Birth Trauma
AUTHORS: Kindred Media and Community
From the Birth Trauma Association:
When we talk of birth trauma, we mean Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that occurs after childbirth. We also include those women who may not meet the clinical criteria for PTSD but who have some of the symptoms of the disorder.
PTSD is the term for a set of normal reactions to a traumatic, scary or bad experience. It is a disorder that can occur following the experience or witnessing of life-threatening events. We usually recognize these as things like military combat, natural disasters, terrorist incidents, serious accidents, or violent personal assaults like rape. However, a traumatic experience can be any experience involving the threat of death or serious injury to an individual or another person close to them (e.g. their baby) so it is now understood that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can be a consequence of a traumatic birth.
Characteristic features of PTSD include:
- An experience involving the threat of death or serious injury to an individual or another person close to them (e.g. their baby).
- A response of intense fear, helplessness or horror to that experience.
- The persistent re-experiencing of the event by way of recurrent intrusive memories, flashbacks and nightmares. The individual will usually feel distressed, anxious or panicky when exposed to things which remind them of the event.
- Avoidance of anything that reminds them of the trauma. This can include talking about it, although sometimes women may go through a stage of talking of their traumatic experience a lot so that it obsesses them at times.
- Bad memories and the need to avoid any reminders of the trauma, will often result in difficulties with sleeping and concentrating. Sufferers may also feel angry, irritable and be hyper vigilant (feel jumpy or on their guard all the time).
It is important to remember that PTSD is a normal response to a traumatic experience. The re-experiencing of the event with flashbacks accompanied by genuine anxiety and fear are beyond the sufferer’s control. They are the mind’s way of trying to make sense of an extremely scary experience and are not a sign individual ‘weakness’ or inability to cope.
Read Kindred articles on Birth Trauma.
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What if everything we thought and believed to be true turned out to be a story passed down from parent to child through daily, unconscious habits to ceremonial traditions, all designed to help us make sense of our world?
What if the chaos we are witnessing in and around us today is a symptom, evidence even, of an Old Story – the belief in our separateness – breaking down?
Would our fears be lessened and our curiosity piqued if we made a conscious choice to turn our attention toward an emerging New Story? Could an expanding sense of wonder allow room for questions like:
What if babies are conscious? What if sustainability begins with conception? What if Womb Ecology Becomes World Ecology?
When we consider the way we create meaning has always been through stories, other questions arise, like, Who wrote these stories? Can they be changed? What steps can we take toward shifting our current, industrial story of a disconnected humanity to a life-affirming and empowering narrative, authored, as always, by US?
Our daily choices and habits are informed by the context, the Big Picture, whether we are aware we even hold a worldview, a personal mythology or a story of our own being and becoming. This revelation is no sentimental notion, but a scientific fact of human conscious development.
Families for Conscious Living and its initiatives like Kindred Media have explored this New Story from the ground up – in grassroots’ communities – and from the top down – with frontier science researchers and social changemakers – for 20 years. FCL’s nonprofit work has been pioneered by families who have sought out insight and solutions to shifting their own awareness from the limits of the Old Story to the expansive, empowering practical wisdom heralded in the interconnected threads of the New Story. This New Story comes with its own language, phrases like Cultural Creatives, Bio-Cultural Conflict, Grounded Expansion, Harmonic Family Resonance, Phronesis and the Ecology of the Child.
What is needed at this time is a safe gathering place, a sanctuary, created with great compassion to inspire and welcome our imaginations to engage in open dialogue, create connected community and identify resources that support an adventurous exploration of holistic, peaceful and sustainable living.
Welcome to that safe gathering space.
Kindred readers are thoughtfully and courageously exploring the disintegration of the Old Story of Separation, the emergence of a New Story of Connection and the space we, as Cultural Creatives, now occupy between these stories. Kindred readers believe the human reach for wholeness as individuals and in community is always happening, even if we can’t find that story reflected in mainstream media outlets, cultural bias, authoritarian politics or our conformist society. This is the need Kindred fulfills as a nonprofit educational initiative: the need to inspire parents, practitioners and policy makers with the evidence of a world transforming through an independent, alternative media outlet that offers the most cutting-edge, holistic insights from the best conscious living authors, researchers, activists and nonprofits.
For a greater understanding of the The New Story, watch Kindred’s editor’s presentation here.
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Kindred Media and Community is an alternative media and educational initiative of the American 501C3 nonprofit Families for Conscious Living. Please visit our Guidestar page and Great Nonprofits to read our passionate reviews. FCL was awarded a Great Nonprofits Top-Rated Nonprofits seal in 2014, 2015 and 2016 and holds a Gold Level ranking of nonprofits at Guidestar.
