She Nearly Died Giving Life
- Kathy Morelli
- May 13
- 15 min read
Birth Trauma, Near-Death, and the Long Road Home Through Somatic Experiencing®
A Note Before We Begin
Throughout this article, you will follow a woman I will call Sara. She is not one person — she is many. Over the course of my 27 years as a psychotherapist specializing in perinatal mental health, I have worked with a number of women who experienced severe hemorrhaging during childbirth, some of whom came close to death. Their stories, blended and made unidentifiable here, form the composite of Sara.
*This article is educational and not a substitute for individualized medical or mental health care.
Sara's Story — Part of Her Stays Behind
The room changed fast. Sara knew something was wrong before the alarms sounded — the nurses' faces, the shift in the air, the way her husband's hand tightened around hers. Sara didn't have any idea what was wrong. (Later she found out there was blood. Too much blood.) People were moving quickly and talking in the clipped, careful language of emergency. She heard her baby cry somewhere to her left, but she couldn't turn her head. She remembers thinking, in a haze and from a distance: this is weird, I might be dying.
Sara did make it. Her medical team stabilized her. Her baby was healthy. And within days, people were saying - with love and well wishes from all - how lucky she was.
And she was lucky. And she also had a near death experience (NDE). Both these things were true, and she would spend months - years - trying to reconcile this dialectic. Trying to hold both these truths without one canceling the other out.
This is birth trauma at its most acute. The body crossed into mortal danger, and the nervous system did everything it was supposed to do. Then, life moved on, but a part of Sara stayed behind, caught in the trauma.
This article delves into how the body retains traumatic experiences like Sara's. And how a blend of therapeutic approaches such as Somatic Experiencing®, expressive arts, breathwork, and grounded mind-body techniques, help women like her discover a path to post-traumatic growth.
What the Body Does When You Nearly Die
When a human being faces mortal danger, the nervous system activates with extraordinary speed and force. It's not a choice. This happens below thought, below language, below identity. It's ancient, and it's brilliant.
The body floods with stress hormones. The heart pounds. Time may feel altered — sped up or eerily slowed. Some people describe a strange calm, a dissociation, a sense of watching from above. Others describe pure animal terror. Many describe an absence of sound or sight. Most describe some combination of dream-like emotion, fear and detachment they cannot fully put into words.
The nervous system is marshaling every resource available to survive.
Where does all this marshaled nervous system energy go?
What Happens When You Survive an NDE?
Animals that survive predator attacks will often shake, tremble, and move through a kind of full-body discharge before returning to calm. We know this from decades of observation.
Human beings have this same capacity — but we are not taught to use it, civilization represses this response. We are sutured, sedated, monitored, congratulated and expected to go on with our lives as if nothing happened.
The energy in the nervous system that was never discharged doesn't just disappear. It settles into the body, into the nerves, into the musculature, and comes out in emotional and physical symptoms, including anxiety, insomnia, sweats, jumpiness, irritability, crying, fearfulness, etc.
Sara — Somatic & Emotional Symptoms in the Aftermath
Sara couldn't sleep on her left side. She didn't know why. She would start toward the pillow and something in her body would clench — a warning, animal and wordless — and she would roll away. She also couldn't stand the sound of medical dramas on television, even brief clips. Her heart would spike. Her breathing would shorten. But she was still functioning in everyday life. Her husband thought she seemed ok. She thought she seemed ok, although a bit jumpy and irritable. But isn't that normal for postpartum? But she was breastfeeding, healing, getting through the days.
What she didn't quite have words for yet was the layer lurking underneath the everyday life. Wordless was the part of her that she left behind in the room where it happened, still hearing those fast footsteps, still dissociated from the traumatic event.
What Trauma Symptoms Can Look Like After a Near-Death Experience
Not every woman who experiences hemorrhage or an obstetric emergency will develop lasting trauma symptoms, but for those who do, the symptoms are disconcerting as they seem to show up out of nowhere, as they occur later, maybe months later...disconnected from the event.
Common symptoms include:
Flashbacks: which are intrusive memories or images that appear without warning, when a smell, a sound, a quality of light takes you back to the event
Hypervigilance: a nervous system that cannot fully downshift, that scans constantly for the next emergency
Physical bracing: chronic tension in the chest, belly, shoulders, or pelvis; difficulty taking a full breath
Emotional numbness and / or emotional flooding, including rage, grief, or despair, shame
Difficulty bonding with the baby, often accompanied by feelings of failure and shame
A constant anger that has no clear target, just focuses on whatever everyday inconvenience that's available
The sense of being a stranger to yourself, as if the woman who came home from the hospital is not quite the same woman who walked in
This last one deserves attention. Many survivors of obstetric near-death describe a rupture in their sense of self — not just 'that was traumatic' but 'I am different now, and I don't know how to explain that to anyone.'
