Birth trauma therapy to help you move forward again
Birth trauma is never your fault, and it’s not because you didn’t try hard enough.
You deserve to be able to move beyond your birth experience, to stop thinking about what happened and enjoy motherhood just as you’d been imagining.
I provide specialist psychological therapy drawing on evidence based approaches including EMDR, IFS and CBT, which can help you to process a difficult birth and move forward again.
You shouldn’t be left feeling upset when you think about your birth experience
It can be challenging to know how to recover when you’ve experienced birth trauma. Even if your birth appeared to have been ‘medically straightforward’ to others, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t traumatic.
Perhaps you ended up having an emergency c-section after planning a water birth. Maybe there was a medical problem with you or your baby, or you felt ignored by people who were supposed to be caring for you. Instead of being joyful, as you had imagined it, your experience of giving birth felt lonely and frightening, and you’re left doubting yourself.
None of that was your fault, and it wasn’t because you didn’t try hard enough.
Now, weeks or months afterwards, it may be impossible to stop remembering what happened, no matter how hard you try to avoid the reminders. On top of this, you also have a baby to take care of and all the pressure this brings. All of this takes such enormous energy, especially after trauma.
I know you want to feel happier when you think about your birth experience. It’s hard to talk about what happened, and people don’t understand.
I created Better Beginnings to provide birth trauma therapy and help people just like you.
Make sense of what happened
A safe space to help you make sense of the events around your birth trauma.
Process the birth trauma
Psychological intervention based on trauma therapy approaches shown to work, such as EMDR therapy, CBT and IFS.
Feel safe and connected again
Move past your birth to live in the now and move forward again
Understanding Birth Trauma and Its Causes
If you feel distressed about your birth experience, you are not alone. Around 25% of women report their birth as traumatic, typically because it left them feeling helpless, frightened or believing they’ve failed. A percentage of these women experience trauma symptoms, and around 4% of mothers have PTSD as a result of a traumatic birth.
We all understand that sometimes childbirth just doesn’t go as planned. There can be a shocking turn of events. Suddenly, the midwives were rushing you to surgery instead of the hypno-birth you’d prepared for. Or the skin-to-skin contact you’d imagined couldn’t happen because you or your baby needed medical attention. And in those short, shocking moments, it feels like being robbed of the joy of meeting your baby.
Very often, however, it’s events around childbirth that contribute more to birth trauma than the process of the birth itself. One of the most significant factors is how women feel they were treated during labour, especially if they felt uncared for or dismissed by people who were supposed to be caring for them at such a vulnerable time. These are the invisible moments which can turn an upsetting birth into birth trauma.
Birth trauma happens at the point of a massive transition – the beginning of motherhood. Whether it’s your first baby of your fifth, birth is the portal into mothering this baby – leaving mothers feeling they have already failed, and it can feel impossibly hard to shift these negative thoughts without help.
You can read more about the ways birth trauma is unique in my article here.
““I spent a long time researching to find the right therapist to help me resolve my birth trauma and I’m glad I did. Miriam made the process as easy and comfortable as it could be.””
““Miriam really made me feel at ease discussing my birth experience and supported me get to to a place where I no longer experience feelings of failure. Thanks to Miriam I’m feeling positive about a future pregnancy.””
““Miriam was fabulous. She fully explained the process of EMDR and at every stage was always checking in on me. The sessions were completely invaluable.””
How it works
Step one
Contact me and let’s talk
Contact me and we can book a free introduction call so you can be confident you’re comfortable with me.
Step Two
Together, we’ll create a plan
We meet and begin by creating a shared understanding of your needs and an individualised treatment plan.
Step Three
Start moving forward again
We work together at a pace that’s right for you, using psychological therapy to help you achieve your therapy goals
The information on this website is for educational purposes only and does not constitute clinical advice. If you are concerned about your mental health please contact your GP or another professional.
FAQs
Below you can find answers to some frequently asked questions about Birth trauma therapy.
You can expect to experience lots of unpleasant thoughts and feelings in the immediate days after birth trauma. Our brains have developed effective ways to help us process complex events.
Sometimes, however, these difficulties continue beyond the first few weeks, and our bodies might need some help recovering.
The sorts of unpleasant things you might experience with birth trauma are:
- Intrusive memories about what happened can pop into your mind uninvited
- Feeling on edge and finding it hard to relax
- Intense emotions or body sensations, like anxiety, fear, guilt or shame.
- Getting stuck on thinking about birth, ‘why didn’t I do/say….’
- Or, conversely, trying not to think about what happened
- Feeling cut off from yourself or your baby
- Finding it hard to sleep, even when the baby sleeps, perhaps also having nightmares.
Birth trauma or PTSD is different from postnatal depression, but they often get confused with each other, even by professionals. With postnatal depression, the main problems include persistent low mood and sadness, loss of enjoyment in life and your baby, changes to sleep, appetite, concentration, and negative thoughts such as feeling you are not a good enough mother.
Although it’s important to say that many mothers have both birth trauma and postnatal depression, they often go hand-in-hand.
If you are worried about your mental health or struggling to keep yourself/others safe then please contact your GP, call 111 for advice, or visit A&E in an emergency.
After a traumatic birth and on top of looking after a new baby, it can feel impossible to keep any kind of routine or preserve time for yourself, which is entirely understandable. Nevertheless, staying connected to people you care about and continuing with small activities is often helpful.
Consider asking for support from your health visitor or GP. You can also contact your maternity service to enquire about a ‘birth debrief’ so you can better understand what happened during your birth – usually they will arrange a meeting with you to review your birth notes and answer any questions you have.
If your trauma symptoms persist after the first few weeks, you may benefit from specialist birth trauma therapy. Birth trauma therapy is a type of psychological therapy, or ‘talking therapy’ which is one of the first line of treatments for birth trauma or PTSD. Eye-movement desensitisation Therapy (EMDR) and CBT are proven to be effective in helping people with birth trauma symptoms.
I completely understand if you’re worried that trauma therapy might be hard. Parts of you may be worried about the idea of beginning birth trauma therapy, perhaps worried that it will be too difficult, that you won’t be able to cope or that it might make things feel worse.
A hallmark sign of trauma is avoidance, understandably because no one wants to go back and think about upsetting things that have happened. Whilst psychological therapy is typically rewarding, it can also be emotionally challenging, and this is true of trauma therapy in particular because the main approaches such as EMDR and CBT involve thinking about what happened in your birth experience and the events around it.
However, it’s important to know that whilst trauma therapy might be hard at times it shouldn’t be so hard that you feel you can’t manage it. Any good birth trauma therapist should begin by making sure you have good safety and stability – by teaching you ways of managing symptoms and regulating your emotions – before doing any work directly on the birth trauma memories themselves. This is important so you always feel in control. I use the analogy that in trauma therapy you are always driving the car – I might navigate from time to time – but we can always slow down or put the brakes on whenever you need to.
EMDR therapy is my main approach for birth trauma, integrated with IFS which is a gentle approach, and I make sure to go at a pace which is right for you, so that trauma therapy should never feel too hard.