The hard truth is, many individuals suffer in silence after childbirth, unaware that their childbirth experience can be viewed as traumatic. Birth trauma can come from adverse physical experiences, mental and emotional experiences, and interpersonal experiences. No one can label your experience other than you.

There is so much emphasis on the birth process, or the adoption process, that once babies arrive new parents are scrambling to adapt to their new reality. It is important to think about the time after the baby arrives before the baby arrives. In this article, we plant some seeds for helping your partnership bond become strong through times of stress rather than devolve.

Have you ever told yourself to stop thinking about something or someone? Maybe it’s an ex-partner, the drawer full of candy, the pack of cigarettes in your purse, or the wine in the fridge. Maybe it’s the anxious feeling in the pit of your stomach you fear, or the work day that you’re dreading in the morning.

When we experience a trauma our mind becomes highly alert to potential danger and it triggers a set of emotional, physiological, and behavioural responses, which often causes us to feel stuck. A common misperception that people have is that they feel their brain isn’t working, while others might say things like “I feel broken”, “I’m not who I used to be”, “I feel stuck”, and so on. If we circle back to the black ice metaphor, we can rest assured that the car (just like our brain), in fact, is NOT broken but trauma does have a way of making us feel stuck in time.

…change is challenging and chaotic. However, chaos is where we grow and transform. It is where we learn to master one level of the game of life and qualify to the next. As Abraham Maslow once said “One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.”