Coping with Christmas after traumatic birth
If you’ve experienced birth trauma, Christmas can be a challenging time. Dr Victoria Selby, a consultant clinical psychologist, has some suggestions to help you find your way through it
December is the month of joy for some, chaos for many and painful reminders for more than care to admit. The nativity scenes, songs of giving life, and knitted babies hanging from trees can take us back unexpectedly.
Christmas can also bring back difficult memories associated with loss and pain, accompanied by external pressures that we should be ‘merry and bright’. The stresses can be many – financial, social, emotional and physical. Many women and birthing people I speak to describe being touched out, stressed out and wiped out. As Joni Mitchell sang:
‘It’s coming on Christmas. They’re cutting down the trees. They’re putting up the reindeer. Singing songs of joy and peace. I wish I had a river, I could skate away on.’
As a psychologist, I am drawn to theory to help understand a little of why we are more likely to find the impact of our past pains affecting us at this time. A compassion-based approach can help. Paul Gilbert, the founder of compassion-focused therapy (CFT), described how our mind can run off three main systems:
Threat – our survival system. Its only job is to alert us of danger through thoughts, feelings or actions
Drive – our incentive system, the state that keeps us motivated and focused on goal seeking
Soothe – our non-incentive seeking system that offers comfort and to be drawn to soothing ourselves or to be soothed by others
All three systems are needed for evolutionary purposes, and we would like them to be as balanced as possible, for most of the time. However, during difficult times, and perhaps as Christmas approaches, we may find that our Threat system and Drive system start dancing with one another, growing in size, and the opportunities for rest and recovery become much trickier to grow and notice. You are not alone in this; many people will find this dance familiar. This can be even harder if, alongside the daily struggles, Threat brings in past memories of trauma or distress, adding to the load you are already trying to bear.
Take a pause
A starting point of managing this period can be to take a breath and think about your own systems. If you were to draw this out on a piece of paper (and you are welcome to) what would this look like? Which would be the biggest system – your Threat? Your Drive? Do you know who, how and what you need to access your Soothe state? So often in traumatic circumstances the ability to psychologically prepare is missing or lacking, so when we face periods where control falls and chaos increases, it can unwittingly replicate patterns of not believing or feeling psychologically prepared for what is in front of us. Taking a pause and using a calmer period to consider what is happening might be a good starting point to understand what is going on for you, because it is this information that can help inform any next steps.
If you find your Threat is high and you’re trying to ease this by ‘doing’ – it’s likely we have a ‘Threat-Drive’ partnership and addressing that can bring a great deal of relief to people.
Three quick techniques that can help
There are some psychoeducational approaches you can take to encourage a more ‘soothing’ approach to your days and weeks. Like any techniques, these improve with practice, and support from others can help offer empathy and connection alongside this. Here are three quick ‘go to’ approaches for the Christmas period, grounded in a compassion approach.
Compassionate challenge
Showing compassion for yourself doesn’t mean just kindness or dismissing your thoughts and feelings. Sometimes you will have a thought that comes from a place of Threat or Drive. There might be an event you’d like to attend, for example, but a thought appears in your head resisting the idea, as a result of past trauma or distress. If this happens, a gentle challenge to the thought can help you.
It’s important to use a friendly tone when practising this and, if it helps, you can draw on previous memories of times you have been really proud of overcoming difficulties. You are likely to find quietly heroic moments all year around. These challenges can help reduce intrusion and fears when you really want to take part.
Some of these prompts might support a challenge:
Thank you for reminding me that this could be overwhelming. Right now, I have prepared and feel able to manage this and would like to try something different to what you’d like to happen.
I have thought about if this is a real threat right now or not. I am going to say ‘no’ this time and welcome some ease.
I think you are trying to protect me but I notice I want to flee or freeze and that isn’t what I’d like to do right now.
My wisdom says this is likely to not be helpful to me right now.
I think this is about you helping me keep control, but it’s stopping me for doing something different so let me try another way.
I sense this might create an argument inside me about what to do or not. So I am going to ask you to take a step back for now please.
Of course, there are times when deciding not to take part isn’t about a resistance block – it’s about a desire to survive and a choice to self-preserve. It’s important to acknowledge that this is OK over Christmas. We can often feel pressured to take part in ALL THE ACTIVITES to make magic – this is not true. You will find any magic in relationships that you hold dear and that are important to you. They will not be extra sparkly because it is a different month with a construction of festivity around it. Here are two more approaches that can help.
Finding your tribe or village
We rely on others – as a human species connection with others is important. When facing the Christmas period it can be helpful to think about ‘who do I go to, and for what?’ Perhaps it’s unwise to go to your long-distance cousin for parenting advice on Christmas Eve – they might not have the relationship with you to navigate the complexity of this in the context of distress. It can be useful to think about:
Who do I go to over this period of time that is none-judgmental and can offer me a listening ear or comfort?
Who do I go to when I need practical problem-solving?
Who do I go to when I need a break, whom I can trust to ask no questions and be available at short notice, if required?
Who do I seek out for joy, for humour and playfulness?
Grounding
This is a term that is used a lot when we talk about distress, and there is good reason for that. It involves the act of making use of something in the present moment to create feelings of safety in the body and mind. It doesn’t have to be bold, dramatic or boastful in its approach. It can be quietly heroic for you.
Grounding can look like taking a walk and collecting a stone, a leaf or branch that you can signify with safety and calm. You can keep this as a reminder of your ability to be relaxed, in control while also navigating difficult times. You can place it on a shelf, by your bed. You can hold it when you need to serve as a reminder. Sometimes people collect a number of objects and make a jar or a box to remind them of all the moments of peace that can exist in our lives.
Grounding can also be spending time thinking of a song that offers comfort or reassurance, and taking yourself away to listen to it for a few minutes – small reminders of what you might need in any given moment. You might want to think about other senses that can stimulate calmness. Smells can be incredibly powerful – something that reminds you of comfort or care, perhaps the smell on another that offered something strong, wise and caring for you.
Grounding can be made your own: you can think about each of your five sense and develop a compassionate grounding survival bag, box or envelope – including things you need for those moments when you really, really need them. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as it promotes you to feel safe in a moment in time – just to be able to take that breather that helps you put one foot in front of another.
There are many self-help resources available, compassionate imagery scripts and audios, safe place visualisations and loving meditation guides. Each can be accessible as a written, audio or video format.
Finally, this is less of a hint but an opportunity to give you permission to the art of saying ‘no’ without guilt associated with it. When we are saying ‘no’ we may be putting a boundary in place that helps preserve ourselves, a relationship or a need that we have. We often judge this so much worse in our minds that the minds of others. It can be helpful to remind ourselves of that.
You can contact Victoria at:
Website: https://drvicpsychologist.wixsite.com/mysite
