About Me
The Mama Nurse is an online resource center created to support families and wellness professionals to make informed decisions about health and well-being.
About Tori Hamilton
Tori has created this website as a way to combat the misinformation often sold to parents within various marketing schemes. She has been a “parenting expert” for the past 13 years, but always struggled with telling parents what to do when they themselves often had the best interventions and solutions within themselves. She owns Attuned Therapy + Wellness, a therapy clinic in Kincardine, Ontario. She has a full practice and enjoys creative writing as a hobby.
Certifications, trainings & interests:
- Registered Nurse with 10 years of labour/delivery, postpartum care, med/surg, palliative care, elderly care & management experience as a Director of Care
- Obstetrical subject matter expert and NCLEX test item writer for private nursing companies
- La Leche League Leader (retired)
- International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC)
- Certified Baby-led Well-Being Specialist
- Certified Perinatal Mental Health Professional (PMH-C)
- Nurse Psychotherapist in Ontario, Canada with training in Compassionate Inquiry, Internal Family Systems, Polyvagal Theory, Complex Trauma and Brainspotting Therapy
- Specializations in clinical practice include perinatal mental health, abandonment wounds, perfectionism, repairing relationships, self-regulation and co-regulation within the family system, healing traumatic events with adults, youth and children through Brainspotting.
- Certified Reiki Master (level 3 Tera-Mai)
- Special interest in psychic development, spiritual awakening, and the interplay between mental health and spiritual awareness
More About My Journey & How I Can Help You Become Your True Self
I am here to help you find your own way. I know how hard it is to reach out for help (or to know that you need it!) when you are knee-deep in challenges that life throws our way.
The reason why I am so passionate about what I do is because I have been through a significant amount of ups and downs, and have always received the help I needed to continue on my path towards enlightenment. There has always been a light at the end of the tunnel, whether it was related to infant sleep and feeding, learning about myself through human design or psychology, or becoming more aware of the spiritual realm through my Reiki training and practice. It has taken me a significant portion of my life, now being 35 years young, to realize that nothing matters besides being present and joyful with my family. My children have been catalysts for my healing journey, and I know that each of your children have been as well.
Children are here to support growth here on Earth, and when we open our eyes to their true nature, we can recognize that everything that we think is wrong with ourselves and our children, are only perceptions. When we heal ourselves as parents, we offer our children the possibility to grow up fully aligned with their life’s purpose and to be allowed to be themselves, rather than having to develop protective layers that we believe to be personality traits.
I believe that when our babies arrive in the world, they already have their own temperament & life plan. As parents, it is our job to stay attuned to our baby’s needs, day and night. When we allow our babies to rest in our love fully, they grow up believing that they are safe in the world. When we believe we are safe, we can become fully at peace with ourselves. Imagine how wonderful that would be? A world full of people who feel completely at peace within?
I believe that all parents deserve respect, compassion & guidance. Parents are tasked with the most challenging job, to release their own trauma in order to let their children grow up without baggage. It is the best thing that we can do for humanity, and it requires a significant amount of energy and time. Parents should be given the utmost respect by society and by their family system. They have been mistreated in many cultures, and the Western World is no different. In my therapy practice, I see children, youth, and adults of all ages. I see the vast range of experiences, and yet I also see the connections between us all. We are all trying to grow and expand our consciousness, and we are all needing help from each other. Whether you are an abusive parent, a parent who has been a martyr, a parent who gave themselves nothing to be sad about, or a parent who doesn’t know where to even start, you deserve to be given a hand up.
There is no such thing as a bad person. Just people who have endured significant heart ache, pain and stress growing up. Our lived experiences shape who we become, and when we take ownership of our behaviours, then we always have the capacity to shift and repair and reap the rewards of becoming fully at peace within ourselves. Even if we don’t have parents who hold and rock and cuddle us, we can still become fully at peace within when we choose to do the inner work.
I believe that all babies are good babies, that there is no such thing as spoiling a baby, and that you won’t ruin your baby’s sleep forever by nursing, cuddling, or rocking to sleep. This is just the beginning, though. I believe that all humans are good humans. People are always surprising me with their insights, empathy and compassion, when they are given the chance to be seen as good. We don’t need to give more than what we have to each other. Just what we have, and when we let go of our pain, we can grow stronger and more capable of helping others.
I believe that the best way to make positive change in this world is to get right to the root of our existence – our infancy – and provide the nurturing (which indeed is a basic human need) that the majority of us in previous generations didn’t have access to. We can start with our infants, but this soon needs to shift towards ourselves as parents so that we don’t become angry and resentful.
I have professional & personal experience in pretty much every aspect of motherhood – pregnancy, birth, postpartum & beyond. Interestingly enough, I also have personal & professional experience with death and the aged. I love death, because with death comes life. I have had multiple near-death experiences, and each and every time I have chosen life because of how beautiful the world and people around me are. Death is not bad. It is another beginning. We don’t let go completely unless we have reached our final destination in this lifetime. We must always respect each other and our suicidal clients are people who need the most tenderness and compassion. They are the ones in life who feel unseen and unheard, and who don’t have a purpose. They need to be fully integrated into our society in order for them to come back to us. They need to be loved and nurtured just like a young infant. The same is true for our aged population. They need to feel purposeful and loved. If we leave them alone in homes that don’t provide this, they will perish very quickly. If we can care for them at home, they will bring so much joy into our lives. This is only true if we are able to repair our relationships with them by releasing the wounds we have been carrying.
In addition to my professional experience, I am also a mom of four amazing kids. I have struggled with breastfeeding challenges (um, all of them), have struggled with severe sleep deprivation, finding myself desperately looking for an alternative to sleep training. We have navigated reflux, eczema, failure to thrive and food sensitivities. There are no experiences that I haven’t been through as a parent, and yet I am never going to live a life like yours. We are all so complex, and we all have an important story to tell. I have became significantly delirious with the awareness of the world at large, and how we are all connected within our lives. This event caused me to believe that I was mentally ill, and yet when I snapped out of this event I understood the meaning of life and all that we are meant to become. Happy.
Happiness seems oversimplified as a meaning of life, but it is exactly what we are when we are at peace with ourselves. Isn’t that what we all want? To be able to rest and enjoy the small moments? To be able to give the world our gifts without having to worry about money or wasting our time or being morally inappropriate towards others? We all want the same thing when we get closer to our true selves, and Internal Family Systems has been a tremendous help in bringing me closer to this awareness. I have been through my own healing journey and continue to attend therapy, as I know I can only take clients as far as I have come myself.
As a highly sensitive, empathic person, I love working with families who also are highly sensitive (HSP). I like to think of sensitivity as a superpower rather than a problem. The same goes for neurodivergence and most other diagnosed mental health problems. Much of what is diagnosed can actually be determined to be a good coping mechanism for what people are going through or what they have been through as infants and children.
Thanks for being here, and for reading this information. I hope that you are able to find the support you need to move through your life in a way that feels good for you, and that your children are able to find their way as well. We are all trying to do our best, and you are not an exception. No matter where you are in your journey, please know how important your life is and how much your story matters.