High Risk Pregnancy and how EMDR can help

You’re pregnant!  You were planning for this for years and it finally happened.  So many feelings, thoughts, fears, excitement.  You’ve always wanted to be a mom and it’s finally happening! You tell those closest to you, sharing the excitement with your partner and start the planning of the baby’s room, buying those cute little booties.  It’s surreal but there’s so much joy, excitement and anticipation. 

Then, you go to an ultrasound appointment and get the news.  The news that no one wants to hear.  The baby is not developing correctly.  There’s a complication.  You are now considered “high risk.” 

For many women, this is completely disorienting, discombobulating and you feel a great sense of overwhelm.  The disbelief and heaviness is too much.  How is this even happening and what can you do? 

Dealing with a “high risk” pregnancy is incredibly difficult.  It can begin to plant seeds in your mind of beliefs about yourself, such as “I am a bad mom,” “I’m damaged,” “I am in danger,” or “I am not safe,” just to name a few.  Past negative beliefs you have held about yourself can become triggered or strengthened by this new situation that seems to confirm those negative things about yourself.  “I must be bad because this is happening to me.”  Rationally  you know that these negative beliefs about yourself are not true, but your gut tells a different story.  Often times, these negative beliefs have such a powerful physical presence in the form of physical symptoms of stress.

Whatever the situation is for you that makes you “high risk” in your pregnancy, EMDR can help you process through the trauma associated with a very stressful present, past or imagined future.  You can begin to heal so that a very challenging situation does not have to be incredibly traumatic.  EMDR relies on the idea that our brains know exactly where we need to go and know exactly how to heal.  We have an innate sense of what we need in the form of thoughts, feelings, body sensations and movement.  We can address the situations where these negative beliefs about the self were planted and nurtured.  We can begin to notice being less triggered, even in the very stressful present situation of a “high risk” pregnancy. 

I hope you can hold onto, for now, that you did nothing wrong.  Your body did nothing wrong.  You are already an incredible mother.  You will continue to be, through this too.  You just don’t have to go it alone.