Medical & Workplace Trauma During the Fertility, Pregnancy, and Postpartum Journey
Virtual therapy for women experiencing medical trauma, birth trauma, workplace discrimination, lack of trauma informed care during fertility treatment, pregnancy, pregnancy loss, and postpartum recovery in Florida, California, and Tennessee.
You Were Not the Problem.
The System Was.
At some point during your fertility journey, your pregnancy, your birth, or your postpartum
experience, someone made you feel like you were too much, too sensitive, too demanding, too
difficult, too emotional, and too focused on something that wasn’t a priority to them.
It can look like:
a provider who dismissed your symptoms
an employer who treated your medical appointments as an inconvenience and your medical needs as unprofessionalism
a hospital that performed a procedure without fully explaining what was happening to your body
a system that moved through your experience without ever asking how you were
You were not the problem. You were a woman with serious, legitimate medical and emotional needs, relying on systems that failed you when you were most vulnerable.
This type of experience leaves a mark, and it deserves to be treated as what it is: trauma.
Systemic Failure During the Perinatal Journey
Systemic failure is not just a bad experience. It is what happens when the institutions and providers responsible for your care make choices, conscious or not, that harm you.
It is dismissal, negligence, violation, and the absence of care that should have been there.
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Being dismissed when you reported symptoms, pain, or emotional distress. Procedures performed without adequate explanation, preparation, or consent.
Providers and systems that never asked what
you had already been through, that didn’t know or didn’t adjust for the fact that you were arriving with a history.
False prognoses, being told you couldn’t conceive, or that everything was fine, when neither was accurate.
Misdiagnosis and the cascade of decisions made based on wrong information.
Consent violations during procedures, unethical practices, and being treated like a file number rather than a person in crisis.
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Being fired, demoted, or pushed out for fertility treatment appointment attendance. Being denied time off for labs, monitoring appointments, or medical procedures. Being required to work through miscarriage, treatment failure, or diagnosis without accommodation or acknowledgment.
Being placed on probation or threatened with termination for medical appointments related to fertility treatment, pregnancy complications, or pregnancy loss.
Being assigned disproportionate workloads because you didn’t have children yet.
Being treated as less committed, less available, less valuable once your pregnancy became visible.
Colleagues and supervisors who made comments, asked invasive questions, or treated your medical situation as a scheduling problem.
Returning to work postpartum before your body or mind was ready, with no real support for the transition.
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Emergency interventions without adequate explanation or consent.
Providers and systems that never asked what you had already been through before you arrived in that delivery room.
A postpartum mental health system that asked one question at a six week appointment and called it screening.
Providers who missed, minimized, or misdiagnosed postpartum mental health symptoms.
Being discharged without adequate support, referrals, or follow-up.
Feeling abandoned by the medical system the moment the birth was over.
Medical Trauma During the Perinatal Journey
Not all medical trauma is caused by negligence or systemic failure. Some of it is what happens when your body moves through an extraordinarily demanding process and something goes wrong that no one anticipated, or that no one prepared you for, or that changed everything about what you thought this experience was going to be.
It is still trauma. It still deserves to be named.
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Adverse reactions to medications.
A body that responded differently than expected.
Procedures that resulted in complications, scar tissue, or new diagnoses. An ovarian cyst that led to surgery.
A surgery that led to something else.
Anesthesia that didn’t come, or didn’t work, or was compromised.
Certain procedures that can be triggering for anyone with a history of sexual abuse that no one asked about.
The compounding trauma of one medical event creating another, and another, until you stopped trusting what was happening inside you.
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An emergency intervention that replaced your birth plan without warning. A delivery that looked nothing like what you were told to expect. A baby who went straight to the NICU.
The experience of giving birth and not being able to hold what you just brought into the world.
Physical complications that were minimized or inadequately treated.
Chronic pain, nerve damage, or symptoms that providers told you were normal when they weren’t.
A body that was healing from something enormous while your mind was somewhere else entirely.
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Your body healing from a pregnancy while you were simultaneously grieving one.
The physical aftermath of a miscarriage, a stillbirth, a termination for medical reasons.
A body that needed medical care in the middle of the hardest thing you have ever been through.
The particular cruelty of postpartum physical recovery when there is no baby to bring home.
What This Trauma Does
Medical and workplace trauma during the perinatal journey doesn’t stay in the past. It lives in the body and in the way you move through subsequent experiences.
It can look like:
• Hypervigilance in medical settings, bracing for dismissal, dreading appointments
• Difficulty trusting providers even when you need their care
• Anger that feels disproportionate but isn’t, it’s cumulative
• Shame about what happened at work, wondering if you should have pushed back harder, said something different, been less visible about what you were going through
• Difficulty returning to work after maternity leave because the workplace that failed you is still there
• Physical symptoms that carry emotional weight, pain, numbness, scars that are reminders
• A grief for the experience you deserved and didn’t get at every stage
Why Work With Me
Lived experience with medical and workplace trauma during the perinatal journey is something I bring to this work with care and intention.
I know what it means to move through problematic systems that can leave you feeling like you’re the problem. You will not have to convince me that what happened to you was wrong, real, serious, or worth grieving.
You will not be asked to minimize it to make anyone more comfortable. This space is for processing what was done to you, and what you had to hold in alone because of it.
Let's Work Together
Virtual therapy for medical and workplace trauma during the fertility, pregnancy, and postpartum journey is available in Florida, California, and Tennessee.
If you have been trying to heal from feeling failed by the systems that you hoped would support you, this is a space for that.