙏

Thank you to everyone who has been part of this journey. The clients who trusted me. The colleagues who believed in the work. And the community here who remind me every day why this matters. 💙

📄 Link in bio

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Perth, WA
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