AfterthoughtsNI offers counselling and training service:
Birth trauma is a term that describes some of the symptoms women and men may experience after a traumatic birth experience.
The counselling pathway which ATNI offers includes:Problems that counselling can help with may include:
- Planning for pregnancy and birth
- Depression or high levels of anxiety during your pregnancy
- Fear (terror) of child birth itself
- Understanding your birth story
- Birth trauma: a (fight/flight/freeze) response to your birth experience
- Grief in relation to loss
- Trauma response as the birth partner
- Relationship difficulties following birth
- Help with coming to terms with physical changes post birth
- Psychosexual responses to trauma
- Previous history of sexual abuse
- Confidential preparation for birth
- Working with Vaginismus
Afterthoughts counselling service aims to:
- Help you understand and come to terms with the emotional and physical journey as you have experienced it
- Deliver therapeutic help adapted to your needs
- Provide you with techniques and tools specific to how your symptoms present. (These tools will also provide you with life skills to manage anxiety and depression symptoms now and in the future)
- Provide treatment for the trauma response which aims to help to reduce or eliminate the need for your body to retain a switched on response to a threat that is now in the past which continues to be triggered in the present. The resulting change is most often immediately perceptible to the client
In an independent audit of this model of care, 90% of women report relief to symptoms within 2-3 sessions