Birth, Trauma, and the Lies We've Been Told

So much of our trauma has to do with the way we were born.

Not just the baby’s trauma—but the mother’s, too.

Women have been lied to for decades about birth.

We've been conditioned—by Hollywood, by well-meaning doctors (and those who are not), by glossy pamphlets in waiting rooms. Conditioned to believe that birth is dangerous, destined to go wrong, something we need to be rescued from. That we must submit to constant tests and scans. That it’s only safe if it’s managed, monitored, and medically assisted.

I remember when I was pregnant with my second baby, sitting across from a doctor who casually asked,

"So… who's going to deliver your baby?"

There was a pause.

I smiled and replied,

"The answer lies in the question, doesn’t it? Who can deliver my baby but me?"

He didn’t smile back.

I wasn’t trying to be clever. I was speaking from a place deep inside me. A place that knew.

A place that remembered.

After working with trauma for over a decade—trauma that lives in the body, in the fascia, in the nervous system—I’ve seen firsthand how much birth matters.

I’ve worked with men, women, and children, releasing patterns woven in early life and even before words. The impact of how we enter this world is not small.

How a mother births matters.

It affects her entire being. It ripples outward. Into the bond she forms with her child. Into how she hears—or doesn’t hear—her baby's cries.

Into what she accepts. What she suppresses.

Into the father's experience, too—how connected, included, or helpless he feels in the process.

And for the baby, it's their first imprint. The first sensory, emotional, energetic blueprint they’ll carry into this realm.

Yes, there are moments when medical support is truly needed.

Thank god for that. But those moments are rare.

They are too rare to justify the normalisation of high-intervention, medicated births.

Too rare to make women fear their own bodies.

Too rare to strip us of the sacred rite that is birth.

This isn’t about guilt or shame. It’s about remembering what we’ve been made to forget.

That we are capable. That we were built for this. That birth is not a crisis to be managed but a portal to be honoured.

And that the way we enter the world—and the way we bring life into it—deserves reverence.