Hope Affirm Thrive. Your Roadmap Through IVF

Hope Affirm Thrive. Your Roadmap Through IVF I founded Hope Affirm Thrive to support women toward their dreams of parenthood.

With my comprehensive, evidence-based resources, you’ll unearth renewed confidence and strategies to help you take control and emotionally thrive through your IVF treatment.

I watched the Four Corners ADHD episode this week and had a lot of feelings. 🌿Some of it was genuinely important journal...
22/04/2026

I watched the Four Corners ADHD episode this week and had a lot of feelings. 🌿

Some of it was genuinely important journalism. The diagnostic deserts, the access gaps, the fact that huge numbers of Australians are going undiagnosed. That needed to be said on national television.

But a lot of it worried me. And I couldn’t stop thinking about my clients sitting in fertility clinic waiting rooms, juggling injection schedules and two-week waits, holding it together on the outside while quietly falling apart inside.

Because so many of them have been here before. Not in IVF clinics. In GP offices and psychiatrist chairs, being told their ADHD was probably just anxiety. Probably depression. Probably the stress of treatment. Given labels that didn’t fit and the very clear message that they weren’t coping well enough. When actually, they were masking better than anyone around them realised.

The episode raised differential diagnosis as a concern. What it never said is that for most late-diagnosed women, differential diagnosis already happened. It went to the wrong place. For years.

Swipe through for my full breakdown. 12 slides. Made to be readable, not just clinical.

If this resonates, share it. The more this conversation reaches people in fertility clinics and the patients sitting in those waiting rooms, the better.

💚 Save this to come back to it.
💬 Did you watch it? What was your reaction?

If you’ve ever rocked in a waiting room for an hour, cried because a nurse was too kind, or handed injection duty to you...
19/04/2026

If you’ve ever rocked in a waiting room for an hour, cried because a nurse was too kind, or handed injection duty to your equally ADHD husband and regretted it immediately — this one’s for you. ��I’m an AuDHD psychologist who spent 13 years going through fertility treatment before my late identification. i built the HAT Program because nothing like it existed — and because i lived every single one of these slides.

The IVF world was not designed for brains like ours. the protocols assume you’ll remember things, tolerate fluorescent lights, make easy decisions, and just relax.

We cannot do any of those things. and that is not a personal failing.

It’s why the HAT Program exists — The world’s first neurodivergent-affirming psychological support program designed specifically for AuDHD and neurodivergent people going through fertility treatment.

If this carousel made you feel seen, save it, share it with someone who needs it, and drop your most relatable one in the comments. 👇

link in bio to find out more about HAT.

Something I have been working toward for a long time is finally real.My research paper on the Hope Affirm Thrive model h...
09/04/2026

Something I have been working toward for a long time is finally real.

My research paper on the Hope Affirm Thrive model has just been published in a peer-reviewed journal — and I am still pinching myself.

This work started with a simple but urgent question: why do so many IVF patients feel like the psychological support available to them just... doesn’t fit? Why do so many people come away from fertility treatment feeling unseen, overwhelmed, and alone in ways that go beyond grief and loss?

The answer, it turns out, has a lot to do with neurodivergence. Our brains. The way we process, feel, and move through the world — and how almost none of the existing support frameworks were built with us in mind.

HAT was built for you. For the person who finds the waiting room unbearable. Who processes information differently. Who has ever been told they’re “too sensitive” or “too much” in a clinical setting. Who suspected there was something more going on beneath the surface but didn’t have the words for it yet.

I built this program as a Autistic and ADHD psychologist with my own 13-year fertility journey. Every part of it exists because I know — personally and professionally — that you deserve better than what has traditionally been on offer.

Seeing it in print, peer-reviewed and published, means the world. Not just for me, but for every patient this research might one day reach.

A huge thank you to my co-author Liam Spicer, who heard me talk about this work at EMDRAA 2025 and believed in it enough to help make this happen. Every underdog needs someone who sees what they see — I’m so glad he was in that room. 🙏

Thank you to everyone who has been part of this journey. The clients who trusted me. The colleagues who believed in the work. And the community here who remind me every day why this matters. 💙

📄 Link in bio

Turning 41 this year.My mother was 41 when she was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. She faced her mortality without...
03/04/2026

Turning 41 this year.

