Seeing the different experiences and how people approach their situations led an Orange-based midwife to become a psychologist to help individuals and couples through their reproductive journey.
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Dr Joanne Lawrence-Bourne has worked throughout Australia, including in the Torres Strait, Sydney and Canberra, in the public and private sectors in different fields, including at one stage as an air hostess.
For 20 years she worked as a midwife but several years into that career she decided to become a psychologist, completed her PhD and has combined the two fields.
"I've changed careers, I've done other things ... but I've always come back to this," she said.
"My mother said I've always wanted to be a psychologist, 'just go and do it'."
Dr Lawrence-Bourne now helps men, women, non-binary people, singles and couples navigate their situation whether they have children or not through her business Natal Instincts Reproductive Psychology in Orange.
"I'm a psychologist with a midwifery background so I do general psychology work with anxiety and depression and sort of all the different struggles that people face in their lives," Dr Lawrence-Bourne said.
"My special interest because I have a midwifery background is around fertility, childlessness, menopause, infertility, pregnancy complications, birth complications, a whole lot of different things.
"It could be cancer that's related to infertility, endometriosis, people who have chronic pelvic pain."
Everyone's journey is different
She said she helps clients come to terms with what hasn't gone as planned, understand their current circumstances and be comfortable with their decisions no matter their age.
"You get extreme joy happiness, elation and then you get really deep sadness, grief, anger, all these different emotions, it encompasses all these different experience and everything in between," she said.
"This whole reproductive topic is a lifespan, right from your teen years and it just continues through the rest of your life and it pops up at different times.
"Everyone's different, you don't have to be at the depths of despair to see a psychologist and have some counselling.
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"Your reproductive journey can be around not having children.
"Some people really want to have children and other people go, 'I don't care if I do or I don't."
"It should be ok whatever we do and it's how we feel about ourselves with these decisions or choice or lack of choice.
"It's hard when you're not getting what you want whichever way it is."
Inspiration as a midwife
She said she wanted to become a midwife because "there's something consistent around birth and it's fundamental to humanity," and she was working at Dudley Hospital and was doing group antenatal classes when she became more interested in the psychology and social side of reproduction.
"Working as a midwife and just watching couples, single people having children then, that was quite a few decades ago now and I've always been interested in the way people think and approach all of this," she said.
"Say you had a same-sex couple having a child, say they were two women, one actually gave birth, how does the other one feel? She might have wanted to give birth. Only one of them can give birth and only one of them can be the genetic parent.
"I've been doing this for 20 years so I love the area, I'm quite passionate about it."
Dr Lawrence-Bourne is also interested in men's perspectives in the field and did her PhD on male childlessness.
"I have a strong focus on men and partners, often they get left out or pushed aside because it's always around the woman who is pregnant so I think it's really important," she said.
The role of instinct
Dr Lawrence-Bourne credited a lot of her decisions and interests on growing up on a property near Orange as the eldest of six children although she's been in and out of the city throughout her career.
"I'm the eldest of six so I come from a large family and I myself only have one child and I was older. My mother, she would have been 40 by the time she had the sixth child," she said.
"You understand the animal world when you live on properties.
"I guess we still are still connected to the animal kingdom and we forget that a lot of our approaches and our behaviours are instinctive, which is part of why my business is called Natal Instincts, the instinct is our animal instincts around all of this.
"Some of of us have instincts to want children, some of our instincts are we don't, how we parent our children and I guess our instincts are challenged by our human social expectations."
Working in the Torres Strait
Dr Lawrence-Bourne has also worked in Sydney, the Torres Strait on Thursday Island, in Darwin, Canberra, the Southern Highlands.
"I was in the Southern Highlands working in the private system and an ad came up," she said of her decision to work at Thursday Island.
"It just provides a different part of Australia so I was up there for a year and a half and went to Darwin, I was really up in the north for three years.
"Again there's just all that cultural interest around birth and how people approach birth is really interesting and is just part of Australia.
"The men and women used to come in their boats coming from the different islands to Thursday Island."
Monday to Friday is the psychology sessions and on weekends I do private antenatal classes.
"Some people have had a really rough journey becoming pregnant, it's taken them years, some sadness along the way so I just do with one couple or one person or their support person so I do private antenatal classes on weekends.
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