Therapy has been criticised for encouraging solipsism. We focus on the needs of the individual in front of us often to a greater degree than anyone ever before, including parents. Counsellors know that if we create a place of boundaried safety, understanding and respect the client is likely to flourish.

Paradoxically, when a person is given total positive individual attention for 50 minutes a week as well as becoming more understanding of themselves they become better able to understand wider relationships. In some sense, a person in therapy needs to become child-like; to have their feelings valued so that they can value those feelings themselves; next to examine their situation with curiosity and respect; then to formulate some kind of plan for the future; and then go out and live it.

In many ways, therapy is a kind of parenting, allowing the client to move from distress, confusion and retreat from the world to understanding and renewed relationship with the world. Relationship is the be all and end all of therapy and ultimately of life.

Once or twice a week I spend a couple of hours listening to a local talk radio station to get a flavour of what people are thinking. Today’s debate was about the proposed tax break for parents, £2000 for every child under 12 where both parents work. Any number of childless people phoned in to ask why they should fund parents, their reasoning being, “If you can’t afford kids you shouldn’t have them.” Never mind that the rebate includes households with a joint income of up to £300,000. When asked who they expected to care for them when they were elderly, to maintain every part of society from midwives and schools to hospices and graveyards, they didn’t see the connection. They were only interested in their own income and didn’t want to support anyone other than themselves.

Last century, Communism was condemned for offering childcare. A mothers place was in the home taking care of her husband and children and often elderly relatives who had previously helped with housework, cooking and caring for children. Now, children live far from elderly parents who are maintained by strangers, childcare has taken the place of parenting and both parents are expected to work. It takes a lot of thought and strength to organise a family so that children spend more than 24 waking hours a week with their parents, a decision that almost always incurs a drop in status and a greater amount of personal satisfaction and contentment within the family.

Therapy gives a person the space and time to move from the infant position of memememe (where we all go when we’re distressed, confused and threatened) to the more adult viewpoint of how others affect us, how we affect others and the most healthy ways of engaging with that reality. We can pretend that other people don’t matter only as long as we accept that other people shouldn’t give a damn about us.

A friend came to stay with me last week after spending 9 weeks in the Fremo Medical and Birth Centre, “a beautiful and safe haven for the mothers of the Kawangware slum on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya.”

Michelle trained as a midwife 6 months ahead of me at St Mary’s Paddington, and delivered my own child at my home in a pool. The next day she came round and blitzed the house from top to bottom and filled the fridge so that I could emerge from bed with nothing to do that day but learn to be a mother.

Michelle and I talked about midwifery and birth, antenatal care and poverty, first world and developing world pressures on women, and I realised just how much I missed being around pregnant women, new mothers and babies. Not continuing in midwifery is one of my biggest regrets, though the relentless and harmful pressure that midwifery has been under for so many years has ameliorated that sadness.

My own labour was textbook – healthy antenatally I knew that there was no reason to anticipate anything other than a straightforward birth, that deep warm water can reduce pain and that St Mary’s was 15 minutes away.  Everything went well and still, it was the closest thing to madness I’d ever experienced. I’ve no regrets about not having pain relief but bloody hell, it was powerful.

Remembering all this, listening to Michelle’s enduring enthusiasm for her work, made me realise that I have a particular background that can be useful to women – and men – who are moving towards and into parenthood.

We don’t have rites of passage any more, we don’t sincerely mark transitions we just accept as a fact that yesterday you were not pregnant, today you are. Yesterday you were not a mother or father, today you are. The most important immediate recognition is medical and then form filling for employers and the tax office. Families can be great, employers and friends can be supportive but what about the engagement with intimate, complex and very normal joy and enthusiasm, doubts and fears?

Midwives report that they hardly have time to be with women in labour, and I remember the disappointed faces from an antenatal clinic 20 years ago when women realised that there wasn’t time to answer all their questions. When you can’t have a conversation about how difficult it is to give up smoking the opportunity to engage in an hours one-to-one conversation about your anxieties and fears becomes remote.

Right now, I can’t offer a community that recognises, welcomes and values women and men as they make the unalterable transition to parenthood (though that’s not by any means impossible) but I can offer a specialist type of counselling. This is important support for all parents, not just those who can afford it, and so I’ll be looking into ways for women and men who find it difficult just to keep the lights on to also access it.

 Let me know if you have any ideas. Pass the message on.