Birthing Trauma

Birthing Trauma

As both a therapist and a mother, I am realizing more and more that although other parts of motherhood are becoming more common to support and care for such as postpartum, there is still a missing piece that many overlook or dismiss.  I would say about 50% of women that I either talk to or work with have some type of birth trauma.  Birth trauma is a vague term as this can refer to anything from the birth experience not being what you had hoped for all the way to the experience of almost dying yourself or the loss of your baby.

I noticed in the later months of my own pregnancy, women would often start to share their birth story, however, as a trauma therapist I noticed quickly that they were usually not positive happy stories. The women that wanted to share their stories usually had traumatic births in one way or another.  Often the women sharing were women who of course ended up being ok, and also eventually had a healthy baby.  However, they would recount their story as though it happened yesterday, even some much older women.  It became clear to me that although somewhat tucked away, many of these mothers were never supported in clearing or working with these experiences and were attempting to process by telling their story.

Unfortunately, women trying to process their birth trauma from years ago by retelling the story isn’t really helping themselves or the new soon to be mother they are sharing with.  It usually only instills fear in the pregnant mother, which of course dys-regulates the nervous system and is basically the exact opposite of what is needed or optimal for birth.  

It also isn’t ideal for the woman sharing about her trauma because if it has been longer then about 6 months it really only brings that trauma back to the surface but doesn’t actually process it out.  That woman is probably trying to process by sharing but really is only re traumatizing herself as well as the person about to deliver. At this point you would want to work with a trauma therapist and most likely use EMDR and somatic techniques to reprocess the birth trauma.  

I believe women tuck birth trauma away for many reasons.  Even knowing better, I did this myself.  About 1.5 years after I delivered my son I went away to visit my sister who had just had her first baby and this is when I realized I had brith trauma that needed some attention.  

I had never left my son for more then a few hours and definitely had not left him overnight.  The first day almost felt like a relief, I had space to breath and be and I was excited to meet my niece. As the days went on my anxiety increased, many negative thoughts kept popping in my mind, ‘I am a bad mom’, ‘I did something wrong by leaving him’.  ‘Is he ok?’. ‘He doesn’t understand and thinks I left him’. I logically knew my husband had it completely under control and that everyone was ok. However, despite this knowing, I ended up moving into more and more anxiety until I was at the airport, about to travel home, and I started to have severe anxiety, almost to the point of a panic attack.  Since I know anxiety is a message, it notified me that something was not right. I realized in this moment that this level of activation did not make logical sense for having left my son for a few days.  

I often tell clients, if your reaction seems very off or seems larger than the situation is, it is probably from past trauma.  

I will share that part of the difficulty from my sons birth was that he was taken away immediately after birth and taken to the NICU, and I did not know if he was ok.  I realized this is what was being triggered here. I felt after his birth and continued to feel a strong sense of grief as well as a feeling that it was my fault, I had failed him in ways that I could not go back and change and I never wanted to leave him or ‘abandon him’ again.  I did not have the birth you see where the woman is completely exhausted but gets to hold her baby, and it appears everything that just happened melts away from the look in her eyes. That was not my birth experience, even though I longed for it as I am sure many other women do. 

Leaving him to visit my sister had triggered the guilt I felt for not being able to hold and nurture him immediately after birth and during the trip the feeling that I had left him came up again, ‘I had failed him'.  

I did end up reprocessing his birth using EMDR and I encourage anyone who has experienced birth/labor trauma to work with an experienced trauma therapist to process this.  It will support you and your baby moving forward. If there is trauma from labor there is often a good amount held in the body and we don’t want to carry that forward with us, it’s a heavy load, and as moms we have enough to carry.