What if your baby's unsettled nature was never about colic?
I'm writing this having just stumbled across Google doc files from when my daughter was a few months old. Documents about colic, allergies, fast let down. All the things I was desperately researching, trying to find an answer, a solution, a fix for the endless crying.
Fix fix fix. Why aren't I enough as her mother to get to the bottom of this?
Looking at those documents now brings back the desperation I felt at the time. There were no allergies to treat. There was no fast let down. Just the slow erosion of my sense of satisfaction and competence as her mother, happening before my eyes.
The question nobody asked
Nobody, until I discovered the fairly niche field of perinatal psychology, really asked what her birth had been like. Of course it came up in generic conversations — that she had been born by forceps — and usually there was a generic reply about how instrumentally born babies will be more unsettled. But not really an exploration of why. Just: that's how it is. Little to no curiosity for how birth might actually have been felt and experienced by them.
This is what frustrates me enormously. And it has been my motivating fire.
When we honour these seasons, these phases in our cycle, something opens in our capacity. When we slow down in step with this wintering, we actually expand - we don’t contract. When we suppress what we’re being called to, we close ourselves off to our own knowing. To our own voice.
The intuitive leap
I realised on an intuitive level — who can't — that a forceps delivery would be traumatic. Maybe all birth is, by its nature. The force involved, the intensity of hormones, the tight spaces to navigate, the lack of prior experience. And then having spent the preceding ten years in mental health, seeing what trauma does to a person, especially when it hasn't been met, hasn't been witnessed — how it manifests in present day mental and emotional problems — how can we not be asking what the first episode of potential trauma is doing on a population level?
The bigger question
It truly astounds me that we don't pay more attention to this from a national, public health perspective. What is public health if we're not looking at the way humans are entering the world?
I have a mental health background. CBT training that gives me understanding of how unhelpful patterns of thinking form, the relationship that has with how we cope, how this feeds into how we feel, the meaning and narrative our stories give us. But what about the first story — the one sitting in the body quietly, subconsciously, unwitnessed? Did it matter? Do we matter? What about the psyche? The soul? When a human is preverbal, how are we being affected by trauma on a somatic level?
Where I sit
I started to question all of it. And this is what I bring — a natural curiosity that is just in the bones of me.
I sit comfortably in discomfort, in other people's pain. I want to witness it, excavate it if that's what someone needs, help them make sense of what they're carrying, feel less alone, less ashamed.
I also occupy a liminal space — not quite in, not quite out. Working within the NHS but questioning it, because of what I have seen is absent in its support of mothers, babies and humans. I see gaps on a level the NHS has no framework for. It doesn't know what it doesn't know.
I understand its language. I understand why it operates the way it does. And I have spent enough time inside it, and asked enough questions, to be discerning about when it offers genuine support — and when it is scratching around in the dark.
If you find yourself somewhere between trusting the system and questioning it, between looking for answers and sensing there's a different kind of question to be asked — this is the space I work in. And you're welcome here.
If you’ve been asking yourself similar questions about what might be going on for your baby, wondering how this might connect to their birth or even life before, and have struggled to find someone who gets it, I support mothers in person in Southampton, Hampshire and Dorset or online if you are further away. I would love to chat, reach out here.