owning your birth experience

Most of us think of birth as a rite of passage, and it is, but what we don’t realize is that birth is just one of many rites of passage that make up the process of becoming a mother. And to understand our postpartum experience, we also have to understand our birthing experience. For many of us, that means reclaiming our place as the protagonist in our own narrative.

Birth is a reckoning, no matter how it goes. Whether your birth is a scheduled C-section or an unassisted home birth, it is a unique journey. Birth changes us in ways that we may recognize right away or that may take years to recognize and assimilate. It also affects our relationships to our babies and to our partners. How our birth goes affects how we traverse the rest of our motherhood journey, how we see ourselves as women, daughters, mothers, and partners.

In our modern world, where there are few formal rites of passage, birth and becoming a mother is a distinct one, changing both how we view ourselves as women and how society views us.

THE PASSAGE INTO MOTHERHOOD

The term rites of passage was coined in 1961 by Arnold van Gennep, a Dutch anthropologist who studied the way that people all over the world acknowledged life transitions, from birth to death. For a complete rite of passage, he identified three phases common to all rites of passage: separation, transition, and incorporation. This means that a person separates from a previous world; occupies an intermediate, transitional space; and then becomes part of a new world.

I am indebted to midwife Rachelle Garcia Seliga, creator of INNATE Postpartum Care trainings for birth and health-care professionals, for her profound insights and synthesis of the map of rites of passage and motherhood. In traditional societies, the changes were as much internal processes of the psyche and soul as they were physical, geographical processes of reshaping and relocation. People moved locations and changed dwellings based on their phase of life. For example, a pregnant woman would leave her family hut, go to a hut where pregnant women and new mothers lived, and then, after a few months to a few years, would move into a new dwelling in the family area. In modern India and Japan, many women still leave their husbands’ houses; return to their own family homes where their mothers, aunties, and unmarried sisters live; and then after six weeks or so, they go back to living in their married homes. Women made an actual physical move that represented the transition. Expressions like “crossing a threshold” or “going through a portal” described literal passages. Today these are metaphorical phrases but they are actually journeys that all women experience, whether or not there is an external physical acknowledgment of it.

Separation

The first phase of the rite of passage, separation, can sometimes even be described as a death. In the motherhood journey, this first phase of separation is pregnancy. While our culture views pregnancy as a time of ripening and blossoming, which it is, there is simultaneously a distancing from our previous identity. Becoming pregnant, when we become a home for another being, we leave behind our individual, autonomous self and our maidenhood. We leave behind membership in the world of nonparents. When we become pregnant, who we were starts to fall away, giving way to something new.

Transition

After a period of separation, we move into an intermediate, transitory space. We’ve let go of one thing and haven’t moved into the next. We don’t belong to our old group; we are not our old selves. But we don’t yet belong to a new group, and we don’t know who we are yet becoming. We are being born into a new version of ourselves. In the transitional space, a person doesn’t have a specific place or identity. We are in a suspended space.

This transition phase is often the most dramatic and the most colorful phase, requiring a seemingly superhuman feat. The transition is the vision quest, the journey to the top of the mountain, the first solo hunt or fasting. In this phase, the body is the ritual site of sacrifice. The ego is dismantled; we come into contact with something larger than ourselves. We have to dig deeper to find resources that we didn’t know that we had. We face the unknown. We’re pushed to our physical, mental, and spiritual limits. Our soul is tested.

In the motherhood rite, the transition phase is birth itself.

Childbirth is the gateway for our babies to move from the inner world to the outer world. For most women, giving birth is a pronounced encounter with our deepest reserves that we may not have even known were there. We are the vessel to bring spirit into form. Childbirth is the gateway for our baby to move from the inner world to the outer world. Birth is a part of a transition into a new self-understanding, a new physical self and a new social self, which we will continue to integrate through the last phase.

Incorporation

The final stage is called incorporation or integration. The word incorporation comes from the Latin root incorporare, meaning to “unite into one body,” “embody,” or “include.” After the transition phase, a person returns to her community with wisdom, lessons, experiences, and physical marks from her journey. She is welcomed into the community and encouraged to share the fruits of her experiences, so everyone can reap the spiritual benefit of her journey. She eventually becomes part of the new social group.

