Birth Trauma

Trauma isn't decided by how bad it looked from the outside. It's decided by what happened inside you, in a moment when your body couldn't act and couldn't get away.

This is the part that keeps women quiet. The chart says the birth went well. The staff were attentive. The baby is here and healthy. So there's no obvious place to put the fact that you brace at the door of the hospital, or go still when someone asks how the birth went, or find your heart racing in the shower for no reason you can name.

You aren't being dramatic and you aren't ungrateful, momma. Your nervous system recorded something your story has no room for.

• 01

  Replaying moments of the birth, or losing whole stretches of it

• 02

  Flinching at medical settings, monitors, gowns, or the smell of a hospital corridor

• 03

  Feeling detached from the birth as if it happened to someone else

• 04

  Dread or avoidance around a future pregnancy

• 05

  Anger that has nowhere to go, at a person, a policy, or your own body

• 06

  A sense of having been managed rather than met

• 07

  Difficulty settling into sleep even when the baby sleeps

We don't start by making you narrate the birth from beginning to end. Retelling it in detail, before your body has any footing, is often how women get retraumatized in a therapy room.

We start with the present. Where the birth still lives in your body now, what sets it off, and what you do to hold it down. Then we work in small pieces, at a pace your system can absorb.

• 01

  Brainspotting, because a fixed point in the visual field lets your brain process what words keep circling around

• 02

  Internal Family Systems, so the part of you that has stayed on alert since that day is understood rather than argued with

• 03

  Somatic work, so the freeze, the bracing, and the held breath have somewhere to finish

Some women do this in weekly sessions. Others prefer an intensive, which gives the material one long, protected stretch of time instead of many short ones.

Preparing for a birth after a difficult one is its own work. We look at what specifically was unbearable last time, what you want to be different, and how you want to be spoken to when you can't advocate for yourself. That's planning, not reliving.

Start with a Conversation

A free consultation is a short call. You can say as much or as little about the birth as you want to, and you decide afterward whether to go further.