Babyloss Trauma

Trauma is your body’s normal reaction to a distressing event. There are few events in life that are more distressing and catastrophic than babyloss. Not everyone that loses a child will experience signs of trauma. This section helps you to better understand what trauma is, what the symptoms of trauma are, how to seek help, and things that you can do to help feel more grounded.

What is trauma?

As mentioned, trauma is your bodies reaction to an overwhelming event, often one that threatens our sense of safety, wellbeing, body and sanity. This is exactly what babyloss, especially stillbirth, is.

We have all heard of fight and flight in nature, when an animal is under threat it either fights back or runs away. There is also another reaction – freezing, also known as playing dead.

This is when an animal’s body shuts down to prevent it from experiencing imminent pain, or giving it an opportunity to escape at a later time. This is what trauma does to the body – it freezes it. In the animal kingdom when a creature comes out of freeze they will quiver, shake it off (known as discharge) and get on with their lives.

Wild animals do not experience trauma. Humans do. We are unable to shake off the experience and so get trapped in a cycle of trauma where we cannot process the experience and get trapped in a cycle of reliving it.

Our bodies know when something traumatic has happened and think they are doing us a favour by shutting us down so that we do not have to deal with this shock, stress and trauma, this threat to our safety.

Losing a baby is one of the biggest compromises to our safety as it is against the natural order of things. It should not happen. That what happened is so horrible, painful and catastrophic, your body may react in ways it thinks are helpful because it does not want you to have to deal with this distressing reality.

Not everyone gets trauma. Trauma usually manifests itself soon after the event, but can manifest years later. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder caused by a traumatic event. The symptoms of PTSD can have a big impact on your every day life.

What is the difference between trauma and grief?

Your body will usually self regulate. With babyloss or any trauma, this pushes the nervous system beyond its ability to regulate. Your body may be in survival mode long after the loss. Over time your body will regulate, but some of the trauma may still be trapped in your system.

Grief and trauma share some similar symptoms, namely exhaustion, inability to concentrate, shock, denial, feeling angry and irritable. Not all health professionals understand the nuances between grief and trauma. The below information will help you to better understand what the differences are.

The main differences between trauma and grief is that grief is a natural and healthy (albeit exhausting and painful) human expression. Trauma is not. Grief will not leave you feeling anxious, on edge, tingly/physically numb, and crucially grief does not give you flashbacks.

Grief may feel like a nightmare but it does not give you nightmares. These are all signs of trauma.

They are signs of trauma because babyloss shattered your sense of safety. Losing your child is an upsetting, overwhelming, unexpected event. When something like that happens it can feel hard to relax, and may make you feel hypervigilant or jumpy, waking easily, and not being able to fall asleep on the couch.

You may be triggered by images, ones that may be completely unrelated but that take you right back to a moment or moments at the hospital, or other setting.

It is common for mothers who have lost children to experience pain, tingling and other sensations in their arms, known as aching arms. This is a physical manifestation of your pain of not having your child to hold.

You may have previously been a confident person that now feels really anxious, or that feels completely overstimulated by social situations you used to enjoy.

You may have unexplained physical sensations such as numbness, headaches, migraines, neckaches, arm pain, or just something that never existed before. Above all else, something just doesn’t feel right and, while everyone’s grief is different and babyloss is against the order of things, something fundamentally does not feel right.

Symptoms of trauma

Reliving the experience

• flashbacks

• nightmares

• repetitive and distressing images or sensations

• physical sensations, such as pain, sweating, feeling sick or trembling

• Intrusive memories

• Unwanted thoughts you cannot get out of your head

Hyperarousal

·         find it hard to go to sleep or stay asleep – easy to wake, especially when partner gets up, difficulty to relax, mentally and physically

·         constantly feel on-guard and alert (hypervigilance)

·         be more impulsive than usual

·         Irritable or aggressive behaviour

·         feel like their muscles are more tense than usual

·         feel pain more easily

·         feel their heart beating faster than usual

·         feel jumpy and be startled easily, always on edge

·         breathe more quickly or less deeply than usual

·         Hyperacusis - Feel overwhelmed by sound

Feeling

·         anxious

·         detached, disconnected from your body, physically numb

·         like nowhere is safe (which can include feeling safe in your own body)

·         fearful

·         overhwhelmed

·         That something bad is going to happen

·         Guilt and shame – that this is somehow your fault. It is not. Feeling that you are responsible for causing what happened or that you do not deserve sympathy because you some how caused this. You did not, and do deserve kindness and sympathy and love.  

