(TW: Birth Trauma + SA) Seeking Therapy

Well it actually happened. After weeks of not checking my mailbox, I just got a letter in the mail that the hospital that I gave birth in fired the doctor who tortured and sexually assaulted me, and nearly killed myself and my son. They thanked me for coming forward so they had the opportunity to improve their patient care - she had been torturing her patients for years and finally my letter stacked up on top of hundreds of awful reports from the nurses and other doctors on the unit.

My husband and I got absolutely manic - I was literally jumping for joy, but shaking and having flashbacks that felt so vivid that I nearly convinced myself that my son wasn’t breathing (he came at 31 weeks and had ONE apnea episode in the NICU). My husband told me that all of his fear and rage and helplessness that he felt all came flooding back. He had to go to work for the evening, but when he came back, we discussed maybe seeking a therapist because the hospital has literally validated that we went through something massively f*cked up.

Where do we go from here? How do we find a birth trauma informed therapist?? What do we do?? Please, any tips or advice you can give is so very needed.

We have been keeping it together because we feel so elated and blessed to have our family home together (I was hospitalized an hour away from home for over a month before giving birth due to severe hyperemesis that made my water break at 27 weeks, and my son was in the NICU for another month) - but my husband and I are both coming to terms with the fact that we are just avoiding dealing with the trauma that we’ve experienced.

Thank you so much for just listening if you’ve read this far. It feels silly to put it out there on an app like this, but under the “staying busy” surface, I know we really need help, and figuring out how to get that help is the first step, right?