We spoke with Poppy Villierezz, Co-Founder of Murmuration Community Therapy about her journey to set up the CIC, which organises gatherings and nurture groups for parents of children with SEND.
At Murmuration, Poppy and fellow founder Naomi Bonger, create spaces for parents to share experiences and develop friendships and community to support each other to process the complex feelings which arise in their specific parenting journey. They believe that, like in a murmuration where birds flock together, this connection builds resilience and joy. Read Poppy’s story below and find out about Murmuration Community Therapy’s upcoming courses, groups, events and projects on their Eventbrite page or website.
The idea for Murmuration Community Therapy came during Poppy’s own experiences of parenting her son Mish, who was born with multiple medical complications and was later diagnosed as having a genetic condition that would cause lifelong disability.
Poppy was already mum to her two-year-old daughter when Mish was born and she found that his diagnosis had a huge impact on her well-being and sense of identity.
“It really had an impact on my mental health. I felt so isolated, even amongst all the good Mum friends, I already had. I had a sense of suddenly being thrown onto a profoundly different path, right off the beaten track of mainstream parenting.”
She found that her sense of isolation grew worse when, with the best of intentions, friends and family tried to assure her that everything would be okay. With all of the difficult and conflicting emotions arising within her, things were not okay, and what Poppy felt she needed most was a non-judgemental space to share her fears and feelings:
“I was finding myself, potentially the mother of a child with disabilities and I couldn’t find any space to talk about that, honestly and frankly. I felt like I should be able to welcome whoever my child was, yet I realised how much resistance I had to the idea of disability, and then felt ashamed of that. It left me on my own in my feelings.”
Poppy found the space she needed in a women’s circle she was attending and she quickly realised that in the future she wanted to set something up for people in the same situation as herself but with a focus on the specific experience of becoming a parent to a child with SEND.
“The women’s circle was a space where I could just be and share everything I was feeling. I found it powerful to shift emotion but also as an ongoing maintenance, a monthly space to discharge the build-up from the last four weeks. I would come out of these sessions, feeling a bit like normal me again, like I had stopped carrying these boulders of stress and anxiety, grief and anger. So, I thought I would love to set something up like this for special needs parents.”
With her background as a community worker, Poppy knew the shape the project could take and she teamed up with Naomi, a qualified therapist who had experience of running group therapy sessions for parents in other situations who’d experienced mental health challenges.
Naomi and Poppy ran a pilot for Murmuration in 2019 to explore how community therapy could best support parents and then received funding to expand. To date, Murmuration has run over 40 groups, with four courses in progress currently, and plans to set up more in 2024.
“Some of the groups have become really strong little communities for each other. It feels amazing to help people connect and find their people a little bit.”
The nurture groups run as a course of sessions, which means that as well as creating a supportive community and a space to share feelings each week, each session explores a different theme to help parents build resilience around common experiences.
“There’s a check-in at the beginning, we have a question that gets them thinking, but mostly it’s an opportunity for people can share what they’re feeling. Then we have a structured section where we look at a theme; self-compassion, grief, guilt and anger or ableism have all featured. We explore what need from our friendships and relationships and what we don’t need. How to maintain inner power and strength rather than losing yourself in your child.”
Poppy reflects that one of the most powerful aspects of the course is to help parents reframe the external prejudice and judgement that parents of SEND children can face daily. She aims to help parents realise that so much of the problem lies, not with them but in society’s attitude towards their children, in the idea that to be disabled is to be ‘less than.’
“We wouldn’t need to run these courses if the world wasn’t so riddled with prejudice and ableism. Even within all the other minority groups that are oppressed, there is a prejudice towards disabled people.
“You see a lot of send parents full of self-blame and self-criticism, feeling ashamed of their emotions. When you realise that we’re in a situation that needs to change on a structural level in society, it’s possible to have so much compassion for ourselves and our families.”
Poppy hopes that Murmuration can help to address these wider societal issues and prejudices through their current project, a film designed to be shown in primary school PSHE lessons, that aims to show neurotypical children how they can be more flexible, welcoming, and respectful of neurodivergent pupils.
Poppy explains,
“When you look at the SEN system in education, it’s focused on how to get SEN children functioning more neurotypically. In this film, we want to flip that narrative around and ask, ‘How can neurotypical people change to welcome difference? So that neurodivergent kids can stay who they are, but feel like loved and respected in themselves.’”
Broken down into seven 5-minute sections, and shown in a series of lessons, the film will be used by teachers as a starting point for discussion and learning. It features the viewpoint of neurodivergent young people who have recently left school, a teacher’s perspective and Poppy, representing the parent’s perspective.
When researching the film Poppy was surprised to find that there isn’t anything similar already out there.
“It feels like a lot of responsibility, as there’s a huge opportunity to support SEN kids with the film but more than that too because dismantling ableism is a universal cause in that it’s beneficial for everyone.
“All of us are working really, hard to fit into the system, which has an ideal version of being human. It’s exhausting for all of us and part of the cause of the mental health crisis that many people are facing, whether they’re neurodivergent or not. I want to elevate that conversation as much as I can, in my own little way, in Bristol.”
Poppy and Naomi are also planning to expand Murmuration’s therapy groups to welcome more parents of children who are medically fragile with profound disabilities:
“We realised that often these parents are just in survival mode and it’s so hard for them to get to groups. In our current groups, about two-thirds of people are parents of autistic kids and I assumed that this was representative of the community in Bristol. I only recently found out that is actually a much lower percentage yet we only have a small number of parents of medically fragile children with more profound disabilities, so we’re trying to create a new strand of nurture groups, which is specifically for that population. “
Murmuration Community Therapy has funding from Bristol City Council for the new work which will be directed at those parents with kids aged 0-3 years to create space for them to make sense of all the aspects of their child’s medical condition. The groups will be called ‘Navigation and Nurture’ and rather than just being focused on parents’ mental health, they will address medical and practical concerns as well. They plan to invite Doctors, Therapists, Physiotherapists as well as Speech and Language Therapists so that parents have the chance to ask general questions about the support and options that are available for their child.
As part of the project, Murmuration has commissioned a booklet to be written for parents who have recently been given their child’s diagnosis. The author, Jemima Alexander is the parent of a medically fragile daughter and works for WECIL, a charity for disabled adults.
“Parents can be lost after that first conversation. It’s often an earth-shattering moment with very little follow-up. Paediatricians will be able to hand out the booklet which will cover medical and physical considerations as well as neurodiversity, and includes an invitation to get in touch with us at Murmuration.”
Murmuration will pilot these Navigation and Nurture groups next year and start three or four nurture groups in January 2024. Find out about upcoming courses, groups and events at Murmuration Community Therapy’s Eventbrite, or website.
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