April Kline is a certified professional midwife, educator, and speaker who helps people heal and thrive in private sessions—both in-person and remote—by utilizing techniques including trauma resolution, craniosacral therapy, trigger point, myofascial manipulation, somato-emotional release, meditation, nutritional support, and whole-person listening.
Together, April and Garrett cover April's journey to midwifery and rewrite Garrett's birth story with Decklen as April walks through ways we can flip our trauma story to one with empowered language. Learn more about how to move through fear around giving birth and somato-emotional release!
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Q: Who are you before labels, titles, or what someone could Google about you?
A: I'm a deeply relational being—both with myself and with others, and everything that I do is guided by that truth. So for me, deeply relational means that I'm not afraid—or, if I'm afraid, I'll do it anyway—that I don't need you to be something to make me more comfortable. That goes for my internal self as well as those around me.
Q: What made you want to pursue birth work? What was your path to getting into your career? What led you to birth specifically?
A: Birth workers will tell you that we all do it for one of two reasons—either we had the most amazing birth ever and we want everyone to have that amazing experience, or we have a horrifying birth and want no one to ever have to birth that way. So for me, it was the latter. So, my birth was similar to yours—the classic cascade of interventions. I was with midwives and I thought that that was all I needed to do. So, four days ended up in the classic slippery slope to a C-section and decided thereafter that I wanted to make sure that nobody ever had to do that. Because, as I started learning more, I started to see all of the places back up the decision tree where things could have been turned, but were missed or ignored or gaslit.
So, the decision tree gets narrower and narrower and narrower. People will say often in my office, I had to have a C-section. I say, “Tell me more about that. What brought us to that point where that was our only decision—was save the moms, save the baby or not?” Because most of the time, there are about fifteen different places back upstream that we could have turned the tide.
Q: What's so interesting is it's verbatim my experience—except that the doctor got held up in another C-section and, just when I thought I was done, tapped out spiritually, said a prayer like I'm done, I am so done, I got to experience the fetal ejection reflex. My body began pushing the baby out thirty minutes past when the doctor was going to wheel me to C-section.
But, one of the things I was very recently tipped off to by a doula—and I don't know why I didn't realize this—is that our brain waves are actually at a different state when we're giving birth. I tend to be more of a bulldog advocate in any doctor's environment. One thing that I think about often when I reflect on my birth is, why wasn't I giving the doctors hell when this was all going down? Why was I not able to speak up? A lot of it comes back to now reflecting and knowing that my brain was literally at a different pace, so to speak, than usual. I did have a doula and it's still just is what it was, and it activated something within me similar to your birth, where it's an opening.
A: Can I pull you back to something? There's an implicit power structure in your language even about how you talk about your birth that implies you should have been able to. You shouldn't have been able to. You, my love, can let that go.
You cannot be in the space that you're supposed to be in to birth well, and also be a cerebral person in a system. It's not the same. It's not just that you're in a different brain. Oh, isn't that nice? Birthing brain. Everybody goes to birth like, that's cute, but it's not even half of the power of it. It's a body game, not a head game. You can't very well go back and forth, especially those of us that are very cerebral that feel very safe in our mental spaces. It's hard to get down in the body, to humble ourselves and say, “I'm going to be completely open and vulnerable. I'm going to go flat. I'm laying down all of me that I think is me to birth this baby, and I trust those around me.” If we will teach each other that that's what's required, I don't think we'd be birthing in the spaces with the people that we're birthing.
Q: How soon into your motherhood journey did you take steps to begin learning about birth?
A: There's parts of you that, just for your own healing, need to contextualize what just happened to you. It’s the first step in recovering from trauma. You start gathering information. You start expanding your mind about how it happened, because you have a story and you're hanging that story on the hooks that you have. But, it's a wise person who starts to expand the amount of hooks they have so that the story can be more complete.
It's a very tricky thing as a care provider to listen to someone so carefully and lovingly that you can watch for the things that are still sticky and gently turn someone's head to look at those in a way that doesn't shame or blame anyone. The care providers that they chose, right? Not them. Not their spouse. Not their sister, their mother in law, whoever.
But, to start to tell the story with more whole truth. Because mostly what I hear is, “Thank God I was in the hospital. The baby could have died.” Oh, well let's hear about all of that. That sounds very scary. And, it absolutely was very scary. I've been in many, many rooms like that, and it got real scary for everybody in that room except me really fast.
