Healing from a Traumatic Birth as a Trauma Therapist: My Story

Content Warning: discussion of medical trauma and mentions of blood, please read with care ❤️

As a trauma therapist, I spend my days supporting others through some of the hardest moments of their lives. I specialize in somatic therapy, anxiety, couples attachment work, and helping people who feel stuck in survival mode. But recently, I found myself in the middle of my own survival moment and gave me an even deeper understanding of what I thought I already knew about trauma.

Two months ago, I gave birth to my son. It was a scheduled c-section, and I felt calm, prepared, and supported. I had every reason to expect a positive birth experience. But that day didn’t go as planned. Over the course of a few posts I will be giving a peek into my healing journey and I wanted to begin by unpacking the difference between an adverse experience and trauma—something I often help clients understand, and now have recently lived through.

Even with all the tools, knowledge, and awareness I have as a therapist, I, like every human, am not immune to trauma. None of us are. But trauma is not just about what happens to us—it’s about what happens inside of us as a result.

When My Birth Story Became Something More

Everything seemed to be going smoothly during the surgery from what I could see and hear (just in case you didn’t know—c-section patients are awake during the procedure). But during the operation, my doctor discovered a lot of scar tissue from a previous surgery, which meant making more incisions. I lost a significant amount of blood.

At that point, I was having what I’d consider an adverse experience. Something difficult and scary, yes—but one that I believed would remain in my past as a tough memory. My coping skills were still intact.

I was wheeled into the recovery room, thrilled to have my baby on earth. I felt good—tired, a little numb, but grateful and excited.

But then things shifted.

I started bleeding heavily again. Nurses became concerned. My doctor returned. More nurses—this time from the ICU—entered the room. I was rushed into an emergency second surgery just five hours after my c-section because of all the blood loss this was an emergency situation and they needed to act fast.

This is the moment my nervous system tipped into trauma territory.

It was no longer just something scary. It became an injury to my nervous system—one that didn’t just live in the past, but in my present. I started to see signs while I was in the hospital: a shift in how I viewed the world, persistent and intense fear, and automatic nervous system reactions I couldn’t reason myself out of. These were signs I have seen in so many clients before. My coping skills were no longer enough and my nervous system was very overwhelmed.

What Turns an Adverse Experience Into Trauma?

This question comes up often in my work with clients, and now I’ve lived it myself. Two things really stood out for me:

1. The presence of danger—or perceived danger—can flood the nervous system.
When we feel we are in serious danger, especially with no clear way to protect ourselves, our body’s natural survival responses kick in. The very real threat to my life activated my sympathetic nervous system (that fight-or-flight response) in a way that was very intense. The purpose of these systems is to protect us in moments of danger but in a situation like the one I was in running away or adrenaline fueled fighting moves were not going to help so all of that nervous system activation just turned into consistent fear and stress.

I really knew that it had gone from an adverse experience to a trauma when I realized I was afraid to go to sleep. A hospital is a really hard place to sleep anyway and after three days of medical interventions I was exhausted and I desperately wanted to take a nap on the fourth day but, while talking to my partner, I realized I couldn’t actually make myself do it because I was too scared I would wake up with some other medical emergency having taken place while I slept.

2. Trauma often comes when we’re caught off guard.
I was prepared for one surgery. I wasn’t prepared for a second. I definitely wasn’t prepared to wake up in the ICU, intubated. I wasn’t prepared to be separated from my newborn son for days because babies aren’t allowed in intensive care.

Humans can endure so much when we have time to prepare. But when we don’t have that opportunity—when hard things pile on quickly and without warning—our nervous system doesn’t have time to gear up. And that sudden overwhelm can turn a challenging event into trauma.

Other Factors That Can Tip the Scale

In my work with clients, I’ve seen many different elements (besides the two mentioned above) that can turn adversity into trauma:

• Prolonged exposure without breaks

• Being alone during or after the experience

• Shaming or minimizing from others

• Back-to-back stressors with no time to recover

• Pre-existing negative beliefs (e.g., “I’m not strong enough” or “I deserve this”)

• Social stigma or feeling “othered”

• Lack of safe spaces to process the experience

And here’s the hopeful part: the opposite is also true. The presence of support, preparation, safety, validation, and space for processing can help keep a hard experience from becoming lasting trauma. Loving community, a positive self concepts, moments that feel like breaks, extended time away from the adverse experiences can all boost resilience as you find your way through the adverse experience and into more safety and stability. These protective factors are so powerful, and I’ll be sharing more about how I’m leaning into them in the next part of this series.

From Therapist to Human (And Back Again)

This experience reminded me—vividly—that responding to trauma isn’t about what you know. It’s about what you feel in your body. And even with all my training, when my body perceived danger, I reacted like any other human would. That doesn’t make me flawed, it makes me wonderfully human.

I’ll continue sharing more in the next post: some more learnings, the tools I used and am using, and the surprising gifts that have come out of this incredibly difficult chapter.

If you’re in your own season of overwhelm or are walking through trauma of any kind, please know this: you are not alone. And healing is always possible, even when it doesn’t feel that way at first.

Thanks for being here with me.

Lauren Ludlow, LCSW