NOTE: This post is from a momma in our Facebook community. Can you relate? I can.
By Eli Leblanc, member of Césarimouski A sentence from your last blog post got me thinking today: “Often times, we are reminded to avoid our triggers.” I sought counseling about this whole birthing experience but it was never PTSD oriented. I never got professional advice on whether or not to avoid our triggers, but I get mixed advices from my family and friends. For example, my boyfriend will say “don’t read this article if it makes you cry”. On the other hand, when I told my friends I would not see Birth, the play written by Karen Brody, with them because I knew I couldn’t handle it, they suggested that maybe I should go as part of my healing process. I didn’t. I tend to think that life makes me unexpectedly encounter enough triggers to give me plenty of material to feed my healing process without imposing any on purpose. For the first time today, I decided to list my triggers. It was quite an interesting exercise. I realized that most of them are not about what happened, but about what did not. Here’s my list:
I know I would have found anything different from a natural birth outside the hospital very hard to accept. But I always thought the general anesthesia without warning was what made it really traumatic. Maybe I’m right and this is just what makes the rest even harder to accept. Or maybe I’m wrong and the trauma was not caused by a single act, but by the whole situation that was a complete opposite of what I expected. I was expecting to live the best day of my life. I experienced the worst. I was expecting a painful and exhausting, but beautiful and empowering natural birth with minimum interventions. I thought it would be love at first sight with my baby and I was convinced to breastfeed exclusively. Instead of that:
Although my birth trauma originates in one single day, it now sort of agglomerates two years of my life. Triggers don’t take me back to a single memory, they make me grief for all the things that I didn’t, and more than likely never will, experience. Read more about Eli's journey in Trauma induced lactation problems: A mixed feeding, co-breastfeeding, tandem nursing story. Would you like to submit a post for Fan Fridays? Send them to [email protected] or on the Facebook page.
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AuthorWelcome to Momma Trauma's Blog! Thoughts, empowering posts and stories straight from Momma Trauma herself, Birth Trauma families & birth professionals. Archives
July 2015
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