Hope and Healing After Difficult Births
We’ve been giving a lot of thought to the paths our clients walk before coming into care with us here at the Center. Unfortunately, many parents find our Center during their recovery from a difficult birth.
We wish that every parent were lucky enough to have a birth experience that empowered them, but the reality is that birth doesn’t always unfold according to plan and occasionally birth challenges can be traumatic.
Cheryl Beck, one of the foremost researchers into birth trauma defines it as an event happening during labor or delivery involving actual or perceived threat of significant injury or death to mother or baby in which the birthing person experiences intense feelings of fear, helplessness, loss of control and horror.
The important takeaway from that definition is that the trauma is in the eye of the beholder. What is a traumatic birth might not sound traumatic to the doctor, friends, or family. The subjective experience matters not just the outcome. Anyone telling a mom, “at least…” or “could have been so much worse…” to try to minimize the experience can sit themselves right down. Even a birth with good outcomes can be traumatic depending on how it was experienced.
While there’s no way to inoculate ourselves from traumatic experiences, we wanted to share a few ways you might be able to best support your healing after a traumatic birth (or almost any traumatic experience).
In the days to follow
Play Tetris. This might sound silly, but research shows that playing Tetris within 3-hours of a traumatic c-section helps to mitigate long-term effects of trauma. The study hypothesized that doing a visuospatial cognitive task helps to make the memory less perceptual and intrusive by activating a different area of the brain. There’s still more to explore here from a research perspective, but it’s such an easy intervention that we think it is worth mentioning.
Skin to Skin: Unfortunately, not everyone can have skin-to-skin immediately after birth, but if it is medically possible, engage in as much skin to skin contact as possible. Research shows that immediate skin to skin contact can be helpful in improving mental health outcomes, but the effect isn’t limited to immediately after birth. During the weeks and months to follow, skin-to-skin with baby can still have a positive impact on both bonding and trauma.
Sleep: The importance of sleep for both physical healing and mental health has been long documented. After a stressful experience, sleep might be low on the list of things to do, but if you can make it a priority.
Rally your troops: Every new parent deserves support, but after a difficult birth, it is important to bring in support. Enlist a postpartum doula, lactation counselor, and other professionals to help you so you can prioritize your own healing. Delegate tasks to friends and family like laundry, grocery shopping, or even talking to doctors or insurance.
Make your talking points: After a birth, everyone is asking “how are you?” or “how did it go.” Sometimes those types of questions can catch us off guard or overwhelm us if things are complicated and maybe you don’t yet know exactly how to feel. Prepare a few short scripts for how to respond. Knowing how to answer those questions can help us move forward more confidently. It might be helpful to have a few pat answers for different audiences (trusted confidantes versus the casual acquaintance) or even different venues (a one-on-one situation versus a public setting). You can choose to share as much or as little as you like.
Longer Term
Tell your story: There is power in how we share the narrative of our lives so share your story in whatever way you need to. Not everyone will be the right person to listen the way you need them to (this can be a key role for a therapist). If you need to, you can break the story up into smaller chunks that feel more manageable for you (or the listener). Creating a space where you can feel heard and validated aloud is important.
Write your story: When you feel ready to, expressively write down what you remember about what happened. For some people freewriting is an effective way to start, but other people might find bullets or even a timeline format helpful. You can keep revisiting what you wrote down as new things come up for you.
Gather the Stories of others: Ask your birth partner and other support people to share what they remember about the experience. Sometimes there are gaps in memory after a stressful birth, and it can help to ask for clarity about what happened. Be prepared to share your recollections together and maybe even find some catharsis.
Collect Your Records: You have a right to all your medical records, and HIPAA guarantees you the right to view them. You can ask each provider for a full copy. If anyone is giving you a tough time about access, you can always show up in person and ask them to print out a copy. Having access to this information can help to answer some questions you might have about what happened and what care you received.
Follow-Up with Your Provider: Ask your care provider to set up a time to review your records, share their perspective, and answer any lingering questions from the birth. Sometimes, it takes a while to be ready to have this conversation in full.
Offer Yourself Kindness: In the absence of a clear explanation for why things didn’t go as planned, women often try to take the responsibility. If only I had done this differently or made a different choice. This was not your fault. Bodies do unpredictable things, and we need to make peace with that. Find forgiveness for your body and your choices. Don’t make yourself the villain in your own story.
Practice Grounding Techniques: If memories of the birth are intrusive, you can try to stay in the moment by using grounding techniques such as washing your face in cold water, counting backwards by twos from 20, the tense and release exercise, the 5-4-3-2-1 sensory exercise, or square breathing. All these techniques can help your brain to detach from the emotional experience and refocus on the present.
Accept the Complicated: It is possible to hold two emotions at once when remembering your birth. Future birthdays can be challenging because they are also the anniversary of one of your worst experiences. You can’t ignore the grief and trauma of that experience even while celebrating the day your baby was born. Allow both experiences to be true and know that it is normal to struggle on this day and even dread it.
Identify triggers: After a traumatic birth certain emotional states or sensory experiences can take you right back in time. Try to sit down and make a list of the things most strongly associated with your birth, and then work with your support system to plan for how to manage any overwhelming emotions that come up.
Get Help: While there is much you can do on your own to cope with the aftermath of a difficult birth, trauma can benefit from specialized care. Reach out for help if, you experience any of the following:
o Flashbacks/intrusive memories of your birth
o Detachment or difficulty bonding with baby
o Frequent crying
o Difficulty sleeping due to anxiety or nightmares.
o Repetitive and distressing images/sensations
o Physical symptoms (pain, sweating, nausea, shortness of breath, trembling)
o Constant negative thoughts about the experience,
o Emotional numbing (feeling nothing at all about the experience or attempting to distract yourself),
o Avoidance of people/places that remind you of the experience.
o Feelings of hopelessness
o Using substances to cope.
While there isn’t any way to completely prevent traumatic experiences, thankfully, there is much that can be done to alleviate the effects and minimize the suffering. In particular, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) can help rapidly improve symptoms.
Even though this is a tough way to start parenthood, this doesn’t set the tone for your entire parenting experience with your child. We are privileged to be partners in the emotional healing journey while you write the next chapter of your life with hope.
