Birth Debrief
Birth is often one of the biggest experiences of your life. The period of time before and after giving birth can be an upheaval. Even for mothers who have been through birth before, every birth is a new experience. There can be questions about what happened, confusion, or trauma and fear.
Your pregnancy may have been rough. You might have experienced something unexpected, or perhaps the birth wasn’t what you thought it would be. Not only that, but there is also a tiny newborn baby to care for. A birth to physically heal from. Tiredness to live with. And all the daily pressures of life to focus on.
It can be easy to push your unasked questions or unsettling feelings to the back of your mind, and just get on with things. The past few generations of women gave birth in a system that ignored the emotional and mental benefits of positive birth. Our healthcare system does not offer much mental health support for mothers. They just hope you have a functioning car seat and off you go!
Unanswered questions can lead to unresolved feelings about birth. This can have long term consequences for women and their families.
What is a birth debrief?
Essentially, birth debriefing provides the birthing woman with the opportunity to talk about her birth experience. You tell your story to make sense of it and your story's significance.
Birth debriefing tends to focus on those women who have had a negative birth experience or who did not have the birth they hoped for. Often, they have very uncomfortable feelings about their birth, but aren’t given an opportunity to understand what happened.
This lack of understanding compounds the negative feelings about birth and increases distress. In this situation, a woman who isn’t able to integrate her birth experience is left with intense feelings of guilt, shame and failure.
Birth debriefing can help you to make sense of what happened, and why, and it can end the cycle of internalizing your feelings and creating more distress.
Going through a debrief can help reclaim your birth experience, help you navigate current emotions, wrong beliefs about yourself and liberate you into walking fully as a restored mother.
What happens during a birth debrief?
This is designed to be a shorter, two-day debrief session. The first day will be about 2 hours where you will discuss what happened during your pregnancy, birth and postpartum periods. There is also time to explain clinical events and discuss what that person has deemed traumatic in detail. If necessary, you can request your labor & birth notes from the hospital in advance of the session so we can review them together.
You will have a small amount of out of session homework and then the second session, we will do a resiliency exercise to help curate continued healing, growth and momentum forward. This call will take about 30-60minutes. After you have completed 1-2 weeks of wellness activities we curated together, we will schedule a 30 minute follow-up call to check in!
