For Clinicians & Birth Workers

Trauma-informed, body-led care for supporting healing after birth

You don’t need to have all the answers to offer ethical care

Working with pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period means working close to intensity, vulnerability, and profound change.

Many clinicians and birth workers arrive here not because they lack skill but because they are feeling the limits of doing more.

You may be noticing moments where:

  • standard protocols feel insufficient

  • clients’ nervous systems are activated or shut down

  • your own body carries the residue of the work

  • “holding space” feels heavier than it used to

This page is for practitioners who sense that how we offer care matters just as much as what we offer.

A trauma-informed orientation to birth care

Trauma-informed care is not a technique.
It is an orientation.

It asks us to consider:

  • safety before intervention

  • pacing before progress

  • consent before interpretation

  • relationship before repair

In the context of birth work, this means recognising that birth — even when medically “successful” — can overwhelm a nervous system when it is too much, too fast, or too alone.

The body adapts.
And those adaptations deserve respect, not correction.

Held Within Capacity 🌿

A living framework for ethical, nervous-system-aware care

All professional offerings are grounded in Held Within Capacity — a trauma-informed framework that supports clinicians and birth workers to:

  • recognise capacity as dynamic and contextual

  • work within, not against, nervous system limits

  • avoid re-enactment through urgency or over-intervention

  • honour both client and practitioner capacity

This framework understands that:

  • expansion is only ethical when safety is present

  • slowing down is not failure — it is attunement

  • care is relational, not extractive

Held Within Capacity offers a way to support healing without positioning yourself as the one who fixes.

How this work supports your practice

This work may support you if you are:

  • a midwife, doula, nurse, doctor, therapist, or allied health practitioner

  • supporting clients with birth trauma, medicalised births, loss, or postpartum distress

  • seeking trauma-informed, body-led frameworks beyond cognitive processing

  • wanting to deepen consent, pacing, and nervous system literacy

  • noticing signs of vicarious trauma, burnout, or emotional residue

  • committed to ethical, reflective, and relational care

Professional support may include:

  • trauma-informed nervous system education
    Understanding adaptive responses in pregnancy, birth, and postpartum

  • embodied and reflective practices
    Supporting practitioner regulation, presence, and ethical boundaries

  • Held Within Capacity as a clinical lens
    Applying pacing, titration, and consent across care contexts

  • space for reflection and integration
    Without supervision-as-performance or pressure to “do more”

This work does not replace clinical training. It deepens how training is embodied and applied

Scope, humility, and ethical clarity

This approach is grounded in respect for:

  • professional scope of practice

  • interdisciplinary collaboration

  • referral pathways

  • cultural, social, and systemic context

It does not position trauma-informed care as something one masters. Rather, it is something we practice — imperfectly, reflexively, and in relationship.

Ethical care begins with knowing when to pause. And when to seek support yourself.

Ways to work together

Professional offerings may include:

  • education and training programs

  • reflective groups for birth workers

  • workshops on nervous system literacy & trauma-informed care

  • individual support for practitioners

Engagement is flexible and paced.
You are invited to meet this work where you are — not where you think you should be.

You are not meant to carry this work alone

Birth work is meaningful — and it is demanding.

You are allowed to:

  • slow down

  • question inherited models

  • care for your own nervous system

  • seek spaces that support reflection and integration

Ethical care does not ask you to override yourself. It asks you to remain present, resourced, and within capacity.

🌿
Care is not measured by how much we hold,
but by how well we attune —
to ourselves, and to those we serve.