Perinatal & Birth Trauma

Supporting you or your partner with pre-pregnancy trauma, pregnancy trauma, birth trauma, and postpartum trauma in Calgary and online anywhere in Alberta.

We need more awareness around perinatal trauma and the way in which it can impact our mental health. Did you know that up to 45% experience their births as traumatic? This stat does not include the pre-pregnancy trauma, pregnancy trauma, postpartum trauma or the trauma that can occur to our partners.

If left untreated, birth trauma, pre-pregnancy trauma, pregnancy trauma and postpartum trauma can have lasting effects. Trauma is stored in the body and needs an approach that addresses the brain and body. At Wild Path Counselling you will find support from someone with extensive training and experience in perinatal trauma so that you can start to feel more like yourself again.

Treatment may include empathic support, EMDR Therapy, Compassionate Holding, Parts Work, Somatic Therapy, Mindfulness, Grief Therapy, or Sandtray Therapy that address where trauma is stored in the brain and body. Read below to find out more.

Perinatal trauma may be obvious right away, or you might not recognize it until later on. Any time is the right time to seek support, even years later. Because trauma is stored in the body it often will not just “get better”. Trauma is also in the eye of the beholder, which means if it feels like trauma to you, it is, I believe you.

Perinatal Trauma

Read each section below to learn more about pre-pregnancy trauma, pregnancy trauma, birth trauma, and postpartum trauma.

  • What we often do not realize before trying to get pregnant is that our past trauma can suddenly pop up. What does this look like? Well it could be the beliefs that we are raised with, the way we are parented, the context we grew up, our current context, past physical abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse or neglect, etc. We might now even realize it is an issue until a trigger brings it to the surface. It can be incredibly helpful to deal with this trauma that may have been buried but often resurfaces in trying to conceive, struggles with infertility, pregnancy loss, becoming pregnant, going through pregnancy, birth, postpartum and parenting. Consider addressing this trauma before it pops up unexpectedly in the perinatal and parenting period.

  • Everyone says that once you’re pregnant you will just have a glow, well what if that glow is not present? What if you are surviving pregnancy when the rest of the world tells you how you should be enjoying every moment? There are so many physical things that can occur during pregnancy that could cause trauma. That could be physical symptoms that occur like hyperemesis gravidarum (severe morning sickness) or other medical complications. It could be a medical procedure that is done with or without your consent that is not trauma informed. Maybe you experience a stressful event such as a natural disaster, relationship rupture, relocation or other incident that feels traumatic. Whatever it is, know that you are not alone in that you can have pregnancy trauma that occurs and there are ways to address this in therapy.

  • We all want a birth that goes smoothly, but there are things that can go wrong during birth and cause birth trauma. The ideal is that you would receive trauma informed care where you feel supported by your team, there is narration of what is happening and informed consent is received for all interventions. This can mitigate the risk of birth trauma. However, something going wrong during the birth with you or your baby, interventions that are unexpected, NICU stays, and not receiving trauma informed care can all lead to birth trauma. Read more below about what to look for to know if you may have experienced birth trauma and need to reach out for support.

  • Postpartum trauma is anything that happens after the birth. This might be trauma caused by the care or interventions we receive or don’t receive following the birth. Potential medical complications for us and our bodies postpartum can also lead to trauma. It may also be a NICU stay for our baby. Postpartum trauma might also occur through a medical complication, severe lack of sleep for us or our baby, colic, allergies, domestic abuse, stressful life events or other complications postpartum.

  • As a partner you can be the forgotten one in the experience of trauma. However, you also may have pre-pregnancy trauma, pregnancy trauma, birth trauma, or postpartum trauma that impacts you. Whether it is historic trauma you experienced, struggles with infertility, pregnancy loss, traumatic events during the perinatal period, witnessing birth trauma, fear of losing your partner or baby, NICU stays, feeling out of control and not consenting, medical challenges for your baby or partner, postpartum impact on you, and more. It is important that you seek out support and find a warm and caring space to address your own trauma.

Perinatal Trauma Symptoms

  • Flashbacks and/or nightmares

  • Anger, rage, guilt, shame, sadness, fear, grief, blame

  • Trouble sleeping/sleeping too much

  • Constantly checking on baby or worrying about your health/baby’s health

  • Difficulty bonding with baby

  • Anxiety - panic, increased heart rate, stomach unease

  • Avoidance - avoiding conversations, people, places, pictures, etc.

  • Experiencing physical symptoms that may be explained/unexplained

  • Intrusive thoughts/images

  • Eating more/less than usual

  • Feeling emotionally detached or numb

  • On edge, agitated

  • Difficulty with daily functioning

What Might Cause Perinatal Trauma?