This phase of integration in a woman’s rite of passage into motherhood is the postpartum period. Many women are shocked by the postpartum experience because they were focused on getting through the birth, as if the birth were the ending. Birth is an ending, but it is not the ending. Birth is the beginning of a longer transitional period, a process that is different in length and tone for every woman. There is another level of ego death and grieving over the separation from her pregnant self and birthing self. The pregnancy is over. The birth is over. Another level of mothering has begun.

A rite of passage is not a linear path. The rite of passage of motherhood is a series of concentric circles and spirals. Pregnancy itself has the three phases of separation, transition, and integration, and being in labor has these phases as well. Qualities of each phase may be present throughout our transition to motherhood. We may disintegrate and reintegrate at various points of the journey. A rite of passage is also an individual experience, as much as it is a universal one. Each person will find different stages of the journey to be more challenging or more rewarding.

YOUR RITE OF PASSAGE
     

The questions below can simply be done in your mind, as a reflection, or they can be answered in a journal entry. Either way, try to truly stop and consider your answers to these questions, as opposed to just reading the questions as quickly as you can.

• In what new ways did you meet or are you still meeting new parts of yourself during your pregnancy, birth, or postpartum experience?

• How do you see these three phases of separation, transition, and incorporation in your pregnancy experience? How is it for you without your pregnant belly?

• Which parts of the rite of passage of pregnancy were or are most significant for you? What were the turning points for you during pregnancy when you had a glimpse of what you were letting go of or who you were becoming?

• What parts of you have you let go of through this journey?

• What parts of you are you fiercely holding on to?

• If you had to tell a pregnant woman one thing that you learned from your birth experience, what would it be?

Your Community and Rites of Passage

This rite of passage is a profound gift and invitation to experience life in its fullest expressions. As women, we are made for this experience. For centuries, indigenous peoples have created rites of passage for boys as they become men, putting them through grueling tests so they could feel what they were really capable of. Men had to fabricate experiences to put the ego on the chopping block, and to imprint a relationship with the natural world. As women, we don’t have to create rites of passages for ourselves. They are built-in, as we cycle with nature, living the life/death/life cycle every month. Biology constructed our very existence to include rites of passage, of which motherhood is a major one.

In times past, there were intermediaries facilitating the journey through a rite of passage. Elders would facilitate the changing of conditions and guard against disruptions from the outside, so the person experiencing the rite of passage could stay fully immersed, free from distraction or outside interference. Each phase had its own specific preparations, reverence, and support, and received its due acknowledgment. When people return from their quest and are neither recognized for their triumph nor able to share their gifts with their community, they experience isolation and confusion, as if their journey made no sense or does not have value. They feel as though they have lost their path. When a person receives recognition, support, and a place to share her experience, she will emerge on the other side stronger, more resilient, and with a deeper sense of self—everything a new mother needs.

While we may not be able to orchestrate a community reception for our emergent-mother self, we can and must claim the power of our experience. As women, we must recognize and appreciate, not minimize or normalize, the power of this rite. We must express ourselves for our community to hear. We must take up space so that our community can receive and value our gifts received through our mother rites. This begins with mining our birth story for its gems and meanings. From there, rather than simply sharing facts, details, and outcomes, we can share the truths and revelations of our experience.

MINING THE BIRTH LESSONS

On that crisp winter day in Rio, as the sun began to set, I was aware that I was laboring alone. An animal marking its territory, I traversed my apartment, pacing, at least ten times over. My body led me around, making a map of the space where I would soon birth a baby. Everything seemed to be going according to plan. My midwife had arrived in the morning and set up the tub, the plastic sheets, and everything needed for the labor and delivery. She had sent my parents out for the day and night, as we had discussed. My mom had really wanted to stay, but the midwife encouraged me to minimize the number of people at the birth to reduce potential confusion. My husband didn’t speak English. My mom didn’t speak Portuguese. I didn’t know what I’d be speaking during labor. My midwife spoke decent English, but we had done all our appointments in Portuguese. We’d call my parents when the baby was born.

My husband came back from lunch and fell asleep after having a beer. My midwife was napping. What was going on? Didn’t anyone care that I was having a baby? After forty-two weeks and four days, I was finally in labor, but where was everyone? Why was I doing it alone? Why wasn’t anyone there with me?

