Dogs for Development CIC

02/08/2025

To beautiful friends, beautiful connections and everlasting love x
Love you always Luce.
Here’s to dogs for development and new beginnings ❤️🐾🐺🥰

30/06/2025

✅ Bloomin’ amazing 🥹 !!!!!!!! Our fifth lot of successful funding secured in the last 6 months!!!?! Thank you SO much this time to the National Lottery for believing in our Pathways to Progress project where we’ll be continuing to work with veterans on a holistic approach to treating trauma … incorporating powerlifting, emotional regulation and distress tolerance via pack psychology/canine assisted psychotherapy, finally ending in a 4 day celebratory retreat in Cumbria alongside Denise from Lift & Empower where we’ll put into practice all our learning throughout the intervention into building resilience and working collaboratively in the outdoors: trekking, wild swimming and canoeing.

So proud of the pups, our clients and my wonderful, wonderful friends. Thank you all ♥️

➡️ please note: I’ll upload a quick video PowerPoint presentation of all the work so far by the end of the week…. so I don’t keep getting told off by Facebook for uploading pics of the companies logo’s we’re working with - my apologies 😅🤦‍♀️

Love to you all and big woof from our beautiful Loki and Ella 🐾♥️

01/05/2025

🌿 Today is the Day...

My good friend and incredible practitioner Martine Shelley is officially opening her doors to the Mother’s Starter Kit: Bringing Generational Healing Home.

I’ve been privileged to have witnessed Martine’s
work and I’ll tell you now… it is - absolutely - transformative. Very powerful stuff ladies, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

❤

A starter kit for mothers ready to bring peace, healing, and wholeness back into their family homes.

24/03/2025

Special shout out to my good friend and incredible colleague, Denise, who has this month (after a tough year) finally managed to purchase and open her new therapeutic & wellbeing centre - Lift&Empower CIC! Still a load of decorating to be done, but the space is fantastic(!) So proud 🥹Comprising of three therapy rooms, a community cafe space, a yoga studio, gym area and meeting rooms… accessible to all. The centre will act as a vital role in bringing the community together to create positive change for all and combat social isolation.

Denise has worked exceptionally hard after initially arriving in England with nothing to her name, escaping domestic violence, penniless and a single parent - she focused all her energy on working hard and overcoming previous trauma through pure hard graft, dedication to fitness, personal reflection and spiritual growth.

She has overcome so many obstacles and her resilience is genuinely
inspiring. Needless to say, I’m incredibly excited to be working closely and collaboratively together on joint interventions over the next 12 months with the funding we’ve received so far, which will enable young people with mental health difficulties, veterans and individuals on low incomes to participate on their own journey of personal growth, development, strength, fitness and mental resilience.

Together we’ll be facilitating combined fitness and wellness integrated psychotherapy programmes, helping to increase overall wellness and healthy lifestyles, offering strength training, coaching & fitness classes; canine-assisted psychotherapy and high intensity cognitive behavioural therapy, focusing on emotional regulation, overcoming trauma, building resilience, strength and self-compassion.

Working within the idea that ‘wellness’ and ‘mind, body, and spirit’ is not merely a concept but a way of life—a journey of self-discovery, growth, and transformation. By embracing practices that nourish the mind, nurture the body, and uplift the spirit for instance, we can cultivate holistic wellness and thrive in all aspects of life.

From my own personal experiences working with Denise, I have certainly found strength training to be an integral part of my own wellness/recovery journey, which has helped enable me to connect with (and process) grief in its purest physical form. It‘s been hugely transformative to understand just how much the body holds trauma and how so many aches, pains, physical issues and inflammation are often as a result of holding trauma. From having hugely debilitating back issues previously to now entering my first powerlifting competition on the 24th April(!)- I couldn’t be in a much stronger place, both physically and mentally 🙏

Thank you Denise- Lift & Empower CIC and Active Essex and The National Lottery for your belief and commitment in us to ensure fitness, strength building, wellness and psychotherapy interventions are widely accessible to people from all circumstances and backgrounds. 💪

And what could be better than incorporating our beautiful furry friends into our powerful journey of recovery too!?! 🐾

Have a wonderful day you lovely lot x

12/03/2025

*URGENT*‼️Would any of you lovely lot have the capacity to foster an urgent rescue from my good friends at the German Shepherd Rescue South East??? 8 year old male called Simba, beautiful temperament. 🥹♥️

It’s an urgent situation so please contact me directly and ASAP if so, thank you so much 🙏

06/02/2025

After Christmas we lost our beautiful little Holly - 17 years she had been in the family. 😔

She helped my dear Grandad so much after Nana’s passing, keeping him walking, providing such companionship, loyalty and love within his own grief. She lived with my beautiful mum after Grandad passed, and helped keep her walking, moving and mobile, and again, provided so much love whilst mum went through her own cancer journey and grief.

She then spent the last of her days still in the family with Linda and John, who did - so - much for her, right until the very end. Forever grateful to you both.. as I know my dear mum, Grandad and Nana would be too.