Physical sensations

·         Physical unexplained aches and pains, especially headaches, chest pains, arms pains, neckache, migraine

·         Numbness in particular body parts, tinglings or feeling like pins and needles

·         Palpitations, stomach upsets, dizziness

Avoidance

Avoiding certain places, such as going back to hospital for your test results

Avoiding certain people or places they may be, such as places you may see pregnant women or small babies

Avoiding certain memories

Your body can bear the brunt of trauma. It can also manifest trauma, for example aching arms. This can feel terrifying and overwhelming. Many symptoms of trauma will go away of their own accord over time, usually three months. It is when these feelings do not go away, or interfere with your ability to manage at home and work that it is likely you are experiencing PTSD.

Can trauma/PTSD be treated?

The good news is that trauma can be treated relatively quickly. It can effectively be flushed out of the body in as little as 2-3 sessions. Usually the closer to the event you have treatment the fewer sessions you need, though you may find the trauma and grief like an onion peel, and as the initial trauma is dealt with, over time other triggers and experiences may happen, which can be dealt with quickly and efficiently. You may find that you need different therapies at different times.

Bottom line is there is a therapy that will help, and will be able to help quickly. Therapy will help reduce your symptoms. It may help feel like weight has been lifted from your shoulders and that you feel a bit more like you again, with the tools and resources to be you in a new world you are adjusting to live in without your baby.

How can trauma be treated?

One of the most important aspects of trauma is acknowledging that life for us has changed and the life we had planned and the world we subsequently living in have changed. As such our old ways of looking at the world sometimes don’t seem to make much sense anymore.

This can involve working with a therapist to change our ways of thinking and to develop resources to help us survive so that things feel less overwhelming.

Working with an experienced counsellor or psychotherapist can give us the opportunity to do this. Some counsellors are trained in multiple forms of therapy and all will assess you to develop a best care and action plan to help you develop the resources to feel less traumatised and more positive about the future.

Different things work for different people. There are lots of different therapies, below we have listed some of the key ones that relate to trauma.

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is a talking therapy that can help you manage your problems by changing the way you think and behave.

CBT is based on the concept that your thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and actions are interconnected, and that negative thoughts and feelings can trap you in a vicious cycle.

CBT aims to help you deal with overwhelming problems in a more positive way by breaking them down into smaller parts.

You're shown how to change these negative patterns to improve the way you feel, both now and in the future, which can be helpful for babyloss parents who know they would like to try for another child.

CBT deals with your current problems, rather than focusing on issues from your past, meaning that sessions are usually capped at 6-12 sessions, as the focus is on creating practical resources for you to transform unhelpful thoughts and behaviours into empowering actions that make you feel better and more positive about the future.

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a type of therapy used to treat the symptoms of trauma.

When we experience traumatic events the thoughts, feelings and memories we have about those events can get stuck. It can be hard to move on from them. The aim of EMDR is to help the brain to process distressing memories. This reduces their influence and allows patients to develop ways to more effectively get on with their lives. 

EMDR helps you to release the trapped trauma quickly. It does not develop resources as other forms of therapy do, but should help you feel less traumatised more quickly. Eye Movement Integration Therapy is also very similar to EMDR and could also be helpful. Depending on the practitioner you may be able to combine EMDR with CBT.

When to get help

It's normal to experience upsetting and confusing thoughts after babyloss, and these may reduce over the next month

You should visit your GP if you are still experiencing symptoms about 4 weeks after the traumatic experience, or the symptoms are particularly troublesome.

Your GP will want to discuss your symptoms with you in as much detail as possible.

They'll ask whether you have experienced a traumatic event in the recent or distant past and whether you have re-experienced the event through flashbacks or nightmares. Outline the symptoms you have above, or keep track of them in our app.

Your GP can refer you to mental health specialists if they feel you'd benefit from treatment. Specialist services are available in some areas and accessed for you by your GP. If there are no services locally, your Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) may be able to fund you to attend specialist services for assessment and treatment in another part of the country (England only).

Not all health professionals understand the nuances between grief and trauma, and may insist you wait for treatement, or you may be referred to a service with a long waiting list. If you know that fundamentally something does not feel quite right beyond your loss it is important to make note of how you feel and speak to your GP.

Once referred the local mental health services, sometimes known as CAHMS, will contact you to book in an assessment. This will usually be done by a qualified therapist over the phone or in person, who will ask you a series of questions. They will then determine what services are best for you.

If you would like to be seen quicker and can afford to go privately googling ‘trauma therapists’ in your area will yield results. Your workplace may also have insurance that can cover the cost of therapies.

Mind can also signpost to free and there are usually free and low cost options available in your area.

Look for therapists who have experience with psychological trauma or traumatic bereavement. Where we have signposted for free grief and bereavement support, it may be worth asking those counsellors if they are able to provide trauma support.

Is there anything that I can do for myself

Professional help will be the quickest way to resolve trauma. However, there are things that you can do to assist your healing and sense of safety. Nova Foundation hope the below videos and infographics (coming soon), combined with our app, help make you feel more connected to your body.