I’d been laboring for twelve hours, what’s often described as “early labor”; there is a gradual climb of intensity. I never went through the “bake muffins and plant in your garden” zone of early labor, where you’re supposed to go on with your life as usual. From the minute labor began, it had required my full attention and presence. I was already in primal territory, not caring that I couldn’t see without my glasses or that I was naked.

My midwife returned, saw my face, and immediately said, “I’m sorry I abandoned you.”

But it was too late. I’d already made a pact with my daughter that it was she and I against the world. Forget about everyone else—she and I were going to do this birth together. From that moment on, we were ensconced in an insulated bubble together that no one could really get into. Our safety depended only on each other—on my body, my will, my determination, and her strength.

To this day, I continue to be awed by the ways that the dynamics that occurred during my daughter’s birth continue to play out in our lives all these years later. We are a tight, interdependent dyad, and any attempt at slackening the umbilical cord is deeply felt on both of our ends. While I did invoke a pantheon of deities as I chanted the entire labor, the deeper message was not to trust in the universe and the women who were present. The message was that the two of us better stick together if we wanted to make it. Our survival depended not on a deep and interconnected family unit, not on the support of known and familiar earth, not on an endless net of birthing mothers and birthing women and midwives for time eternal, but on the unbreakable bond between the two of us.

Each new mom has a birth story. And whether we’re interested in sharing it with everyone or don’t want to really go over the details with anyone else, it’s important that you accept, explore, and own your story. Below, we explore ways to do that.

Community Stories:
Tiffany

I worked with Tiffany via Skype. At three weeks postpartum, she was feeling very unsettled and a bit desperate. She had just given birth to her second baby at a birth center in the water with her midwife and partner by her side. A Feldenkrais movement teacher, she had imagined following her own body’s cues and impulses to love and dance her baby into the world. Feldenkrais is a method of moving the body in non-habitual ways, many of which imitate stages of developmental movement, so that we find the most efficient ways to move, which creates less pain and more freedom in the body. The system itself is concerned with naturalness, which was definitely one of her values. She described kissing her husband as she labored, the idyllic golden lighting in the room, and how she felt in control and powerful. She explained how her baby emerged, perfect, into the water. And yet, there was one moment that she kept replaying over and over again and she couldn’t get it out of her head.

There was a moment when she was on all fours, hands on the side of the tub, deep in labor and beginning the pushing stage. The midwife told her that if she wanted to give birth in the tub, she would need to flip onto her back, because the midwife didn’t want to risk the baby being born in the air and then slipping into the water. Tiffany did not want to be on her back, but did want to have her baby in the water. Everything was happening so fast, the thought passed through her head, Maybe I’d rather get out of the tub altogether, but it didn’t make it all the way into a request.

So she obeyed and turned onto her back. In defaulting to the midwife’s authority at that moment, she lost the thread of connection to her deep intuition, her body, and her truth. Her daughter was born soon after, and interwoven with her joy was a sense of confusion. That feeling remained until we were able to pinpoint the source of her unrest, the place where the internal matrix had been torn, and stitch it back together. She was finally able to say out loud that she would have preferred to stay on all fours, even if that meant getting out of the bath and departing from her original wish to birth in the tub. To any outsider, it would have looked like Tiffany had the ideal birth—in the water, like she had wanted to, with a healthy baby girl. But Tiffany had left behind a piece of herself that she needed to go back and retrieve so she could fully inhabit her body in the present moment and relax into mothering.

In our work together, she was able to pinpoint that moment as a place of skipped communication between her and her midwife. She was disturbed that she didn’t know of the limitation of that position beforehand. And in the throes of transitional labor, she submitted to her midwive’s authority. Afterward, she needed to be on her hands and knees (in our session work) to complete the process and open up a space for her to experience having a choice.

Narrating Your Birth Story

Telling the story of one’s own birth experience is a way to unveil the meanings within. Unconnected events and anecdotes are experiences without meaning, and when we don’t look deeper, we cannot always fully mature and move forward. Connecting fragmented memories and unearthing a coherent narrative is part of the process of returning to wholeness after birth, and in an experiment led by Italian researchers Paola Di Blasio and Chiara Ionio (see below), making connections has even been proven to decrease postpartum depression. The potent insights we get from our memories can increase our emotional and spiritual growth and, in many cases, empower us to move forward and imagine ourselves and our lives in new ways.

