Even though it might be many months, or even years, ago do you feel quite emotional about your birth experience and find it is still affecting you? 

 

It’s completely understandable for you to feel in a state of shock after any traumatic event. But as time goes on do your friends and family struggle to remain understanding? Meaning well, do they say things like "You should be grateful..." or "At least you have a healthy baby..." which only serves to make you feel even more hopeless? It's like you don't matter, isn't it?

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It's not so much what happened or how baby was born but how you were treated and cared for during labour, birth and the early postnatal period. If you felt out of control and no-one took the time to explain what was happening in a compassionate way any birth could feel traumatic.

 

Persistent unwanted thoughts about your birth recur in your mind which can be exhausting and makes you anxious. You desperately want to move on but for some reason find you are unable to put it behind you.

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You may be given a diagnosis of post natal depression but, although the two can be present together, Birth Trauma is very different. The symptoms are those experienced in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and some of the signs include:

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• Having flashbacks, nightmares or perpetual thoughts about your birth

• Distress over anything that reminds you of your birth experience, including anniversaries, birthdays or other women's birth stories

• Avoidance of activities such as baby groups, or other places where you might be reminded of birth

• Feeling emotionally detached from your baby, partner, family or friends 

• Being fearful of the place where the trauma happened or the people involved.

• Difficulty remembering your birth, memories, if any, may be in snippets

• Fear of sex or intimacy, perhaps causing vaginismus

• Dreading another labour and birth, refusing to have any more children

• Guilt

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What on earth can you do about this? Birth Trauma is a psychological injury, not an illness, so we can use a very simple technique, TBR 3 Step Rewind Technique, to release you from the hell you've being going through.

 

As the name implies it involves THREE stages:

1. Deep relaxation

2. Recalling the event in a particular guided way while you are safe and secure

3. Reframing how you will perceive and respond to things in the future

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This therapy is a brief process that can relieve the symptoms, mentioned above, after 2 or 3 sessions. Occasionally a session might need to be repeated but, in most cases, people will notice a significant decreasing, or complete ending, of these symptoms. If talking about your traumatic birth experience will make you feel uncomfortable there is no need for you to tell me what happened. 

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If PTSD symptoms are still a problem for you then the treatment is useful in eliminating them, whether it's been one month, one year, ten years or more since your traumatic birth experience.

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Also, if you are pregnant now as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault or rape during adulthood you needn't take that trauma with you into your labour and early parenthood.

TBR 3 Step Rewind Technique could help you too.