What is Birth Trauma?
Birth trauma is a broad term that includes both physical and emotional trauma experienced through giving birth.
It is much less often associated with physical trauma, which could include severe tearing, infection, placenta or uterine abruption, or any other physical injury occurring during birth.
Most people will be referring to emotional and psychological trauma when they refer to birth trauma.
Not everyone will feel comfortable naming their experience as traumatic, as they may hold beliefs that ‘other people had it worse’, ‘it was all okay in the end’, ‘their baby was healthy so they shouldn’t complain’, or they carry some shame around what it means to have had a traumatic experience.
Why might someone have experienced birth trauma?
In a 2017 research paper exploring women’s descriptions of childbirth trauma (relating to care provider actions & interactions), there were four key themes that were identified (Reed, Sharman, & Inglis, 2017).
These were:
1. Prioritising the care provider’s agenda.
This covers a range of experiences such as feeling as though unnecessary intervention was pushed on the woman as part of the agenda of the caregiver. Also, that women experienced feeling like an experiment, research subject, or learning opportunity.
These experiences are dehumanising, and do not offer the centering and care that women deserve while they are in labour or giving birth.
2. Disregarding embodied knowledge
Women experienced a lack of trust, and not being heard particularly around their own personal assessment of being in labour, needing to push before the care provider believed it ‘was time’ to push, or having an instinct that something was wrong with them or their baby.
It is an interpersonal need to feel trusted and heard, especially within the realm of our own embodied knowledge of our experience. To be dismissed around any embodied knowledge will likely leave a woman feeling powerless, frustrated, or unsafe.
3. Violation
Violation refers to any experience in which a woman feels her self, her boundaries, or her body have been violated, whether that is physically or emotionally. You can read more examples of this within the article.
4. Lies and Threats
This refers to any coercion whether through dishonesty or threatening language.
These particular examples and themes are specifically in relation to the interaction with a care provider. There are a myriad of reasons a woman may have experienced her birth as traumatic. These include feeling trapped or stuck with a midwife who she did not connect with, feeling unsupported by a birth partner, experiencing a very quick and shocking birth, as well as many other experiences that can lead to a lack of inner safety.
Birth trauma has a lasting impact on a woman and her family. It may also be that birth partner who has experienced the birth as traumatic depending on how much power they felt they had to aid, and support the women giving birth.
Birth trauma is not defined by whether your experience meets a definition, or one of the experiences laid out in this article, it is defined by your experience.
You may not even name it as trauma, but as an experience that was misaligned with your expectations or desires, or where you did not feel central to the circumstances of your experience.
However you feel about your birth, it is valid, and welcomed.
If you need support:
Peer Support by the Birth Trauma Association
Mind Online Peer Community: Side by Side
If you are in crisis:
Please call the Samaritans on 116 123
Charlotte is a somatic therapist and holistic birth coach, supporting women in healing from trauma in relation to fertility, conception, and birth, to support living with ease and freedom.