Our dominant cultural narrative is that, as long as mother and baby survive the birth experience and are relatively healthy by Western medicine standards, the birth was successful. This discounts many women’s experiences—even though, yes, they are healthy, and yes, their baby is healthy, their bodies, minds, and souls are still deeply affected. Like so much of the way our culture works, the process itself is exchanged for the outcome, in this case the birth experience is discounted because you have a healthy baby. You see this all the time in the way we talk about birth with each other.

“How was the birth?” a friend asks.

And the answer is “C-section” or “unmedicated natural birth.”

If someone is going to summit Mount Everest, their experience is much more elaborate than if they made it to the top and back. For the climber, there are several vivid and critical moments that define the experience much more than simply “I summited” or “We didn’t make the summit.” While giving birth, there are pivotal moments when we face ourselves at deeper levels, when we come face-to-face with unexpected obstacles or unanticipated reservoirs of strength. When we reduce the experience to the outcome—and specifically to the rote idea that as long as a woman is alive, everything went well—we overlook an untapped resource. The woman and the community miss out on a chance to gain wisdom and maturity from her experience.

Here are the exact directions given to the women in the Italian study:

Once the door of your room is closed, write [down] for ten to fifteen minutes continuously, without lifting your pen from the paper, the thoughts and feelings that you had during labor and delivery. It is important for us that you describe also your most secret feelings and thoughts which you have not told, nor would tell, to anyone. It is essential that you let yourself go and come into contact with your deepest emotions and thoughts. In other words, write what happened, how you lived through this experience, and how you feel about it. Everything you write will remain strictly confidential.

Consider doing this exercise yourself. With the relatively short time limit, you also might find yourself more motivated to start the process of writing about the birth. For some women, giving voice to their experiences is not easy, but it is a powerful process in which you have the chance to become the protagonist of your own story.

The research showed that the most effective decrease in postpartum anxiety or depression symptoms came when women wrote out their unfiltered story within forty-eight hours of the birth experience. However, there is no time limit on making meaning of one of the most powerful and significant experiences of your life. Wherever you are in your recovery process, take the opportunity now to write your story. Even if you have written it out before, it’s worth it to write it out again to see what, if anything, has changed.

Even though we’ve talked a lot about making meaning out of the story, when you sit down to write, free your mind of this intention. Take a few deep breaths—as many as you need to feel your thoughts begin to slow down. As you contemplate your birth experience, notice how your body feels. Decide to write your story from your heart, paying attention to the sensations in your body. If you are right-handed, place your left hand on your heart as you write to remind you to feel your body. If you write from your mind, you will feel pressure to get the order of events and a coherent narrative right. It is your story, so you can include any details you want to. But notice if you are struggling to remember what came first and what came last, rather than how you were feeling during those moments. It is not important to remember every detail in perfect order. It is important to document significant moments and how you were feeling during them.

Community Stories:
Michaela

When Michaela came to see me, she had just become pregnant for the third time. She was experiencing a surge of unresolved feelings from her first two pregnancies. Her first birth had been an unnecessary cesarean. She had just arrived in a new country with totally different birth practices than she imagined. After laboring for what she thought was a relatively short time, she was told that she was not progressing and needed a cesarean. Without being able to communicate well in a foreign language, she kept trying to advocate for herself but it wasn’t working. Generally confused about what was happening, she ended up delivering her baby through a cesarean. The memory of that delivery had haunted her but she had been able to move past it, she thought, by returning to her home country and putting some space between herself, her family, and her birth experience.

Her second pregnancy had unexpectedly dredged up some of those old unpleasant and negative feelings she remembered from after her first birth, but ended suddenly in a miscarriage. When she became pregnant for the third time, instead of feeling the elation she expected, the floodgates of the grief from the first two pregnancies opened. Plagued by sadness and doubt, she came to see me.