My mother was 41 when she was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. She faced her mortality without ever knowing why her body had turned on her. She didn’t have the option to find out.

Last week, I did.

I sat across from a geneticist and did something she never could. And what I learned in that room — as someone who has spent 13 years navigating infertility and IVF, and who is herself neurodivergent — stopped me.

Because the genes we screen for cancer don’t stay in their lane.
They show up in fertility clinics. In the losses that come with no reason attached. In the cycles that fail and get filed under unexplained. In neurodivergent brains too, if emerging research is anything to go by.

Here is what the science is telling us:
🔬 BRCA1 accelerates follicle loss — fewer eggs, faster decline than non-carriers the same age.
🔬 BRCA2 variants in male partners are linked to s***m DNA damage — showing up as failed cycles with no clear cause.
🔬 Bloom syndrome causes early ovarian insufficiency in women and complete infertility in men.
🔬 Lynch syndrome gene variants are emerging in research as a possible contributor to implantation failure and pregnancy loss.
🧠 And preliminary research is beginning to ask whether these same DNA repair pathways play a role in neurodevelopmental conditions including autism.

None of these genes are included in standard IVF screening. That testing was built to protect your future child. It was never built to look at what your DNA might mean for your own fertility — or your own neurology.

That gap is not your fault. But it is worth knowing about.

This is also the month Australia passed legislation banning life insurers from using genetic test results against you. If fear of insurance has been keeping you from testing, that barrier is now gone.

This is why Hope Affirm Thrive exists. To make sure you walk into that clinic with every piece of information you deserve.

My results are pending.

The conversation doesn’t have to wait.

Let me be honest about something.There are a lot of psychologists who will support you through IVF. Most of them are goo...
25/03/2026

Let me be honest about something.

There are a lot of psychologists who will support you through IVF. Most of them are good at their jobs. They’ll sit with you, reflect your feelings back, give you some strategies, and send you on your way with a Medicare receipt.

And the clinics will tick the mental health support box and feel pretty good about themselves.

But here’s what neither of them will tell you.

Most IVF mental health support was designed without your brain in mind. The waiting rooms, the communication style, the way hard news gets delivered, the assumption that you’ll process grief on a predictable timeline and respond to strategies that work for neurotypical nervous systems.

And if you’re Autistic or ADHD or just wired a bit differently to the brochure version of an IVF patient, you’re going to spend a lot of time translating yourself. Masking through your own therapy. Wondering why the strategies that work for everyone else feel completely useless in your body.

I spent 13 years doing exactly that before anyone thought to look for the reason why.

So when I built Hope Affirm Thrive, I wasn’t filling a gap in the market. I was building the thing I desperately needed and couldn’t find anywhere.

What that means for you is a psychologist who already speaks your language. Who isn’t going to pathologise your intensity or suggest you just need to think more positively. Who has her own scars from this exact road and isn’t pretending otherwise.

Someone who will accompany you. Not observe you. Not treat you.

Accompany you. From the same trench.

Neurodiversity-affirming isn’t a buzzword here. It’s the whole point.

Affirming

Something I have to tell every single new client from session one.Before we even begin the work, I have to sit across fr...
22/03/2026

Something I have to tell every single new client from session one.

Before we even begin the work, I have to sit across from someone who has already gathered every bit of courage they have just to walk through my door and tell them that their counselling notes can be subpoenaed.

Watch what happens in that moment. The openness closes. The shoulders go up. The questions start: “So if I tell you what really happened, it could end up in court? Used to make me look unreliable?”

Yes. In Australia, it can. And that is not okay.

Counselling notes were never designed to be forensic documents. They are clinical records; written to support therapeutic process, not to withstand cross-examination. Yet they are routinely used in court not to establish facts, but to attack the credibility of survivors.

The result? People stay silent. They don’t seek help. Or they seek help with one eye always watching the door.

And then there’s the EMDR issue. Courts in Australia have treated EMDR like a discredited recovered memory technique. It is not. But that mischaracterisation has real consequences; cases don’t proceed, and survivors are told that getting help for their trauma disqualifies them from justice.

