Terry Monell, BFA, CCSC, ILC, MA, Somatic Psychology concentrating in prenatal and perinatal developmental trauma.

After many years as an art consultant developing private and corporate collections, contributing to publications on the visual arts and exhibiting her own work, Terry began to combine her interest in art, spirituality and psychology to explore the subconscious. Through various processes, doors opened to her embodied cognition resulting in drawings that radically changed her life. Without any preconceived idea except to follow the intuitive lead of the medium she was using, images of an infant surgery burst forth on the paper day after day for 6 weeks. The surgery she had undergone at 3 weeks was not a surprise but the primitively rendered images of pain, terror and agony shot through her producing a sense of catastrophic fear. Only after speaking to trauma doctors did she realize that operations, before 1990 for infants under 18 months, had been done without anaesthesia as the standard of practice.

Motivated to understand the infant’s perspective she undertook a master’s program in pre and perinatal psychology. She has been asked to speak and write on the subject of infant medical trauma for APPPAH, the Association of Pre and Perinatal Psychology and Health. Devoted to bringing awareness to this unstudied trauma and its long-term consequences, she is currently working on a book.