  • Your perception of what happened - perinatal trauma is in the eye of the beholder

  • Trauma experienced as a child/adult prior to trying to conceive

  • Infertility treatment

  • Not being able to get pregnant

  • Pregnancy Loss

  • Treatment and interventions during pregnancy

  • Stressful life event during pregnancy

  • Severe morning sickness - Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG)

  • Not giving proper consent for procedures

  • Medical interventions and procedures

  • Not having the birth you had hoped for

  • Fear for your safety or baby’s safety

  • Long, painful labour

  • Not being cared for during birth or having proper communication

  • Emergency for you or baby

  • C-section

  • Medical complications for you or baby

  • Provider mistreatment and not being supported or compassionately cared for

  • NICU stays

  • A baby that has colic, allergies, eczema, medical challenges, or does not sleep

  • Birth injury to baby or your body

  • Stressful events that occur in postpartum

  • Anything else that you may have experienced as traumatic

Treatment for Perinatal Trauma

EMDR

EMDR is an evidence based treatment that stands for Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing. It utilizes bilateral stimulation, which means it activates both sides of the brain in order to reprocess distressing memories. When we experience trauma or distress, our amygdala (the fight, flight, freeze response system) gets activated. Those flashbacks or “sticky memories” are being triggered by this. In EMDR therapy we work to soften these memories without having to fully go into all of the details. That fight, flight, freeze response becomes deactivated in association with the memory and can provide relief from the distress and future triggers. We can utilize eye movements to do this, but there are other ways to also create the bilateral stimulation such as hand held buzzers or auditory sounds. EMDR has become a well researched and effective strategy to address perinatal trauma, birth trauma, or distress. Check out the video below for more about EMDR therapy.

Compassionate Holding

Being met in a therapy session with empathy and compassion can have an incredible healing impact. Healing in relationship and feeling heard in a neutral and confidential space, allows you to be seen and heard and will help you to feel less alone. This can also be restorative for those parts of you that were not previously seen or supported by others you have been in relationship with or care providers in the perinatal period. Offering you compassion and teaching you to offer compassion to yourself can have a powerful effect on things like shame, rage, guilt, anger, exhaustion, and the other emotions that often become triggered in the perinatal period. All of you will be welcomed with a non-judgemental and supportive approach that can encourage growth and healing. Compassionate holding might be what you need to start healing that perinatal trauma and birth trauma.

Parts Work

This probably sounds weird, what is this? Well, parts work offers us a way to notice that we are made up of many different parts. These parts of us may be familiar and around for a while, or perhaps they are new and surprising. They may be things like emotional parts, people pleaser parts, numbing parts, identity parts, and more. We can utilize therapies such as The Dissociative Table or Internal Family Systems Therapy to examine these parts and how they have protected you, controlled, taken over, been dismissed, provided safety, created boundaries, and impacted who you are. When we examine our parts outside of ourselves it allows things to become externalized that are often so internal to us. This can provide a wonderful healing container that might be what is needed to move you forward. Examining these parts and the way in which they impact perinatal trauma and birth trauma may be helpful in your healing journey.

Somatic Therapy

Trauma is stored in our brain and bodies. Somatic Therapy is therapy relating to the body that works well to treat trauma and distress because of this focus. This type of therapy might include mindfulness therapy that helps us to have increased non-judgmental awareness. It often will involve grounding. Grounding is something that we utilize to keep us in the present moment. Staying in the present moment is important to perinatal trauma healing because dissociation is something that our bodies can do in order to protect us. Dissociation has been that wise protector when we needed it. However, we want to start to allow your body to be more present and “grounded” again in order to start to slowly heal the trauma or distress. Somatic therapy could also involve body movements that allow for a release of the trauma that our body is holding. With perinatal trauma and birth trauma your body can hold a lot and might benefit from somatic therapies.

Grief Therapy

Often with trauma, we also experience grief, or with grief we also experience trauma. This is why grief therapy may be a part of what we do in therapy as well. We will allow space for the grief within the therapy room. There will be opportunity to explore things like loss, memories, healthy grieving, restoration, memorialization, boundaries, and growing around the grief. This may include utilizing some somatic techniques, sandtray therapy, creative outlets, and you identifying how you can best grieve what you need to grieve. Grief therapy can involve some psychoeducation for you to know more about your own grief and exploring how this has impacted you and your relationship with others. Perinatal trauma and birth trauma can involve a great deal of grief that can benefit from processing it with a therapist.

Sandtray Therapy

Sandtray therapy might seem like it’s something just for kids, but it can also be incredibly effective for adults. It is kind of like Art Therapy in that you are creating something, but what you are creating is done by choosing figurines and placing them in the sand. When we utilize something like sandtray we are accessing another part of our brain that is different than our cognitive brains. What we know from the study of neuroscience is that when we utilize our bottom, top, left, and right brains, we have more opportunity for change and healing in therapy. Sometimes things that we do not cognitively know will show up in a Sandtray and we can the process it or maybe a way that we process something that previously felt stuck. The other benefit is that it connects with our playful side that often adults will tuck away. This can encourage us to connect with our younger selves and again, maybe access healing in a different way. The somatic nature of Sandtray can also offer the healing that our bodies need in order to move through our trauma or distress.

EMDR Therapy

Here is a video that does a beautiful job of explaining more about what EMDR Therapy is and how it may be helpful for you.