Process and integrate your pregnancy, birth or postpartum experience while letting go of limiting beliefs and repetitive thought patterns. Get unstuck, release guilt, shame and blame, and find the answers you need. Gain new perspectives that better serve you for more empowered mothering/parenting/careproviding, presence to the life you have and relationships that nurture.
Birth Story Healing is also for birth workers who have their own experiences of the births they attend and may carry vicarious trauma.
Most people find that a single Birth Story Healing session makes a remarkable difference in service of healing, growth and transformation of their story, as well as how they relate to it and themselves. Some will continue with 1-2 more sessions, especially for a complicated or multi-layered birth-related experience.
It’s hard to get past your birth experience and become the mother you want to be when you can’t make sense of what happened or remain plagued by negative thoughts around it. New mothers don’t always have the time or space to process feelings about their births, positive or negative. There is no automatic opportunity for reflection, feedback, accountability and support around perinatal events or the emotional healing and integration needed afterward.
The adjustment to motherhood may be accompanied by a challenging physical recovery from birth, feelings of loss around missed expectations and even grief about how things unfolded in addition to the steep learning curve immediately afterwards. Challenging, difficult or traumatic experiences only make it harder to be present and enjoy this time with your child. People need an appropriate container (or sacred vessel) to process these events and feelings in order to show up fully for their lives and their loved ones.
Yet, a skilled, trustworthy and empathetic listener may be hard to find. So few people are very knowledgeable about birth and trained to do this effectively. A hyper-focus on medical events and refrains like “be happy you have a healthy baby” can shut us up or shame us when it’s only natural to seek meaning and try to understand why things happened. Beliefs about your birth can affect your self-esteem, relationships and how you parent. When they remain unconscious, they can control you and your life without your consent and even perpetuate themselves in new situations thus creating a vicious cycle of disempowerment and reactivity.
Unfortunately, there are many circumstances when we don’t have all the information or when the cause of events are impossible to explain. We may then resort to familiar narratives which may cause more suffering, such as “I must have done something wrong” or “good things don’t happen to me” or “I can’t trust anyone”.
Yet, healing and growth, awareness and insight are always possible no matter how things unfolded or how long ago it happened. Birth Story Healing sessions are based on an effective process founded by Pam England, creator of Birthing From Within, from whom I was trained personally. My practice has evolved to include a variety of additional modalities that include somatics, trauma-sensitive mindfulness, mythopoetics, depth psychology and neuroscience to help get your story unstuck and give you more freedom to choose how you want to relate to what happened and mindfully move forward in your life.
"Reise" Eiseman-Sanchez Tanner
As a coach and facilitator, Reise offers compassionate insight, nourishing guidance and engaging content that is trauma-informed and culturally sensitive. Her offerings provide soulful support & life fuel for transitions, transformations, initiations, life passages and periods of uncertainty, as well as the preparatory and integration/return phases of journeys, change and rebirth.
With an MA and completed PhD coursework in East West Psychology, her background draws from mindfulness, traditional healing, indigenous wisdom, women's studies, depth psychology, ecopsychology, archetypal activism, applied mythology, liberatory methods, restorative practices, decolonial theory, as well as neuroscience, somatics, logotherapy, positive and narrative psychology.
Reise has almost twenty years of experience as a birthworker, perinatal educator, women's holisitic health practitioner, empowerment coach and yoga instructor. She has attended hundreds of births, taught thousands of parents, trained doulas, served on birth-related advisory boards and presented to the medical community.