Music Therapy Clinician: Supporting reflective clinical practice Volume 1 | Page 15

We’ve witnessed beautiful births, hard births. Unmedicated births, medicated
births. Vaginal births, cesarean births. Hospital births, birth center births, home births.
As powerful as these clinical experiences are, they can also be unnerving. Unsettling.
Even alarming. Sometimes we feel unarmed, insecure, and like we’re lost in the middle
of a maze.

A therapist’s depiction of a family traveling through an unexpected cesarean to meet their baby 2.

We started to look to each other for help with things like running perinatalcentered music therapy practices, processing difficult birth experiences, coping with
many kinds of birth trauma, self-care needs, ethical dilemmas, clinical challenges, and
more. And we realized2: if we wanted to practice in a way that felt safe, responsible,
ethical and sustainable, we needed to come up with some kind of a peer supervision
process.

Depiction of music therapist exploring maternal and professional relationships within birthing process.
2

Some portions of artwork are blurry to protect client confidentiality.

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