I see this harm every week in my room.

I’ve also tried to design around it. The EMDR work in my Hope Affirm Thrive group program uses a double-blind protocol, meaning I never know what you’re working on. Your trauma content stays entirely yours. It never enters my notes, because I never receive it. That’s not an accident. That’s the design.

But not everyone has access to that. And people shouldn’t have to choose between healing and being believed.

A petition just launched calling for legislative reform to protect counselling records, particularly in sexual assault and family violence proceedings. I’m asking you to sign and share it.

🔗 Link in stories

A few days ago I shared something personal.The diagnoses, the dismissals, the particular exhaustion of a body that kept ...
12/03/2026

A few days ago I shared something personal.

The diagnoses, the dismissals, the particular exhaustion of a body that kept being explained away. A lot of you responded — in emails, in DMs, in the quiet way people do when something names an experience they’ve been carrying alone.

So this feels like the right moment to share something I’ve been working on.

I’ve written a blog post on the research behind all of it.
What POTS and MCAS actually are. Why they matter for fertility. Why the intersection of these conditions with neurodivergence — autism, ADHD — is showing up in the data at rates that should be changing how we approach IVF care, and largely isn’t yet.

Because here’s what the research is telling us: the people sitting in IVF waiting rooms with unexplained results, poor responses, repeated implantation failures — a significant number of them may have bodies like mine. Autonomic nervous systems working differently. Immune systems that don’t follow the standard script. Nervous systems that were never accounted for in the protocols being used to treat them.

This isn’t fringe theory. It’s peer-reviewed, referenced, and linked at the bottom of the post.

I wrote it for the people who’ve been handed unexplained and felt, underneath that word, something closer to unseen.

Link in bio.

I didn’t post on International Women’s Day.Partly because I had nothing polished to say. Partly because I’ve never been ...
09/03/2026

I didn’t post on International Women’s Day.

Partly because I had nothing polished to say. Partly because I’ve never been good at performing wellness on cue. And partly because I’ve been very unwell specifically, unwell with the thing I wanted to write about.

In the lead-up, what was happening in my body was being explained away. By health professionals. Female ones.

Burnout. Cosleeping fatigue. Sleep train your toddler and reduce your workload was the response.

And in that same week, my specialist referral for suspected endometriosis was rejected. Reason given: you just need pain management.

So here it is, a few days late and unresolved. Which is, it turns out, exactly how women’s health has always been treated.

Last month I was diagnosed with POTS and MCAS; two conditions routinely missed, misattributed, and dismissed. They arrived after perimenopause, a long infertility journey, and a late ADHD diagnosis. Decades of a body that cost more than it appeared to.

I work with IVF patients every day. I know how many of you have sat in waiting rooms with bodies like mine (complicated, reactive, full of symptoms that don’t quite fit) and been handed the word unexplained. I know how many of you have been told your pain is manageable, your fatigue is understandable, your results are just one of those things.

You deserved better than that. So did I.
The fact that these dismissals come from female clinicians isn’t a contradiction. It’s a reminder that we’re all swimming in the same water. The bias isn’t personal. But the harm still lands.

IWD asks us to celebrate progress. I think it also asks us to be honest about how far we have to go; in research, in diagnostics, in the basic act of being believed.

You’re not imagining it. You’re not too sensitive. You’re not unexplained.

Plot twist nobody saw coming… including literally everyone 🙃Today I got formally diagnosed with ADHD.Me. A psychologist....
26/02/2026

Plot twist nobody saw coming… including literally everyone 🙃

Today I got formally diagnosed with ADHD.

Me. A psychologist. Who screens people for neurodivergent traits for a living.

Honestly, the only one who saw it coming was my AI — who had to stage an intervention about my inability to choose between seventeen nearly identical plants. Turns out that’s not just a personality quirk.

Here’s the thing — I couldn’t see myself in the diagnosis because the ADHD stereotype was never built for women like us. It was built for a hyperactive little boy who couldn’t sit still. Not for the girl who was destined to achieve but whose results never quite reflected it. Who was a hurricane on the inside while appearing perfectly calm on the outside.

