How Non Monogamy Helped Me Heal from Childbirth Trauma

I am pretty sure non monogamy and traumatic childbirth are not things that most people would put together in a sentence. In fact, when I was doing research on this article, it resulted in the fewest results I’ve ever seen on a Google search.

Well, Google team, I am going to add one result to this search.

I recently wrote a story about a rather embarrassing thing that happened with one of my partners; I peed on him during sex (and on the mattress and quilt, if you want the full details). Although he was wonderful and didn’t make a big deal of it, I was way less kind with myself. I felt shame. I was actually surprised at how much shame I felt — and as someone who has been to therapy for a good chunk of my life, I knew enough to start asking: what was underneath all that shame?

I pulled out my meditation apps and my books on shame (thank you Brené Brown!!) and investigated what was underlying my profound feelings of shame. Surprise, surprise, a lot of it pointed back to trauma I experienced during the birth of my first child. He was a normal sized baby who decided to come out sunny-side up. He wasn’t face down in my tummy like most babies are, which meant that his passage through my birthing canal was a lot more painful and difficult than for most births. By the…