Birth and Trust: How Your Birth Experience Can Play a Role in Postpartum Depression, Anxiety & Mental Health

This article is intended for birth professionals, pregnant and postpartum mothers.

In my therapy practice, I see a lot of pregnant and postpartum moms.  I see a correlation between women who are disappointed in their birth experience and afterwards have postpartum anxiety or depression. My background, prior to being a therapist was as a Licensed Midwife. My training specialized in unmedicated, uncomplicated, low-risk pregnancies, birth and postpartum. I have been a huge advocate for natural childbirth, however I have also seen the necessary and welcome use of modern medicine. I believe that there are many ways to give birth, not just one right way. You have to choose what is right for you. I also believe that cultivating trust in the process of birth could decrease anxiety and depression in the postpartum period. 

Many advocates of natural childbirth encourage the birthing parent to trust in birth, trust in their body. But trusting birth is about more than trusting your body can have a vaginal birth or vaginal unmedicated birth, We don’t all give birth naturally or vaginally. For me trusting in your body’s ability to give birth means trusting all of it. Yes, you can have a natural vaginal birth, but there’s more factors to who gets to or has a natural childbirth than just your body’s ability to give birth.

One of my early birth mentors was asked once what sets a woman up for a successful natural birth. I loved her answer. She said it depends on which card in the birth deck of cards you are dealt. (Thank you Felicia Roche!) 

There are other factors besides your body including your environment, your support system, your emotional landscape, and of course, the baby! (Baby’s position, size, how the head is angled, if there is a hand or hands up by the head, cord length can all play a role in the process of birth) There are a whole host of things that need to line up in order to give birth naturally and vaginally. For some women that happens and the stars align. It’s a beautiful thing. I’ve witnessed hundreds and hundreds of natural births. But I have also witnessed dozens and dozens of beautiful medicated births, with epidurals, pitocin, vacuum extraction, and C-sections. Gorgeous c-sections. So when we talk about trusting birth, I think that sometimes, mothers can get locked into equating a beautiful birth with a natural unmedicated vagin,al birth and that if it’s not this, it’s not beautiful and somehow they have failed. 

Women experience an incredibly large amount of shame, guilt, feelings of failure, dissociation, even betrayal when birth takes a turn that was not intended or expected. This is sad because it drives a wedge into one of the most intimate relationships we have, the relationship we have with our own bodies. It’s heart-breaking. 

I question whether birth professionals and natural birth advocates are helping mothers accept and trust their journey by polarizing natural birth as good and other ways as bad. What if the interventions are not things that women need because we are inadequate as birthing moms but our body’s wisdom telling us it needs more support to take on this epic feat of birthing another human? I’m not sure what the best approach is, but I do wonder how to set women up to feel their power and strength regardless of their babies come out. 

If we can trust in birth no matter what it looks like, trust in the journey, trust wherever it leads you to, this is the essence of trust for me. In the end you are still birthing your baby and your body is still doing it. 

So I would invite women preparing for labor to believe that you can do it... believe you can do it however your birth turns out. Broaden what it means to trust in birth.

No matter what it looks like, you are still birthing your baby and it is one of the most tremendous, big and difficult tasks of life. It is the gateway to parenthood. For those parents out there, you know that parenthood itself is no joke. It is big, tremendous, full of wonder, heart-ache and joy.