Holding Space for Ourselves as Birthworkers #054

Your BIRTH Partners

We spend so much time as birth workers thinking about how we can take better care of folks...yet so many of us do a downright abysmal job of taking care of ourselves!
Throughout this season we focused on how we can hold space for the complicated pieces of pregnancy birth and postpartum and so much of that attention has turned to how we can show up better for our clients. AND while we're doing that we also need to show up better for ourselves. No matter what our role within the birth care system whether we support folks in hospitals or out in the community-there is so much tension. There is no time like the present to consider a new way to be in relationship with our community, with our clients, and with ourselves as we hold space for the complicated parts of being a birth worker.
I am thrilled to have Desirée Israel (she/her) on as a guest for this episode to guide this conversation. Desirée brings insights together from a wealth of experience as a birth worker herself along with being a psychotherapist and all around community leader, founder of Motherland Co. & co-founder of the Perinatal Mental Health Alliance for People of Color and The Bloom Collective. Join us as she walks us through the ways that we can better hold space for ourselves.
Tune in as we discuss:
~the pressure of advocacy due to awareness of mistreatment in obstetrics
~connection and correlation between chronic health conditions and birth workers with vicarious trauma and burnout
~scheduling a routine of self-care practices
~how US healthcare systems need to adapt practices to better support workers
~establishing boundaries and navigating guilt as a caregiver
~respecting client autonomy and releasing our own birth expectations
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