Birth Trauma
By Dr Kim Thomas
Birth trauma can feel unbearable – but help is available.
After Daisy had pushed for two hours without success, doctors decided that they needed to use forceps to help her baby out. She’d already had a long, painful labour, and now the room was filling with people, leaving Daisy feeling frightened and out of control. Her baby daughter was eventually born safely, though back-to-back. Shortly afterwards, however, Daisy had a haemorrhage. She felt tired and exhausted and found it difficult to breastfeed. At home, her stitches became infected.
She also began having flashbacks to the birth and found it difficult to see anything that reminded her of what had happened, such as tv shows involving birth. In addition, Daisy felt that she wasn’t a good mother because she still couldn’t do simple things like sit up in bed to feed her daughter.
Birth trauma is the name we use for what happened to Daisy.
It describes the experience of being so traumatised by birth that the memory of what happened continues to affect you every day. This often takes the form of flashbacks to the birth, feeling intensely anxious all the time or avoiding anything that reminds you of the birth.
In some women, the trauma symptoms are severe enough to qualify for a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which affects one in 25 women after birth – about 30,000 a year in the UK. Sometimes, fathers or partners can also be so traumatised by the experience of watching birth that they develop birth trauma.
When you’re a new mother, already struggling with the demands of caring for a newborn, having birth trauma on top can make life feel unbearable. The mums who come to us at the Birth Trauma Association tell us that the constant sense of anxiety – watching over their baby to make sure it doesn’t die, feeling frightened to leave the house – leaves them feeling isolated. Some feel guilty because they find it hard to bond with their baby. Others tell us that family and friends don’t understand why they still feel traumatised and insist that they just need to “move on”.
Fortunately, help is available. In England there are new maternal mental health teams to support women with birth trauma, and there is also the option of self-referring to therapy if you need it from the NHS Talking Therapies service (outside England you will need a referral to therapy from your GP or health visitor).
Two forms of therapy: trauma-focused CBT and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) are very effective at treating trauma symptoms.
Daisy was initially worried about receiving therapy because she was scared the counsellor would think she was a bad mother, but she found it helpful. She also benefited from a birth debrief with the hospital, which enabled her to get answers to her questions about what happened during the birth. Most maternity units now provide a birth debriefing service.
If you’d like to share your experience with someone who understands, you can email the Birth Trauma Association’s peer supporters on support@birthtraumaassociation.org.uk or join our Facebook group (www.facebook.com/groups/theBTA). Women tell us that having the opportunity to talk to others who have been through a similar experience makes a huge difference – and some even say that it saved their life.
Dr Kim Thomas is CEO of the Birth Trauma Association, a charity that supports mothers and fathers affected by traumatic birth. She is also author of the recent parliamentary report into birth trauma. www.birthtraumaassociation.org