Healing After Giving Birth: How to Trust Your Body Again

One of the most damaging things we can do to a woman is teach her to believe that her body is fundamentally broken.

By the time many women find me, that belief has been reinforced over and over again. They've been told, “This is just what happens after babies. You're getting older. Your pelvic floor is weak. Your connective tissue is damaged. Your diastasis will never fully close. Your prolapse is permanent. You need to lose weight. You just need to get stronger. You'll have to learn to live with it. The only thing left is surgery.” 

And often, she's tried everything she was told to do. She did the Kegels. She strengthened. She stretched. She went to physical therapy. She changed her diet. She stopped running. She bought the programs. She did the exercises.

And when none of it created the change she was promised, something much deeper than disappointment happens. She stops trusting her body. She begins to experience her body as unpredictable. Fragile. Unreliable. Something she has to monitor, manage, brace, hide, or protect. 

And eventually, she may stop asking, “What does my body need?” And she starts asking, “What's wrong with me?”

That distinction matters enormously. Because symptoms are clues, not flaws.

A body that leaks, grips, bulges, domes, hurts, feels heavy, or struggles to manage pressure isn't necessarily a body that has lost its capacity to heal. 

It's a body responding to the inputs and conditions it currently has available. And if the body is capable of adaptation (which it is!) then changing those inputs gives us the possibility of a different response.

The beautiful thing about patterns is that they can be changed. So rebuilding trust doesn't begin with me asking a woman to blindly believe me when I tell her that her body can heal. Honestly, I don't think that's enough.

She needs evidence from her own body. Maybe she takes a breath differently and, for the first time, feels her ribs expand instead of her belly pushing forward. Maybe she stands up and the heaviness she's been feeling isn't there. Maybe she coughs and doesn't leak. Maybe her abdomen looks different without her sucking it in. Maybe she finally feels her pelvic floor release, or has an orgasm!

Maybe she goes for a walk and realizes she wasn't thinking about her symptoms the entire time.

Sometimes the first change is incredibly small. But to a woman who has been told repeatedly that nothing can change, a small change is not small. It's evidence. “My body responded.” And then we do it again. And again. And again. This is where I think healing becomes deeply emotional, because every new physical experience begins challenging an old belief.

“Maybe my body isn't broken. Maybe she has been adapting. Maybe she wasn't failing me. Maybe she was protecting me. Maybe I just didn't understand what she was trying to say.” That changes the relationship.

And I think this is the layer people don't expect to find inside core and pelvic floor rehabilitation. There can be grief here. Grief for the years she spent uncomfortable in her own body. Grief for the workouts she avoided, the clothes she stopped wearing, the sex she didn't enjoy, the photographs she hid from, the activities she stopped doing, the moments with her children when part of her attention was consumed by leaking or heaviness or pain. 

Sometimes there is anger, too. “Why didn't anyone explain this to me? Why was I told this was normal? Why did I spend years thinking I wasn't trying hard enough?” And underneath all of that, there is often an enormous amount of self-blame.

Women are extraordinarily good at turning a failed strategy into a judgment about themselves. “I wasn't consistent enough. I should have exercised more. I gained too much weight. I didn't do enough after my baby. I waited too long.”

But one of the things I want women to understand is this: Your body did not betray you. Your body adapted to what was asked of her.

Pregnancy asked her to transform. Birth asked her to transform again. Motherhood continues asking her to adapt every single day. Her body has been solving problems for her the entire time. Some of those solutions may no longer be serving her, but that doesn't make them failures. They're evidence of adaptability. And adaptability is exactly what gives me so much hope. Because if the body learned one strategy, it can learn another.

That's where the physical work and emotional work become inseparable. Every time a woman gives her body a different input and experiences a different response, she isn't only changing her breathing mechanics or pressure management or Core Myofascial Reflex.

She's rebuilding a relationship.

She's moving from fear toward curiosity. From control toward collaboration. From “What's wrong with me?” toward “What is my body telling me?” From “I can't trust my body” toward “My body is responding.” And eventually, from “I need someone to fix me” toward something much more powerful: “My body knows how to heal.”

That is why I never want a woman to become dependent on me for her sense of safety in her own body. My job isn't to make her believe that I have the answers and she needs me to fix her. My job is to give her a framework for understanding her own body- to help her recognize what she's feeling, understand what it means, know how to change the input, and trust herself enough to respond appropriately, and then let the innate intelligence of her body do the rest!

Because ultimately, I am not the healer. She is. My role is to help her create the conditions. Her body does the healing.

And that connects back to everything we've been talking about throughout this conversation. Breath. Fascia. Pressure. The nervous system. Reflexive function. Adaptation. We're not forcing an unintelligent body to behave. We're working with an extraordinarily intelligent body and helping her remember the options that were there all along.

And when a woman experiences that for herself, something changes that goes far beyond whether her diastasis closes or her stomach gets flatter. She stops being afraid of her body. She starts inhabiting her again. She moves differently. She exercises differently. She has sex differently. She mothers differently. She takes up space differently.

There is a kind of freedom in no longer experiencing your own body as a problem that needs to be solved.

And maybe that's the deepest emotional layer of this work for me. We may begin with leaking. A prolapse. A diastasis. Pain. A belly she no longer recognizes. But somewhere in the process of restoring function, a woman begins reclaiming something much deeper: trust. Trust in her body. Trust in her intuition. Trust in her ability to understand what she's feeling. Trust in her capacity to adapt. Trust that a symptom is information, not a sentence.

And eventually, she understands that healing was never about returning to the woman she was before pregnancy. She isn't going backward. She's becoming more deeply connected to the woman (and the body) she is now.

That's the transformation I care about most. Because ultimately, I don't want a woman to leave my work thinking, “Look what Angie fixed” I want her thinking: “Look what my body knew how to do all along.” 

And maybe that's what it really means to trust your body again- not believing that she will never struggle, never hurt, or never need support- but knowing that when she speaks, you know how to listen. 

You no longer see your body as the problem. 

You recognize her as the intelligent, adaptable, healing body she has been all along.