Birthrites: Healing After Caesarean.

Caesarean Birth:
Making Informed Choices.

What to Expect After a Caesarean.

Suggestions for Emotional Healing.

In the words of one mother,
'I certainly did not want to maintain the aggression and bitterness; I was missing out on my beautiful little boy! I missed smiling...'

One small note here; A vaginal birth is no guarantee of healing. You may need to do work on your past birth experience/s to find a sense of peace. This work may be as simple as being able to "talk" about the experience with someone, or it may be much more complex.

An important part of this aspect of healing is being able to talk about your feelings. Your partner, family and friends may become distressed if they see your emotional pain, and they will generally try to get you to focus on the positives (healthy baby and mother) to avoid the concerns over your inner well being. With this in mind, it may be important to discuss your feelings with people who are not so close to you. Some suggestions are:

  • To talk to the staff involved in your child's birth experience. You can either organise a chat while you are in hospital, or take their names down (midwife, doctor, etc) so that you can contact them at a later date. In going over the progression of your labour, which ended in a c/section, you can better understand why the surgery happened, and you may be able to plan your next child's birth with a better understanding of this previous experience to guide you.

  • Contact a support group, such as Birthrites (contacts listed at the back of this book) by phone, email or letter. You can then receive Mother-to-Mother counselling from someone who has experienced the same, or a similar, situation to you. Birthrites also supplies women who contact them with information about future birth choices, and many of the contacts listed organise 'get-togethers' where women can meet (usually in someone's home) to share stories, knowledge and support.

  • Professional counselling. It helps if the counsellor specialises in postnatal problems, as she/he will be better able to relate to what you are experiencing. But you must remember that, though your symptoms may be similar, you may not be suffering from post-natal depression, just grieving for the loss of a priceless life experience.

It's good to give yourself a little time in which you can remember the whole experience. During this time you should just let the feelings 'come and go' as you think about the birth. Don't bottle them up; allow them to be released by actually feeling and acknowledging them.

Allow yourself to be sad. Don't drown in this emotion, but allow the grief to be released. It's a valid emotion when we lose someone or something. You may have been planning the birth for your whole pregnancy, visualising how it was going to be, and the loss of that irreplaceable envisioned experience can be a great loss.

'If I could go back and change things I would have walked out of the hospital at this point but all I wanted was my baby.'

Educate yourself. This will enable you to put everything you experienced into some perspective. Read books about caesarean and VBAC birth, as well as books about natural childbirth. Search the Internet, and join some 'chats' specifically designed for women who have experienced caesareans. Discover the support that is there, in your birthing community, whether that is a midwife, a doctor or a group such as Birthrites.

It's normal to want to rewind the whole experience, saying to yourself 'If only I had doneÉ' But we can't control time, so we need to forgive ourselves, and try to also forgive others involved, if you feel that you could have changed what happened with some forethought. Try to turn the experience into a positive one; in that you gained some valuable knowledge about childbirth that you can use to educate other women who may be about to experience a similar situation.

It's also normal to feel jealous of friends or family who birth vaginally. You feel so happy that everything turned out so well for them, but you ask yourself 'Why couldn't it have turned out like that for me?' Even a vaginal birth that had lots of interventions sounds great! As long as it was vaginalÉ This jealousy will ease, over time, though your longing for a vaginal birth may never totally disappear.

The loveliest suggestion I've seen, for healing after a caesarean (listed on the healing page of the Birthrites website) is:

'As soon as we were alone and the kids were busy I ran a lovely deep warm bath and sank into it, then my husband brought our naked little newborn in and placed him in the bath with me. It was wonderful and amazing. I had missed out on holding him, with us both naked and wet at the birth. I needed to do that, to feel his skin against mine and just look at him as he was born. We lay in the water together, I touched him and he had a feed. I thought about his birth and all the happy moments and just let all my feelings come and go as they needed to.'

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