trauma therapy for birth trauma
Welcome to Who Holds The Mamas, a practice dedicated to offering specialised therapy for birth related trauma.
If you are struggling after a traumatic birth, or finding it hard to move past what happened, please know that you are not alone.
The impact of birth trauma can often be underestimated or overlooked, and can come with an expectation of just being able to simply move on. But for many this is not the case.
What you are feeling makes sense, and it’s okay to need support.
Every mama deserves the chance to heal.
WHO HOLDS THE MAMAS?
I’m Samantha, a trauma practitioner specialising in helping women to process birth trauma, a profoundly important but often overlooked area of care.
After my own traumatic birth I realised just how many women go through this, and how little dedicated trauma processing therapy there is for birth trauma, often leaving mums to try and cope with their experiences alone.
I created Who Holds The Mamas as a practice dedicated to offering women specialised trauma processing therapy after difficult birth experiences.
Birth trauma often requires more than just traditional talk therapy alone. I am trained in trauma-informed therapy and trauma processing techniques, which are crucial in the support of any traumatic experience.
This is a space grounded in genuine understanding and real healing. What happened to you matters, and you don’t need to deal with it alone.
There is nothing wrong with you, Something happened to you
i work with women navigating:
Traumatic, emergency, or medically complex births
Loss of control or distress during labour
Births that felt disempowering, frightening, or that violated consent
Caesarean or instrumental deliveries
NICU stays or other intensive medical interventions
Injury or harm due to clinical negligence
Postnatal anxiety, dissociation, or emotional overwhelm
PTSD and cPTSD
Previous trauma that was reactivated by the birth or postpartum experience
Birth trauma isn’t always obvious, visible or acknowledged, and it is not only about what happened during the delivery process.
It is also about how you experienced the event, how your body reacted to it, and how your nervous system continues to carry it.
SKILLFUL AND compassionate Therapy
The effects of trauma can present in so many ways.
It can feel like anxiety, panic, hypervigilance, emotional numbness, guilt, shame, anger, overwhelm, difficulty in connecting with your loved ones, an inability to move past the events. These are all natural and treatable responses of an overwhelmed nervous system doing its best to protect you.
You are not alone, and you are not broken. What happened to you matters and so does how you feel now.
You don’t need to have the ‘worst’ story for your experience to be valid. If it felt traumatic to you, that is enough.
Trauma processing therapy allows the brain to begin to store painful events as more neutral past memories, and the nervous system to return to a more regulated state.
I blend targeted trauma processing techniques and integration therapies to help your mind and body to safely move beyond what happened.
This is trauma therapy that understands how trauma affects the body and mind, and why you were impacted the way you were.
This is therapy that meets you exactly where you are, is grounded in compassion, attuned to your pace and centred around your lived experience.
a Safe Place to begin
In our work together, you are the expert on your experience, and I will support you in navigating it.
Healing doesn’t mean erasing what happened. It means no longer having to be defined or limited by it.
What happened to you matters.
You deserve support.