Birth Trauma
What happened to you during birth is worth taking seriously.
Birth can be a peak experience and a traumatic event at the same time. A "successful" outcome (a healthy baby) does not erase what your body and mind went through in the hours and days around delivery. And the cultural script of "all that matters is a healthy baby" does real harm by silencing what so many people carry afterward.
Birth trauma therapy gives those hours a place to land, and a path through the residue they leave.
You might recognize
If any of this feels familiar.
"I keep replaying parts of the birth, even when I don't want to."
"I startle, I scan, I can't quite settle since it happened."
"Going back to the hospital, even for a check-up, feels impossible."
"I feel guilty for being traumatized when the baby is healthy."
"My partner saw what happened and we've never really talked about it."
"The NICU stay is something I still haven't fully processed."
What counts as birth trauma.
It isn't about how the birth looks on paper. It's about how it felt, and how it lives in you now. We work with:
- Emergency C-sections, instrument deliveries, unplanned interventions
- Severe pain that wasn't adequately addressed
- Feeling unheard, dismissed, or coerced during labor
- Postpartum hemorrhage and other life-threatening complications
- NICU stays, short or long
- Separation from baby in the hours after birth
- Witnessing your baby in distress, intubated, or in surgery
- Birth that triggers earlier medical trauma or sexual trauma
- Loss of a baby during or shortly after birth
- Partner trauma: what they witnessed and carry now
What 'processing' actually means.
Trauma isn't a thing your brain hasn't gotten over. It's a memory the nervous system hasn't been able to fully store. Birth trauma therapy isn't about reliving the birth. It's about giving your system the conditions it needs to finish the story: slowly, with support, in a body that's safe now.
How the work goes
What therapy actually looks like here.
I'm trained in the Trauma Resiliency Model (TRM®), a somatic, nervous-system-based approach that's well-suited to birth and medical trauma. We pace it. We don't push you into the worst moments before you have the resources to leave them. We work both with the body (sensation, breath, regulation) and the meaning (what happened, what it took from you, what you're rebuilding from here).
Couples sessions are available. Partners often carry their own trauma from a birth and have nowhere to bring it.
Ready to talk?
A 15-minute consultation, by phone, costs nothing and tells you almost everything you need to know.