For me, personally, I felt very cared for even in the midst of the horror that I went through. Not in the moment, but shortly thereafter, I began to see that it was a horrifying gift.
I paid for massage school and found out I was pregnant that same week. It was non-refundable, so I went through massage school becoming more and more pregnant. I did my final exam on my teacher the week that I gave birth, and then had this horrible experience.
Then, 9/11 happened. I watched my dog get run over in front of my face. My husband was traveling two or three weeks out of every month. We had just moved to a house that was thirty miles from a carton of milk in upstate New York. So, it was a perfect recipe for postpartum depression. So, I had that going on.
Again, looking back on it now, I'd say that the seven years it took me to finally feel like myself again after all of that was a blessing, because it has given me a profound respect for mental health and how misunderstood postpartum depression is. I really don't like the discussions that we have about postpartum depression at all. They're very nuanced and very disconnected.
So, it took me a couple of months—it was probably around the time that my daughter was about eight to ten weeks old that I felt like I had a handle on breastfeeding. We were on the other side of 9/11. Everyone was kind of hunkered down anyway, so we were sort of stuck at home, and I just began thinking through how it had all gone and wondering what I did wrong. It was the first question “What did I do wrong? How did I end up here? What did I blow?” That's the way I was taught to think.
That's the way most women, in my experience, have been taught to think about birth and breastfeeding as well. If it's not working, it's something I must be doing wrong. I can’t tell you how many people come in here telling me that they're at the end of their ropes. They're doing it wrong, and they can't figure out why it won't work. I'm like, “It's not you. It's the baby. The baby needs help.” Then, the waterworks. But, our first go-to always is, “What did we do? What are we doing wrong?”
So, I went through all of that and happily got connected into a wonderful La Leche League with a couple of strong doulas, and they pointed me in the direction. There was a training happening that next month, so I took my infant with me—my little three-month-old. Both my girls have walked this journey with me the whole way. So, they've both gone to many births with me. They've both been nursed in every version. That's their normal. It's very sweet. They just think birth is the most normal thing on the planet.
The midwife isn’t the right thing for everybody. I want to be real clear about that. I know that this podcast is going to come out sounding like I think everyone should have a home birth. I think birth where they feel most comfortable. We're all on continuums, and there are extenuating circumstances. Wouldn't it be lovely if everyone could be born on the front porch with their grandma? Yeah, except, there's a time and a place for everything, including every intervention. Let's say it the opposite way: just because something's overused, doesn't mean it isn't sometimes a necessary thing.
Q: At 40 weeks pregnant, I said, “Yeah, I'm not ready.” Then, at 41 weeks, they made me do a non stress test. They said, “If you don't come in in 24 hours, we can't guarantee that we'll have a room for you in this hospital.” I was like “Well, I guess I have to go.”
A: Well, first of all, no one made you get the non stress test. They made it sound like you had no choice. There's that powerless language again. So, they suggested you get an NST and you agreed. Let's say it that way, so we take the power back. I love that they thought it was a good idea just to make sure the baby is doing good. For me, you don't want your care provider to be practicing too far out of their comfort zone. So, you're like, “Sure, I'll listen to the baby. That's fine.” You went in and then they said, “You need to have this baby soon or we're not going to have a room for you.” Maybe.
So, there's a word for that. It puts you in a very, very unfortunate position, because it's a hormone situation. Now you're pumping adrenaline. Now you're pumping catecholamines. Now you're pumping stress hormones. They can be good, right? They can be anticipation. They can get you heightened. They can make you hotter so that you can actually do the thing and be really fiery and great. You need some of it, but you need it in regulation with the other. You start to tip the balance when people start coercing you. Railroading you is another term that people use a lot. You're getting strapped into the seat here. Here's the first step. Do it the way we want you to or you're not going to get anything close to what you want.
Q: What is somatic-emotional release?
A: Somatic is the body. So, the physical level. We tend to, in our society, really segment things. It's not my favorite, because we're not segmented. We're not just a spirit or just a brain or just a body. We’re all of those things, and they all color each other.
So, people will say, “Well, are you trying to tell me that this is all in my head?” And I'm like, “I'm trying to tell you that maybe it started in your head. Maybe. And, maybe there was a propensity in your body that wasn't even yours. Maybe it's something that you picked up from your mother. That's the weak spot that's been trying to get your attention for years and now has to scream at you, because you've been ignoring it because you were talked to, but it's now physicalized.”
When something has physicalized, you have no choice. You must address it on the physical level. Your body only speaks body. I love that we think that our bodies will speak brain, and they won't.
