Perinatal OCD and Childhood Trauma: What Nobody Is Telling You (And How EMDR Can Help)

If you're pregnant or postpartum and experiencing intrusive thoughts that terrify you, you're not broken — and you're not a bad mom.

Let's talk about something that doesn't get nearly enough airtime in perinatal mental health conversations: OCD during pregnancy and postpartum — and its often invisible roots in childhood trauma.

In my practice, I see it all the time. A mom sits across from me (or on the other side of a screen) and, barely whispering, confesses the thoughts that have been haunting her. Intrusive images of dropping her baby. Thoughts of intentionally harming her baby if she’s in the kitchen or driving. Urges she's terrified she'll act on. Rituals she's started doing in secret — checking the baby's breathing thirty times a night — just to make the anxiety quiet down for five minutes.

And almost always, the first thing she says is: "I’ve never told this to anyone. I feel like a horrible mother."

She's not. And you're not either.

What is perinatal OCD, exactly?

Perinatal OCD refers to obsessive-compulsive disorder that emerges or intensifies during pregnancy or the postpartum period. It's estimated to affect roughly 3–9% of perinatal women, depending on how perinatal-specific symptoms are assessed — and many clinicians believe the true number is higher still — because it is chronically underreported, misdiagnosed, and misunderstood (Fairbrother et al., 2021, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34033273/ and Faulk and Kameg, 2023, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S155541552300209X ).

The hallmark of OCD isn't just anxiety. It's the cycle of intrusive thoughts (obsessions) followed by compulsions — behaviours or mental rituals done to neutralize the unbearable discomfort those thoughts create. In the perinatal period, intrusive thoughts often centre around harm coming to the baby, which can feel uniquely shameful and isolating.

The cruel irony of perinatal OCD is that the very fact these thoughts horrify you is evidence that you would never act on them. You are not your intrusive thoughts.

Here's where it gets important — and where I think the conversation in perinatal mental health needs to go deeper. There is often a link to childhood trauma, which we don’t talk about enough (we have to remember though, correlation does not automatically equal causation).

Research is increasingly pointing to a meaningful link between childhood trauma and the development of OCD. Experiences of emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, neglect, unpredictable caregiving, or growing up in an environment where you had to be hyper-vigilant to stay safe — all of these can wire the nervous system to seek safety in the control of rituals, almost like an anchor. If safe and attuned parents weren’t present, then safety could be met, even if temporarily, in compulsions.

And then you have a baby. Suddenly you are responsible for keeping another human alive. Your nervous system — the one that learned early on that the world is unpredictable and unsafe — kicks into overdrive. The intrusive thoughts amplify. The compulsions escalate. The shame compounds.

Common signs of perinatal OCD to look out for:

Intrusive, unwanted thoughts about harm coming to your baby · Excessive checking behaviours (breathing, locks, stove) · Mental rituals like counting, praying, or reviewing · Avoidance of situations that trigger the thoughts · Feeling like you can't trust yourself around your baby.

What I want you to understand is this: if you had a difficult childhood, you didn't choose to bring those wounds into motherhood. But those unprocessed experiences very likely have something to do with what you're experiencing now. That's not a moral failing — it's neuroscience.

Why I use EMDR to treat perinatal OCD

Traditional talk therapy can help with OCD — particularly ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention). And I do integrate ERP principles into my work. But when childhood trauma is underneath the OCD, we need to go deeper than the surface-level thoughts and compulsions. We need to go to the root.

That's where EMDR therapy becomes incredibly powerful.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) works by helping your nervous system finally process the memories and experiences that got "stuck." Those early childhood experiences — the unpredictability, the fear, the moments where you learned you weren't safe or weren't enough — they live in your body. They're not just memories. They're responses that your nervous system still runs, automatically, especially when you're under stress.

In our work together, we don't just teach you to manage the intrusive thoughts. We go to the experiences that taught your nervous system to go into survival mode every time you feel uncertain. We process those memories. We install new beliefs — ones like I am a safe mother and I can handle discomfort without it meaning danger. Then, we prepare you to face your triggers with a new sense of inner safety. Basically, we create a new, healthier, internal anchor.

Clients stay with me on average 10–20 sessions (sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on unique history and needs). And what I see, over and over again, is not just a reduction in OCD symptoms — it's a woman who feels like herself again. A mother who can hold her baby without terror. A person who stops white-knuckling through every day.

That's what I'm here for.

Schedule your free consultation if you want to access EMDR therapy with me (open to Ontario and Quebec residents virtually, with possibility of in-person appointments in the Embrun area).