Birth Trauma + Postpartum Support
Birth Trauma is a labouring woman’s experience of labour and delivery. They would have neuroceived the event as having been highly fearful, terrifying, horrifying and/or life-threatening to self or baby. Those witnessing this event (father, partner, support person, doula, primary care giver) are also at risk of developing secondary traumatic stress (STS) injuries (Simkin & Hull, 2011).
The mind maps a story of meaning onto an experience. The mind is always trying to make sense out of highly charged emotional experiences, both positive and negative. This means that without conscious awareness the mind has already formulated a response to the event to help create context. The meaning it subscribes is usually not restorative or reparative, until one becomes consciously aware of the narrative it is telling (Stapleton, et al., 2020).
Resolving trauma is threefold
1. Trauma impacts the body (physiologically) through the activation of the survival stress response, the body must complete the instinctive stress response to return to a state of hemostasis (Levine, 1997) (Kolk, 2014)
2. The end result of an experience is met with an emotional response, the heart needs to clear the emotional debris through tears or anger release (Dispenza, 2012) (Badenoch, 2008). Moving the emotional material through and out of the body frees up energy within its system to restore and recalibrate.
3. Our mind seeks to assign meaning and context to a highly stressful event. The story that is told needs to shift from a wounded tale to a story of wisdom (Siegel, 2018). The forefather of the interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB), Dan Siegel, notes that we can measure how well someone is healing based on the story that they are telling (Siegel, 2020).
The result of the body, heart, and mind working together is a production of an exchange of energy and information, which in turn, fosters mental health. The human biological system is naturally resilient and our biological system thrives in securely attached social bonds. Secure attachment is developed when a person (from birth) is received by another humans’ nervous system that is open, receptive, kind, empathetic, and attuned to their biological needs (Siegel, 2018). However, when met with a dysregulated nervous system of another, as a result of having experienced a traumatic event, attachment is compromised. We now know that the presence of a calm, nurturing, loving, and attuned nervous system of another will restore and repair any severing of attachment.
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