Antoinette Nicolaou Clinical Psychologist

19/01/2024

We are starting a group for mom's from 1 March 2024 for mom's.
The group runs every Friday for 2 hours.
I facilitate a supportive conversation between mom's in a safe and relaxed environment. Mom's have a coffee and talk about the realities of motherhood, and we provide and hold space for mom's to tell their truth, while feeling supported.
The group allows for 6 participants, and is facilitated in Afrikaans and English.
All group meetings are claimed through medical aid.

We discuss some of the following:

• Normalising fears and trauma around birthing and raising a child;
• Sharing of experiences with vulnerability in a safe, non-judgemental and confidential space;
• Speaking to the stigma and telling the truth about the realities of being a mom, the pressures of managing multiple roles and the fears no one discusses out in the open;
• Facilitating a supportive community of mom's for mom's;
• Discussions around a mom's own generational history, trauma and the fears around repeating these with our children;
• Stigmas and pressure from social media, family, culture and society and the expectations these create for mom's, as well as the emotional impact and focusing on each mom's truth;
• Stigmas and pressures around breastfeeding;
• Judgements often felt by mom's and feelings of failure and inadequacy;

Naturally there are many more topics of discussion and the list is far too long to name them all here, but if you or someone you know feels like they would benefit from an experience like this, please feel free to contact me.

Email: antoinette@anpsyche.co.za
Tel: 0760392531

06/12/2023

22/11/2023

What we don’t say…

21/11/2023

😏

17/11/2023

In many psychology practices we call November “Christmas prep month”.
The reason is that although many of us look forward to the most wonderful time of the year as a time for rest, family and food. Even more of us look upon this approaching time with dread and apprehension.
For many it is a time when the people who hurt us, dissapointed us, abused us, sit accross from us at the Christmas lunch table. It is a time where the woman who is struggling to conceive is asked when are they finally going to have kids, where the man battling quietly with his weight is jokingly called “groot boet”, where the alcoholic is offered a brandy pudding, where the wild child is looked up and down in quiet judgement for their tattoos.
Some will not have a family to sit with at all because of what they believe, because they are gay or because they identify as transgender.
Although Christmas is in theory a beautiful time for togetherness, forgiveness, service and love, this Christmas let’s leave space at our own tables for acceptance, tolerance, respect, kindness and most importantly, minding our own bussiness from a place of loving kindness because we cannot know all the silent stuggles of the loved one sitting accross from us.💚🎄

15/11/2023

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.
~Ernest Hemingway
(Book: A Farewell to Arms https://amzn.to/3rVoG3a )

(Photograph: Ernest Hemingway with Mary Welsh, Cuba 1954)

13/11/2023

Well…

07/11/2023

Life. A synopsis.🙌

06/11/2023

This is a picture of my garden. It looks amazing. It is amazing. It is also a boat load of work to maintain and I pay someone once a week to tend it. I wish I was a person right now who wants to tend my garden. You always hear how good it is for your mental health. I have images of a graceful experience, maybe with a lovely light pink hat, and some crisp garden gloves, and myself gliding ethereally through the beds with joyful bees buzzing around my head.
This is not me. Mostly I sneeze from the pollen. Like, a lot. Like, seven times in a row. And then there is just snot pouring out my nose and I have to grab kitchen paper to blow my nose because there are never any tissues around because I wish I was a person who kept tissues around the house. But I’m not, I’m a kitchen towel person.
I took this picture while sitting on the step outside, quickly inhaling a luke warm coffee while my little one sleeps.
Self care, I think.
I think self care today is a concept that just adds more pressure, especially on social media. In addition to having to do all of the things, you now also have to have the perfect temperatured coffee, the perfect bath, the perfect frikken manicure in the perfect most relaxed way. And document that perfectly so other moms can comment on your post with perfectly positive comments, while everyone secretly feels bad about themselves and their messy homes and no one tells the truth.
I happen to disagree. Sometimes self care is guzzling down a luke warm coffee while hoping your kid doesn’t wake up just yet, in a garden that you don’t tend. Just for the 5 minutes of fresh air.
And then you leave the dirty cup on the kitchen counter for the housekeeper to wash in the morning because you have neither washed your hair or showered today. Yet. We live in hope.
Here’s to authentic living. Let it lead us. Let it unite us in truth.🤞

01/11/2023

Easy read, beautiful insights not only on material wealth and the world, but on the value of honoring the inner self as well.
I like it because it answers questions we are “not allowed” to ask about money and wealth and its relationship with spirituality, in a gentle way that gives permission to want what we want, and explains with common sense why we want what we want.
10/10. Would recommend. 🙌