First written in 2019, this updated reflection explores what truly helps traumatised people heal. Through compassion, co-regulation, and safe connection, our nervous systems can learn to settle again. Healing isn’t about fixing what’s broken. It’s about remembering what safety feels like and finding our way back to ourselves.

The WHO recommendation is clear: once rates climb above 15%, more caesareans do not save more lives. Instead, they begin to create new risks.

Our bodies hold more wisdom than we often realise. Sometimes, the sensations, tensions, or emotions that arise aren’t random, they are reminders of trauma stored in the body. Learning to listen to these signals can guide us towards deeper healing and wholeness.

Sometimes talking just isn’t enough. You might understand why you react the way you do. You may have read all the right books and even had helpful conversations with therapists, friends or support groups. But still, something in your body keeps pulling you back into the same patterns. The same fears. The same emotional pain.

For many women, especially those who’ve experienced trauma, these patterns are often chalked up to “being scatterbrained,” “anxious,” or “just overwhelmed.” But what if there’s more going on beneath the surface?

A caesarean birth can save lives, and still leave you feeling shaken, disempowered, or unsure about what comes next. Whether your caesarean was planned or an emergency, gentle or traumatic, straightforward or complicated, it may have left a lasting emotional imprint on your body and your confidence.

In trauma recovery, we work with the nervous system in layers. Each time we create more capacity for safety, another layer of held experience may surface. This is natural, and often necessary. You might feel frustrated by this process: I thought I’d already dealt with this. But the truth is, you’re meeting it now with more support, more regulation, and more choice than you had before.

Trauma isn’t always about what happened medically during the birth, It’s about how you felt during the experience. Many women describe feeling ignored, frightened, powerless, or unheard. Sometimes birth trauma is linked to emergency situations or intense physical pain, but sometimes it’s the quieter absence of emotional support that leaves the deepest mark.

Birth trauma isn’t stored in the logical, thinking part of the brain. It’s held in the nervous system. The body remembers what happened, often long after your mind wants to move on.

Have you ever noticed how music can touch you in a way that words never could? The human body is wired for vibration. Deep within us, the vagus nerve, a key part of our nervous system, listens and responds to these subtle signals, helping to regulate our sense of safety, connection, and wellbeing.

For people who’ve experienced trauma, especially in early life, the body may have learned to expect threat or rejection even in safe situations. This can show up in chronic tension, a lack of ease in being touched, or even an absence of sensation in certain parts of the body.

As humans, we are biologically wired to seek connection, closeness, and safety with others. But for many of us, early experiences of trauma (especially in childhood) can leave imprints that make relationships feel confusing, overwhelming, or unsafe.

You have an incredible inbuilt, automatic, safety mechanism to alert you to danger and take steps to preserve life. All living beings...

She’s barely an adult. So what has she experienced to date? We are told she had a difficult upbringing. Yet she is pathologised and blamed

In our modern societies we are spending a lot of time in stress through work, relationships, health concerns, politics, pandemics...

I focused on my breathing, I thought about my positive outcome, I lingered on how the touch felt, I got swept along by the music and disappe