Our Team
Taylor Ross
Trauma-Informed Family Wellness and Education Consultant
Taylor is a speaker, workshop leader and consultant who specializes in helping parents and educators build and repair healthy dynamics and support child/community/family development. She provides a safe and empathetic environment while helping clients integrate their own nuanced understandings of topics such as:
-
Child and brain development
-
The importance of the strength and nature of the attachment relationship
-
Aggression, counter-will, rupture, and repair
-
Seeing beneath childhood behavior to the feelings and needs that need support
-
The relevance of parental/caregiver growth and self awareness
-
Working with stress and overwhelm through meditation and mindfulness
-
Setting developmentally appropriate limits with compassion and confidence
-
Shifting the adult/child dynamic from control to supportive connection
-
Experiences and effects of trauma, loss and resilience
-
Age appropriate approaches to challenging conversations
Taylor Ross’ passion for supporting the emotional wellbeing of families has led her to seek a unique variety of trainings. She is a U-Mass Boston Infant-Parent Mental Health graduate, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and has certificates in Buddhist Psychology and Meditation and Non-Violent Parenting and Education. She is a certified Montessori Teacher, has been trained in Mediation, Motivational Interviewing and Parenting Coordination.
"Our children come in with flashlights and magnifying glasses, asking us to tend to our most tender and underdeveloped parts, so that we can show up for and with them as whole, sound mirrors to their developing selves. When we think about becoming parents, this is rarely what is spoken or thought about. The brave work of tending to these places in ourselves often happens in private and is coupled with shame and a delusional sense that it should be easier or others know innately how to do this with more grace."
Taylor
Susannah Barley
Parenting Coach
Susannah Barley has been coaching and supporting parents holistically for 10 years, since graduating from New Ventures West’s Integral Coaching program. Recognizing the brilliance of the HandinHand Parenting relational approach to parenting, she completed the Professional and Instructor Training in 2018. As a life-long professional violinist she is also trained in the art of listening and attuning to those around her, whether they are fellow musicians or parents and children. Making beautiful music this way provides the two skills critical for cultivating a harmonious family song. Together with a "Phd in parenting" from her personal guru of 17 years, her beloved son, these trainings form the foundation of her approach.
A few years into parenting, she realized that the conditioned and traditional parenting of her son’s trauma-induced needs was just not working. She was led to abandon that approach and begin a journey of self-empowerment and profound change. Since then she has had a lived experience -- sometimes deeply painful — of the road to family healing and happiness.
Susannah brings an embodied understanding and compassion for parents who are bravely struggling with the multi-layered demands of family life. She has fire-in-the-belly to provide parents with the support, education and care that they need to look honestly at their own part in the family dynamic - and thereby begin to transform conflict into connection. Helping parents to find their own power and authority, and playful, loving selves is truly an ongoing honor and joy.
"Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is a way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them
The extraordinary will take care of itself.
William Martin