Content note:
This article contains discussion of birth trauma, dissociation, medical trauma, postpartum depression, panic attacks, PTSD, burnout, and late-diagnosed neurodivergence. Please read gently and take breaks if needed.
Written by Tania Fragoso
Trauma-Informed & Neuro-Affirming Perinatal Coach and Counsellor
Founder of Wired Differently, Mothering Anyway
Tania supports ADHD, Autistic, AuDHD and highly sensitive mothers navigating birth trauma, postpartum burnout, matrescence, and the unresolved parts of motherhood that standard support often misses.
Website: taniafragoso.com
I was 29 when I became pregnant with my twins. I had moved to London, built a life in a city that never once felt like mine, learned to function inside systems that were never designed for someone like me, and I had become very, very good at pretending none of that was true.
I worked in an open-plan office in corporate banking. The lights never dimmed. The noise never stopped. The unspoken rules of office politics baffled me completely. I was loyal, hardworking, and always willing to offer my time to new projects. The slow days were painful. I craved the novelty and the constant change of pace the role offered, but struggled to maintain the rhythm, especially when pregnancy arrived.
Looking back, I can read the signs so clearly now. The fainting on the tube. The strict routine that contained everything. The way my body was already saying, in the only language available to it, that this was too much. Long before I had any words for it. Long before I had any words for myself at all.
I moved back to Portugal at 25 weeks of gestation. My husband stayed behind, commuting every other week. The routines that had been holding me together disappeared overnight. I was navigating a different healthcare system, a high-risk pregnancy, a country that felt both like home and entirely foreign.
I remember sitting in my doctor’s office one afternoon, sobbing. Telling her I didn’t think I could take it much longer. She called the head of service. He said no to an induction.
Nobody asked me how I really was. Nobody noticed that I had already gone somewhere quiet inside myself.
I know now that I was already dissociating. That this is what happens when a nervous system reaches the edge of what it can hold, it withdraws somewhere safer. It can look and feel like failure, but in reality, it’s an extraordinarily intelligent form of protection. But in a maternity system that had no language for it, it simply looked like compliance and coping.
It always looks like coping. Until it doesn’t.
What I carried in with me
What I understand now is that I arrived at that birth room already hollowed out. Not by the pregnancy, not by the move, not by the months alone. By something much older than any of that. Three decades of being told, in ways both subtle and direct, that my way of being in the world was too much, or not enough, or simply wrong. You learn, after long enough, not to question. Not to push back. Not to take up space. By the time I was rolled into that corridor, I had already lost my voice. The birth room didn’t take it. It just confirmed what I had already come to believe — that what I felt, what I needed, what I experienced, was not worth saying out loud.
This is what the cost of an undiagnosed nervous system looks like in practice. Not dramatic. Not visible. Just a woman who accepted without question everything that was given to her, because she had spent a lifetime being corrected for trusting herself.
By the time I was rolled into that corridor, I had already lost my voice. The birth room didn't take it. It just confirmed what I had already come to believe — that what I felt, what I needed, what I experienced, was not worth saying out loud.
The birth room
I was 39 weeks and five days when my c-section was scheduled. Both babies were breech. There was no conversation about alternatives.
I was rolled into a corridor and left there alone. My husband was not permitted inside the theatre. I was not thinking about meeting my daughters. I was counting the minutes until the discomfort would end. A nurse eventually came to tell me there had been an emergency. My surgery would be delayed. I didn’t ask anything. I had completely lost my voice.
So I waited.
When they finally took me in, a nurse tied my hands to the bed. She removed my glasses.
I asked why.
She said some women panic and pull at the IV catheter.
I did not panic. I went somewhere else entirely. The restraint. The loss of my glasses, the one thing that made the world legible to me. The lights, the sounds, the lack of acknowledgement that I was in the room, and this was the day I was going to meet my babies, the pushing and pulling that nobody had thought to warn me about. It all felt mechanical, lacking empathy and humanity. Like I had stepped onto a conveyor belt, and parts were being taken apart and put back together. My nervous system received all of it as a threat. And it did what it had been doing for thirty years.
It left.
I remember them holding the babies above my face. I could not see them clearly. I could not touch them or smell them. And then they were gone. For someone who had spent her life feeling too intensely, at that moment, I felt absolutely nothing.
Later, in the recovery room, I had a faint recollection of my husband sitting by me, and on the opposite side, a puddle of blood on the floor. Hands pressing on my uterus. The sense of rush and emergency around me. Doctors coming and going. Pain I felt from somewhere above myself, watching from the ceiling, untethered, loosely present. And then there was nothing. A vacuum where time should have been.
