“Your workshop was pivotal for me. I came for help with my son’s outbursts and I learned so many keys to unlocking our struggles and supporting him, and it was there my own healing began, a cascade you so beautifully helped set in motion”
— C.P. Embodied Childraising Course Participant
Kirstie Seaborne
Kirstie is an international teacher and a leading voice for an embodied approach to parenting. She specialises in empowering adults who are at risk of burn out, especially parents facing aggressive and rejecting behaviours.
She has taught body-mind approaches for 30 years, but it was in 2013, inspired by her experience as a therapeutic parent, and a mental health mentor for at-risk students, that she focused her attention where she felt it was needed most, and set up Embodied Parent Education.
She ran her first workshop for adoptive parents in her home town of Brighton, which sparked a fire and love for this work that never dimmed.
She has since worked across continents, providing training for Echo Training, The Carers Trust, The Embodiment Conference, special schools, and she has coached clinical leads of NHS Trusts, Cabinet Office and DEFRA staff, family mediators, social workers, teachers, school psychologists, prison residents and play therapists.
My Story
The main inspiration for my work is my experience as a foster, adoptive and birth Mum, having parented my amazing and neurodivergent children from babies, through teens and into adulthood (and being partner to their ND Dad). It’s hard to believe I’ve been a Mum for 25 years now! (Yep - that photo is at least ten years old, but I love it so it’s staying!)
I know first hand the impact that trauma and alarmed, agitated nervous systems can have on the whole family, as well as the professionals supporting them.
Like many of you, my kind of parenting looks VERY different from ‘the mainstream’; it’s taken a paradigm shift and new way of seeing and being that I now celebrate, but which continues to be an ongoing practice that I still often grapple with.
And transitions to adulthood look different in our family too, trying to balance everyone’s essential needs for self-agency and autonomy, with high levels of vigilant care and supervision, for safety’s sake. It’s a daily dance of complexity and contradictions, on constantly shifting sands.
I don’t share many details of my family’s story, since it is not mine alone to share, and only do so in chosen groups, with permission. But my clients tell me they ‘get that I get it’ and they appreciate my honest, non-judgemental and pragmatic approach to taboo subjects.
Education and Training
I am one of only a handful of certified Embodied Leadership Coaches in Europe, trained by the late, great Wendy Palmer.
I am a qualified teacher (PGCE) with a Masters in Movement in Education (Laban) and BA Hons Dance, a certified Compassion Fatigue and Compassion Resiliency Educator and Bowen Therapist, and Somatic Resilience and Regulation Practitioner.
I have an Advanced Certificate in Traumatic Stress Studies (from Bessel Van Der Kolk’s Trauma Centre) , certificates in trauma-Informed care and mindfulness for youth (with focus on trauma and SEND) and I’ve trained in attachment, trauma and brain-based parenting models.
I also draw on my training in sensory-motor regulation, somatic attachment and relational trauma, somatic shame transformation, developmental movement, neuro-dramatic play, martial arts and interpersonal neurobiology.
I hope my education reassures you that you are in safe hands. It may not, however, tell you if you will resonate with me personally - for that we need to get together, so please contact me to arrange your free 30 minute online session. I look forward to meeting you.
