Misdiagnosing Birth Trauma, Probiotic Strain as PPD Treatment, and a New Take on Stress

In Today's Issue:

💥 Trauma, Birth, and the Stories We’ve Been Afraid to Tell
🧠 Gut Check: Is a Probiotic the Next Big Thing in Depression Treatment?
🫶 When “Stress Less” Isn’t Helpful (And What We’re Doing Instead)

💥 Trauma, Birth, and the Stories We’ve Been Afraid to Tell

Let’s get something straight: birth trauma isn’t just about emergency C-sections or catastrophic outcomes.

And if you’re a provider—or a mother—you need to hear this:

Birth trauma can occur in a “normal” birth. It can begin during conception. It can linger for years. It can live in the nervous system long after a healthy baby is born.

In this week’s must-listen podcast episode, I sit down with Dr. Maya Weir, a clinical psychologist specializing in birth trauma and the emotional landscape of early parenthood.

And what unfolds in our conversation is nothing short of transformative.

🔍 We unpack what trauma actually is (hint: it’s not about what happened—it’s about how it was experienced).
💔 We talk about the grief of a birth that didn’t go as planned.
🧠 We explore how trauma lives in the body—and why talk therapy alone is rarely enough.

What you’ll hear will change how you see early motherhood forever.

And here’s what most providers don’t realize:
👉 What’s often labeled as postpartum depression is sometimes unprocessed trauma.

And the treatment? It’s not the same.

Dr. Weir shares the somatic tools she uses in practice—tapping, protector/compassion visualizations, and bilateral stimulation—to help mothers move trauma from implicit memory (triggers and body responses) into explicit memory, where it can finally be understood, released, and healed.

These aren’t just techniques. They are lifelines for parents silently carrying unprocessed pain.

She also talks about:

🔁 Why postpartum often resurfaces childhood or even ancestral trauma
🧬 How parenting our babies triggers unresolved wounds from how we were parented
✨ And how that isn’t a curse—it’s an invitation to heal

We talk about how "birth trauma" isn’t just about what happened in the delivery room.
It’s the entire maternal journey—conception, pregnancy, postpartum.

Maybe we need a new term: Maternal Trauma.
Or maybe we just need to start listening.

If you work with new mothers and you aren’t asking,
“How was your birth experience?”
You’re missing the doorway to true healing.

As Dr. Weir puts it:

“Even those who had a ‘good’ birth benefit from processing it. Because birth splits us wide open—it touches everything.”

Let’s not miss the opportunity to offer more than diagnosis and checklists.

Let’s offer understanding. Let’s offer tools. Let’s offer healing.

👉 Listen to the full episode here.

And if you're a provider ready to bring real trauma-informed care into your practice, our Perinatal Mental Health Certification Training is now open. Every module is built around the real science and lived experience of perinatal transformation—mental, physical, and emotional.

Let’s stop minimizing. Let’s start changing lives.

🧠 Gut Check: Is a Probiotic the Next Big Thing in Depression Treatment?

We’re living through a mental health crisis, and the answers we’ve been given—medication, therapy, waitlists—all fall short.

But what if the next breakthrough in depression treatment isn’t found in a lab, but in your gut?

A new wave of research is putting probiotics, specifically strains of Lactobacillus rhamnosus, on the map as promising tools for supporting mental health. These mighty microbes produce GABA, the brain’s primary calming neurotransmitter, and help regulate the body’s stress system, the HPA axis. When this system is thrown off—by chronic stress, trauma, or addiction—GABA levels can plummet, and symptoms of depression skyrocket.

🔬 Here’s What the Science Is Showing
In mice, certain L. rhamnosus strains have been shown to increase brain GABA activity, lower cortisol, and reduce depression- and anxiety-like behavior.

One study even showed that after 4 weeks of probiotic treatment, stress hormones dropped, and depressive behaviors decreased—but only in mice with a functioning vagus nerve, the body’s main communication highway between gut and brain.

In human studies, the HN001 strain taken during pregnancy and postpartum reduced anxiety and depression symptoms compared to placebo.

🧩 Why This Is a Big Deal
This is more than a cute gut-health tip. It’s a paradigm shift. Depression isn’t just “in your head”. It’s in your client's nervous system, their endocrine system, and yes, their microbiome. And this means healing doesn’t always have to start with pharmaceuticals.

💥 But here’s the catch:

• Not all L. rhamnosus strains work the same way. Some show promise in mice but don’t replicate in humans (yet).
• The effect might be more potent for those with active stress or mood disorders, not necessarily in “healthy” people.
• There’s still a huge research gap in translating gut–brain science into practical clinical tools.

More than anything, this reminds us: the future of mental health is multidimensional. We need more than just meds and talk therapy. We need full-body, whole-person approach. Which also means including bacteria.

Click here for the article cited. 

🫶 When “Stress Less” Isn’t Helpful (And What We’re Doing Instead)

Inside our private Postpartum University® community, we recently had a heartfelt conversation about the overwhelm that so many of us carry: running a business, parenting, managing health challenges, trying to maintain a home... and somewhere in there, remembering to breathe.

Someone said, “Being told to stress less only makes me more stressed.” (Michelle — thank you for that truth.)

And here’s what I shared back:

I needed that reminder too. Because yes — I’ve built systems. I’ve designed a life that includes rest and care. I know how to protect my energy and regulate my nervous system.

But even with all of that — it doesn’t mean it’s okay.

It’s not okay that I’ve had to carry so much.
It’s not okay that it takes this much self-care just to feel okay in my body.
It’s not okay that so many of us are holding everything all the time.

And I think this is the next level so many women are waking up to.
Not just building more capacity — but asking why the capacity is needed in the first place.

Right now, I’m in that same process. I’ve been having big conversations with my husband. We’re hiring help. We’ve made the choice not to homeschool this year. We’re reworking our entire family schedule.

These decisions haven’t been easy, but they’ve been necessary.

I don’t know what changes might support you, because your life is uniquely yours. But I wanted to share mine — just in case you need the reminder:
You don’t have to do it all. And if it feels like too much, that’s because maybe it is too much.

Stay fierce, stay rooted,
Maranda Bower
CEO & Founder of Postpartum University®
www.PostpartumU.com

Current Ways You Can Work With Postpartum University®
🔔Get on the Postpartum Nutrition Certification Waitlist
📝Free Postpartum Restoration Method™ Assessment Tool
🧠Perinatal Mental Health Certificate Training

💌 Know someone who gets it?
This newsletter is basically a secret handshake for providers who are done with surface-level postpartum care and want something deeper, realer, and rooted in truth. Forward this to your people—the ones who need to be in on these conversations. 👉 They can join us here: www.postpartumu.com/newsletter