About me

Roma Norriss - Birthing A Better World

roma Norriss Doula & NCT Breastfeeding Counsellor

Bio

Roma Norriss is an experienced Parenting Consultant, turning around scratch-your-eyes-out-hard family situations where nothing else has worked. She has been working with parents (as a Birthworker, NCT Breastfeeding Counsellor and Hand in Hand Parenting Instructor) since 2006.

Dubbed the ‘Nigella of the parenting world’, she can be sighted in a naughty red dress but in actuality spends most of her time coaching internationally from her bed in pyjamas with her hair standing on end. She is a warm, overconfident, prolific, playful, pattern interrupter, who somehow has the answers to your life.

Based in Somerset with her delicious kidlets and much adored partner, she sponges up any opportunity for intimacy and is an all round bothersome love-addicted wrestle-maniac. Lifelong foodie, she loves feeding people and when the chips are down is prone to escaping to Kerala for a God plug in.

What she doesn’t want you to know is that she actually finds children quite tedious and has been forced to master parenting only for the sake of making her own children significantly LESS so.

My Parenting Story

‘Teach what you need’ they say. I realise now I was drawn to work with birth and parenting because that was where my own trauma was rooted. I studied Midwifery at Kings College, which I loved, but being around birth so intensively brought up implicit memories from my own infancy (an excruciating 5 week isolation in an incubator following premature birth) and my body responded by getting extremely ill. Just as I had recovered and was about to resume my training, I fell pregnant with my firstborn, Zephyr and that became the new training!

My sweet Zephyr, little did I know that you would be my redemption. It certainly didn’t seem that way when he was kicking my head in and screaming all day long (after suffering a traumatic period as a toddler). Things were bad. He was self-harming and suicidal, made little eye contact, wet himself when distressed, went crazy in social settings. Our lives were thrown into chaos by having a house-trashing tornado that never slept and wanted to hurt everyone. The judgements from those around us were crippling.

Desperate to prevent him from experiencing the isolation I went through in my own childhood, I threw everything I had at helping him recover. I went above and beyond what I could’ve mustered for my own healing and in the process happened upon Hand in Hand Parenting; the most elegant, sensible and effective conversation on parenting on the planet. In order to handle this tormented, intense, aggressive kid, I had to gain mastery over my own emotional state. To do that, I had to examine my own childhood. The upshot was that we got our beautiful boy back and he is now happy and thriving and living a normal life. The unexpected byproduct was that I found my way into my body and freed myself from a lifetime of shut down. We brought each other back.

The gift of all this for my work is that I can meet anything you throw at me unflinchingly. I have the conviction that you lack, because I’ve done what you need to do myself and helped many others to do the same. I am certain that when there is enough resource, any hurt or difficult behaviour is recoverable. 

Get in Touch

‘Roma is a unique parenting consultant because she works at such a deep level.  There’s no prescriptive ‘what to do’. Instead, Roma works with feelings and this is the level at which most of us need to get unstuck. My most memorable session with Roma was where she got me to experience just  ten minutes of feeling the quiet, the silence and being with myself. It has ever since been my ‘go to’ memory when things feel out of kilter and I need to come back to a place that is safe. This was one of many remarkable gifts from my sessions with Roma. I’ve seen a huge change in my family since my sessions with her.’

Amrit

Mother of a 7 and 12 year old, U.K.