The Truth About Not Bonding After C-Section

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Not bonding with your baby straight away after a C-section is far more common than many women realise but almost nobody talks about it.

In this deeply honest episode of The C-Section Healing Space, I share my own experience after having 3 C-sections, including not feeling that instant “rush of love” with my first two babies after traumatic birth experiences.

We talk about:
• Why some women don’t bond instantly after birth
• Trauma and emotional shutdown after C-section
• The nervous system and birth trauma
• How difficult labour experiences affect bonding
• Epidurals, emotional numbness and overwhelm
• Why guilt and shame keep women silent
• Emotional healing after traumatic birth
• How suppressed emotions stay in the body

I also share gentle first steps to begin reconnecting with yourself and your body after C-section, including the simple 5-minute ritual that supported my own healing journey.

This channel is a calm, soul-deep healing space for women recovering emotionally, physically and energetically after C-section.

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https://www.divinajohnson.com/product-page/reconnection-body-oil

✨ Subscribe for videos on:
• C-section recovery
• Birth trauma healing
• Nervous system healing
• Somatic healing
• Emotional recovery after birth
• Meditations and reconnection rituals

#CSectionRecovery #BirthTrauma #PostpartumHealing #CSectionHealing #PostpartumMentalHealth #SomaticHealing #EmotionalHealing #TraumaticBirth #NervousSystemHealing #MotherhoodHealing