A very proper and polite woman, she had a hard time communicating her true feelings about the poor care she had received during her first birth. She apologized several times and often physically covered her mouth when she spoke. She was trying to protect the reputation of her doctor, worried that I would think she was blaming and badmouthing her doctor if she shared her real thoughts. After I assured her that our session was confidential and that I wouldn’t judge her doctor, she was able to express her true feelings. Through tears, she shared the words that she had tried to say. She explained asking for more time, but being told that there was no more time. She explained that she asked if there was something wrong with her baby, and deducted there wasn’t because no one was rushing in to help. She felt that because they took their time, they were just wearing her down until she finally gave in to the outcome that was easiest for them.

When she allowed herself to express her frustration at not getting straight answers and her anger at the confusing situation as well as with the nurses and doctors, and also recognize the ways that she had been a warrior by challenging the birth staff at multiple moments along the journey, she found forgiveness for herself for giving in to a cesarean, recognizing that she had expended all of her resources for struggling in such a complex situation. When she allowed herself to tell her story without worrying about what I would think about her or what anyone would think of her, she was able to appreciate her own experience and imagine different outcomes for her upcoming birth. She made the courageous choice to change doctors and set herself up for the kind of birth she knew she wanted to have.

When I saw Michaela several months later, she had gained the courage to change health providers. She chose a birth team that was supportive of VBAC—a vaginal birth after cesarean. We had discussed in session how important it was for her to learn to express her emotions, of all kinds, without caring so much about how her feelings were perceived by others, and she shared that she had been having some more frank conversations with her family.

The next time I heard from Michaela, she wrote to tell me that she did indeed have the redemptive birth experience—a VBAC—she so hoped for with a doctor who listened to her.

Other Ways to Tell Your Story

There are many ways to tell a birth story. Although there is specific research on the benefits of writing it down, artistic expression of any kind can be a way to work through the story in the body and through creative channels that can often lead us to different, possibly unexpected meanings. Some women may like to paint, draw, make a collage, or even make a voice recording.

Instead of or in addition to writing, you can speak it aloud and record it, or make art with it. Here are some ideas:

1. With one hand on your heart or on your womb, take several deep breaths. Clear your mind and begin to reflect on your birth experience. Without pressure to write in a correct chronological sequence, write down the moments that stand out as you look back on the whole experience.

2. Record your birth story. Tell your story and record it as a voice memo on your phone.

3. Use colored pencils or pastels. Recall some of the turning point moments of your birth. You don’t have to label those turning points positive or negative. Keeping that one moment in mind, allow your hand to move across the page. Draw that moment. You don’t have to be a good artist to do this. You can even close your eyes while doing it so that you don’t expect it to be accurate.

Whenever you do it, there will be power in telling your birth narrative. You may find critical pieces of self-understanding and understanding of your mother-child bond or your partner bond in the process. You may find that the ways you look at yourself are influenced by specific statements or circumstances from the birth.

Stories don’t always have wonderful endings like Michaela’s. But it is a common occurrence when I work with women who are having difficulty conceiving, that when we dig into the birth experiences they’ve had, including abortions and miscarriages, we clear a pathway to understanding and meaning about what happened in their bodies and in their psyches—and they often then conceive. Contrarily, when women haven’t learned how to truly own their birth experiences, they often unconsciously end up with the same kind of care they received the first time, even if they make a concerted effort not to. I’ve seen women who were 100 percent clear that the care they received during their first birth was substandard and, in some cases, inhumane, turn around and repeat the scenario again the next time. It is often the births where something needs healing whose narratives especially need to be told.

TENDING TO A BIRTH THAT NEEDS HEALING

When we say the words birth trauma, most of us think of babies and what they go through in birth. But mothers are experiencing one of the most transformative experiences of their lives when they give birth, and birth is getting more complicated than it has ever been. Women are inundated with choices from start to finish in their pregnancies—the frequency of ultrasounds, whether or not to vaccinate, where to birth, which birth classes to take, even how to breathe. While most women make the choices they feel will allow them to have the best birth experience possible, no one can control or know exactly how birth will go. Women often suffer in silence, not noticing their new pains or limitations, as they are focused on their babies and families. If they do realize how they feel, they don’t know where to turn.

