Recovering from a difficult birth
3-step rewind process
If you had a difficult and upsetting birth experience and need to process those painful memories and release distressing feelings (even if it’s quite some time after the birth), the 3-step rewind process is a safe and effective guided technique based on Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) that will help you to heal and move forward in your life, leaving the trauma responses behind.
The 3-step rewind can be particularly helpful if thinking about a previous birth triggers flashbacks and feelings of fear or helplessness, and this trauma response is holding you back from experiencing pregnancy and birth again.
In the face of life-threatening danger (whether that danger is real or perceived), the fight-flight-freeze response is triggered as one of our most primitive survival systems. Not all of us experience pregnancy or birth in the way that we hoped for, and this can leave you and/or your partner with very uncomfortable feelings about what you have gone through or witnessed. Sometimes a birth can look ‘perfect’ to outsiders but be perceived very differently by the parents, or a difficult experience may be dismissed by comments such as “At least you’re all safe/alive.” What you went through and how it makes you feel is valid, and you don’t have to live with these problematic feelings forever.
If a distressing event is not properly processed by the brain, then the heightened emotions and physical symptoms of fear and helplessness that arise become inextricably and biologically linked to the memory of the event, and it simply isn’t possible to get your rational brain to ‘move on’.
The symptoms experienced by someone who has gone through a distressing event can be problematic day-to-day as simply remembering the event can trigger the fight-flight-freeze response again even when there is no present danger, causing you to repeatedly relive what happened and igniting the feelings all over again. Symptoms such as hypervigilance, anxiety, guilt, anger and disrupted sleep can be absolutely exhausting and prevent you from living your life in the way that you want to.
In taking you through the 3-step rewind process, I will hold space for you, listen and guide you to move through and beyond your past experience, enabling you to look ahead to the future that you desire.
How it works
The process consists of 3 sessions, each one week apart. Every session is tailored to your needs, pace, and comfort level, and they can take place at your home or online. Once completed, you will receive a personalised meditation recording to use whenever you feel the need for support.
There are 3 stages to the process:
- Hearing your story should you want to tell it (although this is not compulsory if it feels too painful), and understanding the changes you would like to experience when the troubling symptoms have lifted
- Deep relaxation, recalling the event in a specific guided way, whilst feeling safe and secure
- Supported visualisation of yourself coping in the future and responding in a different way
The 3-step rewind is a safe, highly effective and non-intrusive technique used to help you to restructure and process a stressful event.
Please note that the 3-step rewind is NOT therapy or counselling, nor is it an alternative to seeking medical help or taking medication for your mental health. Please seek the help of your GP or talking therapies if your symptoms are at a level that impacts your normal daily activities, or they have lasted many months.
Additional resources
MIND charity have information about feelings after birth and where to get help.
The Birth Trauma Association has a helpline as well as useful information.