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Birth Trauma is…..

Closeup of a newborn baby's feet nestled around a white blanket.

In honor of Birth Trauma Awareness Day…..

Birth trauma is the person who begged not to get an episiotomy but the doctor did it anyway.

Birth trauma is the person who spent months and months planning a beautiful home birth only to have to throw it all away in an instant, because they could not find the baby’s heart beat.

Birth trauma is the person who had the perfect birth they always wanted only to find the baby wasn’t breathing after.

Birth trauma is the couple who had their baby on the way to the hospital – feeling scared and alone.

Birth trauma is the couple that went to the hospital to have their baby only to find that their baby had passed away.

Birth trauma is the parent whose baby spent weeks in the NICU because they had an infection.

Birth trauma is the person whose OBGYN told them they would honor their birth plan only to completely disregard it when the time came.

Birth trauma is the person who had to have an emergency cesarean.

Birth trauma is the person whose midwife told them they could “do whatever they wanted” to the birthing person’s body.

Birth trauma is the parent who had a fever in the delivery room and couldn’t see their baby once it was born.

Birth trauma is the person who was emotionally manipulated into birthing a way that they didn’t want.

Birth trauma is the person who was stitched up postpartum without anesthesia even though they were screaming in pain.

Birth trauma is the person who was physically held down in the delivery room.

Birth trauma is the person whose provider performed interventions with out even asking first.

Birth trauma is the person who was forced to stop pushing to wait for the doctor.

Birth trauma is the person who was pressured with decisions when all their support people stepped out of the room.

Birth trauma is the person who was physically injured from an epidural done wrong.

What is birth trauma?

It’s an experience.

It can not be debated.

 

Psychologically speaking birth trauma is no different than any other form of trauma. When we talk about trauma we are talking about any perceived or experienced threat to the well-being and life of the individual or those around that individual. In birth trauma it is common for the birthing person to feel helpless, isolated, uncared for, fearful and/or anxious. According to this resource as many as 34% of birthing people will experience birth trauma and up to a third of those people will develop post traumatic stress disorder from that experience.

The societal mindset towards this needs to change if we want to see healing and progress from this way too common occurrence. We need a bigger emphasis on body autonomy in the medical community, more evidenced based practitioners and for providers to be trained in how to help people process traumatic experiences.

Just to be clear- there is no blame here. The person who needs an emergency cesarean most certainly may have experienced birth trauma, however that does not mean the cesarean was bad. We have to move towards teaching providers how to make space for the processing and emotional needs of their patients postpartum without wearing guilt or blame. This frees providers up to process their own experience also without needing to be validated by the experience of another person, and allows them to be supportive in a way that our families really need.

As a society we need to move away from this idea of invalidating someones experience in telling them they should just be grateful they are alive and their baby is alive. If all that mattered was the physical existence of life then we could argue that someone who lived imprisoned or in perpetual abuse had the same quality of life as someone who doesn’t simply because they are physically alive. (Check out my blog post on that here)

We know this is ridiculous because our emotional experience and well being is important to the quality of our life. This is the place from which we should operate to facilitate healing and growth as a whole.

So how can we support people through this experience? By listening. Giving them space to process their experience. We can help by offering open minded tools- recognizing that what works for one person may not work for another. We can support more therapist, social workers and somatic experiencing practitioners who work with birth trauma.

The change happens in putting practices in place that help avoid trauma when it can be and helping to process trauma when it is needed.

What is your story? Have you experienced birth trauma? What does birth trauma mean to you?

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Why I Made A Facebook Group About Compassionate Motherhood

I have been really thinking intentionally about the TruBirth Facebook group lately. You see there are like a million mom groups to be a part of ranging from *super holistic* to *screw those crunchy moms* and everything in between.

I often hear of moms doing purges of the groups they are in or talking about the drama behind being in a group, so when I started my TruBirth Facebook group I wanted to be intentional. I wanted to create a place outside of the drama of what we feed our children, how we choose to birth and what type of diaper system we use. I wanted to prove that there is a much deeper common thread that we all hold which is that we are all emotional beings.

