Making sense of your birth trauma: how Make Birth Better helps
‘It helped me recognise what happened. It validated my experience. I can now set a name to it’, is what a woman shared with Ashleigh Watkins – a volunteer MSc graduate researcher for Make Birth Better – talking about the support she got from the website. By interviewing people, Ashleigh has analysed how it helps those who identify with birth trauma navigate and make sense of their experience. She shares what supported them and helped validate their trauma.
Just as beauty, birth trauma can be defined as lying in the ‘eye of the beholder’, what each of us experience as traumatic births may be viewed or seen differently through the eyes of others. This does not mean what we experience is less valid in any way. In fact, it highlights the importance of interpretation and meaning we give to events in our life and the psychological impact they can have on us.
Connecting with others
Many mothers I spoke to felt connected with others due to accessing and reading other’s personal birth trauma stories. This allowed them to feel less alone or ‘not as alienated’, normalising their own trauma response. This type of peer support was also seen to encourage women to reach out to family, friends and further support. Women shared: ‘it made me feel it wasn’t quite as daunting’ and ‘the stories have given me confidence to speak out’.
A more positive outlook
Many women I interviewed were very critical and judgemental towards themselves after their trauma experience, like the person who shared ‘it made me feel less of a woman’ after a caesarean birth. However, MBB’s website helped these women to identify their personal strengths and adopt a much more positive perception of their traumatic experience, disconnecting negative associations. Terminology on the site helped women verbalise their experiences more easily, as well as talk more openly about their experience, which led to more positive expressions. For example, women started using humour when describing their birth stories to others.
“My caesarean used to make me feel less of a woman, now I can joke about it”
A better bond with myself and my baby
Birth trauma can sometimes have a profound effect on the relationship with your child. Women I talked to stated that they worried they had a weak bond with their child or experienced physical impediments, including curtailed breastfeeding, due to the impact of trauma. By accessing the MBB website women felt that they developed a clearer understanding and explanation for feeling this way, which felt more like ‘a normal process’. The site helped them build a less critical and more accepting attitude towards themselves and more positive relationship with child. A woman said: ‘I just wanted the burden of my child taken away but reading the Make Birth Better website helped me to understand my emotions and to have a more positive relationship with my daughter.’
Not my partner’s fault
Some women expressed recurrent emotions of anger and frustration towards their partner, whereas others expressed avoidance behaviour. Some also found they had a lack of understanding of the impact their birth trauma may have had on their partner. MBB’s site, however, helped these women to mentalize their partner’s separate perspectives. This contributed towards behavioural changes, such as being more aware of their anger and open to talking about each other’s trauma experiences. A woman shared: ‘The father of my child and I separated I think because he went through a mental depression as well and we didn’t get any kind of help. Reading information from MBB definitely helped me understand why he was experiencing that.’
“Words like ‘feeling out of control’, ‘scared’ or ‘violated’ resonated with many”
A sense of validation
Many of the women expressed that they were very much in denial. However, through use of the website women found they were more aware of what had actually happened to them, which led to a clearer understanding that what they experienced was birth trauma. Many also felt they resonated with terminology, including ’feeling out of control’, ‘scared’ or ‘violated’. Many said it validated their experience.
In awe
My research highlights the immense amount of support and positivity coming from the information Make Birth Better offer to parents who are experiencing birth trauma. Focusing on all different aspects including connecting with others, helping build relationships with others and adopting a less critical and judgemental attitude towards themselves. I am honoured to have been a part of this research and would like to thank the MBB team for this opportunity. As well as a tremendous thank you to the women who shared their personal accounts of using the site to me, I am greatly inspired and in awe.
If you’d like to get a better understanding of birth trauma or how to find help, please visit our Support for Parents page here.
References
Beck, C. T. (2004). Birth trauma: in the eye of the beholder. Nursing research, 53(1), 28-35.