Manisha Sheth - Baby Loss & Perinatal Counsellor

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Manisha Sheth - Baby Loss & Perinatal Counsellor

Counsellor & trainer supporting parents and professionals with baby loss, perinatal mental health, and culturally aligned care.

16/08/2026

You can love your baby completely and still miss the version of you that existed before.

You can be grateful for your relationship and still mourn the life before parenthood changed everything.

Both things are true. And carrying both of them at the same time, without permission to name either, is exhausting.

I hear from so many women who are frightened to say this out loud. Who worry that admitting they miss their old life, their old self, their old relationship means something is wrong with them. That they’re not grateful enough. Not maternal enough. Not coping as well as everyone else appears to be.

What I want to say to them, and to you, if this is landing, is this:

Grief and love are not opposites. They live alongside each other all the time. You are mourning a version of yourself and your life that has genuinely changed. That is allowed. It is human and it doesn’t need to be hidden.

For many women in South Asian and global majority communities, there’s an extra layer here. The expectation that motherhood is only joy. That expressing anything else is ingratitude or weakness. That the right response to a healthy baby is uncomplicated happiness.

The silence that expectation creates is one of the loneliest places I know of.

If you’re sitting in it, you don’t have to stay there alone.

~ Manisha 🦋

13/08/2026

🦋 Trauma-informed care is a phrase that appears a lot in maternity and mental health spaces. But it doesn’t always get explained, which means it’s hard to know whether what you’re receiving actually qualifies.

So here’s what it genuinely means, and what to look for.

🍂 At its core, trauma-informed care recognises that many people accessing services are doing so while carrying experiences that affect how safe they feel, how much they trust, and how they respond. A trauma-informed practitioner works with that, not around it.

🍂 It means your pace is respected. Your concerns are taken seriously. Your cultural and faith context is part of the picture, not an afterthought. And you are never made to feel like your distress is an inconvenience.

🍂 For Black, Asian and global majority women, this matters enormously. Trauma-informed care that doesn’t account for race, culture and the lived experience of navigating systems that weren’t designed for you is, in my view, incomplete.

If you’ve ever left an appointment feeling worse than when you went in, more dismissed, more alone, that is worth naming. That is not what good care looks like.

You deserve better. And it exists.

~ Manisha 🦋

11/08/2026

Nobody told me there was a word for it.

Matrescence. The transformation of becoming a mother. The identity shift that is as profound as adolescence, and almost entirely absent from the conversations we have to prepare people for parenthood.

It isn’t just about mood or mental health, though it can affect both. It’s about who you are. Who you were before. The version of yourself that existed independently of your baby, your partner, your family’s expectations of who you now need to be.

And here’s a common theme that comes up for couples: two people are both going through this transformation, at different paces, in different ways, inside the same relationship. Neither has the language for it. Both are quietly wondering what happened to the person they fell in love with. Both are wondering if the other person is okay. Neither is asking.

The distance that grows in that space isn’t a sign that the relationship is failing. It’s a sign that two people are both carrying something significant and haven’t yet found their way to each other with it.

That’s exactly what couples counselling in the perinatal period is for.

~ Manisha 🦋

09/08/2026

World Breastfeeding Week may be drawing to a close, but this conversation doesn’t belong to one week.

Because feeding struggles don’t just affect the person feeding. They move through the relationship too. And that part rarely gets named.

It can look like this:

🍂 One person is exhausted, in pain, grieving the feeding experience they hoped for, and feeling like their body has let them down. The other doesn’t know how to help, is scared of saying the wrong thing, and starts going quiet to avoid making it worse.

🍂 The silence that grows in that space isn’t distance. It’s two people who love each other not knowing how to reach each other across something really hard.

🍂 And underneath it all there’s often so much that goes unsaid. The guilt of stopping. The resentment of pressure, from health professionals, from family, from a culture that has very loud opinions about how babies should be fed. The grief of it not going the way you planned. The exhaustion of holding all of that while also keeping a tiny human alive.

Partners, this is for you too. Your person doesn’t always need you to fix it. Sometimes they need you to sit with them in it. To say: I know this is really hard. I’m not going anywhere.

And if feeding has become something that’s sitting between you and your partner, quietly, heavily, that’s worth talking about. With each other first. And with someone who can help, if you need it.

