Can't forgive him for birth trauma

[Unwind]

And I know it wasn't really his fault.

My DH wiggled out of going to antenatal classes and appointments with me, and would not read the books I tried to make him read, but otherwise did his best to be supportive.

That best was not good enough - he let hospital staff ignore and undermine me during labour and after our daughter's birth, when she was in SCBU. It was an unbelievable nightmare to me, and I did not stand up for myself or for her - so why do I feel so bitter that he did not? We were both naive, we trusted the professionals, who were in positions of authority, we were first time parents and did not have confidence in ourselves in that role.

But I have not been able to feel the same way about my DH since then. How can I get over this? I have tried counselling, it did not fix things.

Is it possible sakura that you are projecting your own horrible experience here?

Each situation is different.

Men and woman are both caught out by a horrible birth

Neither is to blame

My ex did the NCT classes and was still impotent and hopeless

No sorry Sakura to me the ONLY thing that matters is a healthy baby. There is a long history in my family of late miscarriages and stillbirths, and quite frankly NOTHING compares to the trauma of that.

Disco, you're misunderstanding the OP.

Only she knows her partner, and she feels let down by him. SHe has explained what he did not do, how he could have done more if he had been connected to her more, taken the ante-natal classes seriously, looked to her for cues during labour.

She feels let down and shouting her feelings down is not going to change them. All that can happen is they will be buried.

The husband simply needs to acknowledge he could have been more considerate, and show that if there's a next time he will be the protector. The husband probably didn't realise how important it was to be there for her, that is his mistake. BUt the OP still has the right to her feelings.

Luckily, I worked it out with my DH and trusted him the second time round, but it must be addressed.

NO I'm not projecting Victoria. Unwind told me upthread that the lack of control I described was exactly how she felt.

Disco, a history of miscarriages and stillbirths do not need to be compounded by birth trauma, which is almost always avoidable. All that is needed is for the birthing woman to be respected and listened to, in most cases.

My husband came to the antenatal classes for our first child. But he didn't read any books. Neither did I, really. I don't think 'not reading books' means he doesn't want to be a father or is not preparing.

My DH is an polite, warm man, who really doesn't like to 'make a scene.' On an everyday basis, I adore these qualities in him. He is calm and listens to what you say. This makes him a lovely father and the kids benefit However, it makes him a useless birth parnter if tings get complicated. And I know that he felt completely out of his depth and pretty much useless. BUT I would prefer him to be useless at birth and great the rest of the time than vice-versa. I don't think your husband is alone in how he handled the situation. It is very de-skilling and midwife's and doctors can be very convincing. He was def a lot better the second time around!

Its terrifying having a baby and bringing them home. I'm sure over time you will be able to separate which feelings are generated by the birth trauma itself, which are generated by the overwhelming sensation of becoming a mum, and which are truly about your husband.

I hope you give yourselves time and compassion. You've got your wonderful baby to take care of. Take a day at a time and I'm sure you will find a way to reconnect with your husband and get those feelings of being safe back.

The OP's issues (with the medical staff and her DH) aren't just around the birth itself. There's the after-birth period where she was horrendously bullied by a nurse, and when she talked to her DH about it he told her that she was overreacting. At that point he wasn't standing watching his baby's heart decelerate. There was a consistent pattern throughout the labour, the birth and the postnatal period of listening to what his wife was clearly telling him, listening to what the medical staff were telling him, and then siding 100% with the medical staff every time. That's got to be absolutely devastating in a birth partner.

Unwind, might it also help to realise that while your DH is a great husband and father he is and pretty much always will be a lousy birth partner because of his horror of confrontation. He is always going to go along with what the authority figure tells him. When you feel ready for another child, look into hiring a doula, or having your mother or another experienced friend or relative there. Ultimately you are going to have to let go of your feelings of blaming him for not being something he couldn't be, but I suspect you are going to need some specialist counselling (not CBT). And it would be a good start if he can also admit that he couldn't be what you needed him to be in that situation.

