“It’s a great day to meet a baby!”
We proudly make that our tagline, but we understand that sometimes that fateful day doesn’t feel so great if things not only don’t go as planned, but they also get scary. Sometimes a baby’s birthday doesn’t necessarily feel like a happy day because of extreme circumstances like emergency medical procedures and extended NICU stays.
This is the case for any birth plan – whether it’s a hospital birth or a home birth. And although WE believe every baby and mama and birth is beautiful, we also understand that it doesn’t always feel that way, and grieving the loss of what you may have expected your birth and baby story to turn out, is super important, so we are big advocates of not just therapy, but EMDR therapy.
During EMDR, patients focus on past traumatic material while simultaneously experiencing bilateral stimulation, such as eye movements, hand-tapping, or audio tones. This stimulation is associated with a reduction in the vividness and emotion of the trauma memories. Patients may also be guided to let their minds go blank and notice any thoughts and feelings that come up, and then replace unwanted thoughts with positive self-beliefs or images.
It may sound more complicated or scarier than it sounds, and something we highly recommend exploring with a therapist who specializes in this method.
As much as we would love for every birth story to be perfect for every one of our mamas, God is God, and the human body is the human body and we are at the mercy of nature when it comes to how a birth story unfolds. So if something goes unplanned that deeply affects the family of our clients, EMDR is something we work on with clients who experience special medical births that call for some healing by helping them find an EMDR resource that would work for them.
What are your thoughts on EMDR? Have you ever tried it?
