Did You Have a Traumatic Birth?
Today, I want to chat with you about birth trauma recovery.
Unresolved or unidentified birth trauma is often a contributing culprit to postpartum mood struggles. Too often it is missed as a contributing factor during traditional postpartum therapy.
It has been a while since this video was recorded (2017), however, it is a good resource for anyone who is trying to identify if their birth was indeed traumatic and how to move forward. I recommend watching at 1.2 or 1.5x speed.
The stressful material from your birth – memories, sensations, emotions, and thoughts – remains trapped within your body, heart, mind and energetic systems until it has the opportunity to be metabolized or digested; in other words felt.
When left unattended, the unresolved survival stress can expressed itself as the symptoms typically assessed for postpartum mood disorders. The symptoms are indeed destabilizing and for some, terrifying. So let’s not ignore the impact of living with postpartum mood struggles.
The Edinburgh postpartum depression scale, for example, is a common tool used to screen women for postpartum depression (and anxiety too). Many new moms are familiar with this questionnaire. And, over the years, I have a heard a common response from the moms I have worked with which sounds like: ‘I was afraid I was going to be diagnosed with a mood disorder so I didn’t answer the questionnaire honestly’.
What is left out of this initial screening conversation between a new mom and their healthcare provider is an investigation into the mother’s birth experience, and an assessment of birth trauma, rather than the protocol approach of the Edinburgh scale. What if the focus was less on screening for PPMD and rather, helping a new mom assess whether or not her system is in a frozen, stuck, or prolonged survival stress state as a result of their birth? What if healthcare providers were trained in the neurobiology of health and wellness, and could help a new mom in the immediate postpartum complete the survival stress response? This could potentially mitigate the expression of the symptoms labelled as a PPMD.
There are different ways in which a health professional (including Doulas) can help a new mom express and digest trapped survival stress and/or traumatic stress material within her embodied system (body, heart, mind, and energetic). For example:
Body > Somatic exercises that focus on trauma recovery focus on discharging the trapped energy within the body. Peter Levine is the founder of Somatic Experiencing and provides many options to move the trapped material through and out of the body. Kimberly Ann Johnson, in her book Call of the Wild, offers plenty of embodied exercises to support this important phase of healing.
Heart > Feeling the feelings is essential. Finding your tears is part of the healing process. Fear, anger, grief and the spectrum of survival emotions are part of trapped survival stress. Buffering from feeling our feelings is a protective response and therefore, requires a safe, soothing, and supportive space for these emotions to be felt, expressed, and moved through the heart. Therapeutic art can be very healing during this phase of recovery, as well as, narrative therapy, journalling, spiritual ceremony or rituals such as ‘closing of the bones’.
Mind > Dan Siegel, the founder of Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) and Mindsight, often says that we can tell how well someone has healed based on the story they are telling. I call this phase ‘moving from the story of the past, to the story we want to tell’. The mind searches for meaning. The story, narrative, or cognitions we hold about our birth stories impacts our wellbeing. Thus, it is important to work with negative cognitions and core limiting beliefs, and turn them around. This is often expressed through the act of becoming aware of your thoughts and paying attention to what you are hearing yourself say about your birth, postpartum, and self. This is the skill of reflection.
Energetic body > We are energetic magnetic beings. Some people relate to this part of our system as their Spirit or Soul system. Trauma and unresolved survival stress dysregulates this aspect of our embodied system. There is much I can and do say about childbirth as an initiatory event. In Chinese Medicine, I was taught that after birth the Chi (life force/energy) is very low and requires nourishment and heat to replenish it. The postpartum is a time to be nourished and cared for, helping the new mom restore and recover. There are many ways to support the energetic system for recovery for example: Reiki, massage, floating, spiritual ceremony and/or ritual, sound or frequency, song, chanting to name a few.
This was a brief overview of how to support the embodied system of a new mom, and what is required to shift out of survival and/or traumatic stress response and step into repair and recovery.
