Healing Birth Trauma

If you’ve been here with me for any length of time (or are part of my instagram fam), you will for sure have heard something about the birth of my daughter (and healing birth trauma that came from it!). I promise I don’t aim to make my traumatic birth experience my entire personality, but I have felt a personal conviction to share our story over the last few years. Because even though I did all of the research, reading, watching birth stories + courses, I wasn’t prepared when my daughter was born.

I wasn’t prepared for her birth or what happened during it.
I wasn’t prepared for her NICU stay.
And I really wasn’t prepared for the healing I’d need to do as a result of both.

I’m not going to rehash my daughter’s entire story or even share more about my birth here because that isn’t the point of this post, but I will link a podcast that includes every last detail for those of you who want them. What I will share here is that I walked away from the hospital after a 6 week NICU stay with very serious PTSD and a real need to get some help.

I didn’t have a postpartum recovery period. I didn’t enter motherhood with a solid foundation of breastfeeding or sleep or even a healthy baby. I love my daughter more than any human in the entire world (besides her dad), but I was not prepared for just how hard recovering from our experience would be for all 3 of us or how all of that trauma would affect my entry into motherhood.

I am not an expert on healing from birth trauma or even a hard postpartum. But I have done it. And I felt like I really had to figure out how to do it on my own because the resources available felt far and few between. I heard a LOT of women share that they too had traumatic stories, but I couldn’t find a place where they shared how they moved on, how they healed, how they reframed their ideas of birth. Because even though my birth was traumatic the first time, I didn’t want to believe that all birth was traumatic.

And friend, it is work, but it can be done. You can heal from your experience. You can mourn and process and move on. You are deserving of that experience.

Step 1 to healing birth trauma: find a therapist

For me, the first step was enlisting the help of a professional. About a month or so after we came home from the hospital, I knew I needed to reach out to my therapist. I couldn’t sleep at night from the flashbacks. I replayed my birth over and over and over, micromanaging every single detail and trying to fill in the missing pieces, as if some how those missing parts would make it all make sense. But instead of helping, these flashbacks left me awake when I was desperate for sleep, convinced of my own fault in the outcome, and struggling with extreme anxiety about my baby.

Luckily I had a therapist I’d worked with off and on over the last few years and I called her. We met together and she provided me a safe space to process every single detail of what happened. Because she wasn’t a friend, family member or someone with any personal investment in the events, I had complete freedom to speak and process without worrying about her emotional response. She also had freedom to challenge me in my thinking patterns in a way that no one else did. I spent 3 months meeting with my therapist weekly as I transitioned into motherhood and these sessions helped give me the groundwork for the rest of the healing work that I would take on in the coming months and years.

If you take nothing else away from this post, or do nothing other than this in healing birth trauma, please give yourself the gift of therapy. I can’t imagine having to manage the emotions and experiences surrounding this trauma by myself. I’m not sure I could have done it without the the help of a professional. I KNOW it’s expensive and time consuming and hard to make space for when you have tiny babies, but it will help you more in your motherhood journey than you can imagine. It is so worth it.

Step 2: write your story

The second step for me was actually allowing myself space to really process my story in a way that felt helpful. And for me, that was writing it down. My therapist actually recommended that I spend time doing this, and I took her up on her suggestion. I shared it online because that’s my personality and was part of the healing for me, but you don’t need to do that for it to be effective. Seeing the details on paper and giving words to the things that I experienced and felt was very cathartic. It’s also been wonderfully interesting to go back and see how differently I would characterize the experience now that we’re a few years removed. Honestly, no matter how long it’s been since your own experience, I think this process is an incredible gift + so helpful in healing birth trauma.

Step 3: find connection or community

Once I’d given myself space to re-live and start to process my own birth story, I moved on to what I would consider trauma exposure therapy, ha! While pregnant I listened to hundreds of hours of other women’s birth stories on the podcast, The Birth Hour. But after Poppy was born, I honestly couldn’t be exposed to anything birth related without feeling like I’d been slapped. I couldn’t see it on tv, hear someone else talk about it, anything, But over time, I knew that I needed to rip off the bandaid. So, I start listening to stories again.

And I did it without judgement of how I responded. I started by listening to other traumatic stories, mostly because I actually found the happy, normal births much harder to listen to. Hearing other women share their stories of trauma, although different than mine, allowed my brain to fill in gaps in my own story. Sometimes their language for how they felt or what happened felt like a better representation of my feelings that anything I was able to conjure up and that made me feel so much less alone.

