What happened to you mattered too
Anyone who tells you it is all in how you look at it is misreading the evidence, and setting you up to blame yourself.
The finding that how a birth felt predicts trauma better than what was done is sometimes turned into something else entirely: that only your attitude matters. That is not what the evidence says, and the difference is not academic. One version tells you your reaction is valid. The other tells you your reaction is the problem.
Events matter, and they matter in a straight line.
A population-based Icelandic study looked at 22,585 singleton births among 10,903 women, from a research cohort linked to the national medical birth register. Among women having a first baby, the proportion who looked back on the birth negatively rose with the number of obstetric interventions they had, counting induction, epidural, instrumental birth, episiotomy and cesarean.
From about one in nine to about two in five. The combinations most strongly linked to a negative experience were those including instrumental birth or an emergency cesarean.
In France, 6,200 women were interviewed and then asked two months later what kind of memories they had of the birth. 16.4% of women whose labour was induced had negative memories, against 8.8% of women whose labour started on its own. After accounting for other differences, induction was linked to about 1.8 times the odds of a negative memory. Only about a quarter of that link was explained by the birth ending in complications or an operative delivery, which means most of it was something else: the length of it, the immobility, the waiting, the way it was explained.
So both things are true at the same time. Your appraisal of the birth is the strongest single predictor of trauma, and what actually happened to you shifted the odds substantially before you appraised anything. You did not manufacture this by having the wrong attitude.
"I am not comparing. I am telling you what it was like."