The result is a group of women who share my sentiment that while the things we choose to do as mothers is totally important, it’s not more important than connecting with other moms and learning to be a loving and compassionate person. What we have created is a group based in compassionate motherhood.

After all I may choose to feed my kids all the best food in the world and practice “the best” parenting techniques but if my sweet little bundles see me treating those in the world with judgement and non-tolerance what are we really left with at the end of the day?

So why is this so hard? Well first of all its really complicated.

It’s complicated because so much discussion around topics happens on social media, stripping people of their physical and emotional essence. I’m sure most of the people reading this have at sometime or another been a jerk online or shared some judgmental meme because they got caught up in the moment and didn’t think about the millions of ways it would interact with those around them. I know I have and that is because social media is hard. Its hard because it is with us 24/7, right in our pocket, with almost instantaneous access and we are not our most thoughtful selves all of the time.

It’s also complicated because of passion. People get passionate about topics and I’m not even remotely suggesting that this is wrong. Passion is beautiful. It’s also hard to facilitate these passions in relationships where people do not share that same passions. So how do we juggle this?

The biggest reason its complicated though, is because most of us lack the ability to be truly self compassionate.

So what is self compassion? Self worth, self care, self acceptance, self forgives, self growth, etc. It’s seeing the processes we need as worthwhile and pursuing them.

Just to clarify I’m not talking about the ability to rationalize, which can be mistaken for self compassion. Like “I am self assured because I have rationalized everything I do!” No. Rationalization actually shows a truly low level of self compassion because it says “I’m not worth really working on myself in the ways I am challenged so I am just going to lie about myself and brush this under the rug”.

A common example of this is seen in birth trauma. A woman who experienced birth trauma may rationalize that this is just how birth is, or that it was wrong of her to have desires for the outcome of her birth, or that she should just be happy for a healthy baby, healthy mom, etc…. Each of these are essentially a tool to invalidate the feelings and necessary emotional processing of the events.

So this is where the cycle begins; denying self compassion and invalidating our feelings. Then when we see someone else with birth trauma, especially if they are starting to process through their experience emotionally, we tend to push our rationalizations on them as fast as we can. Almost like we can not allow another person to process what we did not allow ourselves to process. So we pass along the lies we told ourselves to further justify the experience we gave ourselves.

This cycle can go on from woman to woman creating a hostile environment where very few feel validated and where it is hard for forward motion in the birth world to happen. Instead of processing and saying these things were wrong we see women brushing them under the rug and nothing changes.

This goes so much beyond birth trauma, and its why emotional health is so key to making this world a better place. If we can all truly learn to validate our emotional needs then we will see that we lose the need to validate through our reactions in other peoples experiences. When we are secure in ourselves then we are free to be truly and deeply compassionate with those around us. Every piece of ourselves that we learn to love deepens our ability to love the world around us and make it a better place.

 

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Why Saying “All That Matters is a Healthy Baby and Healthy Mom” Hurts and What to Do Instead

34% of women these days are reporting their birth expense as “traumatic”(1), 28% are showing some or all of the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in regards to their brith experience (2). Despite the growing ideal of “natural childbirth” over the last 10 years our cesarean rate has stayed in and around 30% nation wide.

As a childbirth educator and lactation consultant I see lots of moms just before and just after they experience birth. I know that in my experience there are moms who desperately do not want interventions at birth, that regardless of the precautions they take or the education they get they end up with the very things they did not want. I also know that lots of moms who experience this are told not only by those close to them but by society as a whole that if they should “just be happy for a healthy baby and healthy mom”.

This notion of being grateful for “healthy baby and healthy mom” is not lost, nor is it wrong, it is just used inappropriately and (likely) unknowingly by those around new parents in order to deal with the discomfort of the listener. I don’t think any mom is going to say, I am ungrateful for my healthy baby and being healthy myself. The notion that this statement somehow is the antitheses of the pain and loss mothers may feel is where the problem comes in.

When we practice self awareness and making space for the experience and feelings of others (as is spelled out 5 Steps to Pursuing Self Awareness) we realize that no two sentiments ever cancel each other out.

