Navigating Birth Trauma: Grieving the Experience You Planned & Your Former Self
Giving birth can be a long, slow process, or a fast, fraught process, or a little bit of both. It is intense, real, and life-changing. Giving birth is a big deal in anyone’s life, and the impacts of your experience can last well beyond the final labor pang and hearing your baby cry for the first time.
Birth is also a very personal process, filled with high hopes and specific needs and wants. Those needs, hopes, and wants also vary wildly from person to person. Having a birth plan can be a great comfort, something to point to when in the thick of things, and something to easily communicate to those around you what you want your experience to be. But what happens when nothing goes as planned, and the experience you have is vastly different than what you had in mind?
We’ve collected some thoughts here about birth trauma and your options for birth trauma therapy when grieving the experience you planned and your former self.
Before you begin, remember that our professionals are always here to help
When Birth Doesn’t Go To Plan
Birth experiences can go haywire. Emergency c-sections, being unable to go through with a home birth, needing medication when the plan was a natural birth, having your wishes ignored in the moment, all can happen, and all can be very hard to grapple with after the fact. The goal is always to keep everybody safe as possible in the birth process, but if you experience events that aren’t in the plan, it can be traumatizing. It’s hard to prepare for a life-changing event, but it’s even harder when your preparations to psych yourself up for birth don’t work out.
Birth Trauma Can Feel Disorienting
You may find yourself, with your new baby at home, feeling like you shouldn’t complain, you shouldn’t share how difficult a time you might be having with what you went through. You may find it overwhelming to think about, on top of the day to day stress of caring for a newborn, and feel inclined to shove it away. You may find that you don’t feel like yourself anymore; everything has changed, and you’re at a loss as to who you are now, and how your life will go. You may find yourself reliving the hard parts of your birth experience, unable to let them go.
Birth Trauma is Real and Valid
You do not have to feel guilt or shame over feeling traumatized after a birth plan doesn’t work out. Your feelings are real, valid, and yours. There’s no one way to respond to a major life-changing event. Grief, joy, fury, confusion; all are reasonable responses to a birth experience that didn’t go to plan. These experiences can be shocking in the moment, and the aftershocks can pervade your life for a while. This isn’t a flaw in you, it’s a normal part of grieving an expectation.
Birth Trauma and Grief
A key to understanding why you feel the way you do after your birth experience didn’t go to plan, is understanding grief. You’re grieving a lost expectation, a lost experience you thought you’d have. You may also be grieving a lost understanding of yourself; you used to be someone who made plans and they typically went as expected. Now, with a birth plan that didn’t work out, and with all the chaos a newborn brings, you may be struggling to cope.
Grief is a nonlinear process, and one that requires you to fully work through your feelings. That can seem very daunting, especially when you’re at the first steps to even understanding what you’re grieving, let alone how to go through grieving it.
Keep in mind, you’re in a process, a normal one, even if it’s uncomfortable. Remind yourself that you didn’t cause any of the birth trauma you’ve experienced, and you didn’t earn it. It happened, that’s all. And all you need to do is be honest with yourself and those around you about how, and who, you are.
Working Through Birth Trauma
Fortunately, there are so many ways to seek support though this grieving process.
Find your people
Wanting to isolate in grief is not uncommon. It can feel overwhelming to spend time around people when managing birth trauma AND a newborn. But isolation will make things harder on you. Recruit a friend or loved one to help you find support if you feel it’s too much for you to do on your own.
Consider:
Mom support groups
Scheduled weekly time with friends or family
Birth trauma counseling; support from a therapist can bring an open mind into your support circle, which can be invaluable.
Local play groups; you may not feel like playing, but connecting with fellow parents can make a world of difference.
Connect with yourself
You’re managing the life of a whole new person with your newborn, but your whole life has changed too. Connect with yourself where you are. Try to suspend judgment if you can; you have been through so much, and you are doing your best.
Consider:
Journaling. Let yourself really pour it all out. Your journal doesn’t judge, and your honesty will serve you well.
Gentle movement; walking, yoga, stretching, swim. Connect to your body again; it has changed, but it’s still yours. Approach it with kind curiosity.
Eat well, and drink water. Nourish yourself, as you deserve care too.
Rest. Rest as much as you can. Find help for chores, let some things slide. Rest.
Consider Birth Trauma Therapy with LunaJoy
LunaJoy offers birth trauma therapy services, including therapy to support those whose birth did not go to plan. We understand your trauma, and want to walk with you through the process of grieving lost experiences, as well as the process of building back up to being present in your life, now. We are here for you, and our therapy setup creates an open-minded and open-hearted place for you to be honest as you go through the grief process about your birth trauma. Contact us today to set up a new client appointment to get started.
