What I Learned From Completing a PhD as a Grandmother

By Dr. Jennipher McDonald |  Clinical Hypnotherapist  |  Somatic Practitioner  |  Perth, WA

I submitted my doctoral thesis at Curtin University in June 2024. It was conferred in 2025. I was a grandmother.

I write that sentence and it still surprises me a little. Not because I doubt it — I was there, I lived every page of it — but because it does not quite fit the story most people carry about what a PhD student looks like. About when learning happens. About how old is too old to start something new.

I began the doctorate because I had a question I could not answer any other way. After thirty years as a Clinical Hypnotherapist, NLP Trainer and somatic practitioner, I kept encountering a ceiling in my work with women who had experienced family and domestic violence. The clinical tools were doing something important. And there was a layer beneath them that I could not reach.

My question was this: how can somatic practice and systems theory transform the oppression that comes from lived experience of family and domestic violence into wholeness? Following that question all the way to its answer took four years.

What the research confirmed

The doctoral work confirmed what I had suspected from clinical practice: that trauma lives in the body, not just the mind, and that healing which does not address the somatic level will always hit a ceiling.

It also revealed something I had not fully anticipated — that creative expression, specifically movement and performance, can reach places that neither talk therapy nor bodywork alone can access. When women were given a safe container in which to move their stories rather than narrate them, something shifted that other approaches had not been able to shift.

The body, asked to make a shape representing wholeness, discovered that it already knew what wholeness felt like. The knowledge was always there. It simply needed a safe enough space to surface.

It is never too late. The nervous system is not a fixed thing. The patterns that were learned can be unlearned. Wholeness is not a destination for the young and the unscarred.

What it taught me about what is possible

Completing this research as a grandmother — with lived experience of the very thing I was researching — taught me something no literature review could provide: that the question matters more than the timing. That it is never too late to take your deepest question seriously enough to follow it all the way.

If you are wondering whether it is too late for you — whether the healing you need is something you have missed the window for — I want to tell you clearly: it is not.

The work I do with clients, and the workshops I facilitate, are full of women who came to this at fifty, at sixty, at seventy. The body is patient. It has been waiting for you to be ready. When you are, it will meet you exactly where you are.

If you're curious to experience this for yourself, I'd love to welcome you in for a session.

By Dr Jennipher McDonald

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