Birth trauma is used to describe experiences that pose a real or perceived threat to the safety and well being of the mother, father or baby in birth, including the threat of death. It can also be used to describe experiences where the traumatized person perceives a threat to the physical or emotional integrity of the mom, dad or baby. Note that this concept is not determined by outcome but by perception and experience of the traumatized person, so, for example, all that matters is that the risk of death be present, not if the baby or mom died. (This experience is not indicative of birth trauma, though it absolutely would fall under the umbrella of this definition.)

Birth trauma has a wide range of instigators from having medical procedures pushed or forced upon moms, to the loss of mom or baby, to the mourning of plans lost from the ideal birth a parent envisioned.

The presence of birth trauma is never to negate the fact that mom is grateful for the life of her baby or her own life. I have often heard women criticize those who are mourning and feeling the wide range of emotions associated with birth trauma as selfish or silly for caring more about ideals than the health and well being of baby/mom. I can tell you that in my time spent with those mourning the loss of an ideal birth or other traumatic experiences I have never met a mother who does not love their baby or the fact that they are both healthy.

The presence of birth trauma points to the fact that our existence is so much more that purely physical. Our physical life is not more important or more significant than our emotional or spiritual existence. This would imply that someone who lives enslaved or oppressed has the same quality of life as someone who isn’t simply because they are physically alive. I don’t know many people who would debate this fact, but if you deny people the space to feel their emotions to the fullest simply because they are physically healthy and alive you are imposing this idea. SO though a mother and baby who experienced a birth trauma may be physically healthy whats to say that they are emotionally intact? At the end of the day is it really up to ANYONE other than the mom or day them self to decide whether their feelings are important or not?

So lets not devalue your sentiment of how grateful YOU are for a healthy mom and baby by forcing your feelings on someone else! Those feelings belong to you and there is nothing wrong with that, if you want to interact with new parents feelings around their birth-ASK!

It may be helpful to think about why you want to move the conversation to the feelings of gratitude rather than listen to what really is going on in moms mind and heart.

One thing that is pretty common is a general discomfort with emotions that may be deemed as “bad” in our society. This would basically be anything that isn’t happy or anything that brings up feelings of sadness.

Another common reason people will be so quick to shut down the emotional processing of certain emotions in another is because they themselves have similar emotions that were not allowed to be felt, or were shut down by someone else. You yourself may have experienced birth trauma or even another form of trauma in your life, and have never allowed yourself to mourn and feel the feelings that go along with it. So when that person starts to talk about these things you yourself are triggered back to these repressed emotions and in order to shut it back down again and shut down the person you are talking to.

Identifying that this is at the root of your response gives you the ability to now decide if you would like to either work through your own experiences or if you are uncomfortable talking about this traumatic experience and maybe need to distance yourself from this conversations about the trauma at hand.

If the latter is your sentiment then simply say “I hear what you are saying, and I want to honor that. This is triggering some things in me that I am not ready to open up. I can not talk about this at this time.”

Once we have done that, we have set up a safety net to catch ourselves when we are talking to a new mom/dad about their experience. Then you can try one of the following:

Train your brain to ask questions and listen.

Offer to write out a birth story for the family as they tell it to you while nursing/feeding the baby.

LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN. Then offer to call tomorrow to listen some more.

Offer sympathy with their experience, acknowledging that their experience is important.

Remember that what they say is valid, even if it sounds “wrong” compared to your experience/feelings.

Know how you can help and don’t be afraid to ask for specifics if you are unsure.

Watch for signs of PPD and offer love and help if mom needs it. Be delicate and gentle here but don’t be afraid to speak up.

Moms need us to start listening, asking questions and speaking up for their well being. The first step in doing this is identifying any personal prohibitors we may have and addressing them fully. Through our own emotional awareness we make space for others to find themselves. So next time you catch yourself thinking or saying “all that matters is a healthy baby and healthy mom” Stop yourself and instead say “Your experience matters and I am here for you.” You never know how big of a difference that could make in the new families early weeks.

Did you feel free to mourn your birth pain or birth trauma? Have you ever found yourself saying “all that matters is healthy baby and healthy mom”? Why do you think you said this?

References:

1) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12581038

2) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16808083