Birth Trauma

June 15, 2021

What is Birth Trauma? How do I know I experienced it? What can I do?

These are some of the top questions we often get asked in relation to birth trauma. It can be challenging to know and to explore.

We are here to break some of this down for you today.

What is Birth Trauma?

First and foremost, I need to preface this by saying: Trauma is in the eye of the beholder.

What do we mean by that? That your experience gets to be defined by you and feels traumatic is from the view of your experience.

When we look at diagnosis of Acute Stress or Postpartum Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that’s when criteria come in for a formal diagnosis but that doesn’t take away from the traumatic parts or what feels stuck for you. We wanted to make sure we talked about the distinction. So hopefully that makes sense.

Birth Trauma can be triggered by a variety of different experiences but often it is in relation to treatment, perception of safety (whether you felt your life, your partners life, or your baby’s (babies) life was in actually or perceived danger), and experience. Examples of this would be

Medical Complication during pregnancy and birth
Premature Birth
NICU Stay
Previous Trauma
Treatment by Professionals
Stillbirth
Length or pain in labour
Change in birth plan that was unexpected
Level of medical intervention needed
Previous Pregnancy Loss/Miscarriage
Infertility History

How Do I Know I experienced it?

Sometimes it can take some time to know that was your experience. So if you don’t realize or unable to reflect on it right away that is ok. There is no timeframe on this.

Some signs and symptoms that we look are:

How you describe your birth story- does anything seem painful or triggering?
Insomnia
Relieving Experience
Detachment from experience, self, partner, or child
Feeling of Grief/Loss
Anxiety
Depression
Difficulty related to both emotional and physical healing
Shame or guilt around your birth story
Avoidance
Hyper-Vigilance
Impact relationships
Impact of future family planning choices

What Can I do?

It is important to let your medical provider or birth support team know that there are things that you may be struggling with
Reaching out to a trained perinatal therapist or that has experiencing working with birth trauma to help process your experience
Become aware of what things may trigger you
Honour your story
Find ways to reconnect with your body
Reach out to supports as you can
Enroll in our course Beyond Baby Blues
In Beyond Baby Blues we will teach you how to process and manage birth trauma in a compassionate way