~ Manisha 🦋

08/08/2026

Rainbow Baby Week 2026 is 16th–22nd August, and I’m honoured to be joining Willow’s Rainbow Box on Monday 17th for their Perinatal Mental Health in Pregnancy After Loss panel event.

It’s a free online event and I’d love for you to join us. Whether you’re navigating a rainbow pregnancy yourself, supporting someone who is, or working in this space, this week has something for everyone.

Link in bio to book your free space for the 17th!

~ Manisha 🦋

06/08/2026

I’m pleased to share that counselling appointments are now open through Islamic Marriage Solutions.

As the counsellor providing this service, I’ll be working with Muslim couples and individuals who are looking for professional support that holds their faith and cultural values at the centre, not as a footnote, but as a foundation.

Services available include Marriage Readiness Reviews, Premarital Counselling, Parenthood Preparation and Ongoing Couples Counselling. All sessions are held online via Zoom.

New clients are welcome to book a free 15-minute discovery call to find out more and explore whether this is the right fit. DM me to learn more.

For general inquiries, feel free to email [email protected] or leave a voice message at 0115 8248786 for a callback.

~ Manisha 🦋

31/07/2026

This one is for the partners.

Because I sit with couples where one person is visibly carrying a traumatic birth experience, and the other is carrying something too, quietly, guiltily, convinced that their distress doesn’t count or isn’t appropriate to name.

They were there. They witnessed something frightening. They may have felt completely helpless. And then they went home, got on with things, and told themselves that what they felt didn’t matter because they weren’t the one it happened to.

That silence has consequences. For the individual. And for the relationship.

Partners can develop trauma responses after a difficult birth. That is real, it is recognised, and it deserves support, not as an afterthought, but in its own right.

~ Manisha 🦋

29/07/2026

July is Minority Mental Health Month, and I don’t want it to pass without talking about what actually gets in the way.

Because it’s not enough to say “seek help” without acknowledging how complicated that can be for global majority communities. The stigma is real. The fear of what family or community will think is real. The experience of reaching out and finding a service that doesn’t understand your world, and coming away feeling more alone than before, is real.

These barriers don’t exist because global majority communities don’t care about mental health. They exist because of a complex mix of cultural values, community structures, generational silence, and services that were not designed with us in mind.

Naming them isn’t criticism. It’s the beginning of something.

If any of this resonates, if you’ve been sitting with something and haven’t known how to take the first step, my link in bio has details on how we can work together. A free 15-minute call is always where we start.

~ Manisha 🦋

26/07/2026

Enmeshment is a clinical term, But in culturally diverse families, it can show up in ways that are much more nuanced than a textbook definition captures.

It’s not about families being toxic or parents being controlling, though sometimes those things are present too. It’s about what happens when the boundary between self and family becomes so thin that it’s hard to know where one ends and the other begins.

It can look like:

🍂 Not being able to make a decision, about your relationship, your career, where you live, without it first going through the family.
🍂 Feeling responsible for your parents’ emotional state.
🍂 Guilt that arrives the moment you prioritise your own needs.
🍂 A partner who comes second to the family, not because you don’t love them, but because that’s the water you’ve always swum in.

And here’s the part that matters most: these patterns make sense. They developed in families where interdependence was survival, where community and reputation were genuinely important, where love and duty were the same thing.

Understanding enmeshment isn’t about rejecting your family or your culture. It’s about developing enough clarity to make choices, real ones, rather than just repeating patterns without knowing you’re doing it.

That’s work I find genuinely meaningful to do alongside people.

~ Manisha 🦋

24/07/2026

I want to name something that doesn’t get talked about enough.

For many Black, Asian and global majority couples, the fear of counselling isn’t just about stigma. It’s about what might happen in the room. Whether the counsellor will understand. Whether the family will be framed as the villain. Whether faith will be dismissed. Whether one partner will walk out feeling like the session was quietly stacked against them.

Those fears aren’t irrational. They come from real experiences, of services that weren’t built with us in mind, and frameworks that don’t always translate across cultures without care.

Culturally aligned couples counselling isn’t about having a counsellor who shares your background. It’s about being in a room where your whole life is taken seriously. Where the complexity is held, not flattened.

If you’ve been putting off counselling because you weren’t sure it would feel safe, I want you to know that that matters. And that the right space exists. Check out the link in bio to learn more.

~ Manisha 🦋

Address

Nottingham

Telephone

+447885564351

Website

https://nurturingmama.co.uk/

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