Peaceful Playful & Present

Bonnie Berry, Occupational Therapist

My dream is for all children to have adults who are attuned to their needs, provide a sense of safety and connection, and support them through love, understanding and co-regulation.

About Me

I love being outside in nature, particularly walking and hiking with my boys (nothing too strenuous!). As a wife and mum of two boys, I also like my solitude. But when I do get time on my own, I often don’t know what to do with it, or fill that time with things off my ‘to-do list’ instead of tuning into my own wants and needs.

I love learning new things and finding connections – when I have the brain capacity to do so. I have noticed that when my stress load is high, I feel like my brain can’t take on more information. Learning new things, trying to make sense of things and make connections becomes a stressors. But when I do have the capacity, leaning is energising and I get really excited. You will hear me bang on about my latest discovery.

I love working with parents and educators. You are the experts on your kids. Helping you discover what you already know about your kids, helping you make sense of it and nutting out solutions to challenges you are facing, brings me great joy. I know that by supporting you, I can make a difference in your child’s life. You are the consistent in their life. Working with you is going to make the biggest change in your child’s life – the research backs this up!

I enjoy a good laugh. I love a good meme or video and often send random shares to my friends with comments like “us”!

My experience over the past 15+ years as a paediatric Occupational Therapist has shaped the way manage my own health and well-being, my relationships with my husband, kids, friends and family, and how I parent my boys. My own journey of stress, anxiety, raising children, and challenging behaviour, as well as my work as an Occupational Therapist, lead me on a search for more.

My current approach combines knowledge, and experience from Occupational Performance Coaching, Shanker Self-Reg™, and sensory processing and a neuro-sequential (brain development) model of therapy.

My dream is for all children to have adults who are attuned to their needs, provide a sense of safety and connection, and support them through love, understanding and co-regulation.

About

Services

Family-Focused

All my services are family-focused.

My work has shifted more into coaching parents and educators, as it is you who is with your kids the majority of the time. YOU have much greater impact than me working one-on-one with your child once a fortnight, or withdrawing them from class.

Collaboration

We will work closely together. What do you want your child to be able to do? How do you want your family to be? We need to collaborate and work together. You child, your family, you are all unique. There is no one, cookie-cutter approach that is going to work for everyone. We are co-creators of the supports that will make the greatest change for you and your family.

A different way

This might be different from what you have experienced or expect. You might have pictured someone working with your child, just seeing them at school or direct intervention to build skills or ‘fix’ behaviour. That is not necessarily wrong but that’s just not the way I like to work. The social model of disability is leading us away from a medical model of deficits and ‘fixing’ to a focus on strengths, adaptations, and looking at the broader physical and social environments.