This is what happened to you in your birth space. You got all up in your head about it. Why did it go badly? What did I miss? What should I have known? Did I pick the wrong people? Did I not read the right books?
I'm just trying to put myself in that room when it must have felt like such a relief to finally be humbled, to finally go soft and just flat. No more fighting.
Q: I would tell people it felt like being a prisoner of war. Like I had been being tortured. As a prisoner of war, they're trying to break you. My experience was okay, broke—and then the body just…
A: So, what you just did gave me goosebumps. Do you feel that? That's oxytocin. That's what happened in that room. That's what I would have guessed happened, but you just confirmed it because you just recreated it. Your brain goes, “We're done. There's nothing left to do.” You made peace with that. You actually believed it. And your body goes, “I'm on board, I got this.” It's out of the way, which is the hardest. It's hard to do on a daily level anyway, right? To be in our body and get grounded.
Q: So, I think potentially the somatic-emotional release that I had that came almost exactly two years later was my husband's 40th birthday. I was called to do a cold immersion retreat in Wyoming where we do breathwork and we go in the cold. We went in March and it was snowing and there was a cold tub outside. It was there as an invitation if you wanted to use it on your own time. It was the first morning. My husband was actually sick, unfortunately. A bunch of women, a couple men, we all go out to do the tub and I'm waiting. I'm so cold. It's 37 degrees outside. I'm in my bathing suit waiting to get in. I'm already cold. Finally, it's my turn and I get in. My motivation to do it and stay the whole 2.5 minutes was I paid for this. I'm here to do cold immersion. I'm going to stay open. Locked myself in. I got in and it was so overwhelming. The only way to move through it was to close my eyes and breathe. But whatever started to come up was so powerful that the other women that were also moms could feel it. They were like, “You're okay, Garrett, you're okay. Sam's coming.”vSam was the facilitator and teacher. So, he comes to the front of the tub and I end up opening my eyes, and he's right there. He's like, “Breathe with me, breathe with me.” I keep breathing, and I was brought back to the room because the only way out is through in birth. I start bawling like I'm having this emotional experience. I'm releasing all of it—or at least that's what it felt like. Then the timer goes off and I get out and I look up and the other women that were moms are bawling. They're like “I don't know what that just was.” Then, I just go “Birth trauma.” They were like, “Oh my gosh. We felt it. We didn't know what it was, but we felt it.”
A: So, there's the famous book “The Body Keeps the Score.” Your body was holding that story, waiting for someone to take it down off the shelf and give it a physicalized opportunity. It had to be on the physical. You could sit in therapy all day long, but talk therapy does not do this unless you have a practitioner. I don't have to have my hands on you to do it, necessarily. I thought I did because, as a massage therapist, it's an easy way in. But, if you're astute at all and if you have a lot of hooks, if you know a lot of stories and you know a lot of the particulars around things, then you can kind of feel and guess.
My clients will tell you that I often say that if I guess what's happening right now, you'll know if I'm right. They're like, “Yes, probably.” So, I'm going to throw out a couple of things. I'm going to tell you what I think it might be, since we're a little stuck. You throw out the thing and one of them hits, and it's just like what you experienced when you opened your eyes and then it's like a pin is pulled and the whole thing just unravels.
Q :How do you approach women who haven't been through a birth without obviously wanting to scare them?
A: Well, let's be clear that everyone on the planet has been through a birth. This is why we're here. So, you have been through a birth. You just don't have conscious memories of it. But, your body keeps the score.
So, you tell me your story about your cold plunge, and I think in my head the whole time, “Desert Storm.” I'm thinking. “How did her body experience that?” You think about it from your mother's point of view. I'm sitting here thinking about it from yours. Horrifying. Wasn't breathing. Then, knowing what I know about where you were born, I go, “Was she actually not breathing, or were they just protocol out the wazoo and terrified?”
Because, I'll tell you what, at a home birth, babies don't breathe a lot. They come in gently and they haven't transitioned, they're still connected to the placenta. They're still getting everything that they got while they were in utero, and they didn't die in utero. As long as the placenta has not sheared off of your uterine wall, they're still getting everything that they ever got.
Humans don't like to just shove through experiences. We need transition time. People are all hung up on how these kids these days can't transition well, and they all have processing disorders because it takes them too long to get their shoes on in the morning. I'm thinking, “Is it really that the kids are wrong, or is it that we've set up the wrong situation?” It's both, of course.
