When Your Body Remembers: Birth Trauma, PTSD and the Seven Year Cycle

What my son's 21st birthday taught me about healing.

We have just celebrated my son's 21st birthday and it was a surprise for me to find myself in a space the evening before that I thought I had left behind. Like many Mums the night before I was icing a cake, creeping around hanging banners and generally trying not to be spotted by the stay up late young men in my life.

His birth was something that I thought I had processed and come to terms with many years ago. In fact I thought I may have reached a place of acceptance and even gratitude because if we hadn't gone through what we did the young man standing before me would be very different indeed.

As someone who has worked with fertility and pregnancy for the last 30 years I have heard many worse stories than mine and have never felt the need to share it that much other than occasionally to help quantify some difficulties my son experiences. He has a diagnosis of autism and learning delay but he doesn't exactly tick all the boxes. He was without oxygen for longer than he should have been and the resulting difficulties are very likely to do with the damage associated with this.

I went into my labour hoping for a home birth but realistic about the possibility of a hospital birth. When my labour failed to progress I was transferred to the hospital and medication was used to help me progress. Just like in many stories I have heard the midwives were stretched and my continuity of care was compromised. Changes of shifts and exhausted and understaffed for a busy night I was left too long and experienced trauma and my son was born not breathing which was initially unnoticed, delaying his help.

I do not need to share graphic details and retrospectively I realise that without the help of the hospital neither of us probably would have survived and so I am grateful to live in a time when this support is possible.

After I came home with an ill and traumatised baby I struggled. Anaemic and exhausted I started to have flashbacks and dreams of being attacked. It took me a while to realise I had PTSD symptoms but when I did I sought help that reduced the intensity which given my son continued to struggle and not sleep I was grateful to be functioning.

Fast forward a year and his birthday came around and I was surprised to find myself reliving the labour. The time of year triggered memories and as the hours clicked by the day before I slowly experienced the story of the year before. As I was rushing around planning his 1st birthday party I just kept pushing the thoughts aside and ignoring the malaise that took over my body. Once the birthday came and went it lifted and I forgot about it but a year later it was back in a lesser way but there.

I pushed this to the back of my mind and pushed forward conceiving my second son. Concealing the fear that would rise at the thought of doing it again. I sometimes marvelled that my fear of not providing my son with a sibling was greater than my fear of birth.

Thankfully this time I did get my home birth and in the process validation that my previous birth had been far from normal. Even in later years I would compare my first experience to surviving a car accident. I was proud to have got through it but never wanted to do it again.

So as the years went by small snippets may arise around his birthday but not with the same intensity but enough to remind me that this trauma lived below my conscious thought. My body remembered. This is one of the ways shock impacts us. We store these memories differently, never really filing them away completely. I often use the metaphor with clients of having a movie still running in the background. However when this is happening it causes a drain on the system and keeps us looking for or experiencing being in danger, especially when all of the familiar triggers arrive like the blossom on the trees for me.

Out of my experience I learnt how to turn these movies off and give people back their capacity to be present in their life, not distracted internally. It is a simple but profound process that has helped all sorts of clients from the needle phobic to the war weary soldier.

So this year he turned 21 and I thought with all the work I have done and things I have learned I was beyond this experience but never say never — this year it returned. It started as a feeling of being out of sorts and then I remembered what that feeling was so I took a moment and journaled.

As I sat with that feeling I found myself thinking about something I'd been taught years ago — the theory of seven year cycles.

I Remembered my story with a completely different perspective. He is 21, he is a young man, we made it!!! All the years of struggle, the home education, the judgement, the fighting his corner time and again, the move that was in part to give both boys an opportunity to foster more independence as they move into the phase of their lives that is typified by the call to adventure, the testosterone fuelled experiences — and there he is, this amazing young man.

Maybe the key of the door age was not some arbitrary age picked by circumstance and cultural expectations — maybe there is something deeper. There are many people who have documented seven year cycles including Rudolf Steiner in his developmental philosophy. At 21, when all three childhood cycles are complete, it is suggested that both adult and child can finally integrate what happened at the beginning.

I had not come across this idea of integration before but I would say that in some way this is exactly what I experienced. I also can genuinely say it has been amazing to sit with such a level of gratitude and appreciation for who he has become.

Your Turn

Is there a date in the year your body remembers before your mind does?

What might it be trying to tell you?