You did not manifest your birth trauma

There is a lot out there at the moment about manifesting – you manifest your reality, what you focus on you expand, taking radical responsibility etc. And this is all well and good, until we start applying it to trauma. This belief that everything happens for a reason insinuates that you have in some way created your trauma or it needed to happen for some reason or another.

You did not cause your trauma, and to have someone suggest this is deeply irresponsible. When 68% of all birth trauma (and this is only what is reported) is interpersonal, meaning that it involved another person (generally from the direct actions of care providers) – this is not your fault. You are not responsible for another person – especially one who is supposed to support you. Even if you chose to hire them, you hired them in good faith that they would have your best interests at heart.

Maybe you feel like you didn’t prepare yourself enough. Well we don’t know what we don’t know – and why wouldn’t we think that the hospital antenatal education is preparation enough - it’s coming from the experts, right?! So after your birth if you feel like you needed more, well how were you to know otherwise beforehand? Or maybe you did seek extra preparation, and maybe it wasn’t right for you, but you didn’t know what else there was. Again, not your fault.

Our culture places no emphasis on the importance of birth, so why would you have any reason to think differently?

Maybe you felt that tug that something wasn’t right, and you ignored it. Or you weren’t listened to when you did speak it, or you wish you said it more loudly, more forcefully. Well, as women living in this patriarchal world, we have been taught to ignore the signals that our body sends us and we have been taught to not make a fuss. We have never been encouraged or supported to listen to the signals that our body sends us or our own internal wisdom. And the medical system sure as hell does not listen to the patient when they are trying to inform them what they believe is happening to their own body! So again, not your fault.

If there was something that you were fearful of happening in or around your birth – something that you were focused on or worried about, and then it actually happened, you still did not create that. Maybe it was your intuition that brought up this fear to consider, prepare or warn you that it might be a possibility so you weren’t completely blind-sighted. Maybe it was just purely coincidental and just completely bad luck.

If any of these things happened to you, one I am sorry that it did, and two, you didn’t manifest your birth trauma because of it.

Birth is wild and unpredictable. As much as we can plan and prepare for it, or as much as outside forces might try to contain and control it – there will always be an element of the unpredictable to it - this is reality. The most random, unpredictable thing can happen in birth to the woman who has done all the work and prepared as much as possible. Sometimes there is no rhyme or reason for what happens, it just is.

Birth is a big life event, and as with all big life events, it might come with some lessons or something to teach us. But if your birth was traumatic in some way, the trauma did not have to happen to teach you the lesson. It might have been a sliding doors moment to change the trajectory or your life or motherhood journey because it has given you a new lens or perspective, but this is a by-product. It was never the end goal, and to be told that the trauma needed to happen to achieve this is just spiritual wankery.

The word responsibility gets thrown around a lot, “taking radical responsibility for your life” but if you break it down: response / ability – i.e. your ability to respond. It’s how you respond to the hand you’ve been dealt, not looking into how you created it. These are two very different things.

So while post-trauma growth is real, it can be a hard journey to go on. It means looking at the event and processing the feelings that it left behind, and a part of that processing might be finding new meanings or understandings. This may then send you on a new life trajectory that you could never have anticipated – but this may or may not have happened anyway without your birth being traumatic. An empowering birth can equally set you on a different life trajectory, so don’t let anyone tell you that your birth needed to be the way that it was in order to… you get the idea.