Thank you all. ProfLayton, I think you are right, if we had anticipated that so much confrontation with medical staff might be necessary, I think that we would have hired a doula. We did not have rosy expectations of the birth itself, and were aware that things might go wrong, but were naive about the level of care we would recieve.

I've been reading, but not posting because I am feeling rather confused and emotional about this right now. I've spoken to DH, and we are going to sort out some more counselling soon - not right away, because I just don't want to go through it right now.

And bear in mind, Disco, that they didn't get a healthy baby. The way that Unwind and her DD, who had already been identified as at risk of hypoglycaemia were treated in the immediate post-birth period directly contributed to her DD's admission to SCBU and to possible brain damage. Much of the trauma Unwind has described here has focused around that time and the succeeding few days.

Take your point that the ONLY thing (not the most important thing, the ONLY thing) that matters is a healthy baby to extremes then it should be fine if a doctor comes along and says "well, Ms Disco, we're going to shave your head" or "I'm going to amputate both your legs now" or some other crazy suggestion, because you've still got a healthy baby and that's the ONLY thing that matters? No, because there was absolutely NO need to shave your head or amputate your legs and it had NO relation whatsoever to whether the baby was healthy. Similarly with "we're going to talk over you and give you no information at all about what we are doing or plan to do" not in any way a requirement for a healthy baby. And in fact the fact that that was the culture that had been allowed to grow up and continue unchallenged in the hospital actively contributed to the baby's hypoglycaemia and health problems, so was actively detrimental to having a healthy baby.

glad to hear you've spoken about it. that's half the battle...

Footlong - I'm getting incredibly angry reading your posts.

You obviously know very little about the technical side of childbirth and have no understanding why that issue is an issue for the OP. re. epidurals/interventions - if you have no clue as to what I'm going on about - then there's a whole bunch of reading you need to do before you blunder in.

Seriously, what have you to offer to someone suffering from birth trauma?
This is not aibu, this is relationships.

If you absolutely cannot understand why unwind feels resentful about her husbands participation (or lack of) during pregnancy/birth - then please back off.

There are legitimate reasons for why the OP feels as she does. She is not being irrational.

This issue is important for her recovery. She needs to feel heard, to believe that her husband really understands what she went through.

You obviously have a flimsy grasp of psycoloogy, if you think that such a traumatic experience such as this should have no effect upon the relationship between a couple.
It does, and it probably brings up subconcious issues that the op will need to deal with.

Yes, her husband is not to blame for what happened, but he was there and the OP felt let down.
She is not crazy. She feels let down, and that puts strain on the emotional relationship between them.

You have no concept of the vunerability (spelling) that women go through with pregnancy and childbirth. Her husband let her down, he did not act in a way in which she felt supported.
She now has to deal with the fact that the most significant person in her life was not able to help her when she needed help the most.

There were things he could have done differently. It might not have changed the outcome, but the OP would not have felt so alone and vunerable if he had done so.

To tell her to get on with it and deal with the trauma herself is naive stupidity.
It has affected their relationship, this aspect needs dealing with if the OP is to 'trust' her husband in the future.

I wish you all the best unwind.

DiscoSquishedBrains, your experience of short painful births when your DH really annoyed you hardly compares to what Unwind went through. And it is not helpful in the least to tell a woman what she should be feeling, or what the most important thing she should take into account should be.

LarryGrylls -- You and possibly Footlong are the only posters who have mentioned separating in this thread.

Newnamethistime; I have PMed you

Prefessorlaytonismyloveslave -- great post.

