Birth trauma can leave lasting emotional and physical impacts long after delivery. You may find yourself replaying parts of the birth, feeling on edge, disconnected, overwhelmed by medical settings, or carrying grief, fear, guilt, anger, or a lingering sense that your body or experience was not fully understood or protected.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is an evidence-based therapy that can help the nervous system process traumatic experiences in a way that feels more manageable and less overwhelming. In working with birth trauma, EMDR is adapted to account for the layered and highly embodied nature of perinatal experiences. Treatment may focus not only on a single moment during labor or delivery, but also on earlier medical experiences, fertility journeys, pregnancy complications, fears around safety or loss, postpartum experiences, NICU stays, or the ways trauma continues to show up in parenting, relationships, and connection with self or baby.

Our approach to EMDR for birth trauma emphasizes pacing, nervous system regulation, and helping clients remain grounded throughout the process. You do not need to recount every detail of your experience for therapy to be effective. Sessions will incorporate preparation and resourcing skills, attention to body sensations and triggers, and space for the complexity that can coexist in birth experiences, including love, grief, gratitude, fear, disappointment, and trauma existing all at once.

Whether your experience involved a difficult delivery, emergency intervention, medical trauma, loss of control, postpartum complications, or a birth that simply did not feel emotionally safe, therapy can provide a space to process what happened and move toward healing with greater steadiness and self-compassion.