Healing After Birth Trauma: What Every Mother Needs to Know with Teela Tomassetti

In this deeply validating and eye-opening episode, Dr. Amelia Kelley sits down with psychologist and birth trauma specialist Teela Tomassetti, founder of the Reproductive and Perinatal Trauma Center in Canada. Together, they bring long-overdue attention to an experience far more common than most people realize: birth trauma, which affects up to 45 percent of birthing parents.Teela shares her personal and professional journey into this work, including her own traumatic childbirth experience and the years-long process that followed. She breaks down what birth trauma really is, how to recognize it, and why so many women dismiss or minimize their own symptoms. Amelia also shares her own powerful birth stories, offering a rare, vulnerable look at how trauma can stay alive in the body long after delivery.Whether your childbirth was traumatic, complicated, confusing, or simply not what you expected, this episode gives you the language, validation, and tools to begin understanding and healing your story.This conversation is for mothers, partners, birth workers, medical professionals, and anyone who wants to better support the postpartum experience with compassion and truth.Key Takeaways:Birth trauma does not only happen during delivery. It can occur before, during, or long after childbirth.Trauma is subjective. Only you get to define whether your birth felt traumatic, regardless of medical outcomes or others’ opinions.Highly sensitive and neurodivergent mothers may experience birth environments more intensely, making compassionate care essential.The golden hour is a myth that pressures mothers. Bonding is not a moment. It is a relationship that forms over time.Postpartum is not six weeks. For many mothers, recovery emotional and physical can take one to two years.Birth debriefing is a powerful way to heal: through understanding, story sharing, and validation from supportive people or professionals.Birth trauma impacts the nervous system, identity, and attachment. But healing is absolutely possible.Connect with Teela Tomassetti: Instagram: @theteaonbirthtraumaPractice: Reproductive and Perinatal Trauma CenterInstagram Practice: @perinataltraumapracticeConnect with Dr. Amelia Kelley: About | Dr. Kelley's Books | Instagram Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-sensitivity-doctor/exclusive-content