Trauma is not defined by an experience itself; it is not the event that happened. Trauma is determined by our body’s ability to metabolize an experience. Something that is traumatic for one person may not be disturbing for another. More important than why this happens, which may be the coalescence of our personal, familial, and cultural history, is how we recognize it and what we can do about it. To be human is to experience trauma. Fortunately, to be human is also to experience healing.

The Nature of Trauma

So why do some women experience trauma while others don’t? In Birth in Four Cultures, Brigitte Jordon explains that there are three primary factors that determine a woman’s sense of satisfaction about her birth experience:

• her perception of control;

• how supportive she found the birth environment and the people in it; and

• her prior vulnerabilities including her own birth and childhood, prior abortions or birth experiences, and her history with depression.

Even the most prepared woman, one who has chosen every part of her birth scenario as well as her support team and has done healing work on her own past, may experience a birth that registers as trauma. Trauma is a loaded word, but it is not a life sentence.

In Michaela’s story, the lingering imprint of trauma was caused by not feeling in control at that specific moment during her birth. Her body recalled and reexperienced a feeling of helplessness when in that particular physical position. The position sent her body into a mild freeze, and she didn’t have full access to her voice. You can see how delicate this situation is, given that, overall, Michaela was in control and in a supportive environment.

Birth itself is a vulnerable act. We are usually naked, exposed, and fully open in the most intimate part of our body. Our neurochemistry heightens our sensory awareness. In giving birth, we feel and sense more. This affects and influences our memory. As a result, subtle behaviors and position changes can strongly influence a woman’s internal experience.

Birth injuries are physical injuries that occur during childbirth, as described in chapter 7. If you have never heard of the term birth injuries, you are not alone. Geraldine Barrett et al. found that over 80 percent of women in the United States emerge from childbirth with some kind of pelvic scar tissue, and the CDC reports that over 30 percent of women deliver babies via C-section, which is major abdominal surgery. Women who experience birth injuries are more likely to experience birth trauma and PTSD.

Birth trauma and birth injuries are more frequent than we realize. Between 25 and 34 percent of women report that their children’s births were traumatic, even though the staff and their support team may not perceive it that way. Birth trauma includes more than just danger of death to mother or baby; it also includes physical injuries and the perception of danger, as well as feelings of extreme fear, aloneness, disrespect, lack of control, or helplessness. When we only think of a major catastrophe, death, or accident as trauma, the smaller but also significant, undigested pieces are left untreated and dismissed altogether. In doing so, women may blame themselves for an inability to move on or to feel satisfied about a birth that everyone else thinks went great. (See the section “Cross-Training Your Nervous System” in chapter 4.)

In the case of a birth that needs healing, writing out a birth story can potentially cause more harm than good. If you notice that your heart accelerates or you start to feel anxious or frantic when considering returning to the events of the birth, then this is not the time to revisit your entire birth experience. Instead you can work with your experience in other ways.

Recall if there is one moment when you felt helpless or overpowered. While there may be more than one moment, see if you can choose just one. This is important—you can’t work with every moment at once. If it is not immediately obvious what moment that is, then choose the first moment in the experience that you remember feeling out of control.

RENEGOTIATING A BIRTH THAT NEEDS HEALING
     

1. Choose ONE moment in your birth experience when you felt helpless, overpowered, or out of control.

2. If you feel a very high level of activation (recall this from “Cross-Training Your Nervous System” in chapter 4 and also check in with yourself to see if intuitively this feels helpful) when recalling this moment, start with your powerful imagination. Visualize what you would have liked to have happened. Imagine what you would like to have said, how you would like to have moved, possibly who you would have liked to have with you at the time. See the whole scene in your mind the way that you would have liked that moment to have gone.

3. If the level of activation feels medium, write down the answers to the same questions as above: What you would like to have said, how would you have liked to have moved, or who would you have liked to have with you at the time?

4. Now that you have imagined or written about how you would have liked to react, speak, move, or respond in that moment, notice how you feel in your body. Stay with this practice of noticing for at least thirty seconds.

5. Then let your eyes wander around the room and notice things that catch your eye. Where do your eyes land? Notice what happens in your body and your breath. As you orient back into the room you’re in, become more present in the here and now.