Unwind -- I'm glad you will be talking with your DH here, and I hope your journey towards resolution of the trauma you suffered is on the way. It is possible to recover from this. The healthy way is to do it in your own time and to take your feelings seriously.

i think the idea that she should not ahve her H as birth partner in future is a good one - it is a way round (tho possibly a cop out for him) . but if in all other aspects he is a great dad and husband, then birth is just one episode in all this.

also - define "safe and healthy baby"

what is a healthy baby?

in case of PTSD over a birth - there are women who have PTSD because of horrendous birth "even tho" they have "healthy" baby.

it isnt to do with the health of the baby is it? is about expectations/loss of control/ etcetcetc

there are women who have PTSD/guilt over a horrendous birth which has resulted in a a baby with CP or other issues. again, the birth trauma and having a child with SN could be linked, but also the trauma of birth itself needs to be addressed.

unwind has a baby who was at risk of brain damage but thankfully now has only mild delays - is that still a a "healthy baby"?

is it relevant to her birth trauma?

the after care was not good but it not clear if the mild delays are due to poor aftercare or not.

nteresting mathsanxiety. I am not allowed to tell unwind how she should be feeling - as far as I'm aware I have done no such thing. If I have it was entirely unintentional.

Yet you are allowed to tell me that MY birth experiences are not valid in this instance.

HOW FUCKING DARE YOU. My birth experiences are every bit as valid as everyone else's here. Plenty of mothers would consider the labours I experienced to be traumatic in their own right. They were fast and painful. So fast there was no time for the pain relief that would have been necessary and welcome if I had had the chance to take it. So painful that in the second one I actually put my fingernails RIGHT THROUGH the mattress on the bed.

Yet that's not valid? I actually went into clinical shock they were so fast. Yet I don't consider it to be traumatic because I laboured with no preconception that birth was about control over your body and what was happening to it. All I expected was someone to deliver my babies safely and healthily. Maybe that's why I am not traumatised and others are?

And no, I am not going to explain safe and healthy, it speaks for itself. My first baby was 6 weeks early due to hyper emisis and pre-eclampsia which actually developed into elcampsia which made me go into premature labour. She was very underweight, very jaundiced and scored a 4.

The second one was 4 weeks early for exactly the same reason and scored a 6. They both experienced developmental delays but have now caught up.

They are now fit and healthy and as far as I am/was concerned that is ALL that matters to me.

I'm out of this thread. As far as I'm concerned it is precisely the false expectations that you can remain in control during one of the most distressful, painful and dificult times of your life that have caused births to be considered traumatic.

Sometimes we just have to accept that there are times that we will not be in control and others either know better than us or are able to judge what is best for us and not interfer with those that do.

Unwind I wish you all the best for the future.

Unwind I hope that talking to your DH is proving helpful and this thread is not upsetting for you.

One thing that has not been mentioned - is a part of the reason that you can't get past this tied up in your worries that the difficult birth has affected your DD and her future development is slightly uncertain and therefore you feel guilty and/or you blame your DH for letting her down? I'm not saying that either of you has, far from it, but just that maybe you are feeling like that?

Unwind please try to have some counselling sessions with a trauma specialist. You never needed CBT, you needed to come to terms with a one-off situation. Please also try to involve your dp in this. This is really common, much more so than you imagine.
Your situation sounds exactly as mine nearly 16 years ago (although my ds is disabled through it).
It took a very very long time to accept that dh and I were in no way to blame. How could we be - he was a motor mechanic and I was a civil servant and no matter how many books you've read and classes you've been to, nothing can prepare you. It was just a really f*ed up day (and month afterwards). After some really good counselling (and unfortunately about 100 tellings) I realise now that dh was just as scared as me, we were both bloody petrified.
You can recover from this - I went on to have dd seven years later under very different circumstances. One of my main memories is of being so pleased that dh took her immediately after the c-section, bathed her, dressed her and cuddled her whilst they finished off with me. She looked so safe and loved. So there must be forgiveness and acceptance.
Must get off, my trauma one who will be 16 next month due home from school and there is more GCSE coursework to be done...

Sometimes we just have to accept that there are times that we will not be in control and others either know better than us or are able to judge what is best for us and not interfer with those that do.

