In this blog post I want to address a heavy but important topic, processing your birth. Processing your birth becomes a heavy topic when you feel that your experience turned out much worse than you anticipated and it leaves you feeling traumatized. This blog isn’t only for the mama who has experienced a traumatic birth but for every mama who is trying to process her birth experience in a meaningful way. All mamas need time to think about their birth experience. We will likely compare and contrast our feelings, thoughts and takeaways with those who were at our birth trying to get answers to any questions. Processing your birth can take days, weeks, months or even longer.
Let’s talk about the factors that play a role in how you perceive your birth experience, how to gain clarity and get answers and how to move forward based on how you are perceiving your experience.
If you know of a mama who is having a difficult time processing the events of her birth or expresses many negative emotions about it, please share this post with her. I thank you for helping me help other mamas.
Your reaction to your birth experience is influenced by many factors. I want to list some major ones here:
- Your prior hopes for your birth
- Your prior goals for you birth
- Your understanding of how the events played out
- Your feelings of control or loss of control
- Your involvement in your birth experience
- Your involvement in decisions during your birth experience
- Comparison to other births you’ve had or to the birth stories you’ve heard from others
- The number of interventions that were or were not performed during your birth
- Your own perception of how your birth went
- If there were complication with you or your baby during or after birth
Your birth experience can leave you with so many different feelings:
- You may feel relief or sadness that it is over
- You may feel empowered by your birth events or disappointed
- It may feel like it was a whirlwind of events
- It may feel like a drawn out experience
- You may be mourning an experience you hoped you would have had
- You may feel guilt or resentment
- You may feel overwhelming joy and amazement
- You may gain confidence from your experience or have newly surfaced doubts
- You birth experience can leave you feeling disconnected from your baby or empty inside or just the opposite bringing you close to your baby immediately after his arrival
- Birth can be a fulfilling or an emptying experience
No matter what occurs during your birth experience, the most important thing is that you reach an understanding of how things happened and why they happened. You do not have to settle for being happy because you have a healthy baby.
There is so much more to having positive feelings about your birth experience than whether or not you gave birth to a happy and healthy baby.
It is okay to NOT feel positively about your birth experience even if you birthed a happy and healthy baby.
Experiencing a traumatic birth or developing post-traumatic stress disorder after your birth is not the same as developing a perinatal mood or anxiety disorder. Traumatic birth has no defined characteristics; it is a traumatic experience if you perceive it to be so and no one can tell you it’s not true for you. Between 25-34% of mamas describe their birth experience as being traumatic and 9% of those mamas develop post-traumatic stress disorder as a result (Simkin, 2018, p.350).
If you are struggling to understand your feelings about your birth, talking to a provider should be where you start to process the events. I’d suggest first speaking about the experience with your provider. Get any questions you have answered to an extent that you feel comfortable. Don’t brush past any details if you feel like you need them to reach a better understanding. Keep asking questions until you get the information you need. Your recollection of the experience may be incomplete whether or not you realize it to be so. Consider talking to your birth support team. Who was at your birth with you? Talk through the experience with them and disclose your feelings so they can continue to support you through that. It might be helpful to talk through your birth with a birth professional who was not on your birth team. They can guide you through the events from your perspective and offer a non biased perspective.
It is also important to note that you don’t have to be struggling with accepting your birth events or perceive it as being traumatic in order to seek support for processing what happened. Any mama wanting clarification and details about her birth events can seek out a birth professional to talk about their experience with.
If you are having a difficult time after your birth and are manifesting feelings such as trauma, sadness, anger, confusion, guilt, resentment or low self-esteem, it is a wise idea for you to seek direct support from an online support group and therapist or counselor. I would recommend this in addition to doing as I stated above about talking to your provider or another birth professional about your experience.
I hope you have found this information tangible and actionable. I hope that if you are struggling with processing your birth that you are not alone. Reach out for support. I am here to guide you to any resources if you are in need. I will leave a resource here for you as well.
All the best, Jerica
RESOURCE
- Postpartum Support International: visit Postpartum.net
REFERENCES
Simkin, P., Whalley, J., Keppler, A., Durham, J., & Bolding, A. (2018). Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn: The Complete Guide (5th ed.). New York, NY: Da Capo Press, Incorporated.