It is very important that you not skip to rewriting your entire birth story the way you wish it would have happened. This is not about denying the circumstances of the birth you had or living in fantasy. This is about giving your nervous system a chance, in small pieces, to complete a cycle of self-protection and agency that may have been thwarted during the birth. The nervous system is sensitive and responsive, so working with one moment at a time is the appropriate pace for a birth that needs healing. You might not feel an immediate change, nevertheless respect a slow pace in working with sensitive material. If this process is appealing to you and also effective, then you may be compelled to renegotiate more than one moment. If you decide to work on more than one moment, leave a day or so in between, so that you have a chance to process the changes.

If at any moment, this process feels like too much, return to the rule of threes (from “Cross-Training Your Nervous System”). Sometimes it is necessary to have a trained professional that you can develop trust with guide you through this process of renegotiating the birth events.

If you experienced a traumatic birth, seek out the help of someone who is a trained counselor and versed in working with women and trauma. Birth Story Medicine, the work of Pam England, is a powerful modality for processing birth material; it is led by women practitioners who are specifically trained to help women find the medicine, the healing gems, in their birth stories. I also recommend working with a Somatic Experiencing practitioner who can work with the physiological patterns in your body, possibly utilizing touch. Birth is a visceral experience and also a sexual experience. Because birth and sex happen through the body, deep healing often happens by including touch and the body in the process of coming to resolution and closure of the birth experience.

I wish there were a better word to use than trauma to discuss these issues. Trauma is a word that people tend to either under-identify or overidentify with. It becomes a label that we cling to or reject. The truth is that we have all experienced trauma in life. Not one of us moves through life perfectly able to process and digest every circumstance and event that comes our way. That unprocessed or undigested material gets stuck in our system. Afterward, we are on autopilot, often repeating thoughts or behaviors that we may not even notice have been ingrained from the experience. Many women realize that their birth experience was traumatic for them because they cannot stop thinking about what happened and continue to feel the emotion of it. Many other women experience postpartum depression or anxiety, major shifts in their self-image, sexuality, or relationship, and don’t realize that it is related to something that happened during the birth experience.

Whatever the outward circumstances of your birth were, if there are still parts of your birth experience that haunt you, that you find yourself going over and over, that just don’t sit right with you, make sure you do the exercises in this chapter. They will help you begin to own your own birth experience. Beyond that, please give yourself the relief of seeking out a professional, whether therapist, midwife, or postpartum doula to help you. Trying to just get over it won’t work without looking more deeply, and sometimes that requires the support of a wise person who knows something about birth and can help you understand your experience.

ACCEPTING THAT YOU ARE NOT WHO YOU WERE

Women are often surprised by the “negative” emotions of grief, feeling overwhelmed, and sadness that they experience in a time when they expected to be supremely joyful. As a society, we tend to glorify the intoxicating feelings of having a baby, so when the darker emotions come, they can be unexpected and upsetting. Whether it is a loss of her carefree self, the loss of her relationship before the baby, or the loss of her big, pregnant belly, the feelings of grief are real, and almost all women feel them. When women can be honest with themselves about their true feelings, without layering on shame or guilt for not feeling how they think they should, they can relax knowing that it is the natural process of becoming a mother. They can gain greater access to the full experience of mothering and life—in all its shades and textures.

Community Stories:
Leslie

Leslie came to work with me after she gave birth for a second time. Her second delivery was a cesarean, and she wanted to know if it was going to be possible for her to try for a vaginal delivery when she got pregnant again. She was worried about scar tissue on her cervix that she felt had impeded her delivery, made it unable for her to dilate fully, and had been the cause for the cesarean. Her doctor had tried to break up the scar tissue during delivery but not to great enough effect. Leslie became flooded with emotion as she told me about her first delivery, when the scar tissue had developed. In her second trimester of pregnancy, she learned that her baby was no longer alive, and she decided to deliver that baby vaginally. Of course, she was heartbroken but had come to terms with the spiritual significance of that baby in her and her husband’s life. When we began to work with her second birth story, she realized that her body did not open because she associated that dilation with birthing a baby that was not alive. Her body was protecting her from having that experience again. So rather than feeling safe and open to dilate, she remained safely closed and delivered a healthy baby girl via cesarean.