I later discovered, through EMDR, that my husband was not in the room at all. I had fabricated his presence. My mind, trying to protect me, had given me the one thing that might have made it survivable.
When I held my daughters for the first time, I felt nothing. I inspected them for something that would tell me they were mine. I found nothing.
I held them anyway.
Before I even knew about my AuDHD diagnosis, I already knew that the practices in that room were not only harmful to someone wired like me. They were outdated, and wrong, and lacking in the most basic humanity, for any woman, on the most significant day of her life. Not everyone who went through them dissociated. Not everyone carries birth trauma. But when I began studying birth trauma years later, what struck me was how simple the failures were. Not complex systemic problems requiring years of reform. Simple human things. Acknowledgement. Warmth. The understanding that the person on the table is not a body to be managed but a woman in one of the most vulnerable moments of her life. When we remove humanity from the room, we do not just fail the women who are already fragile. We fail everyone.
The seven years after
I went home. I got on with things.
This is the part that still carries grief. Not the birth itself, I eventually found a way to make my peace with that, slowly and imperfectly. But the seven years that followed, in which I treated the symptoms and never once reached the root.
Postnatal depression. Burnout. Panic attacks. PTSD. Each one named, handled, and filed away. And then the cycle began again.
What I was missing was a framework. A way of understanding that what had happened in that room was not a personal failing. That the disconnection I felt from my daughters in those early weeks was not a failure of love. That the freeze, the dissociation, the way my nervous system responded before, during, and after the birth, all of it had a name. Several names, in fact.
I received my AuDHD diagnosis years later.
The first thing I felt was not relief. It was grief. For the woman who had gone through all of that without knowing. Who had blamed herself, quietly and consistently, for things that were never hers to carry.
I was not broken. I was unsupported. In a system that was not built for someone like me.
The things I changed, and the one I couldn't
When I became pregnant with my youngest, I knew more. Not everything. But enough.
I prepared differently. I accounted for my sensory needs. I advocated, imperfectly and with enormous effort, for what I needed. But I had not accounted for how much healing remained undone. I had been solely focused on the mind. The body was still holding the unprocessed weight of the first experience, and faced with the same circumstances, it did what it needed to do to protect me, and shut down. After three days of attempted induction, at 42 weeks and five days, I accepted a C-section.
As they wheeled me into the theatre, this time with my husband beside me, tears falling, a nurse looked directly at me.
She said: I know you are frightened. I know what you have been through. But we are going to take care of you.
Something in my body loosened.
My glasses stayed on. My husband’s hand never left mine. The lights were dimmed. Each member of the team introduced themselves and acknowledged my fear. Claire de Lune played in the background as my daughter emerged, and she never left my side.
That nurse and that team did not fix anything. They did not undo what had happened. But they did the one thing that changes everything for a nervous system that has been bracing for years: they made it safe, just briefly, to stop scanning.
That is what being believed does. Not fixed. Not solved.
Just believed.
Why I’m sharing this now
If you are reading this and recognising something, in the freezing, in the disconnection, in the way the birth room felt like something you survived rather than something you experienced, I think you deserve to know this: You are not to blame. You are not weak. It wasn’t your fault.
It was a nervous system doing the only thing it knew how to do. In a room that had no idea what to do with it.
Many neurodivergent women go through this without a diagnosis. Without a framework. Without anyone ever explaining why it is this hard. Some of them are still going through the days the way I did, treating the symptoms, keeping the house, getting on with things, secretly blaming themselves for not getting over it, for not being happy that at least they survived and their baby is healthy. I know this because it is the narrative I carried as well. For seven years.
That is a long time to carry something that was never yours. I grieve the late diagnosis, but above all, I carry the grief of what not having a framework cost my family in those years. And this is why I do what I do. For me, for my daughters, and for those who feel like they are missing the rule book that everyone else seems to have been given at the start.
You deserved more than that, in that room.
So did I.
About the Author
Tania Fragoso is a trauma-informed counsellor, neuro-affirming perinatal coach, and AuDHD mother of three. She works with mothers who feel something has been left unresolved in their birth, postpartum period, or identity shift into motherhood.
Her practice supports ADHD, Autistic, AuDHD and highly sensitive mothers through birth trauma, postpartum burnout, and matrescence. Her work is grounded in specialist training across counselling, perinatal mental health, birth trauma, neurodivergent support and lived experience.
Website: taniafragoso.com