I would not ever accept that i wont be in control of my own body during childbirth. Health care proffesionals are not God , they do not have control over you , they are there to offer a service , its up to you what parts of that service you want to use and which you dont . Its sad that you consider this to be a reason why some people find births traumatic.

Nurses and docters do NOT get to decide to perform internal examinations / insert catheters , or do anything else without your specific consent . Those that do should be charged with assault as far as im concerned .

Not invalid, just not comparable. You are equating your experience to hers and saying you recovered and it wasn't your DH's fault and therefore the same goes for Unwind. Birth is a completely unique experience. What is a horrific one for one woman might not faze another. One DH's much-appreciated support might be grounds for banishing him to the couch by another. One size does not fit all where birth is concerned, and to tell a woman she needs to look on the bright side and be thankful she made it home alive with a live and healthy baby is projection of your own experience onto hers, and patronising.

I have personally experienced a high level of intervention in all of my deliveries, short of a cs though. I got over the idea that I would be in total control at all times of the so-called birthing experience after DD1's arrival. I had good experiences and bad each time, depending on who was dealing with me. Some medical 'professionals' are anything but. For the entire duration of DS's birth I felt I was treated like a slab of meat with a baby stuck inside me. I recovered, but that doesn't mean that anyone else would, or that anyone else would have felt as badly as I did about the delivery. There is probably someone out there who could compare the experience favourably with something she went through. And it would be irrelevant to me and how I felt about it.

I don't see in Unwind's posts here the expectation that full control over the entire experience would happen. I see a DH who detached himself from the pregnancy and the birth to a remarkable degree, both in terms of knowing basic medical aspects of childbirth and what to expect in general terms when things go wrong, and wrt the emotional and even spiritual aspects of birth, one of which is the expectation, not unreasonable, that the father of the baby will show some interest (going to antenatal classes and doing a bit of reading are not that much to ask) with the aim of better supporting the mother in the process. A little knowledge and preparation could have helped dispel whatever terror or helplessness he was feeling.

Unwind I have PM-ed you.

There are some great posts on this thread (proflayton, mathanxiety, newname to name a few) and some posts which mean well but have no real understanding of birth trauma and some posts which absolutely disgust me.

Birth trauma is a reaction to a situation which a deeper part of your brain, a more instinctive part, knows wasn't right. Unwind has tried to apply logic by trying to understand her DH's actions but trying to rationalise his actions obviously hasn't helped her to deal with the trauma and she posted her for support.

IMO, to tell a woman who has experienced a traumatic birth that all that matters is a healthy baby is just about one of the worst things you can say. It not only minimises her experience, it can also make her feel guilty for thinking that she's entitled to a postive birth experience.

Unwind, I wish you all the best in moving on from this.

We don't know that OP's DH does not curse and berate himself everyday that he didn't know enough. They have only just begun to share their feelings about what they went through.
My DH had read the books, watched the films, done the classes. But when confronted with all hell breaking loose it didn't count.
We all begin the process with our plans and our visions of how it's going to be.
"I am going to labour on all fours and DH is going to massage my back"
A few hours later and it's "F off DH, touch me again and I'll deck you".
I do not mean to belittle post-birth PTSD by using this analogy. Just trying to demonstrate that you can't guarantee yours or anyone else's reactions.

Oddly, that wasn't what I was saying at all. What I was trying to do was to point out that it is unreasonable to expect to be in full control of one's body and the whole experience when giving birth. You don't expect to be in control of your body when you are puking or have the shits and although it's a pretty crass example and I can't think of a better one off the top of my head, your body is still basically trying to expell something. Your body does pretty much what it wants when it's in labour and there's feck all you can do apart from try to relax and get on with it. Which is a bloody tall order tbh.

