Objective To explore women's traumatic childbirth experiences in order to make maternity care professionals more aware of women's intrapartum care needs. Method A qualitative exploratory study with a constant comparison/grounded theory design was performed. Thirty‐six interviews were conducted with women who had given birth in a Dutch birth setting. Findings Three themes, playing a profound role in the occurrence of traumatic birth experiences, emerged: (i) lack of information and consent – maternity care professionals' unilateral decision making during intrapartum care, lacking informed‐consent. (ii) feeling excluded – women's mal‐adaptive response to the healthcare professionals's one‐sided decision making, leaving women feeling distant and estranged from the childbirth event and the experience. (iii) discrepancies – inconsistency between women's expectations and the reality of labour and birth – on an intrapersonal level. Conclusion Women's intrapartum care needs cohere with the concept of woman‐centred care, including personalised care and reflecting humanising values. Care should include informed consent and shared decision‐making. Maternity care professionals need to continuously evaluate whether the woman is consistently part of her own childbearing process. Maternity care professionals should maintain an ongoing dialogue with the woman, including women's internalised ideas of birth.

This qualitative study, utilizing a feminist perspective, aimed to explore and articulate women's recall of emotional birth trauma experiences. The reason being that one in every five women has a negative recall of childbirth and one in every nine women has experienced birth as a traumatic event, with sometimes detrimental implications for women and their families. Thirty-six individual narrative interviews with Dutch-speaking women were conducted. Consent was obtained and interviews were audiotaped and fully transcribed. Sentences with the 'voice of the 'I'' were extracted from the transcripts and were constructed into I-poems, showing four key themes: (1) The journey -unmet hopes and expectations of women during pregnancy, birth and thereafter; (2) The 'I' in the stormwomen's notions of painful thoughts and memories; (3) The other -women's responses to the interaction with healthcare professionals; (4) The environment -sensory awareness of the birthing environment. The results described and showed the rawness and desolation of women's experiences reflected in their narratives of self, context and in relation to others, maternity care providers in specific. This study showed that acknowledging and listening to women's voices are of merit to inform (student) midwives and other healthcare professionals who are involved with childbearing women so that the significance of this experience can be understood.Citation: Fontein-Kuipers Y, Koster D, Romijn C, et al. I-POEMS -Listening to the voices of women with a traumatic birth experience. J Psychol Cognition 2018;3(2):29-36.