Do You Have Womb Trauma?
- Shelley Harrison
- May 26
- 5 min read
Updated: May 27
It started when you were in the womb, even though you couldn’t have known.
Science shows, the small cell of you was present within your mother’s womb, when she came to be in your grandmother’s womb.
Mom was Grandma’s second child…
Your maternal grandmother met a man on the dance floor just before he went away to serve in WWII. There was a spark.
Social taboos and all she had ever heard from her parents, and society about sex, didn’t stop her from following her pleasure.
Her first child was conceived. The father went away to war, never to be heard from again. Perhaps he lived, perhaps he fell.
Grandma carried the baby as long as she could in secret, and was then hidden away to give birth. The child was adopted out, lost to the family.
Or maybe your grandmother found an illicit way to have her first child aborted–saved from the shame of being an unwed mother, but not from the shock and grief.
Perhaps she birthed her first child, and her elder sister took the baby. The child was told auntie was her mother, and shame was avoided, the child provided for.
It lived as a secret inside grandma. There was no comfort or empathy for her shock, her aloneness, her grief, her shame, her longing.
Later, she met your grandpa, your mother’s father.
Was her heart still with the first lover? Did she fall in love with grandpa? Was it a marriage of survival and necessity, or love?
Your mother was their ‘first’ child.
But something in mom knew. Deep inside her body, your mom carried an unspoken, preverbal fear: “What if they don’t keep me? Why do I deserve to live when the other one didn’t?”
Mom was born into the imprint of unwept tears for her elder sibling.
Every time grandma looked at mom, she remembered the first one.
Now you come along.
You are trying to have a baby. Longing so deeply.
Or, you are married, but somehow your heart is drawn to someone outside the marriage.
Or, you struggle with grief that somehow feels bigger than you.
How could you possibly know that the real root of it is what happened to grandma that was never spoken about, or only whispered?
This is one layer of what can be held within you as womb trauma.
Like so many women, you were very little when it happened.
You don’t have clear memories, or it was so overwhelming, your brilliant self figured out how to block it out and forget.
But so many things have unfolded in your sexual life that made you suspect it.
How do you talk out what you can’t clearly remember?
Maybe womb trauma was something you slowly absorbed growing up.
The things that weren’t said about sex and menstruation.
The ways you noticed mom and dad weren’t affectionate.
The teasing on the playground.
The images of women and sexuality in the media and movies.
The religious attitudes that made your own awakening life force a sin.
As you tried to find your way through your emerging sexuality, maybe there were some good, kind, loving and ecstatic experiences.
Maybe there were some that bruised you emotionally, or scarred you deeply.
You’ve talked about it, but somehow it still lives inside your body.
It bleeds through the way you notice you flinch, shrink, rage or withdraw. It shows up in the ongoing tug of war with your partner around who initiates sex and who doesn’t.
It subtly magnetizes who you seem to attract and who you can’t seem to attract.
This is another layer of womb trauma.
You made it through your initiation into womanhood.
You found the mate, or found your own way to have the children you longed for.
Did you dream of a joyful birth where your body opened to the potent flow of creational energy and birthed in power?
Did you trust your medical support, but wish it had all been a bit…kinder?
In your most vulnerable and open moment, were there invasive medical procedures?
Attendees in fear more than supportive trust?
Shock, feeling overwhelmed and having to shut down to just get through?
Postpartum depression that descended over your heart and mind that just wanted to love?
In the demanding terrain of welcoming your children and nurturing them, was there just no time or capacity to really heal from birth trauma?
This can be another layer of womb trauma.
How did your body physicalise all of these experiences, acknowledged, and unacknowledged?
It could be…
Menstruation hurts, or menopause is making you crazy.
Sex hurts or just isn’t pleasurable or orgasmic.
You are struggling with illness in your pelvic floor, ovaries, cervix, uterus, hips, or lower back.
You long to have a baby, but in spite of all your efforts, it’s not happening.
Your sexuality has become knit together with shame, fear, or avoidance.
The first reason many women feel they need to do womb healing work is because they have a physical condition in their reproductive organs.
Scary, difficult, and wounding experiences around your sexuality, can leave blocked emotional and physical charges in your womb and pelvis.
You may have already consulted your medical professionals, worked with a pelvic floor physiotherapist for the symptoms, and talked it out in therapy, but you know that your body is holding old traumas, and pent up emotions.
You sense blocked energy in your uterus. (Or prostate).
Or you feel nothing, because you have frozen this part of your body to avoid what has been too hard or scary to process.
If the blocked energy has not become a physical condition, you may experience it in your sexuality.
You may avoid sex, or your sexual intimacy with self and other, may be revealing some areas of concern or discomfort.
The real longing is to feel our beauty as a woman from the inside out.
The real longing is to allow our arousal and sexual pleasure to overflow in safety and wash over and through us from head to toe leaving behind peace, confidence, radiance and sacred delight.
The invitation of energy healing + trauma clearing work is to clear away the debris that keeps your inner light from shining through your body and your sexual and creative life force expression.
How is doing healing work with your womb an initiation into your greatest gifts?
As womb trauma flushes out of our body, nervous system and energy field, what flows up from underneath is joy and pleasure. We begin to reclaim our sexual health and confidence.
This energy rises up through our foundation–the 1st and 2nd chakras, and pelvis. It fountains up to energize all aspects of our lives.
I believe a part of each woman’s LIFE PURPOSE is to be a doorway for the divine feminine, so the healing, balancing qualities of the yin energy become more available collectively.
When you do your own womb healing work, you become part of the vast tapestry of women on this planet reclaiming the sacred feminine and making our world safer and more loving for those who come after us.
You may even be guided deeper into womb work as a spiritual practice to connect with the divine feminine, the goddess, and your own forgotten magical capacities connected to our wombs.
If you are ready to reclaim energy flow through your pelvis, womb and 1st and 2nd chakras, I’m here to be your guide to clear out what holds you back, and bring more sacred healing energies into the blessed base of your body.
I’m comfortable holding space while guiding you to ‘drop-in’ to your body, including sinking awareness into your sexual organs.
While we work, I will sink into my own pelvis, 1st and 2nd chakras, and womb to accompany you.
It’s not about arousal energy. It’s about including every part of you and supporting you to attune to what you are holding in terms of blocked energy that needs tender loving care to come back into flow.
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