She crossed a threshold that the people around them didn't cross with them. That is profoundly isolating.
Somatic Experiencing: Meeting the Body Where It Is
Somatic Experiencing® (SE) was developed by Dr. Peter Levine, a biophysicist and psychologist who observed that trauma lives not primarily in the story of what happened, but in the unfinished business of the body's survival response.
SE does not require you to narrate the trauma again and again until it loses its charge. Instead, SE turns gently toward what the body is still holding — and creates conditions for the nervous system to finally, safely complete what it started.
In addition, as part of the therapy, in SE we look for a safety resource, such as the felt sense of safety, support, or ease in the body. This safety resource might be a memory of a place in nature, the sensation of a warm blanket, the image of a person who feels like home.
This gives the nervous system a safe place to come back to before exploring the edges of the trauma.
Sara — Resourcing Safety Early in Therapy
In order to establish a safety resource, her therapist asked Sara where in her body she felt okay right now. Sara laughed. She didn't feel okay anywhere.
But then, she scanned around her body and noticed her hands. They were warm. They were resting in her lap and they were just hands, not in danger, not doing anything. Her therapist said: stay there a moment. Just notice that your hands are warm and at rest.
It felt almost too ridiculous to matter. And it was also the first time in four months that she noticed there was a quiet place in her body that wasn't bracing.
Titration and Pendulation: The Art of Going Slowly
Two principles guide SE work with severe trauma: titration and pendulation. Titration means approaching difficult material in very small amounts — just enough sensation and memory to notice, not enough to overwhelm. Pendulation means moving back and forth between the difficult and the safe: a moment of approaching what the body holds, then a return to resource, then approaching again.
This rhythm — toward and back, toward and back — isn't avoidance. It's the nervous system learning, through repeated experience, that it can approach the edge of the trauma wound and return. That the trauma wound is not infinite. That there is ground to stand on.
For women who survived a near death experience in childbirth, this process can be slow.
The survival activation by the nervous system was enormous, and it has often been held for a long time before therapy begins. There's no rushing it. The body heals at the pace the body heals. The nerves heal at the pace that the nerves heal.
The Voice That Was Silenced, The Self Who Disappeared
One of the most consistent themes in working with women who have survived obstetric emergencies is what I think of as the unspoken. The moment when a woman wanted to say something , wanted to move towards the people in the room, to say "Stop, wait, I'm scared, I need someone to look at me, I need to know I'm going to be okay," But the room was moving too fast, or the medical language was too clinical, or she was too frightened to find words. And then ther is the profound shrinking of the self and the profound aloneness.
The emotional tsunami that lives in the aftermath of birth trauma is a mix of anger, grief, fear and "I was there too. My experience mattered too. The room held my life and I was in it but not of it."
Feeling these feelings is not the opposite of healing, sometimes feeling the feelings is the beginning of it.
In SE work, when these feelings begin to move - when they stop being held in the jaw, the chest, the locked hips, and begin to have motion - something shifts. The body remembers that it has efficacy. That it's not only a vessel that things happened to. That it takes up space and has something to say.
Sara — Several Months into Therapy
Sara was describing a moment during the birth when she had tried to move, but couldn't. She looked for someone to help her but the medical staff was busily engaged in helping her to live. She felt trapped by her own body, afraid and alone in the crowded room. She shrunk into herself.
During this session, her therapist noticed Sara's hands. They had moved from her lap to the arms of the chair. Her jaw had set.
"There's something in your hands right now," her therapist said. "What do they want to do?"
Sara thought about that for a moment. Then she said: "They want to push. They wanted to push against that frozen feeling and make someone in the room look at me!"
"Go ahead and push, " said her therapist. And Sara let her hands push hard against the arms of the chair. Then Sara moved her hands through air, waving for attention. Her therapist held the space.
Sara's eyes filled with fear and determination.
"I am here,", Sara said. "I am here and I need someone to see me. I need to stay part of this scene."
Her therapist said: "I see you. I see you right now."
Sara's nervous system absorbed the emotion of being seen and being part of the room. This helped move out some of the fear she had been holding.
