It can be an anxious time when your birth doesn’t go to plan
Women approach pregnancy and birth in many different ways. There are so many things to think about whether it’s your first baby or your fifth but there is one common goal; to give birth. Whether you’ve embraced every birth preparation class, read every book, tried a variety of different relaxation classes and practised your hypnobirthing or decided to go with whatever comes, there is one focus that all mums-to-be are aiming for; to give birth in the easiest way possible. But what happens when your birth doesn’t go to plan?
All mums have their own experience and how they feel about it will vary for each new mum. Even similar experiences can be perceived in different ways. A birth not going to plan for one mum can mean something very different for another. Not going to plan isn’t about interventions or a traumatic delivery, it is as simple as it didn’t happen as you’d planned or expected. Mums have interventions and feel fine about it so it’s not always related to how you gave birth, it’s very much about how you felt about the birth that you had.
There are various options for mums who feel that, for whatever reason, their birth didn’t go to plan.
Here are 5 ways of coming to terms with your birth experience.
- Talk to those you’re already close to. Whether it’s your partner, your Mum, your sister or your best friend, talk it through and share how you’re feeling about it. You don’t need to keep it to yourself.
- Talk to someone at the hospital where you gave birth (or contact the home birth midwives if you had a home delivery). Most hospitals will have some sort of birth reflection service. It could be going through your notes on an individual basis or as a group to share how you feel about your birth experience. If you have questions, it is worth speaking to someone who can explain what happened and why.
- Find a support group external to where you gave birth. Whether it’s a forum on social media or a local group who meet in person (once they’re back up and running although will probably have an online version at the moment) then it can be really helpful to meet up with other mums who also didn’t have the birth they’d planned.
- Talk to someone like me. A trained counsellor can really help you to process how you feel following the birth of your baby. There’s no time limit to how soon you should talk through your feelings so whether it’s 6 weeks or 25 years, if it still bothers you, it’s worth exploring further.
- If you really don’t want to talk to anyone but still feel frustrated, angry or robbed of the birth you’d planned, you can write a letter explaining exactly how you feel. The letter can be used in a couple of ways. You can write it to yourself explaining exactly how you feel. If there is something that you have concerns about, you can write to the relevant department explaining exactly how you feel. This letter does not need to be sent. It can be very therapeutic simply writing how you feel and leave it there. If you do want to write to someone, never send the first draft. Allow that first letter to be the one where you just let the words flow and write exactly what you want to share. If you want to send a letter, then put the original away for a couple of days and then come back to it and create a second draft that will be more focussed on your concerns. That first draft is the one that is important to you because it helps to release all of your thoughts and feelings and helps you to make sense of what happened.
But my birth wasn’t traumatic
Struggling with the birth of your baby isn’t about something going wrong, it is simply because, for whatever reason, it didn’t go how you expected and your thoughts, feelings and emotions have been affected by it. When it comes to thinking about your birth experience, your thoughts and feelings are valuable and deserve to be acknowledged so if you feel that there are aspects of your birth that are causing you to feel angry, anxious, frustrated or fearful then you deserve to be heard.