Disclaimer: This content is for educational and informational purposes only and is not medical advice. Please always seek advice from your doctor, midwife or qualified healthcare professional regarding your physical or mental health, recovery or medical concerns. Individual healing experiences vary, and this content is intended to support, not replace professional medical care.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hmm, this is a tough one, isn't it? I know there could be a lot of guilt and shame and blame when it comes to not bonding with your baby straight away. And I have some theories that I want to share with you on this one. And this happened to me with my first two. I've had three C sections. With my first baby, when they showed her to me, I didn't feel anything at all. I actually remember like falling asleep, like almost falling asleep, and the anaesthetist like shouting, like, Davina, you've got to wake up. When they showed it to me, I just didn't feel anything. And the same with my second, they showed him to me, and I was just like, hmm, okay. It wasn't happy or sad. I was just very indifferent. I was just like, hmm, okay. So I want to talk about how this might show up for you, how this may have shown up for you. With my first, it was a 36-hour labour. It was horrible from start to finish. As soon as I walked into the hospital, it was it was just down from there. I had the doctor who was really awful, and then they just kept coming. After that, I had epidurals that went wrong, and I thought I was gonna die. It was just like a horrible ordeal, like the whole 36 hours I was put on a drip, I didn't know what a trip was, learning that it was an induction, and that wasn't until afterwards that I learned that. But so many, just so many things happened in that 36 hours that like when it came to the C-section, I was just like, whatever, just do whatever needs to be done. Like I'm over this. I was just over it. I they took her out, and yeah, I just didn't feel anything. Then when I went into the postnatal ward, I remember the midwife said to me, Davina, your baby hasn't eaten. I think she's in hours. She's like, Your baby hasn't eaten for hours. You need to breastfeed. And she just pulled down my gown and like shoved my baby on. And I remember thinking to myself, Does anyone see me? Like, does anyone see me in this moment? Just a few hours ago, I thought I was gonna die. You guys have been awful to me. And I just felt I just felt like I was a vessel. And that was it, just nothing. I just didn't feel cared for in any way. If that resonates, I feel like that can be one of the reasons why you didn't bond with your baby instantly, because you may have been exhausted, you may have just been through a really traumatic birth experience, and that can that could have contributed to you not bonding instantly because you're still reeling from what you have just been through. And I think when you actually think about it, it's quite a lot to expect of a woman to now be completely elated after what she's just been through, because just because you have the baby, it doesn't erase everything that you have just been through. So I think that that's one reason that that could have happened to you if you didn't bond instantly, and another, which I have there's a longer version of it on here, but the short version of another reason why you may not have bonded is I believe that when you have the epigeural, because it numbers us from you know here down, and we're numbed physically, so that we can have the operation. But as we are not just physical beings, we're also energetic, spiritual, and emotional ones, I don't think it's a stretch or a reach to say that when you're numbed physically, that you can also be numbed emotionally and energetically, because your brain is still going, your mind is still going, so you are still cognizant of what is happening, but your body is turned off. So if you are scared or nervous or worried about the procedure, your brain would be saying to you to run, to like do something, but the signal's not working because we've got the epidural, so it we're not, we just we don't even get the signal. So your brain would just be like, what is going on? Like, is there some kind of malfunction? What's like I'm like we're scared, like I'm telling I'm telling our legs to run, nothing's nothing's happening, like it's turned off, and I think that can have an effect on our nervous system emotionally as well and energetically. So having that epidural could also turn off the the feelings that you would want to have emotionally too. I don't think that's a reach. Let me know in the comments what you think if you've ever thought about this, if you have experienced this, how it felt for you if you didn't bond instantly with your baby, like that rush of love that mums talk about when they see their baby. I didn't have that for my first two. I did have it with my third, and I do go into that into in the other video. If you want me to talk about it again, let me know. Just put it in the comments. But because basically I just did I did more work on I knew more about this stuff when I had my third, so I did more work about learning about the mind and body, etc. But yeah, those are two kind of big reasons I think that you may not have bonded instantly with your baby. And also, depending on how your postpartum has gone, that that not bonding can last a long time. I mean, with my second, with my first, I don't think we bonded for the first year, with the second, probably even a bit longer. And I've spoken to mums before who have said even longer. Their child's 17 and they just felt like they didn't have the same bond with them that maybe they had with their other children. And what we talk about is how emotions stay within the body, they're lodged within the body, they cause dis-ease within your body, they don't just disappear. So just because you've had the baby now and you're okay, the baby's okay, doesn't mean that everything that you've been through disappears. It doesn't mean your postpartum just disappears, doesn't mean it just wasn't hard anymore. No, it was still hard, it was still difficult. And if you don't process those things, those emotions, those experiences, they stay within the body, they don't just evaporate, and and that's what hurts, that's what stays. And so it's about releasing those. It's about not carrying the pain anymore of your experience. Sorry, that was a wasp. Um it's about not carrying that pain anymore, knowing that it's okay to feel the way that you feel, because there's so much guilt and shame around this topic, because society only ever shows you perfect moms, and they don't really show you the real side of what healing can look like, and so you feel that you can't share it because what are people gonna say? So you keep it in, but keeping it in just creates more disease. There's a reason why women have the highest level levels of autoimmune disease, because the research has shown us that autoimmune is suppressed emotions, and that's what we do well, right? That's what women do really, really well, is we just push it down and we carry on. But by pushing it down and carrying on, we create dis-ease within our body, and that can be the reason why your scar is still numb, why your tummy still hurts, why your scar hasn't healed, why it's taken a long time, why the bonding isn't there still, is because you've just suppressed everything and moved on, trying to move on. But your body hasn't. Your body's still right back there in that moment. So it's really important for us to do the work to heal. And the first thing that you can do is five minutes lying down on your bed, hands on your tummy. You can do it over clothes, just spending five minutes and just breathe. Just breathe. Try and focus on your tummy in your room and see what comes up, and then you may want to journal about what comes up or note what comes up. You can also in the link in the description, you will see my homemade reconnection oil, which will be available really soon. You can join the wait list, and that's what really supported me on reconnecting with my body again, because that really is the first step to this healing is reconnecting with your body again and doing the ritual, which is what you get, the oil and the ritual. That's what supported me from going to a kilo scar that looked like this to completely gone. And you can find that in the link in the description. But know that you're not alone in this. Like, comment, let me know what you think about this, let me know what your experiences are. Also subscribe. I really want to grow this channel. I want more women to find this space so that they know that they're not alone. I'm creating this because this is what I didn't have with my three c sections. There was a lot about physical healing, but nothing about emotional, spiritual, energetic healing that takes place, that is required to take place to fully feel like yourself again. So subscribe, but share, also share this with another c section mum so she knows she's not alone. This healing can happen whether your c section was two months ago or twenty years ago. You're never too late.