It is okay if you don’t relate to the term: traumatic birth. You can replace it with a highly stressful, triggering, scary, shocking or extremely painful birth experience. The key is that you felt trapped in the birth experience, and could not escape nor change the unravelling of events.
Trauma is a word that describes both your physical and psychological responses to an extremely stressful, painful, and/or terrifying event in which you perceived (neuroceived according to Polyvagal research) a risk of harm or life threat for yourself or your loved ones.
So, what does this say about postpartum mental health struggles?
To begin, the symptoms that moms are experiencing in the postpartum are real. They are disorienting, destabilizing, scary, and cause a lot of fear and grief. Something I discovered, after working with hundreds of mothers over the years, is that the upsetting symptoms expressed in the postpartum are never a siloed experience.
Many moms noted worrying about ‘getting’ a postpartum mood disorder as if it was something you randomly catch. I am not minimizing the impact of severe depression or anxiety, however, the symptoms expressed are typically the by-product of too much survival stress, trapped for too long, with no end in sight. This material impacts the embodied system of the new mom - body, heart, mind, and energetic.
This is why at ASK Therapy we have a nervous system informed approach to therapy - not your typical approach to perinatal therapy.
The nervous system is your biological engine and also, your personal surveillance system. It is always working to keep you alive and better yet, to help you thrive through its social engagement system.
Sometimes life events (a.k.a. birth) can cause it to flare up and remain trapped in states of alarm. And when your system is stuck in high alert and alarm, those horrible and painful mental health symptoms show up.
What’s the problem?
The challenge is that many of us do not know how to either discharge the excess energy or jump start the engine when it has run out of gas, because we were not shown how. Furthermore, we are left with the stressful emotions, memories and cognitions that keep us stuck in holding patterns of distress.
The consequence?
A mother feels isolated and trapped in the overwhelming felt sensations, emotions, and stressful thoughts, and the most painful part is often the disconnection mothers feel towards their newborn, children, and loved ones.
Granted, adjusting to motherhood is, in and of itself, an all encompassing event that demands all of your attention and energy. Add any extra stress factors from your birth experience and you can easily be tipped out of balance.
What all of this is telling a new mom is that their embodied system (body, heart, mind, and energetic) is likely on overdrive as a result of unresolved stressful material from their pregnancy, birth, immediate postpartum and/or their past, and it needs attention so that they can restore it back to a state of health and well-being.
The good news is that this can be done!
You or a new mom does not have to remain in overdrive and chronic survival stress for the remainder of their postpartum, or journey into motherhood.
According to Dan Siegel, health occurs when we shift into a place of coherence - a harmonious rhythm of communication and connection between your brain, heart, body, and relationships.
Our team of therapists hold a deep belief in the capacity to heal the embodied system: body, heart, mind, and energetic. Working with a professional who is trauma informed and nervous system informed is an essential component towards restoring your system back to health.
I call this stage of healing – 'getting your brain back online'.
However, your healing will not feel complete until you have integrated all the aspects of your birth experience. This includes changing the way you tell the story and feel about the event - your birth narrative.
Trust me, the story can change - I have listened to hundreds of moms shift from a deeply wounded birth story to one of wisdom and power.
When we begin to heal, we have a wider gaze in which we can hold many different aspects of the experience at once. We no longer focus our attention only on the negative memories, but rather, the story becomes fluid, flexible, and comprehensive.
Learning how to tune your attention inwards and begin to notice what stressful thoughts and emotions arise from within is a critical skill of self-reflection. At ASK Therapy we highlight the R’s as foundational to your healing journey. We help you to assess how well resourced (inner and outer) you are, and how skilled you are in regulating strong emotions. There are plenty of free YouTube videos that can help you develop the skills of inner and outer resourcing, emotional regulation (being with), and self-reflection (being aware of) which will be extremely supportive of your therapeutic and/or healing journey.