Traumatic Birth & NICU Stay Therapy in California
When your birth story isn't what you planned—and the healing takes longer than expected.
Your baby is here, but this isn't how it was supposed to go. Whether you're still in the thick of it or months later still feeling the impact, therapy can help you process what happened and find your way forward.
What You’re Going Through
You expected birth to be intense. But you didn't expect it to feel like your life was in danger—or your baby's.
Maybe it happened fast. Emergency C-section. Code blue. Suddenly, there were ten people in the room, and no one was explaining what was happening. Or perhaps it was slow—hours of labor that wasn't progressing, interventions that didn't work, watching monitors instead of trusting your body.
Maybe the nightmare didn't end there, and your baby went to the NICU. Nothing feels normal. Your feeding journey isn't off to the picture-perfect experience, and holding your baby comes with wires and beeps, if you're even able to hold them. The nurses track every detail while you're left feeling like a visitor in your baby's life. Maybe you even had to go home without your baby when you should have been able to go home as a family.
The guilt is overwhelming. You feel like your body failed. Like you should be grateful they're alive, but you're actually angry about how it all went down. Partners often feel helpless too—watching the person they love go through trauma while feeling completely powerless to fix it.
Months later, you might still jump when you hear certain hospital sounds. You might avoid driving past the hospital or feel your heart race during routine doctor visits. Sleep doesn't come easily. You replay those moments over and over, wondering what you could have done differently.
This trauma doesn't just stay contained to "what happened during birth." It seeps into everything—how you feel about your body, your confidence as a parent, your relationship with your partner. It can increase the chances of postpartum depression and anxiety for both moms and dads. It can make the expected identity shifts of new parenthood feel even more overwhelming.
You love your baby fiercely. But you're also grieving the birth experience you wanted, the early bonding time you missed, and the version of yourself that felt safe in your own body.
How Therapy Helps
Trauma therapy creates space to process what happened without judgment or pressure to "just be grateful everyone's okay." We work together to help your nervous system understand that the danger is over, even when your body still feels like it's in crisis mode.
We'll use a trauma-informed approach, Accelerated, Resolution Therapy (ART) - similar yet faster than EMDR - to help process the specific moments that feel stuck—the sound of the monitors, the moment you realized something was wrong, the first time you saw your baby connected to machines. These approaches help your brain file these memories as "something that happened" rather than "something that's still happening."
We'll also address how this trauma intersects with everything else you're navigating as a new parent. The identity shifts feel harder when you're also healing from trauma. The mental load feels heavier when you're hypervigilant about your baby's safety. We'll work on strategies to manage anxiety around medical appointments, help you reconnect with your body, and find ways to bond with your baby that honor where you both are now.
For partners, we'll explore how to support healing while also processing your own experience of witnessing trauma and feeling helpless.
This isn't about "getting over it" or "moving on." It's about integrating what happened so it doesn't run your life anymore.
What Gets Better
The flashbacks become less frequent and less intense. You start sleeping through the night again.
You can drive past the hospital without your heart racing. Medical appointments feel routine instead of triggering.
You stop replaying those moments, searching for what you could have done differently. You start to separate what happened during birth from who you are as a mother.
You learn to hold both grief and gratitude—missing the birth experience you wanted while celebrating that your baby is here and thriving.
The hypervigilance around your baby's safety softens into normal parental concern. You start trusting your instincts again instead of second-guessing every decision.
You reconnect with your body as something that kept you and your baby alive, not something that failed you. You'll find your own way to bond with your child, one that doesn't look like the movies but feels real and right.
Your relationship with your partner strengthens as you both process what you went through together.
