Tracey Sainsbury

Tracey Sainsbury, autonomous, independent specialist fertility counsellor

Tracey's love of children saw her leave home at seventeen to travel the world as a nanny, at 27 after meeting her soul mate, Jonathan, she set up a nanny agency. After going back to college she went on to work with Progressive Management Solutions Limited a firm of Occupational Psychologists and then with Fertility Network UK. In both roles providing administrative support whilst training as a counsellor.

Her ambitions as a teenager were to be a sex therapist in Harley Street and to be a Mum. Tracey, in addition to being a counsellor and author now trains sexual and relationship therapists in Fertility Matters for COSRT, CICS and Relate. Sadly her pathway to parenthood was not so successful, years of trying to conceive, pregnancy loss, IVF, donor conception all lead to contentment - contentment with the decision to explore nurturing in other ways.

Counselling, she believed, would help her to better parent her sons through adoption and later her foster child. Quickly learning that you can parent therapeutically - but can't be a counsellor to anyone you're close to! Tracey also learnt that sadly sometimes love isn't enough and following the adoption disruption with her eldest son she remains a Mum to her amazing son Lewis.

Whilst working as a Fertility Counsellor with the London Women's Clinic, Tracey developed a counselling model called FLO, Fantasy Loss Ownership, to help explain and explore the implications of fertility related decisions, especially donor conception. This lead in part to her joining the National Donation Strategy Group to promote Best Practice in egg and sperm donor, care and support.

Tracey also developed the concept of Nurturing Capacity as a way of explaining and exploring the impacts of fertility related desires - not just infertility, as it is as applicable to primary infertility, secondary infertility, single people who hope to conceive and same sex couples too. It is appreciated by the people who attend her talks at the annual Fertility Show in Olympia and prior to that at the National Infertility Day conference, and indeed it was the audience there who asked her to first consider writing a book from her talk and who gave her the confidence to say 'yes' when Sarah Rayner asked her to write 'Making Friends with your Fertility'.

Making Friends with your Fertility, is Tracey's first book and she very much hopes that you find it useful. You might be trying to conceive - or know someone who is...or who may be one day.

You can follow Tracey on Twitter IVFcounsellor and get in touch via www.fertilitycounselling.co.uk