When you announce your pregnancy, family and friends often expect you to be excited and happy. It can therefore be hard to admit that you might be feeling worried, anxious or ambivalent about being pregnant. Sometimes the journey through pregnancy is not always as straightforward as we would like, and it is normal for you and your partner to feel a variety of conflicting emotions about being pregnant, which may be both positive and negative.

If you didn’t have the birth you were hoping for, you are not alone. Many women (and their partners) experience the birth of their baby as being traumatic. This could be because you felt like you weren’t in control of events, or you didn’t receive the standard of care you were expecting. Perhaps you felt that your lives were in danger. No one else can tell you if you have experienced trauma. If it felt traumatic to you, then it is classed as a traumatic birth.

Sadly, women can experience the loss of their baby through failed IVF cycles, miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death. Experiencing loss of this kind can cause great sorrow at a time usually associated with joy and excitement. Often there is no known reason for perinatal loss to occur. If you have experienced baby loss early in the pregnancy, you may not have told anyone else that you are pregnant which means that you are bearing your grief alone.

No matter how much research we do or how prepared we think we are, the reality of becoming a parent is often very different to our expectations. It can be an anxiety-provoking, exhausting and lonely time. Parenthood changes every aspect of our lives, from our daily routines and sleep patterns to our relationships and sense of identity. It can cause old mental health issues to resurface, or the increase in stress can result in new difficulties emerging.

Many people who become parents will have experienced trauma or abuse when they were a child, often at the hands of their caregivers or parents. These experiences may have felt safely in the past, but becoming a parent can often cause difficult memories of past trauma to resurface. Parents are then faced with attending to the needs of a new baby, whilst struggling to manage their own distress associated with the retriggering of difficult life experiences.

Becoming pregnant and having a baby is a life-changing event and will inevitably impact on the relationship with your partner. As you take on new roles as parents, the dynamics can shift and cause tension and conflict. The first few months in particular can feel very challenging, as you navigate this transition to parenthood together whilst recovering from childbirth, coping with lack of sleep and attending to the demands of a new baby.