Sustainable Doula Work: Beating Doula Burnout

The problem

How does someone do sustainable doula work? If you have been in the doula biz for long, you’ve likely learned the prevalence of doula burnout. Burnout is a state of chronic stress that leads to physical and emotional exhaustion.

Emotional detachment does not lend itself to effective doula support. This doesn’t make you want to continue the work for long. When you are in this work, you have to be in it. A client hiring a doula expects to have someone that can hold space for them. To be able to make decisions in a challenging birth environment. They need to be able to unpack their feelings from a birthing experience that didn’t go as planned. They need to be raw and real with them.

The State of Maternal Mortality in the US

The United States has a maternal mortality rate over double that of other high-income countries. This birthing environment can lead to secondary trauma for doulas in birth rooms witnessing poor outcomes, practitioner violence, and unnecessary interventions.

Notes: Chart recreated from CommonWealthFund.org The maternal mortality ratio is defined by the World Health Organization as the death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and site of the pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management but not from accidental or incidental causes.

Data: OECD Health Data 2020, showing data for 2018 except 2017 for Switzerland and the UK; 2016 for New Zealand; 2012 for France.

Source: Roosa Tikkanen et al., *Maternal Mortality and Maternity Care in the United States Compared to 10 Other Developed Countries* (Commonwealth Fund, Nov. 2020). https://doi.org/10.26099/411v-9255

The logistics of this work are hard, sometimes impossible, to keep up with when you have a family at home. When you have 4 weeks for every client that you need to be on-call, ready to pick up and leave at any moment, in order to keep the bills paid you end up living your entire life on-call. This leaves no room for vacations. You miss out on birthdays, weddings, graduations, and more. Every plan you make has to be punctuated with: “If I’m not at a birth.” This is not sustainable in the long term.

Birth it Forward’s Solution

At Birth it Forward, we truly believe in making this work sustainable. Birth it Forward believes that someone who wants to be a doula should be able to support their family with the work. We believe that you should be able to do this work and enjoy your life outside of it too.

Birth it Forward battles doula burnout in three ways.

Providing education on beating burnout, secondary trauma, and compassion fatigue. In our Udemy course taught by Moriah Barr, LMFTA teaches doulas how to cope with the work without detaching from it.
Doula teams. BIF doulas work in a team of two primary doulas that trade off the on-call period. This allows our doulas to have the time to attend fun events and family functions. It allows them to relax without having to be prepared to pick up and leave at any moment.
Doula support network. This is really another benefit of doula teams. Our clients have in regular communication with you, another primary, the backup doula, and a doula coordinator. They approve and expect the entire team to have discussions surrounding their care and support. What that means for our doulas is that they can decompress and ask for advice about the specific situation without infringing on the clients’ privacy.

Join the revolution. Do sustainable doula work. Beat doula burnout. Become a member of Birth it Forward.