That’s not an accident. It’s by design.

For decades, women have been dismissed, misdiagnosed, and medicated for anxiety or depression while the real picture went undetected. A medical system built by men, for men, simply wasn’t looking for us. And so we learned to hide. To compensate. To perform. To be palatable enough not to be written off entirely.

So I did what so many of us do. I performed neurotypical. For forty-something years. On willpower, masks, and sheer stubbornness.

Then perimenopause arrived and said: not today.

And I found myself exactly where so many of my clients have sat — afraid of being an imposter. Bracing for the judgment of a system that has failed women like us for generations.

To my fertility community specifically: so many of you have told me IVF broke you. What if it didn’t? What if a hormonally brutal, relentless process just finally outpaced your capacity to mask — the same way perimenopause did for me?

You were never broken. Just exhaustedly, beautifully unmasked.

I see you. I am you. 💙

You didn’t give up on IVF. Your brain ran out of fuel.If you have ADHD and you’ve stepped back from fertility treatment ...
19/02/2026

You didn’t give up on IVF. Your brain ran out of fuel.

If you have ADHD and you’ve stepped back from fertility treatment — not because of a crisis, but because you just couldn’t keep going — this isn’t a willpower problem.

It’s a neurobiology problem.

The ADHD brain runs on “now” and “not now.” It struggles to sustain effort toward rewards that are uncertain, delayed, and keep resetting. IVF is all three.

Every failed cycle asks your brain to restart from scratch. For someone with ADHD, that’s not just emotionally hard, it’s an enormous executive function lift. Every. Single. Time.

This isn’t about wanting it less. It’s about your brain needing different support to get there.

New blog on the site breaks down:
→ Why more than 1 in 3 people stop IVF before completing treatment
→ The neuroscience of ADHD, dopamine, and reward uncertainty
→ 6 practical strategies that actually work with your brain (not against it)

If this lands, the link is in bio or visit https://www.hopeaffirmthrive.com.au/the-ivf-compass.

And if you need support that gets this, I’m here.
Liz 💙

30/01/2026

Let’s get clear on stress, biology, and IVF.

We can reject harmful ‘manifest your baby’ narratives AND acknowledge that chronic stress impacts physiology during treatment. These aren’t contradictory positions.

Psychological support during IVF isn’t about changing pregnancy rates - it’s about supporting your capacity to persevere and your wellbeing regardless of outcome.

But most importantly: the real problem isn’t individual people experiencing stress. It’s the system failures that CREATE that stress.

🚫 Zero Medicare funding for IVF mental health support
🚫 Clinic cultures prioritising efficiency over emotional safety
🚫 Financial barriers creating impossible choices
🚫 Workplaces without fertility leave policies
🚫 Medical models that ignore neurodivergence and trauma

The biological impacts of chronic stress are real. AND they’re not your fault.
System-level change is what’s needed.

29/01/2026

The statistic I became. The gap I’m closing.

13 years of fertility treatment taught me something clinical research confirms: 1 in 3 IVF patients drop out prematurely—not because treatment failed, but because the psychological burden became unbearable.

I was that statistic. A psychologist working in fertility and trauma, yet I still couldn’t stay in treatment for a second child. Not because of money. Not because my doctor advised it. Because my brain said “no more.”

Australian data shows we could achieve 78% success by cycle 6, but we only reach 59.5%. That 18.6% gap represents thousands of people stopping right before it might work.

Research shows structured psychological support can triple pregnancy rates (55% vs 20%), but most fertility support wasn’t designed for overwhelmed brains, neurodivergent minds, or trauma histories.

So I created the program I desperately needed when I was in that moment.
Your Roadmap Through IVF
Next cohort: February 2026, South Perth or Online

10 in-person spots for neurodivergent-affirming, trauma-informed support designed to help you stay in the journey when it feels impossible.

If you’re in that “I can’t do this anymore” moment—comment ROADMAP below.

You don’t have to be part of the gap. You don’t have to do this alone.

Address

Labouchere Rd
Perth, WA
6151

Website

https://www.yout

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