There is one grand transition in labor, right? Everyone knows about transition. I just think it's funny that we've glommed onto that one, because it's a medically quantifiable moment. You go from eight to ten centimeters, now you've transitioned. Now you're allowed to push. In a lot of places, now you must push. There are so many transitions happening through the entire event. Then, the baby comes out and there's no transition time. If that baby hasn't taken a breath within the first couple of seconds, they're in there with towels scrubbing on the baby and jostling the baby around. They're like, “We're going to have to take the baby to the warmer. The baby's not breathing.”
So, I always describe it as that psych test—that picture where it's either a vase or two faces looking at each other. People tell me their birth stories and they’re like, “It's a vase. It's a vase.” And I'm like, “It's two faces. It's two faces.” And, as soon as you see it, you can't go back to not seeing it again.
Q: What are your conversations like around fear in birth?
A: There are sort of signposts that are similar. It's very slow and it's a lot of listening. There's a lot of very specific questions that are mostly designed to dig below the story, because most people have a birth story that they tell over and over and over.
Sheila Kissinger is a really wonderful author around birth and grounded birth, womanly birth. She says that women will tell their birth stories over and over and over, pretty much in the same way, looking for what she calls medicine. Looking for someone to truly hear the story. Understand the story that helps them feel it and reframe it and find the power that they lost in the process. Our bodies are made to encapsulate things that could harm us, to separate them and put them away. But, if you do that too much, all you're going to be is like a giant cluster of grapes.
I just worked with a baby this morning that came through her mom so fast that she never even got to do her cardinal movements. She just flew out. She clearly was afraid of turning her head to her left, which is part of the cardinal movements. She didn't get to do it when it was a biological imperative. So, now she has it that she shouldn't do it. There's no physical reason. I feel nothing firing here when she tries. Like, there's no birth trauma. No one pulled on her. There's nothing there. So, it's emotional. I hang her upside down and I ask her to tell her story, and she starts to tell her story. As she tells her story, she gets stuck like this, making her way into the pubic bone. Then, she starts crying and tries to turn and can't. Then, I help her turn and she has this huge release. The mom starts crying—has no idea why. I bring her up and I put her right on the mom's chest, and the two of them just sit there and bawl, and neither of them really knows why. But, she has no problem turning her head in any direction now.
Then I think about if we missed that and this person grew up and spent her whole life—it's like an achilles heel, right? She's afraid. There's no reason that she can't, but there's this whole—she didn't even know the world exists over here. For her, the world exists from here to here. So, she's avoiding this at all times, and it leaves one feeling very insecure and vulnerable. Because you can't do what you're supposed to do, but you don't really even know what you're supposed to. It's just an achilles heel your whole life, which leaves your nervous system like this. No one knows that that's happening for you. You don't even know. It's really not supposed to be like that. It's so interrelated. Birth is so important. It's why we're here.
Q: How do you talk to moms about pain in birth?
A: When people talk about pain and birthing, they are controlling a conversation that's not theirs to control. So, I want you to start to notice every time you talk about birth, how quickly the conversation turns to pain. It's on purpose. It's really smart people with a lot of money to lose controlling a conversation that is not theirs to control.
There are these studies with tens of thousands of women. They did three humongous studies where they asked them about their birth experiences. They asked them what the most important things about their birth was for them. Pain isn't in the top ten. It doesn't matter how painful it was. It doesn't matter. That is not a marker that women who go through birth think about looking back.
If it's a C-section, they'll talk to you about it. If it's a birth that's controlled where they have no power, then it becomes part of the conversation. Across all three of these tens of thousands of women studies, they experience, right when the baby comes out on their chest—that's a lovely one. For all of them, what it boils down to is “Did I feel heard? Did I feel like I was part of the equation? Did I feel like I had agency?” If those two things are met, pain is not even in the top ten.
I'll tell women this, even in labor. I was at a birth with another midwife once, and afterward she came to me and she goes “It never in fifteen years has dawned on me to just say to a woman what you said.” I was like, “What did I say?” She goes, “You said: Yeah, it hurts. It hurts like a mother.” She's like, “I always tell them they're strong. They can do it. They have everything they need.” I'm like, “You got to say it hurts.” And, guess what? Who cares? It doesn't matter. It's going to last another thirty seconds. You got this. Let's do it. Yeah. It sucks. I'm sorry. It sucks, and it's gone. Let it go. When you're not in it, you're you. It's fine. Enjoy. Now. Hi. How are you doing? She goes, “Oh yeah, I'm okay. I'm like, “Yeah, you're really hard. That was a lot, wasn't it?” And she goes, “Woof, that was a big one. Oh, and here comes another one.” I'm like, “Awesome. Let's rock this one. Let's get up on top of this one and let's stay up on there.”