These are not dramatic or huge, cathartic moments, but a series of incremental and deeply embodied moments. But they are transformative. The person fading in the birth room finds her way back. The body remembers that it has agency.
Integrating Other Complementary Modalities
Somatic Experiencing® works well alongside other integrative approaches. For women healing from birth trauma and near-death experience, expressive and non-verbal modalities can deepen the work.
Expressive Art: When the Body Draws What Words Cannot
The memories of the trauma lives in the body as image, sensation, and emotion - not as a coherent narrative. Expressive art gives form to this non-verbal knowing. Expressive art is not about skill or performance, its abotu accessing emotional memories using color and shape.
Some women draw the room as they remember it, finding places where their hand wants to make a mark of anger or grief. Some create images of before and after — who they were walking in, who came home. Some use clay, pressing and pulling until the hands have said what they needed to say. Some simply move, letting the body trace what it still holds.
Sara — Working with Expressive Art
Sara chose red. She didn't plan to — her hand went to the red pastel without thinking. She drew the room large and then she drew herself in it: very small, very still, surrounded by motion. She drew the door to the hallway and then, with a light blue color, she drew a ghost of a person at the top of the room, on the ceiling, without quite knowing why.
When she looked at what she'd made, she said: "I drew the part of me that was dissociated and watching. The part that was already somewhere else, as I was not really part of the room."
Yoga and Breathwork: Returning to the Body as Safe Ground
After a life-threatening birth, numbing and dissociating from the the body is common. Returning to the body through trauma-informed yoga and conscious breathwork is not about performance or achievement — it's about re-establishing a relationship.
Breath is particularly significant. During the hemorrhage and emergency response, breathing almost certainly became shallow, held, or erratic. Many women continue this pattern for months afterward without realizing it.
Learning to breathe fully again — gently, without forcing — signals to the deepest layers of the nervous system that the emergency is over.
A Simple Practice: Extended Exhale Breathing
This can be done any time you notice tension, bracing, or anxiety beginning to build:
Inhale through the nose for a count of 4.
Exhale slowly through the mouth for a count of 7 or 8.
The extended exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system — the body's 'rest and restore' response. You're not suppressing what you feel. You're creating conditions in which the nervous system can begin to downshift.
If breath-holding feels activating or frightening — which is common after obstetric trauma — simply skip the hold and focus only on the longer exhale. Let it be gentle. There is no right way to do this.
Gentle yoga postures that open the chest and belly — areas that often carry the bracing of the birth room — can be profoundly releasing when approached slowly and with full permission to stop at any time. Many women find that these areas have been held so tightly for so long that they have stopped noticing the tension. Yoga brings them gently back into awareness, which is the first step toward release.
DBT Skills: Practical Tools for the Hard Moments
Dialectical Behavior Therapy offers a set of concrete, practiced skills for navigating the intensity of trauma healing. Several are particularly valuable for women moving through birth trauma:
Temperature: Cold water on the face or wrists engages the dive reflex, rapidly reducing heart rate and the sense of emergency.
Intense movement: Even one minute of brisk walking or jumping can help discharge survival energy that has been activated.
Paced breathing: The extended exhale practice described above.
Progressive relaxation: Systematically tense and release muscle groups from the feet upward, teaching the body the difference between bracing and release.
Opposite Action — For the Pull Toward Isolation
Trauma pulls toward withdrawal. The opposite action is not forced positivity — it is a small, chosen movement toward connection.
Texting one person. Sitting outside for ten minutes. Holding a warm drink and noticing its weight and warmth in your hands. These small acts of engagement interrupt the nervous system's momentum toward shutdown.
Women healing from near-death birth trauma often find themselves in a painful internal split: the part that says I should be over this, I have a healthy baby, I am so lucky — and the part that is still in the birth room, still terrified, still angry, still grieving.
Wise Mind holds both without letting either silence the other. You can be grateful and shattered. You can be lucky and traumatized. These are not contradictions. They are the whole truth.
Bonding, Interrupted
For women who nearly died in childbirth, the first hours and days with their babies are often marked not by the expected flood of love, but by numbness, dissociation, or a terrible sense of emotional distance. Their body was mobilized for survival and had no remaining energy for the soft, open attunement of loving bonding.
Many women carry alot of shame about this. They expected to feel one thing and felt another, and they have quietly concluded that this means they are bad mothers. It doesn't mean that. Bonding and attachment are complex emotional and physical relationships. Contrary to popular myth, there is not only a "critical hour" where bonding takes place with mom and baby.
