Do you ever feel unsettled by your birth experience? Maybe you actually have flashbacks to the delivery room that send your heart racing and mind panicking? Is the trauma of your previous birth experience is holding you back from having more kids or being able to overcome pelvic floor dysfunction?
Current research indicates 45% of women report experience trauma during child birth – and that number is a gross underestimation since most women never actually report feeling traumatized by their birth experience. Birth trauma can be physical or mental and can have long lasting effects on many areas of your life – including sexual dysfunction, strained relationship with your partner or baby, inability to function, and increased anxiety and depression. Often times when we hear birth trauma, we think of a horrific experience like near-death of mother or child. And yes, of course this is a risk factor for developing birth trauma and/or post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But did you know, your birth doesn’t have to go completely awry for you to develop birth trauma? In fact, it’s not necessarily what happened in that delivery room but the mother’s perception of what she went through that leaves lasting effects. Research has demonstrated that women who felt out-of-control or a lack of support and communication from their birth team were at a significant greater risk of developing birth trauma and/or PTSD.
So how do we improve these stats? How do we help women to feel empowered after birth rather than traumatized? How to we prevent these long-lasting functional impacts of birth trauma? Here are my top 3 recommendations as a Doctor of Physical Therapy and as a mom who has also experienced the lasting effects of birth trauma.
Surround yourself with a supportive birth team that you trust.
Your birth team may include your partner, an OB or midwife, a doula, a pelvic floor physical therapist, but remember YOUR birth team is YOUR decision. Birth workers and medical staff work for YOU. Therefore you can and should choose your birth team based on how these people make you feel, how they communicate with you, and how they support you. If you have an OB who is not supportive of the way you want to deliver your baby, I promise you are going to feel it in that delivery room. If you don’t trust your doctor to show up, I guarantee you are going to feel that angst in the delivery room. Find yourself providers you trust, that communicate effectively with you, that support your decisions, and I promise you will enter and leave that delivery room feeling more confident, more in-control, more empowered regardless of how your labor and delivery go.
Talk to someone.
Regardless of how big or little your trauma was, if you feel like your experience in the delivery room was traumatic, please talk to someone. This could be a psychologist, psychiatrist, or counselor. This could be a mom support group or church group. This could be your Doctor of Physical Therapy, like it was for me! It wasn’t until I recounted my birth story for my pelvic floor physical therapist that I realized how traumatized I had been by the experience and how these negative emotions I was holding in were seeping into other areas of my life and creating significant loss of ability to function normally. Sometimes just telling someone your story is enough to help you identify what is continuing to hold you back and what you still need to process to move forward. Sometimes you need more help making a plan to overcome these thoughts and emotions. Do what is necessary for you without letting those pesky thoughts of shame or guilt creep in. There is no wrong way to process birth trauma except for not to process it at all.
Prepare you body and mind for the delivery room by taking a birth prep course like Life Changes Physical Therapy’s Plan, Prep, Push course.
If feeling out-of-control is a significant risk factor for developing birth trauma, then make sure you are as in-control as possible going into birth. There are very few life events that we don’t plan and prepare for, why should child birth be any different? Plan, Prep, Push can help every mom whether this is your first child or fifteenth take action to prepare the body and mind for what is to come in the delivery room. In this course we go over specific ways to prepare you body and pelvic floor during pregnancy, realistic birth plans that can easily be communicated to your birth team, a plan for positioning and activities to help with natural pelvic opening and pain relief during labor, techniques for pushing to allow you to feel confident in your body’s abilities prior to entering the delivery room, and a postpartum plan to help you starting getting back to being you immediately after birth. Birth prep courses like Plan, Prep, Push give moms and their partners the tools to feel empowered in their birth experience rather than traumatized by it.
Do yourself a favor and don’t become another birth trauma statistic. For the sake of your mental, emotional, and physical well-being, contact Life Changes Physical Therapy today to find out how your can sign up for the Plan, Prep, Push course in the privacy of your own home or in a small group setting!
-Dr. Chelsea Garvin