My birth wasn’t traumatic but…
Maybe you don’t feel like your birth can be called traumatic – you didn’t have a 1.5 litre PPH or a 4th degree tear or have five pulls of a vacuum extraction with the doctor’s foot on the bed.
But you still feel uneasy when you think of your birth, like a constant level of dread in the pit of your stomach that something isn’t quite right.
Maybe you feel like you have to put on a fake smile when people are congratulating you, but deep inside you feel like crying, because you feel like your body isn’t quite yours anymore, that you had so many people looking at you and touching you – with or without consent, and you feel a bit disconnected to your current reality.
Maybe you feel like things were done to you without your involvement in the decision making process, but feel like you aren’t allowed to complain about it because it’s just ‘what is done’ and it happens to so many other women and they are ok about it so you just should be too.
Maybe you didn’t bond with your baby straight away, or you still haven’t, and are burying it deep inside of you because you are worried there is something wrong with you or it makes you a bad mother and if anyone was to find out they might take your baby away.
Maybe you feel like your body failed in some way – that it didn’t do what it was supposed to.
Sometimes the most wild and unpredictable things can happen, even in the most planned births - yes even in an elective C/S - which can leave us reeling.
Any or all of these feelings often come up often in my birth debriefing sessions. And what I want every woman who relates to any of this in even the smallest of ways to know – you did not fail. You are a good mother, and what happened in your birth is not your fault.
So whilst you feel like your birth wasn’t ‘bad enough’ to be called birth trauma - if you didn’t walk away on the most amazing oxytocin high feeling deeply empowered, OR HOWEVER YOU THINK THAT YOU SHOULD HAVE FELT AFTER GIVING BIRTH, then that isn’t ok and you are allowed to have feelings about that!! And these feelings deserve recognition and support.
We are sorely lacking empowering education in the antenatal period, and we are lacking a maternity care system that is set up to provide individualised, trauma-informed support and evidence-based care to the women who come through it.
The system is set up to support itself, not the women.
You did not fail. The system failed you.