One of my cousins desperately wanted a water home birth for her second child. Her birth plan was incredibly detailed and she was v traumatised when it all went wrong and she ended up in hospital having a caesarean. It took a year of counselling to help her understand that she wasn't a failure because of it, yet she had 2 women at her NCT class berating her for not being strong and refusing to go ffs.

I'm allowed my personal opinion and my personal opinion is that an awful lot of birth traumas happen because women have unrealistic expectations of being able to be in full control of the situation. In an ideal world that would be fantastic but it's not an ideal world and personally I think that ideas like that are more damaging than anything. A bit like breast feeding warriors who cannot and will not see that, for the women who are unable to breastfeed, their attitudes are incredibly upsetting and unreasonable. And that IS something I can speak from experience from.

I wasn't, and didn't AFAIK tell unwind that she should basically suck it up and get on with it. What I WAS doing was agreeing, to a certain extent but not totally, with footloose, that is is wholley unreasonable to blame a DH on a bad birth experience unless he is directly responsible for it. As Lulumama said earlier, even the most prepared couples turn to jelly.

If I've come across the wrong way and I have upset you Unwind I apologise profusely and totally. That was the last thing on my mind. I just felt that a large proportion of posters on this thread had overlooked the first 2 paragraphs of your OP and were man bashing for want of a better phrase.

I would also still point out that ALL birth experiences are valid and comparable. It's no different to the pre-birth horror stories that need to be balanced out by positive ones. And as you are not in unwind's mind you are unable to judge whether or not one of these 'incomparable' experiences has helped her to stop and think about her experiences and maybe see them in a different light.

But in this case, Disco, Unwind was not a victim of unrealistic expectations of what childbirth would and could entail. She deeply resents her H's refusal to even meet her halfway when she wanted him to participate with her in preparation for the birth. If your DH did such a thing, then your experience would be comparable, but apparently your DH showed a willingness beforehand to do what you considered necessary and sensible and supportive, even though you (like me) would have hit him with a 6 x 4 if you had one handy as things progressed. Plans go awry in childbirth as in no other area, and nobody denies that, but the DH here had no plan at all.

i wanted to add that i can also relate to how distressing it is when staff members at a hospital act in a bitchy and offhand manner... most nurses are amazing but occasionally you come across one or two that use their position of power over you... it happened to me recently when i was admitted for severe abdominal pains. i had told a previous doctor some details that i thought might be important but she didn't pass them on to the next dr, so 2nd doctor was annoyed when i mentioned it again to her. one of the nurses in the ward kept bitching loudly about it in the hallway to the other staff, each time they had a handover of staff, saying that i hadn't bothered telling anyone, what an idiot i was etc... i could hear every word she said and i believe she knew that. the other nurses were lovely but her behaviour made me feel humiliated and vulnerable.

long winded way of saying, i empathise that the staff's mis-behaviour must have added to the feeling of being unsupported. i would have hoped that if my DH had been present, he would have put her in her place as i felt too unwell to take her on.

Op you CAN get over this, really you can. Your relationship won't be the same as before though, because parenthood always does change things. As does going through an traumatic event, as you two have done.

You can come out of this stronger as a couple, with a better marriage. You will learn to accept each others weaknesses and forgive each other when you have been let down. As others psoters have said, you may have to forgive your dh for being such a crap birth partner as he is otherwise a good husband and father

Please get some help from a counsellor who specializes in this area

springlamb, as one who is unqualified to join in this debate, may I thank you for sharing your real-life experience so powerfully and compassionately. I'm sorry to hear that your baby was, in fact, damaged and delighted to hear he's getting along with his GCSEs :)

I think that what you said, about the acceptance processes you & DH needed to go through, is possibly the most important contribution to Unwind's thread. I'm writing this mainly to help her notice your posts.

As for my reactions, I loathe all kinds of attempts to dictate what a person "should" feel - and there have been many of those here. I also think know that "All that matters is a healthy baby" is a sop dating from the days when many women inevitably died in childbirth. It has no place in a developed country.