Because guess what? If you're a bobber on a wave, you don't care how big the wave is. It's only if you get down in the mush that you care. Come up here, come up here. You come up here with me. And she's like, “I can't, it's too big.” I'm like, “Yes, you can come here, come here, come here. You're a bobber.” And she comes up and she's like, “It's really big.” And I'm like, “It's huge. Let's go. Let's ride the sucker.” And she's like, “Yeah, let's ride it. It's the biggest.” And you ride it. And I was like, “It's just energy.” And she goes, “That's just energy.” And then I'm like, “And now it's coming down the back side. Let it come down. Now you're just laying on the sand again.”
But it's so powerful. It's just like emotions. People are so afraid of big emotions. All they want to do is move. Let them move, and then they're done.
The fact that this is even a conversation that we have to teach people in doula classes, and we have to teach moms in birth prep classes, and we have to teach nurses, and we have to teach all these people. There's no teaching necessary. If someone is encouraged through their entire pregnancy to trust their body, to listen to their body, that there's someone looking them in the face saying, “I love what you're doing right now. How did you know to move that hip like that?” She goes, “Oh, I moved my hip? I'm like, “Yeah, you did. You knew that baby was stuck over in the hip, didn't you?” And she's like, “Well, I didn't really know, but I guess I did.
That connection, that biofeedback can start and then they're never the same again. There's a trust that starts to get built that we might as well package up with a big bow and hand it over if we don't birth this way.
I founded an entire organization that ran for fifteen years called Darlene's Network on the Idea of unconditional support. My master's thesis was informed consent and unconditional support. How can those two things live side by side? The night before I defended my thesis, my lead on my committee told me there's no such thing really as unconditional support. I said I don't believe you, because I've literally been teaching it for ten years.
Q: So, what was the impetus for The Well?
A: So, you mentioned at the beginning of this that I am really cross-trained. There's a lot of interdisciplinary stuff in what I do, but I can't do it all and I can't help everybody. It's a source of frustration. I can't be the specialist in everything. So, this building was built in 1967, so she's needed a lot of love. But, it was my dad's building. He ran 27 therapists out of this space. He was a psychologist. So, when he died, he put the building in his trust. My mom and my brother bequeathed it to me with a little bit of input from me, which was very lovely. There were all these empty rooms here, so I started working out of the space myself.
Then our home midwife, Katie Quinn, asked if she could start doing her prenatal out of here instead of driving to every single prenatal, which is what we always used to do. I said absolutely, come and join me. Then, it just sort of dawned on me how lovely it was to have that hallway hand off with her. So, somebody's got a baby who's persistently breech, and she's like, “April, can you see them and help that baby find a way to turn?” I bring them right across the hall.
Or, I have someone who has gone through this process that you started diving into a little bit of how do we unravel a birth story that we have so square in our head and start to see the faces instead of the vase? How do you start to do that process? Then, they get to a point where I'm like, “You could just have a conversation with a home birth midwife just for the information and see how it feels. I think after that conversation you will know whether that's even a viable option for you or not.” I can just say, “Hey, Katie, do you have ten minutes to meet my friend?”
So, that was lovely. I wanted more of that. So, the next person that came in was a pelvic floor PT. In other countries, pelvic floor therapy is prophylactic. You go for pelvic floor therapy after every birth. Here, it's like people are just getting the memo. So, she's literally across the hall.
Then, there are all these rooms downstairs. So, I renovated the whole building and started moving other people in. So, prenatal and postnatal massage and a social worker. We have a breast milk mom-to-mom share. We have fresh mamas, which is any moms whatever age, however you birthed, I have anywhere from five to thirty moms in here on Friday mornings. It's just lovely. All the babies. I have a full lactation clinic with six of us from IBC. I have a friend who is a pediatric dentist coming in to work out of here on Fridays. I have a pediatric OT. Reflexology. You name it, we got it. I have a master gardener who just keeps the front of the building looking like a big, beautiful wildflower jungle. People often come in the door and get choked up. It’s just safe.
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This blog post was written based on kozēkozē Podcast Episode 379: Birth Trauma & Fear with April Kline.
If you’d like to listen to the conversation first-hand, tune in here.