Taking Back Your Birth Story With An EMDR Intensive

My Birth Story (not really but kind of)

When I first started seeing therapy clients I was heavily pregnant. I was an intern finishing up grad school and trying to get in my clinical hours before I had my baby. Somehow, my first two client's in the community mental health center I was at both showed up with infants in arms to process traumatic births. I left after those sessions reeling and thinking as long and I didn't spend the month after delivery hooked up to machines in a ICU I would be happy with my birth.

Meanwhile, instagram was absolutely bombarding me with birth stories and I was drinking them up. At the start of my pregnancy I wanted an epidural more than i've ever wanted anything in my life. About six months in I was seeing so many accounts talking about their empowering all natural water birth that I started to doubt myself and wondered if it was too late to do hypno-babies.

In the end I got the epidural and it was beautiful, and ugly, and confusing, like most births. But here's the thing, making a birth beautiful isn't about what happened in your story, it's how you feel about your story. I've talked to moms who were taken to the hospital by ambulance due to hemorrhage that find their birth stories magical and moms who had the perfect natural birth with a midwife and doula who feel scared and let down. All birth stories are good birth stories, sometimes you just have to work a little to get them there.

Why Birth Stories Matter

Birth stories shape how we see ourselves. As parents. As partners. As people with bodies that can carry, birth, or not birth. They touch our identity, our sense of safety, our relationships with our babies, and our connection to our bodies. When that story feels unresolved—if it ends in confusion, fear, disappointment, or shame—it can quietly affect so many parts of life afterward.

That’s why telling your birth story matters. Not just the facts, but the feelings. And it’s also why birth stories are worth tending to, especially if they still hold pain.

When Birth Feels Traumatic

You don’t have to have had a “worst-case scenario” for your birth to have been traumatic. Sometimes it’s the look on someone’s face. The feeling of losing control. The unexpected NICU stay. The moment no one listened. Even a technically “successful” birth can feel traumatic if it left you feeling powerless, dismissed, or unsafe.

Trauma isn’t about what others think “should” have been traumatic—it’s about how your body experienced it.

EMDR Intensives: A Healing Space for Your Birth Story

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is one of the most effective trauma treatments available. It helps the brain reprocess painful memories so they no longer feel overwhelming or stuck. In an EMDR intensive, this healing happens in a focused, accelerated way—often over a single day or a couple of longer sessions—giving your story the time and space it deserves.

Instead of going through traditional therapy week by week, an EMDR intensive allows you to immerse yourself in healing and walk away with real progress. For birth trauma, this can be especially powerful.

How It Works

In an EMDR intensive for birth trauma, we begin by gently exploring the story you carry—where the pain sits, what parts feel unfinished, and how it’s showing up in your life. Do the birth stories on instagram make you feel deep disappointment? Do you avoid talking about yours because it fills your body with dread and stress? Maybe you feel anxious every time you drive past the hospital. Maybe you tear up when friends talk about their “amazing” births. Maybe there’s guilt, fear, or just a blank space in your memory.

Through EMDR, we target those stuck pieces. The brain gets the chance to do what it was meant to do—to make sense of what happened and let it move through. This doesn’t mean you forget. It doesn’t mean you deny the hard parts. It means your story gets to settle. The jagged edges soften. The grief finds its place. The shame lifts. And often, something beautiful takes its place: compassion, pride, peace. Four to six hours of EMDR can change your life almost as much as your birth did.

Every Birth Story Can Become Beautiful

This doesn’t mean rewriting history or pretending everything went how you hoped. It means finding your version of healing. One where the truth of your experience is honored—and where you’re no longer haunted by it.

People who thought they would spend the rest of their lives trying to get their birth stories out of their heads do intensives and say things like "There was so much beauty there" or "My spouse and I have never come together like that before" or "I was so strong all alone and feel so proud of it" or "I thought my body betrayed me but it actually told me exactly what it needed"

You deserve to feel whole again. To remember your birth story and feel steady, not shaky. Whether your birth was everything you dreamed of or nothing you expected, EMDR can help you claim your story with clarity, softness, and strength.

Your birth story matters. Let’s make it one that heals.