Midwifery, birth trauma and the path towards trauma-informed care

My interest in trauma has developed through many years of working closely with human experiences of threat, vulnerability, activation and recovery, particularly within pregnancy, birth and early parenting. As a midwife, birth practitioner and yoga teacher, my work has consistently focused on how intense life events are processed through the body and nervous system, and how incomplete stress responses can shape ongoing wellbeing, identity and a person’s sense of safety and agency.

In my clinical midwifery practice within the NHS, I regularly support women and birthing people during situations involving acute stress, fear, pain, medical intervention and loss of control. I have observed how experiences that overwhelm an individual’s capacity to respond, even when clinically “routine”, can lead to persistent autonomic dysregulation, hyperarousal, hypoarousal, intrusive memories and difficulty integrating the birth experience. This has led me to understand trauma not as an event, but as the nervous system’s response to perceived threat and insufficient support or completion.

A core aspect of my work involves facilitating birth reflections and debriefs with individuals following difficult or distressing birth experiences. In these sessions, I support people to gently revisit their birth story in a measured, safe way, helping them to orient to the present moment, notice internal sensations, and distinguish past threat from current safety. These sessions are a crucial process for meaning-making, nervous system settling and the partial completion of unresolved responses, particularly when undertaken with careful attention to pacing, resourcing and choice.

Over the last decade, I have noticed a worrying pattern: birth trauma is increasing. More people are leaving birth feeling frightened, unheard, powerless or unsettled, even when everything appears “fine” on the surface. Research suggests that as many as 20–48% of women report birth as traumatic, and between 3% and 6% develop clinically significant post-traumatic stress symptoms afterwards. In the UK, evidence shows roughly 4–5% of women and birthing people meet criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder following childbirth, equivalent to around 25,000–30,000 people each year, one in three describing some aspects of their birth experience as traumatic. These figures indicate that systemic issues around support, communication and agency have a profound impact on nervous system regulation during birth, and that there is often insufficient space or support to properly process what has happened.

Alongside frontline clinical work, I have been engaged in human-centred and rights-based approaches to maternity care, including work with Birthrights, the Association of Radical Midwives, and international initiatives focused on the humanisation of childbirth. These experiences have strengthened my awareness of how systemic factors, power dynamics and lack of choice can contribute to traumatic stress, particularly for those already carrying vulnerability or prior activation.

My interest in trauma has increasingly taken a somatic and neurobiological focus. Through yoga teaching, pregnancy-specific movement, breathwork and yoga nidrā, I have supported individuals to develop interoceptive awareness, self-regulation and a greater capacity to track internal sensations. I am particularly interested in how orienting, resourcing and cultivating a sense of safety in the body can gently expand nervous system capacity without re-traumatisation.

Trauma theory has been consolidated through professional development in perinatal mental health, safeguarding, motivational interviewing, and completion of Peter Levine’s Healing Trauma course. Now Somatic Experiencing is providing a coherent framework that names and organises much of what I have witnessed clinically: the importance of titration, pendulation, discharge of survival energy, and supporting the completion of thwarted defensive responses.

In 2025, I began co-facilitating a birth experience peer support group for people who have had difficult or traumatic perinatal experiences. In this setting, we work carefully to support nervous system regulation, pacing and choice, prioritising safety, present-moment awareness and the cultivation of resources before engaging with challenging material. This work has further clarified my desire to develop more precise skills for working directly with trauma physiology. Hence I was drawn to Somatic Experiencing training because of its respectful, non-pathologising and biologically grounded approach to trauma resolution. SE’s focus on restoring self-regulation, supporting resilience, and working with the body’s innate capacity to heal aligns closely with my professional values and existing embodied practice. I am particularly interested in deepening my ability to recognise autonomic states, track activation and settling, and support gentle renegotiation rather than catharsis.

This understanding now shapes the way I work: whether in birth reflections, yoga nidra, peer support groups or one-to-one conversations, my approach is grounded in nervous system awareness, compassion, pacing and deep respect for the body’s own intelligence and capacity for healing. Rather than focusing on fixing or pathologising people, I am interested in creating spaces where difficult experiences can be approached gently, safely and with greater understanding.