Birth Trauma & Your Baby’s First Birthday
If you’ve faced traumatic or distressing experiences during pregnancy, childbirth or postpartum, it makes sense that your baby’s birthday feels really hard.
For birth trauma survivors, your baby's birthday is also the anniversary of a traumatic event. Trauma reminders- or triggers- can cause a traumatic stress response. Your baby’s birthday (and the months and weeks leading up to it) is very likely to stir up memories, as well as the emotions, thoughts and body sensations that you associate with that day. Many parents feel a deep sense of anger, guilt and shame when they are thrown into a state of re-experiencing their trauma, struggling with unexpected and unwelcomed thoughts and emotions instead of feeling excited to celebrate their child's birthday.
Other difficult anniversaries include pregnancy or infant loss and the due dates connected to these losses, embryo transfers and disappointing fertility treatment outcomes, ultrasounds or termination for medical reasons (TFMR).
Being mindful of anniversaries is part of coping and recovering from trauma. Take especially good care of yourself around your child's birthday-it may bring back some incredibly painful memories.
Self care needs often change when you’re coping with trauma reminders:
Remind yourself, it’s okay to not be okay. Prioritizing your emotional wellness is good self care, and this usually means working through some very uncomfortable feelings.
You’re allowed to feel many emotions at the same time-even when they’re conflicting.
Information is power. Understanding the effects of trauma and how you’ve been impacted can help you regain some control and decide what you need to do to take care of yourself. Symptoms of trauma can be managed and treated, (for example avoidance, flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, fight or flight, dissociating). They are not personality traits. You’re not over-reacting, you’re not failing, you’re not a bad person. You’re coping with trauma.
Practice new ways of setting limits (boundaries) and asserting your needs. This is most likely going to be a work in progress, as you adjust to the ways your needs are changing after a trauma. Figuring out how to communicate boundaries is an important part of trauma recovery, and usually hard to put into action-so go into it with a spirit of experimentation.
There is no timeline for trauma healing. Birth trauma can have lasting effects. A trauma response can happen long after the traumatic event has passed, and recent trauma has a way of bringing up old trauma.
Some important things to know about reproductive birth trauma
According to @postpartumsupportinternational 9% of birthing people will develop postpartum PTSD, and more that 30% report some aspect of childbirth as traumatic. Events like fertility challenges, miscarriage/pregnancy loss, NICU stays, baby loss, emergency C-section, and other medical complications during pregnancy, labor and delivery are commons causes of PTSD.
Birthing people with history of trauma, childhood trauma/abuse at increased risk for PTSD during this period.
Some of the kinds of experiences that are commonly traumatic for families include:
▪️Fertility challenges
▪️Miscarriage/pregnancy loss
▪️Neonatal loss/death of an infant
▪️Medical complications during pregnancy, childbirth, or postpartum for you or your baby
▪️TFMR
▪️Past traumas that resurface during this period
Getting started with therapy for birth trauma in Pasadena, CA
If your parenthood journey has been difficult, it's important not to dismiss or minimize this part of your experience, especially when your distress or fears continue longer than the first month after your baby is born. Postpartum depression, anxiety and PTSD are treatable.
Are you concerned about how you're feeling? Reach out for help. Trauma focused therapies like EMDR have been shown to be highly effective in healing the effects of birth trauma.
I’d love to talk to you about how I can help.
Reaching out for support is a big step and I want to make the process as comfortable and easy to understand as possible. To get started, just call (626)808-5463 or email me to schedule your free consultation.
