Sometimes parents come to see me straight after a traumatic birth, with their new baby in their arms and their world turned upside down. Just as often, they seek out my support when they are contemplating having another child, or already pregnant and heading towards that next birth.

If you’re reading this, you might be standing in those same shoes now.

“Am I ready to have another baby?”

“How can I know if I am truly ready?”

Whenever I get asked this question, the first thing I say is that nobody else can ever (or should ever) tell you if you are ready or not. Not your partner, your doctor, your mum or your psychologist.

This isn’t something that someone else can assess and decide – it comes from inside.

It’s a feeling, an internal shift, a quiet solidity inside you. You might notice it over a few weeks or months… and one day it feels possible to say… “I think I’m ready now”.

This might come from therapy that addresses the trauma of your last birth experience, helping you to fully recover from what happened to you.

It might come from doing a lot of research, many nights spent reading, listening and searching, giving you a new understanding about what might have made your last birth more complicated and shining a light on what could be different.

It might come from late night conversations with your other half, where you find yourselves going back through your last birth and putting words around your deepest fears about next time. And finding that in airing them out and giving voice to these fears, you also find some ideas about how to manage them.

But how can you know if you really are ready?

As a psychologist, I believe there are three key elements that come together when parents feel ready:

Feeling able to hold the emotions

It’s so understandable, and very normal to feel a mix of anxiety, fear hope and anticipation about having another baby. When emotion feels overwhelming, we can swerve away, relying on distraction and avoidance to cope.

Feeling like you have the capacity to acknowledge these feelings is the first step toward understanding and managing them – and might be something to look for in terms of your own readiness.

Do you feel like you could sit down and journal about how you I feel when you think about having another baby?

When it comes to anxiety, I know that it can really help to have some coping tools. Do you feel like you know how to respond to negative or worrying thoughts about the birth if they emerge? Do you feel confident you can return your nervous system to a calm state if you begin to feel panicky?

Resolving trauma connected to your last birth.

The impact of birth trauma is broad and varied. In terms of mental health, a traumatic birth can lead to PTSD, anxiety, or depression. Sometimes, the beginning of another pregnancy can trigger these symptoms again.

If you find that you are experiencing hypervigilance, flashbacks, or overwhelming fear connected to birth, it’s time to seek out some professional support.

Working with someone who understands both birth and birth trauma can help you process your previous experience and give you the psychological tools to manage another pregnancy.

Doing all the right practical preparation

Preparing to birth again involves both emotional and practical steps – and perhaps it is doing both of these together that can develop to that internal feeling of readiness.

When you speak to your provider about your last birth experience, your specific fears and concerns, you begin to build your team. Having a supportive team around you, that understands how your past experiences might be affecting your pregnancy and are working with you to help you feel safe can make a significant difference to how you feel going into birth.

This is where I find the process of creating and sharing a trauma-protective birth plan can be so powerful – because its not your typical birth plan!

Communicating your needs, choices and preferences can help you feel more in control of the birthing process, even if it takes an unexpected turn.

When I think about the families I have supported over the years, feeling ready is usually connected to two key feelings.

A sense of hope, often very new and quite fragile, but there. A sense of hope that this next birth could be good. That a positive experience is possible, even with everything that happened before.

And a sense of agency that comes from knowing that there are things you can do to make this birth feel different. Knowing that you do have some influence over the birth, over what might happen and how you might feel. Knowing that there are steps you can take, conversations you can have and choices you can explore.

If you’d like to feel ready to birth again, my free guide on how to prepare for a Better Birth next time is a wonderful place to start.

Or you can go straight to my beautifully supportive Better Birth program! This empowering online course has been specially developed for mums to rebuild your confidence in yourself, your body and in birth.