Holly spent many times walking with the pack and I in her younger days and many a nights cuddling next to me on the bed. 😔 She was a strong and feisty little soul, belligerent, yet loving who had experienced so much of her own grief over the years. Resilient to the core - she was incredibly loved, by everyone in the family.

She died peacefully in my arms with so much love around her.

Sleep well Holly, may you be at peace now back in the arms of your Nana, Grandad, Mimsy and Annie. ♥️

You were a beautiful (and belligerent) little soul who gave SO much to our family - thank you from the bottom of my heart. Love always. 😞

💔

25/06/2024

🐾Calling all our *ESSEX* dog loving friends! 🐾 …… GUESS what? We’re baaaaaaaaaack!! 🥰

SO EXCITED to be delivering a fully interactive seminar on Sunday, 14th July - *limited spaces* available!

*Dog Behaviour*
Improving the relationship between you and your dog.

Exploring the following: 👇

✅ Socialisation
✅ Reactivity
✅ Canine-assisted Psychotherapy - what the relationship with our dogs can teach us about ourselves
✅ Trauma
✅ Heirarchy of needs (Michaels, 2015)
✅ Motivational systems (Gilbert, 2007)

Please join us for an exclusive x1 day seminar to help you deepen your knowledge and understanding of dog behaviour. Explore how much our furry friends can also teach us about ourselves!

Cost: £65 per person, light sandwiches/snacks tea and coffee included.

*limited spaces available*

Contact nataliabate@yahoo.co.uk, or, send us a message via messenger to book your place!

Really excited to be back, and to see you all very soon ! ☺️🐾

➡️Venue: Snoopies Grooming, Hall Farm, Church Road, Little Bentley, Colchester, CO7 8SD
➡️Date: Sunday, 14th July
➡️Time: 11am - 4pm

See you there 🐾

*Bookings must be made in advance

*Facilitated by Natalia Bate BA(Hons), PGCE, Pg Dip, MA, (HCPC and BABCP accredited)

24/04/2024

My beautiful Millie, the kindest, most gentle, loving and compassionate soul I have ever had the privilege of knowing was very sadly put to sleep yesterday morning at 5am.

She had a malignant and very aggressive tumour, which quickly spread to her vital organs. As any dog, or pet owner, will know, deciding on the right time to help your companion sleep peacefully is often an excruciatingly heartbreaking and utterly devastating decision to have to make. But, there will always be a point within this (quite frankly) - gut wrenching - process where your loyal companion will look intensely into your eyes and tell you that they’re tired, and that that they’ve had enough. I suppose, in a way, it’s a final act of love and a real privilege to be able to cease the suffering of someone (or something) you love unconditionally and be there for them at the final point of death - not that it makes the process any easier to go through with of course.

My beautiful Millie was 14 years old, she led a kind, loving and ultimately very happy life. She spent many years working alongside me as a therapy dog and has helped hundreds of children from complex, diverse and often difficult backgrounds. She has worked with patients in an acute mental health ward, clients from cancer care, mind and the police. She has worked in palliative and residential settings, special schools, pupil referral units, and helped to build resilience working with young people in care. She has helped families referred by the NHS, war veterans suffering from PTSD, and has also helped students increase their own sense of wellbeing and helped them to explore different concepts of leadership, helping them to enhance their own self-awareness.

Her kindness, non judgement and love for all, allowed her to connect to even the most shut down and/or traumatised of individuals. Where I, or other professionals, had struggled to connect or build a solid therapeutic alliance, Millie was able to instantly bring about a sense of trust, calm, connectedness and a true sense of joy, which allowed for some very powerful moments in our clients (all too often) chaotic lives. Who knew her gentle energy and wagging tail could bring about so much joy (and hope), even in the darkest of hours.

In her retirement, Millie continued to use her “angel dog” status in older life to steal donuts off my mum, make friends with prostitutes, run off with the local cats (she just bloomin - loved - them!?) and enforce extra bum scratches from those she loved most!

Millie was always the kindest and most gentle, loyal, calm, incredibly loving and sweetest of souls. She remained faithfully by my side for her whole life, always keeping me in her line of sight - I was so incredibly lucky to be her whole world. It didn’t matter where I was at, emotionally, mentally or even physically - she just continued to love me, unconditionally. And I, of course, her.

Although, devastatingly, Millie won’t be with me for the rest of my life, I am incredibly privileged to have been able to be by her side for the whole of hers.

So, whilst indeed grateful for the life of my dear, beautiful and sweet, Millie, I am of course heartbroken, devastated and struggling to adapt to her loss. Although there is a small part of me (despite being a staunched atheist at times) which does like to believe that she is now running freely with my beautiful mum… both free of pain, endlessly joyful, eating donuts a plenty, and dancing beautifully somewhere over a rainbow.

Perhaps one of the biggest things
I have learnt from our dear Millie is that family is - anyone - who loves you unconditionally.

Sleep well my beautiful girl.

Thank you for everything. You are so missed.

🌈

30/12/2023

Food for thought as we enter the New Year.