Your perinatal journey (pregnancy to parenthood) is deemed to be one of the most wonderful times of your life, but for some women the postpartum period, after giving birth is very far from being the beautiful bliss that they had planned for or hoped it would be.  

Childbirth itself for some can feel like an incredibly traumatic experience, both emotionally and physically. Leaving you with feelings such as fear, sadness and pain.

All at the very time when you were geared up to become sort of super human, preparing for far less sleep and coping with an array of hormonal and life changes. Whilst feeling like this, your baby may be crying lots and needing more attention than you had imagined. It’s no wonder that some women experience post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after trauma from childbirth and have ongoing issues as a result. 

It affects not just the Mother. It can have an impact on the family relationships at home. With any trauma, we associate those negative feelings with the source of pain suffered. You may not have benefited from any prenatal and postpartum wellbeing support, leaving you little head space to process the whole new Motherhood experience.  As a result, this can cause a more distressed baby. Trauma from childbirth can also affect the father or partner in the relationship who is also struggling with the lack of knowledge, feeling helpless and forcing a lack of connection within the relationship.

I recently spoke with a woman who felt so traumatised by her particular childbirth experience that she was left in fear of becoming pregnant again. Therefore saying ‘she just couldn’t face the idea of having another baby’ incase something similar happened again.  She was also pushing her partner away and didn’t want to be intimate with him anymore.  Conjuring up more feelings of guilt and this cycle of trauma convinced her she wouldn’t be a good mother.

The cycle can be broken, it doesn’t have to be like this and you are not alone. 

It’s important to recognise that a traumatic childbirth can cause long lasting trauma and seeking treatment early is recommended. The RTT hypnotherapy method, created by Marisa Peer, is incredibly effective at resolving these types of issues, ones that arise from traumatic birth experiences, whether that is stress, anxiety, sadness or fear, and we can turn those experiences around.

You can learn more about what my client’s say here.