Birth Trauma & the Postpartum Window

Birth trauma

This could be a birth that involved fear for your life or your baby's, an emergency you didn't see

coming, a feeling of not being heard or believed in the room, a procedure that happened way

too fast. These are traumatic events, and your nervous system encoded them as such

whether or not anyone called it that afterward.

Signs it might be birth trauma:

• Intrusive memories or flashbacks to the delivery
• Avoiding talking about the birth, or feeling triggered by other people's birth
• stories
• Difficulty bonding with your baby, or guilt about that difficulty
• Hypervigilance about your baby's safety that doesn't feel proportional
• Dread about future pregnancies
• The feeling that everyone has moved on but you haven't

EMDR is well-suited for birth trauma. It's targeted, it doesn't require you to recount the

birth in detail every session, and it's effective.

Postpartum anxiety, OCD, and rage

Postpartum depression gets the headlines. Postpartum anxiety, postpartum OCD, and

postpartum rage are equally common and less recognized. The intrusive thoughts

about your baby being harmed. The compulsive checking. The unbearable irritability.

The feeling that you're failing in a way you can't say out loud.

These are treatable. They are not the new normal of motherhood. They are not who you

are now.

New parenthood — for fathers too

I work with new fathers. The transition into fatherhood is a real psychological event and

it's chronically under-discussed. Identity shifts, marital strain, financial pressure

colliding with emotional unavailability you grew up with, the feeling of being

unprepared for the level of love and the level of fear. 

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