A traumatic birth experience can leave you not only feeling battered and bruised but also detached from your body and your old self. Journalist Leah McLaren said she, ‘felt weirdly detached, like a zombie shuffling through the motions’ when writing about her traumatic birth experience for the Guardian newspaper a couple of years ago.
Feeling this way is particularly distressing at a time when you want to bond with your baby. It’s important to know that you’re not alone in your experience, The Birth Trauma Association estimate that over 200,000 women feel traumatised by childbirth and develop undiagnosed and untreated symptoms of PTSD.
It’s important that we find ways to help and support women who can feel their experience is overlooked so long as their baby is healthy and they are physically patched up. Disregarding a mother’s experience misses the essential point that the wellbeing of a new mum and her baby- cannot be so easily separated.
At our small group sessions we will help you understand how trauma impacts your whole system and how you can do some simple things to help your system recover.