But over time, I moved on to listening to all birth stories again. And I allowed myself space to feel ALL of the feelings: jealousy, bitterness, sadness…and eventually, hope. Somehow after a few months, I noticed that my heart began to allow space for birth to be more than trauma. For my actual beliefs about birth, that it’s good and holy and perfectly designed, to begin to show through again + for my birth trauma to find it’s place amongst the realities of birth for most normal, healthy women. What a gift.

Step 4: birth processing

Being a resident of the UK, I also had access to a service that I believe ALL women, regardless of their birth experience, should have: a birth debrief. It’s a meeting with a birth professional (a midwife) who was not connected to your birth. For me, this looked like spending an hour in a room with this midwife as she read through my hospital notes and we processed them together. She provided me with all sorts of medical information that I had previously been in the dark about. (I’ll link a set of stories I did on instagram all about this experience if you want to know more). It really did help answer some of my questions about “why” some things were handled the way they were. I also was able to challenge places where I felt like my legal right of informed consent was not honoured. Obviously this didn’t change the reality that it happened, but it did allow for direct feedback to the hospital about this issue, which felt important to me.

I’m not sure whether or not any medical professionals in the US would offer this service, but I do know there are private doulas and birthing professionals who do. Please leave it in the comments if you know where to find a resource like this in America.

Step 5: prayer

For me, the healing process could not have happened without prayer + surrender. I believe that God carried us through our pregnancy/birth/early years experiences with Poppy in a way nothing else can. I SAW the results of our (and thousands of others prayers) play out in real time. I knew that if God could heal my baby that He could heal my heart too. And so I brought him all of the broken pieces and continued to lay them down again and again and again.

I knew in my head that there was purpose and beauty in the season that we lived, even if I didn’t believe that sickness and separation was God’s best for me or my baby. It was a long journey of accepting the consequences of the broken world we live in + how it affected God’s perfect plan for birth + babies, but over time, He met me exactly where I was. And I truly learned the reality of His strength in my weakness. Flowers really do grow in the valley.

Step 6: physical recovery work

My delivery was hard on my body, but not in a lasting way. Tears heal, blood transfusions help. My body moved on very, very quickly from birth + set all of its energy to showing up for my newborn and making breastmilk. However, all of the depletion of pregnancy, birth and postpartum does catch up to you eventually + it really did for me. I spent the first 6 months or so in a complete haze of sleep deprivation and triple feeding, but once the fog started lifting, I knew I needed to invest in healing myself physically.

For me, that looked like reprioritizing nourishing foods, supplementing where I needed it + starting to work on my strength again. I didn’t actually need any sort of proper pelvic floor rehabilitation, but I did complete a core recovery program that I think was hugely influential in moving me forward in the healing process. There’s something profound about seeing a physical outworking on the inward healing you’re doing + core work was that for me.

Step 7: preparing for next time

I have found huge freedom digging into research around true physiologic birth. Women’s bodies and what they go through is incredibly magical and empowering and so.freaking.amazing. In an effort to educate myself, I have read countless papers of peer reviewed research on postpartum hemorrhage rates, birth place safety statistics, etc. And the realities, even if they weren’t mine, are fascinating and SO encouraging. It should not be my job to advocate for myself with up to date evidence to a medical professional, however, I needed to be informed about my options before I considered another pregnancy.

I’m currently 21 weeks pregnant with my second baby and have found the amount of work I’ve done gathering scientific data + educating myself on the physiologic process of birth has made me feel incredibly empowered, even in the midst of a medically classed “high risk” pregnancy. I feel able to vocalize what I believe is true, what I want and how I choose to be cared for. I KNEW I needed to be informed of my rights as a birthing woman this time + I’m invoking those rights with all sorts of pride on this current journey. Part of avoiding future trauma for me is feeling like I’m fully engaged in the decision making process this time, so I’m making sure that happens.

Final thoughts on healing birth trauma

Friend, I know this work is hard. I hate that it’s work that we have to do, but there is SO much beauty and goodness on the other side of healing birth trauma. The reality is, none of us are immune from it. We can’t protect ourselves or our babies completely. Life is full of unknowns and unforeseeable circumstances. We don’t control the hand that we’re dealt, but we DO have power over how we respond to it.

I hope that if you’re still carrying burdens from your own experience that you will dig into healing birth trauma. You are so deserving of this work + I hope this helped a little, at least to remind you that you aren’t alone on this journey.