09/14/2017
Oh so true mommies. Talk about your difficult feelings until clarity comes. You never deserve to feel that you "failed".
"I realised that I didn’t fail, and my body didn’t fail, and my partner didn’t fail. As it dawned on me that I didn’t fail, a new understanding emerged: that I was failed. I began to understand where I was failed by my health carers, where I was failed by my antenatal education, and where my partner and I were both failed by our culture’s understanding of birth."
Feeling like a failure is echoed in so many women we meet. In fact, it is one of the most common responses to a bad birth that we come across at Birthtalk, and one that often has the deepest emotional distress.
The fact is, we don’t ever see a woman as having failed, because we know that birth is simply not a pass/fail event.
You may be thinking, “Ahhh – but you haven’t met me!” And that is true. However, we have met plenty of women over the years who were certain they had failed before they began coming to Birthtalk. Many conversations in our meetings start with, “If only I’d just done this” or, “Why did I do that?” or, “I can’t believe that I did that”.
Says Melissa from Birthtalk: "I felt a deep sense of failure for a long time after my birth, which pervaded every part of my life. I lost my confidence in social situations, and did not feel confident looking after my newborn, because I felt like I’d ‘failed at everything else’. I wouldn’t even put my baby in the car seat to come home from hospital after he was born. I handed him to my husband, as I just didn’t feel capable anymore. I did eventually move on from this, but the feelings didn’t just lift over time. They only lifted because I gained an understanding of what actually happened in my own experience."
What we've found is this: working through feelings of failure needs to be grounded in facts. It’s not just a matter of getting over it, or stopping feeling like that. It’s a matter of exploring new information and applying it to your situation, to get to a place where you can see your birth in a new light.
It takes time. And it takes work.
Melissa shares how she felt after taking that exact path: "I realised that I didn’t fail, and my body didn’t fail, and my partner didn’t fail. As it dawned on me that I didn’t fail, a new understanding emerged: that I was failed. I began to understand where I was failed by my health carers, where I was failed by my antenatal education, and where my partner and I were both failed by our culture’s understanding of birth.
It was just the beginning of the healing journey, but an incredibly important turning point."
From the section "I feel like a failure" in our book 'How to Heal a Bad Birth: making sense, making peace and moving on.' The section includes the chapters "Why wouldn't my body work in labour?" and "I read all the right books and did all the right classes...what happened?"
Available at http://howtohealabadbirth.com
