When you book a holding space session with us you will get one hour with two doulas. When you enter into a longer support plan with us, whether that is a with woman plan or a birth support plan, you will get a circle of three doulas at your disposal. You might be wondering what the benefit is of having two or more doulas instead of just one, and we would love to share with you what led us to working in this way and how it has been beneficial to women.
Before becoming a CIC we each worked as an independent doula which usually meant working entirely on our own with a client. We found that this was incredibly lonely and, at times, just not feasible. Generally, doulas tend to burn out after three years which we think, at least in part, is because of working alone. Becoming a small team of doulas with aligning values was an absolute game-changer!
When we support women as a team it means that we are pooling together our combined knowledge and experience as well as creating a real sense of sisterhood. Is there anything more wonderful than knowing that, if you need a sounding board or somewhere to vent, you’ve got a circle of women to turn to? It’s even better when that circle of women completely trust your intuition and will reflect your confidence back to you in an authentic way. For some, that circle is already existent in their lives with family and friends, but even then sometimes those connections come with expectations or it may feel difficult to put boundaries in place. When you have a circle of doulas supporting you, we encourage you to figure out what your boundaries are and assert them, we have no expectations of what your support should look like and we won’t respond to your thoughts with our own personal experiences.
Although we all have the same core values of trusting women and their intuition, and we all work within the same philosophy, we each have different ways of being. We each have different insights and approaches to addressing the challenges faced by the women we work with which can be incredibly beneficial within a support session because it gives women different ways to understand and process the same information. A woman we supported once said to us, “It’s like having three different flavours. You know you’re going to get the perfect mix of empathy, compassion, straight talking and badassery”.
Our support is open to women of all ages going through anything at all, which means that often women talk to us about complex issues that they may never have shared with anyone else before. Having two doulas in a session means that we are able to ensure that you are always being deeply listened to and held. It’s often the case that after listening to women we will have some observations to reflect back to her, but we have usually picked up on different elements of her story. Having two sets of empathetic ears means that we have more capacity for holding that space for you. It also means that the follow-up emails we send out after a session are comprehensive because they are compiled from two sets of notes.
Confidentiality is really important to our organisation and the women who use our services because it is foundational to creating a safe container for women to share openly. When we work together as a small team it means that we are able to debrief together and support each other effectively without having to share anything outside of the organisation. Although we have clinical supervision, this is done by heavily anonymising clients so it does limit what we can talk about, but having each other as mutual support hugely improves our ability to carry the emotional load of providing the support that we do. We often get asked by clients whether we are getting support ourselves in order to do the work we do, and the answer is yes. We are continuously debriefing, processing and learning from each other.
Working together has massively increased our availability and flexibility for taking on new clients and offering unlimited sessions to long-term clients. Having the capacity to offer as many sessions as each woman needs means that we can tailor our support to the individual which is the best way to have a positive impact. Lots of doulas who work alone have a back-up arrangement so that if anything comes up whilst they’re supporting someone and they are suddenly unable to attend a birth for example, the back-up can go in their place. This can work if they have a close relationship, work in a similar way and the woman is able to build a relationship with the back-up as well, but this isn’t always the case. Because we already work as a team it means that women are able to get to know us all equally and because of our shared values we know that women will get the same high standard of support from any of us whether that is during a support session or attending a birth.
The practical benefits are of course important, but above all else the sisterhood that comes with our support should not be underestimated. Women have told us how incredible that sense of sisterhood really is, especially if you’re feeling it for the first time. The effect of women supporting other women is powerful beyond words. So powerful, in fact, that it threatens patriarchy.
Do you have your circle of women already? Would you like us to be part of that circle?
If you’d like to chat to us about how we might be able to support you, please book a chat with us here.