Healing trauma before babies

By this point in history, most people have heard the word ‘trauma’ when discussing mental health. Trauma is defined by Judith Herman in her book Trauma and Recovery as

“…an affiliation of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning.”

To be an effective birth worker, I believe we must understand trauma. Birth and breast or chest feeding can be a major trigger for people who have experienced any kind of trauma in their life. To be an effective birth worker, we also need to understand intergenerational trauma. People who want to or are trying to get pregnant have to face the reality of biological fertility, age, and the amount of time it takes to process familial trauma. We all carry the familial wounds left to us from our parents, grandparents, great grandparents…and people in our family we’ve never met. People that came long before raised the people who raised the people who raised us. People who kept secrets and shame and raised their kids in that environment without direct explanation. If we hope to shift our legacies we have to face the beliefs and behaviors in our families that cover up past traumas and expose them to the light.

This is a piece of justice in birth work, that often the urgency of this work falls to the people actually giving birth. That the timeliness of getting a hold of your own trauma and healing balanced with the biological reality forces that emotional labor onto people would be physically carrying the baby. It is, at its core, a tension between wanting to prioritize ourselves and be selfish and wanting to be responsible for our legacy and the life of someone who doesn’t yet exist. Someone who is part of us and influenced by our actions and yet separate from us too. Like all injustice in our world, it is unfair. But it gives us also an opportunity to shift our patterns toward healing and more full acceptance of ourselves. I believe that healing our own trauma is the greatest gift we can give the next generation but that means a lot of privilege to access that space of healing.

I am 31 years old. A fairly new 31, to be fair (September 12th) but also, I am 31. I already have had people telling me for years that my clock is running out. Do I want to have more than one? If so, I better get started. Don’t I realize how many pregnancies end in miscarriage? Don’t I know that the older I get, the older I will be while raising them? I feel that pressure. At the same time, I feel the pressure to navigate my own mental health. Three and a half years of therapy, recently switching over to two sessions per week, just to reprocess through the unhealthy behaviors and patterns I’ve learned in relationship to others. Unearthly, processing, feeling the feels, and then making the changes to my life that allow me to live more healthily. But it takes so much time. And I wonder when I will have done enough to earn the right to carry the next generation. Will it be when I stop waking up to nightmares at night? Will it be when I stop dissociating at the mere mention of abuse and neglect in family units? When will I feel confident enough to create a life inside me and then be responsible for its existence in the world? When will I feel deserving of that right? That answer is probably never, really.

This is the responsibility that birthing and pregnant people are living with, this is the question that every doula client I work with has asked themselves in one way or another during the course of their pregnancy or birth. That’s why birth work is justice work. This question of “deserving” is at the intersection of patriarchy, racism, heteronormativity, ableism. It’s why systems of oppression go for control over women and birthing bodies; control of who can marry and reproduce or create a family either by biological birth, surrogacy, or adoption. Whose bodies do we police in terms of birth and adoption? Brown and black bodies, disabled bodies, whether that be physical, mental health, or both. Women or feminine people must be controlled. Non-heteronormative bodies that don’t fit into our binary system of gender. And the more layers that exist the more we believe we have the right to exclude them from reproduction and making or bringing together a family. The less they deserve the right to one. Poor people? They don’t deserve to bring new people into this world that they aren’t even financially contributing to themselves. Nevermind that this country was built off of stolen labor and stolen land. People with mental illness? They can’t raise a child without traumatizing them and should stop reproducing now. Two dads? They can’t raise a child, how will their kids understand mothering and feminine identity?

White supremacy continually reinforces that white, wealthy, nuclear families are at the top of the “deserving” list for creating a family. This is how we decide who deserves a family and who doesn’t, by how much or little they conform to that. But living in my family was traumatizing, certainly for me but really for every member of my family. Even for the family members that fit in, or are accepted in my family. Conforming was the top priority; control and an “us versus them” mentality. This is isolating and lonely because we are not monoliths (yes, even as white people)and that means there will always be whole parts of ourselves we have to cut off to conform to that lie or image of perfection. When other white people ask me about how to navigate and understand their family experience, I tell them that learning about white supremacy culture has been the only tool I need. This is why we need to acknowledge and honor black queer people who wrote and developed and exposed this reality. Understanding white supremacy culture has shaped my whole framework for how I understand the world and continues to offer me healing and frankly, sanity. Secrecy, lies, isolation, control, rejection…all these pieces of white supremacy culture have been at the root of the traumas in my family, whether that trauma manifests as substance abuse, severe mental illness, bigotry and hate, homelessness, fractured marriage and relationships…and much more. Often as white people, we look externally to the problems of the world and don’t see that we continue to build families within this violence and pass it along to the next generation. The belief that wealthy, white people are the standard for “earning the right” to reproduce or build a family is based white supremacy culture. In reality, intergenerational trauma exists in those families as much (or more) than families that don’t fit that mold.

Birth work means challenging the belief that we are entitled to control the reproductive and family building choices of other people in our lives. As birth workers, we have to protect and defend that autonomy for all people and families.