As trauma work progresses, the energy returns for a deep relationship with her baby. As the nervous system slowly discharges what it's been holding, and the tsunami of anger and sadness finds its voice, the body begins to feel safe and not numb any more. So the softness and joy of motherhood that was inaccessible during survival mode becomes available.
Moments of true attunement with her baby begin to arrive: eye contact that reaches the heart, feeding with a full non-verbal presence and the morning when the sight of the baby's face opens up love instead of anxiety.
These small moment is what healing looks like.
Sara Comes Back to Her Baby
Sara was nursing her daughter one evening when it happened. Her daughter looked up at her with wide eyes. Sara felt it: a wave of love so tender and so protective it was almost unbearable. She started crying. Her husband saw her tears and asked her of she was ok.
"More than ok," Sara said, as she felt a wave of loving emotion so strong it took her breath away.
What Sara Would Tell You
The composite of Sara — the many women whose experiences have shaped this article — didn't heal in a straight line. There were weeks of numbness, sessions that felt like nothing was happening and nights when the terror came back. And so much anger, it felt never ending.
And there were also moments like this: the time in the session when her hands remembered they could push.
The morning she noticed she had slept through the night on her left side without that fear.
The moment her daughter looked up at her and she felt it: I am here. I made it. I am home.
Healing from birth trauma — especially when that trauma included the edge of death — is not about returning to who you were before.
That woman is gone.
It's about discovering who you are now: someone who crossed an unimaginable threshold and came back with an embodied knowledge about what it means to be alive.
The women I have worked with who have moved through this describe an expanded capacity for emotional depth, for embodied presence, for the full weight of love, that they don't believe they would have found another way. But this isn't a silver lining. It doesn't erase what happened. This emotional expansion and wisdom is called post-traumatic growth.
It's what's discovered on the other side of going all the way through.
How to Begin
Find an SE-Trained Therapist with Perinatal Experience
Somatic Experiencing practitioners complete extensive training through the SE International Trauma Institute. When seeking a therapist, look for someone who is SE-trained and familiar with perinatal and maternal mental health. The SE International practitioner directory at traumahealing.org is a good starting point. Don't hesitate to ask a prospective therapist directly about their experience with birth trauma and obstetric emergencies.
Build Your Full Circle of Support
SE works best within a broader network. This might include individual therapy, a postpartum trauma support group, a trauma-informed body practice like yoga, and — when you are ready — connection with other women who have survived what you survived. You do not have to carry this alone, and you were never meant to.
Give Yourself Permission to be Angry
If there is anger — at the room, at the speed of it, at the people who moved past you without seeing you, at the body that frightened you, at the cultural pressure to simply be grateful — let it have space. Not as a place to live permanently, but as a necessary passage. Anger, in trauma healing, is often a sign that the nervous system is beginning to believe it has the right to respond. That's not a problem. That's medicine.
Let Healing Be Slow
There is no schedule for this. Some women experience significant shifts in a handful of SE sessions. For others, the layers release gradually over months or years. Both are valid. What matters isn't the pace but the direction and that you are not walking it alone.
You Were There Too
Whatever happened in that room, you were there. Your fear was real. Your body's response was real. The moments when you thought you might not make it and the woman who is still, somehow, here — reading this, breathing, carrying all of it — is real.
Somatic Experiencing®, expressive arts, breath, movement, and the quiet courage of turning toward what the body holds, are all ways of saying to yourself, at the cellular level: I see what happened. I am here now.
Sara found her voice in the therapy room and someone finally said: I see you.
You deserve that too.
Healing isn't erasing what happened.
It's integration of an unimaginable event into an expanded sense of self.
Clinical Note:
The composite case of 'Sara' is drawn from the blended, de-identified experiences of multiple women seen in clinical practice over many years. No identifying details have been used. This article is for educational purposes and does not constitute individualized clinical care. If you are experiencing birth trauma symptoms, please reach out to a qualified mental health professional.
Resources & Further Reading
Andrews, T. (1993). Nature speak: Signs, omens and messages in nature. Llewellyn Publications.
Herman, J. L. (1997). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror (Rev. ed.). Basic Books.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full catastrophe living: Using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain, and illness. Delta.
Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.
Levine, P. A. (2010). In an unspoken voice: How the body releases trauma and restores goodness. North Atlantic Books.
Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the body: A sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
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