Parenting After a Traumatic Birth: A Trauma Therapist’s Honest Perspective

Early parenthood is a wild ride, and anxiety is expected. Layer a traumatic birth on top, and it feels like driving for the first time in a hurricane during an earthquake. Intense, right?

This is part three of a series. In part one, I talked about how an adverse experience transforms into trauma. In part two, I explored what hospitalization taught me about how we can support our nervous systems during a traumatic experience. Quick recap: I'm a somatic therapist specializing in anxiety, trauma, and attachment. A couple of months ago, I had my own traumatic birth experience: NICU, two surgeries (one emergency!), and waking up intubated in the ICU. My intention with this series is to use my story to help you understand trauma healing, offer tools for navigating and recovering from traumatic experiences, and build resilience.

The impacts of a traumatic birth don't disappear when you leave the hospital. For many, that’s when they truly begin, especially how trauma impacts early parenthood.

Raising a Baby While “Broken”

I had realistic expectations for early parenthood: a mix of joy, sadness, long nights, cuddles, new responsibilities, and constant learning.

But after my traumatic birth, I couldn't do basic childcare for two weeks. I could barely walk, eat, bend, or hold my baby for more than 10 minutes. I wasn't physically well, and emotionally, I was just as rough.

I cried multiple times a day. Every physical symptom spiraled into believing I'd be hospitalized again. I was afraid to sleep and startling awake when I did drift off. When anxious, I’d feel out of my body. I readily recognized these as symptoms of trauma and this wasn't the start I wanted. It was hard to accept I needed to heal physically and psychologically before being able to more actively parent.

My family and husband were incredibly helpful, but I felt guilty, like everyone was doing more. Feeling utterly broken by trauma, I tried to do things that would cause physical harm.

What helped was knowing that feeling "broken" was just the trauma talking. Trauma often shows up as shame and guilt. Yes, I had physical and mental injuries that desperately needed healing. No, that didn’t make me broken. The more quickly and deeply I healed, the better for all of us, me, my son, my husband, and my family.

After a traumatic birth, you often have a huge, urgent "other" item on your to-do list before you can fully dive into parenting. This can feel wrong. But if you don’t prioritize healing, the injury lasts longer or keeps coming back.

“What If” Exhaustion

Early parenthood anxiety is often connected to the massive new responsibility of caring for a brand new human, hormone shifts, sleeplessness, and the desire to do right by your vulnerable baby while learning as you go.

A traumatic birth can crank this anxiety to 100, adding vivid imagery of bad things that could happen (or did happen), and intense, automatic physical stress responses. For me, a mild headache at 2 AM would surge into panic, believing it was a symptom of a life-threatening illness, then that belief caused nausea, then that nausea combined with the headache led to me me thinking I was dying and my baby was dying, and my mind disconnecting from body. All while holding my baby, trying to project peace I absolutely wasn't feeling.

Trauma can cause the logical mind and the body to disconnect during your toughest moments so awareness and thinking the right thoughts often doesn’t help. I knew what was happening to me and I could name it: somatic response, sympathetic nervous system getting activated, thought spiral, depersonalization. But that knowledge didn’t change my experience. Only breathing, connecting with my resources, putting ice on the back of my neck, and focusing on the weight of my baby in my arms really helped.

The good news? Somatic practices, grounding, and resourcing can help decrease symptom intensity, make them tolerable, and even reduce them over time. Your nervous system repeatedly encountering stressors then moving towards peace is how healing happens.

The bad news? Even with these practices, the nervous system roller coaster can take minutes to hours and a lot of energy. Energy you’d rather put towards parenting, physical recovery, or relaxation. That may not be possible yet, but it doesn't mean it never will be. With an EMDR therapy intensive, loved ones' support, and healing practices, I now enjoy much of parenting and bonding, even as I continue to heal.

Summing It Up

You will need help and your recovery will take time. Even when you’re physically able to engage more with your child, trauma recovery is a huge energy drain and needs to be your focus. Practically, it may be weeks, months, or years before you can fully focus on psychological and emotional healing because you need to just get through for now. If that's you, hone in on what helps you get through: music, time with friends, dancing, reading, art, journaling, spiritual spaces, or community.

If help is available, take it totally unapologetically and embrace it. You need it and your deserve it. If not, my heart goes out to you. Make finding support, building it, or asking for it a priority. If you're solution-focused and used to caring for others, it may feel absolutely radical to prioritize seeking, finding, even paying for or asking for support for yourself. But here, it is absolutely necessary.

If you have unaddressed trauma and long-standing trauma that you recognize you need to heal, please reach out for a consultation. EMDR, Brainspotting, and somatic therapy can support your healing and therapy intensives can offer relief sooner than you might think.