Birthcare with Katie

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Birthcare with Katie

Mental Health Midwife & birth educator. Supporting you in pregnancy after a difficult or traumatic birth. https://linktr.ee/birthcarewithkatie

Move from fear and uncertainty to calm, confident and prepared for a better birth. Birthcare offers hypnobirthing courses to expectant parents at any stage of pregnancy. Birthcare can offer you the opportunity to approach birth with confidence, calmness and excitement and help to achieve a positive experience of birth for you and your baby.

09/05/2026

The practical exercise from this week's episode, and you can do this right now, whether or not you have listened yet.

Think about a moment in your life when you felt frightened or overwhelmed and something helped. It does not have to be related to birth or pregnancy.

Write down what helped. Was it a person, something they said, or just them being there? Something physical, warmth, touch, a familiar smell or sound? Something you did, breathing in a particular way, counting, focusing on something specific? Your environment, somewhere familiar, having control over what was around you?

Now go through each thing and ask: could this be available to me during my birth?

Some will go straight into your birth plan. Some will need a conversation with your birth partner. Some are as simple as bringing something familiar with you on the day.

This is not a generic list of coping strategies. It is yours, the things that specifically work for you. And knowing what they are before you need them changes something about the fear.

Save this. And if you want to go deeper into building this toolkit, Birth Without Fear is the course I made specifically for people in your situation. Link in comments.

Katie
NHS Mental Health Midwife | Perinatal Trauma Specialist

08/05/2026

Some people I speak with carry a deep belief that when the moment comes, they will fall apart, is this you? Do you constantly worry that you will not be able to cope. That the fear will take over and you will have no control over it.

Here is what I want to say about that belief.

Every time you read this post, listen to my podcast, you are building evidence against it. Every time you think through your birth plan, you are building evidence. Every time you practise your breathing, you are building evidence. Every time you show up for this work even when the fear is loud and it would be easier not to think about it at all, you are building evidence.

Not that the birth will be perfect. But that you will have what you need.

The belief that you will not cope is understandable given what you have been through. And it is not the whole picture. This preparation work is the counter-evidence. You are already doing it.

Save this for the days when that feels hard to believe.

With compassion,
Katie
NHS Mental Health Midwife | Perinatal Trauma Specialist

06/05/2026

The goal is not to completely eliminate all fear. The goal is to know what to do when it shows up.

This is the reframe at the heart of this week's episode. Share it with anyone who has been told to just stay calm and found that advice impossible to follow.

05/05/2026

Scared of birth is hard enough. Scared of how scared you are on top of it, that is whole new level of exhausting.

If this is where you are, you are not doing anything wrong. Share this with someone who needs to hear that.

04/05/2026

New episode, for anyone who is not just scared of birth, but scared of how scared they are.

That double layer is exhausting. And this episode is about it. Link in the comments.

03/05/2026

Moving from naming what happened into understanding what can actually be different this time is not always comfortable. But it is so important.

Coming next week: fear doesn't have to run the show.

I talk about your relationship with fear specifically, why the standard advice to eliminate it before labour is not quite right for someone who has been through what you have been through, and what a more honest, more useful approach looks like instead.

Back Monday.

Katie
NHS Mental Health Midwife | Perinatal Trauma Specialist

02/05/2026

The practical tool from this week's episode, and you can do this whether or not you have listened yet.

Get a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle.

On the first piece of paper: left side, write down what happened in your previous birth in brief bullet points. Right side, write what it was about those things that felt too much. Was it the feeling of not knowing what was happening? Feeling alone? Feeling completely out of control? Feeling like nobody was listening?

That second column is important. Because it tells you what this birth most needs to address.

On the second piece of paper: left side, things you cannot control about this birth. Right side, things that genuinely are within your control.

The right side of the second column might include your birth plan, who is with you, what your care team know about you, the breathing techniques you practise, how you prepare your birth partner, what you will do if something feels wrong.

Work on the right side. That is where the preparation goes, and that is where you focus should be, NOT the left column that you cannot control.

Save this. And if you want to go deeper, Episode 6 of Building Birth Confidence is in the link in comments.

Katie
NHS Mental Health Midwife | Perinatal Trauma Specialist

01/05/2026

A good birth doesnt always mean an experience that goes exactly to plan, because birth does not work like that for anyone, and telling you it will is not something I can honestly do.

What I can tell you is that the people who come through their next birth feeling okay are generally the ones who prepared well. Who had the right support around them. Who had built skills they could reach for in the hard moments. Who had people in that room who knew their story and understood what they needed.

The goal is not to guarantee the outcome. The goal is to be in a genuinely different position to where you were last time. Better equipped. More supported. Less alone in it.

That is achievable. And that is what this work is building.

Episode 6 is the start of that building, the practical phase of the series. Link in comments if you haven't listened yet.

Katie
NHS Mental Health Midwife | Perinatal Trauma Specialist

29/04/2026

This is the idea at the heart of this week's episode, and it is the one I come back to most in my NHS work.

Trauma is not caused by what happened.

It is caused by what happened felt too overwhelming to cope with.

This distinction matters more than it might sound, because it changes what is possible.

If trauma is caused by what happened, the only way to prevent it happening again is to guarantee a perfect birth. And nobody can promise you that. Birth is unpredictable, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not being honest with you.

But if trauma is about what feels unbearable, then the question shifts. It moves from "how do I stop bad things happening" to "how do I build the skills, the support, and the tools so that even if things are hard, they do not have to feel unbearable?"

That is a question you can actually answer. That is preparation you can actually do.

Two people can have exactly the same birth, with the same interventions and the same outcome. One of them feels okay. The other is traumatised. The difference is often not so much about what happened. It is about whether they felt heard, whether they felt in control, whether they had the right support around them to help them to cope.

That means that you can take steps to make sure that this birth doesn't feel traumatic again, the things that influence this are within your reach to influence.

Save this. And share it with anyone who needs to see it.

28/04/2026

When you have been through a difficult birth, it makes complete sense that you would want to control everything about the next one.

So you go over what happened. You research every possible scenario. You try to prepare for outcomes you cannot predict, because your brain has learned that birth is unpredictable and that feels terrifying.

But trying to control something that cannot be controlled leads to one thing: exhaustion. And the feeling that no amount of preparation will ever be enough.

So here is a more honest list.

Scroll through. Because the things you can actually influence are real, they are meaningful, and there are more of them than you might think.

Save this. And if today's episode has not landed in your feed yet, it is there now. Link in comments.

Katie
NHS Mental Health Midwife | Perinatal Trauma Specialist

27/04/2026

New episode for anyone who has been trying to prepare for every possible birth scenario and still feels like it is never enough.

There is a reason for that. And today's episode is about it. Link to listen in the comments.

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