Highly engaged in her own process and quite uninhibited, she touched her own cervix, feeling the scar tissue. Her own manual work along with mine, together with the understanding of the unconscious belief that was operating during the birth, has led her to feel confident that both her body and mind will allow her to have the natural birth she wants when she decides to have another baby.

These emotions are gifts that allow us to experience more of the depth of who we are. Most of these emotions are neither desired nor comfortable, yet they can be the grist for our evolution. Exploring them can give us clues as to how we can resolve patterns of behavior and emotion, changing them not only for ourselves, but also for our children.

I emerged from the birth of my daughter with one reinforced core belief and one new, imprinted one. The core belief was: I am alone in the world and I have to do everything myself. The new one was: It’s me and my daughter against the world. They have each had their own repercussions.

Under stress, these beliefs become default operating systems, unconscious internal mantras. When I’m conscious and awake, I work with them, recognizing when they arise and opting for behavior that gives my system information to the contrary. When I am in the “I have to do everything myself” mode, I pause and get in touch with my own internal little girl who feels stranded and overwhelmed and ask her what she needs. Usually she just needs to be heard. Then I look realistically at my life and take inventory: Who is on my side? Who is there to help me? I take a moment to express gratitude for that support—my parents, my daughter’s schoolteacher, my landlord, my sister, my clients, and my friends. Then, if I still feel like I need help, I reach out and practice humility while asking for what I need.

It’s hard to know what comes first sometimes—the belief or the reality. For my daughter and me, this core operating system that says our survival depends on our coalescence as a united front has meant that we have mostly lived in one-bedroom or studio apartments, without spaces of our own. We have lived on three different continents sharing the same room and same bed. Men have come and gone from our lives, and what has remained is the two of us, each the major pillar for the other. I have many times mistaken codependence for interdependence. And I am divided when she tells me that I am the one person in the world that really gets her. Part of me thinks there is so much beauty in our closeness and trust. The other part wants her to feel safe and understood in multiple arenas by many sources. Both are true. I do what I can to reinforce a feeling that she is supported by many pillars, not the least of which is life itself. Yet I see how that birth pact, where I placed will above life, permeates our reality to this day. We are both living into the understanding that we are drafting on the waves of the flow of life.

Each birth has its own intricacies and lessons for each mother that are hers to discover over time. This is why it’s important to tell your story your way. It’s okay if things didn’t go as planned. It’s okay if they did but you weren’t as ecstatic about them as you thought you would be.

Even if things did go as planned and you and your baby are both “fine,” there will be things—emotions, physical sensations, and so on—that you won’t be prepared to deal with immediately. It will help you feel more whole and emotionally healthy if you process them in your own time. How your birth experience goes affects your postpartum period. When women feel disappointed, discouraged, or traumatized, digesting the experience can be extremely challenging. It takes time and support.

SUMMARY

• Birth is one part of an extended rite of passage that is the transition to motherhood.

• Telling your birth story is an important part of coming through birth in one piece, and it can even diminish symptoms of postpartum anxiety and depression.

• It is okay and even normal to have “negative” feelings after a birth.

• Some births are traumatic for mothers, even if they may have not been life-threatening, or appeared to be so from the outside. Working through the birth trauma can be the key to physical, emotional, and spiritual healing.

Reflections

• What parts of yourself have you met through the rite of passage that is birth?

• Is there a part of your birth experience that is lingering with you that you continue to think about or wish would have gone differently? How do you feel about each member of your support team during your birth experience? How do you feel about your partner when you think about the birth? How do you feel about your relationship to your baby when you consider the birth?

• Can you identify a core belief that was activated during your pregnancy or birth experience? Can you identify a new core belief that arose out of your birth experience? Identify a core belief that was activated during your pregnancy, birth, or postpartum experience. (That may be something like “I am alone,” or “I can’t trust people in authority to listen to me.”)

Practices

• Write, record, or draw out your birth experience.

• Choose one moment in your birth story that won’t leave your mind. Recall that image and visualize what you would have liked to have happened. Imagine what you would like to have said, how you would like to have moved, possibly who you would have liked to have with you at the time. See the whole scene in your mind the way that you would have liked that moment to have gone. Then notice how you feel in your body as you imagine that new scene.