January 2011
Healing the Heart After Cesarean – Unraveling Your Birth Story
There are three main responses to trauma, two of them we are very familiar with: fight or flight. The third response is a state of immobility or freezing. According to Peter Levine, author of Waking The Tiger, who has been studying trauma for more than 25 years, the freezing response might be the key to understanding human trauma.
When animals are faced with a terrifying event, they instinctively respond by fighting or fleeing. In some cases the wisest reaction is to “play dead”, yet after the danger is over the animal gets up, shakes off the residual effect of the trauma and moves on leaving the traumatic event behind. In the case of us humans, the neo-cortex (our rational brain) is so powerful and cultural conditioning so deeply ingrained that we often block our instinctive responses and the terrifying event does not get released.
It has been documented how labor can stall ("freeze") when the woman does not feel safe. Sometimes just walking into a hospital can stall labor. In her book Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, Ina May Gaskin writes about how a dilated cervix may “slam shut” when the laboring mother is disrupted either by real or perceived danger. This is a way that nature has programmed mothers to protect their infants during the process of labor and birth.
Medicalized birth with its cascade of interventions can be a terrifying experience for many women. The smells, sounds, procession of unfamiliar people, vaginal exams, bright lights, lack of food, lack of ability to move instinctually and the generalized “birth is a medical emergency” attitude can trigger the fight or freeze response. In this scenario, a laboring woman invests great amounts of energy preparing to “fight” and sometimes actually protecting herself and her baby from the interventions of medical birth.
When the exhausted, sometimes terrified woman is unable to “progress” the answer is often a c-section. Some women go into surgery still fighting; some are petrified with fear and grief. By the time the baby is born she is exhausted and often has difficulty bonding with her baby and breastfeeding gets compromised.
Even when a person recognizes a surgery to be necessary, Peter Levine writes, on the cellular level the body still registers the cutting through flesh, muscle and bone as a life-threatening traumatic assault.
Epidurals are yet another way a laboring women can experience trauma. If the woman is experiencing pain or fear, if the people (doctors, nurses, partners, etc.) in the room are fearful themselves or impatient, the placement of the epidural becomes a traumatic experience that gets stored in the cells.
We store our life experiences in our bodies and symptoms such as depression, headaches, mood disorders, fibromyalgia, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), cancer and all kinds of dis-ease are the way our body speaks to us.
Releasing trauma is a transformational experience. The energy that has been blocked by traumatic events and the life force that is invested in repressing the painful memories can be freed. When trauma is released, our life force energy is available in the present moment to create the life we want for ourselves and our children. Every moment becomes new and creative.
Healing the Heart After Cesarean - Unraveling Your Birth Story
An Experiential Workshop for Body, Mind, Spirit
Just as the image of peeling an onion, trauma can be released and transformed one layer at a time. With that goal in mind, I developed a group process that supports women to gently explore their cesarean experience thru breath awareness, meditation, journaling, movement, art, massage, craniosacral therapy, community and ceremony.
This is a six week workshop to allow for a gentle unraveling of your birth story. The workshop will begin Sunday, February 6 thru Sunday, March 13 (six consecutive Sundays) from 3:00 to 5:30 PM.
For more information and to pring a flyer: http://www.thepeacefulbirthproject.com/uploads/Healing_the_Heart__Unraveling_Your_Birth_Story.pdf
TO REGISTER CONTACT:
Evelyn Ojeda-Fox, BA, LMT, doula
Birthing From Within Mentor
727.432.8080
More Tools to Release the Energy of Trauma
TAT and EFT are self-applied techniques. EMDR has been successfully used with veterans of war to treat post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and with many others for the release of trauma. EMDR should be administered only by licensed clinicians.
If you feel your situation is outside the scope of this workshop, I highly recommend getting in touch with an EMDR practitioner. http://www.emdria.org/
There are hundreds of techniques, these are some I have personal experience with in releasing my own traumas.
Tapas Acupressure Technique (TAT) http://www.tatlife.com/
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) http://www.eftuniverse.com/
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) aahttp://www.emdria.org/
A well-done depiction of the traumas often associated with hospital births. This is one of the areas we specialize in at Arcanum Wholistic Clinic. Peeling the onion of your Birth Story is an important aspect to healing the trauma of entry into the physical world. I've seen nothing less than miraculous resolutions to karmic patterning and physical ills as a result of treating the birth trauma.
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