All right, so I just finished an incredible session with a client, and unfortunately, this client had a very traumatic birth. The baby was stuck, and there was a lot of—almost assault-like, you know—maneuvers that needed to happen to get the baby out. A lot of trauma. But I got to see her prenatally, I got to see her postpartum to help her through some of that, and now I’m seeing her with the baby five months old, and the baby’s in the picture and so beautiful.

But you know what we talked about that I thought was like, “This is stuff that we all need to know”? When our body goes through trauma—and I’m going to talk specifically about birth trauma—when something goes scary wrong during birth and it’s all hands on deck to get the baby out, there is a leftover trauma from that. And not just the physical trauma, but that combined with the emotional trauma of the experience magnifies everything in our body. Yet we don’t really deal with it at first because we are caught up with taking care of the baby. And when we’re caught up taking care of the baby, we kind of put everything on the back burner. But our body still knows.

So part of the process of healing the core and regaining that strength is connecting and honoring what your body has been through. And it’s emotional to go there, so we avoid it, right? We don’t like to go into deep, dark places a lot of the time. But what I see time and time again is that when we lean in and bring comfort to that part of our body with some counter pressure—just some firm, nurturing touch—and then we thank our body for what it’s done for us with an attitude of gratitude, where we’re grateful that our body was able to do what it was able to do and that it has the capacity to heal (even if it’s not healing as fast as we want to), it changes everything.

Because as women, when we have a traumatic birth, we feel like our body failed us. It didn’t do what we thought it should do or what it was supposed to do, and there’s something wrong, and we have this angst between us and our body. But that angst is part of what’s getting in the way, and we need to heal that. We need to acknowledge that our body fought for us and fought for the baby, and it’s working hard for us. And that it’s just hard. Birth is hard, and it doesn’t always go well. But we are still forever connected to our body. We’re forever partnered with our body.

So how can we nurture and heal and connect to that so that our body can regain the strength and connection it needs? We can’t do that by burying it or ignoring it. We have to lean into it, support and nurture it to get to the other side. And I just got to see the fruit of that. And as hard as it’s been, it’s really beautiful to see on the other side.

So you can do it. It’s hard, but we can do hard things.