Strong Mothers Project

About Strong Mothers

Strong Mothers is a five-year initiative dedicated to supporting deeply traumatised women throughout pregnancy and during the first years of their infants’ lives. There current program that we are proudly partnered in, focuses on refugee mothers and their families who have experienced shocking trauma. Many have fled their homelands in fear of their lives, arriving in Australia displaced and traumatised, while facing poverty, isolation, and judgement as they begin to rebuild their lives.

Strong Mothers is the legacy of Norma Tracey OAM, whose 60-year career has profoundly shaped the field of parent–infant mental health. Norma is the author of six books, ten booklets, and more than twenty-four internationally published papers on the wellbeing of mothers, fathers, and children.

This much-needed project based in Western Sydney, Strong Mothers blends intensive therapeutic care with holistic social support. Renee proudly partners with and sits on the Strong Mothers sterring committee along with offering continuity of care, support and education from our dedicated Doulas.

At the heart of the program is three to five years of weekly individual psychotherapy, designed to heal, strengthen, and empower each woman—both as an individual and as a mother. This core therapeutic work is complemented by mothers’ groups that build practical skills in parenting, infant care, cooking, shopping, and daily life management.

The program also offers financial assistance, educational opportunities, and access to crucial social resources. Where a partner is present, they are welcomed as active participants and provided with targeted support to help strengthen family relationships.

The program is comprehensively evaluated by Western Sydney University (WSU), with the goal of developing an evidence-based model of care that creates a lasting circle of security and support—helping mothers build a stable foundation for themselves, their infants, and their futures.

Norma Tracey Founder and Clinical Director of Strong Mothers wrote of her years of experience with her colleagues who now inform this work through weekly meetings around Psychoanalytic theory of trauma:

“Modern psychoanalytic theory pays special attention to the emerging understanding that childhood trauma, as well as severe adult trauma, can lead to an autistic cut-out or even a psychotic pocket where emotion can’t be experienced, pain can’t be suffered, meaning is lost, and there is a concretisation of experience and loss of capacity for reverie and empathy.”

https://strongmothers.org.au/