First steps to feeling better about birth

Today I wanted to talk to you about the very first steps to feeling positive, or even neutral about birth; I say neutral because sometimes, if I’m working with a person who is completely terrified of birth, or has maybe had a bad experience in the past, the idea that they might look forward to birth or have a good experience of birth is just too far fetched for them to get on board with.

And this is part of the reason that this podcast episode has been a couple of weeks in the making, because it’s a topic I really want to get right for you. Hypnobirthing can sometimes be thought of as a bit ‘toxic positivity’ - glossing over anxieties, pushing fear to the back of the mind, just say a few affirmations ‘i let go of all fear… I trust that my body knows how to give birth’ and you’ll get over it.

This is not how I teach, and it’s not how I believe hypnobirthing should be taught. Fear is a very normal part of life - it helps to keep us safe; it’s an instinctive response that has evolved over time to keep us safe, it’s not something you can simply turn off. And while I know and teach about the impact fear can have on birth, and I help my clients to dial down and work through their fears I don’t believe that you should just tell yourself not to be scared. I believe that any and all fear that you have around birth is valid, and those areas need to be recognised & accepted before they can be addressed.

Fear is something that needs to be worked through, and there are lots of different ways that you can do that.

I am also acutely aware that the message of trusting your body, again something that is synonymous with hypnobirthing, can be incredibly challenging for people who have struggled to conceive, suffered a miscarriage and lost their babies or experienced a traumatic birth where they perhaps felt failed by their bodies. If this was your experience, it is completely understandable that a positive mindset around birth would be something that feels entirely alien to you. I would strongly suggest that you look in to working with a birth professional who has specific experience in supporting families who have experienced some kind of trauma.

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So where do we start? How do you get yourself to a place where you feel like maybe birth will be ok… we want to first take you from believing birth to be an inherently negative experience, to thinking ‘actually it could be ok’.

I always start by giving people a space to voice their fears; the things they are most worried about; maybe talking about their previous birth if that’s relevant and then addressing the feelings that those things bring up. Is it fear? Anxiety? Humiliation? Stress? Anger? Disappointment? Resentment? Guilt?

There are any number of feelings that come up when we think about birth - and for everyone who feels excited, joyful, grateful, optimistic; there are people who feel the complete opposite - scared, anxious, dreading their births.

I want you to know that you don’t need to spend the rest of your pregnancy riddled with fear at the thought of giving birth. It might not feel like it now but there are ways to overcome this. You can change the way you think about birth, and it might seem hopeless to begin with, but there are small changes you can make that, little by little, will begin to impact on the way your brain thinks about birth.

And a good place to start is voicing your feelings. I really believe that step 1 to finding some neutrality and hopefully leading in to positivity about birth is recognising how you currently feel about birth. Because it’s valid. How you feel about birth right now, regardless of what those feelings are, is the way that your brain has categorised birth - and a lot of the time that’s to do with external influence.

The modern world does not show birth in the most positive light. Drama is entertaining and so the media that we see around birth is dramatic; the stories that people tell us are dramatic.

Historically, ‘normal birth’ and by normal I mean what happens most of the time, not what is normal for our physiology, but it is quite normal, or common, for birth to be highly medicalised. And that sometimes results in different procedures; medications; lots of people; your body in positions that feel very vulnerable. And that can be scary - if all you know of birth is stories like that alongside the rubbish depiction of birth that we are shown in tv shows and movies it’s completely understandable that your brain freaks out at the thought of going through that.

So what I would suggest that you do is find someone who will listen to you. And make it clear that their job is to listen - you don’t need them to fix you - you just need to release some of these pent up feelings.

This job of listening, that is actually very difficult to do, and it’s something I’m definitely better at doing with clients than with friends or family. It makes us uncomfortable to see people we care about in pain; our instinct is often to try to fix them because if we fix their problem, then not only does our friend ‘feel better’ but we feel better because we’re no longer in that uncomfortable place where we are holding space for their sadness; anger; fear; whatever it is they are feeling.

So, if you share a negative feeling around pregnancy or birth, you might find that people say things like ‘it’s ok… don’t worry… it’ll be fine… it could be worse… everyone feels this way… you’ll get through it…’ that might leave you feeling a little lost… like you’re not being heard; that your feelings are silly. We want to avoid that, because your feelings are valid - whatever they are.

So choose your sounding board wisely and make it clear that you just need someone to listen while you vent and let loose, and that if you need some words you’ll ask for them, but otherwise you maybe just need a hug and a cup of tea.

If you have given birth before and have unresolved issues from that birth I would really recommend having a birth debrief, either before becoming pregnant again or in the early stages of your pregnancy if possible. This gives you more time to work on rebuilding your mindset.

Step 2 - Give yourself a break

Now, if you’ve listened to the earlier episodes of this podcast, you’ll have heard me wang on about how impactful fear can be on the process of birth. And while that is true, I really don’t want you to be giving yourself a hard time by being frozen by your fear. That is not going to help anyone.

I really don’t want you to be wracked with worry that you are making your birth more difficult by being scared. Don’t beat yourself thinking about being stressed all the time. Because being hard on yourself is only going to make it more difficult for you to make changes.

What I want you to do is to accept where you are in the moment. Right now, whatever stage in pregnancy you are, however you are feeling. Recognise it and accept it.

Just because you are feeling this way now, doesn’t mean that this is how you will be feeling for the rest of your pregnancy. In fact, I’m going to take the fact that you are listening to this podcast as a sign that you want to feel differently. And again, I want to reassure you that this is entirely possible; that you can think and feel differently about your upcoming birth.

Let’s talk a little about neuroplasticity - a fancy way of saying that our brains are changeable. Our brains grow and change all the time; and the way we think, the thoughts we consciously choose to have, the information we choose to put in to brains has a major impact on that.

Your brain is constantly taking in new information, deciding whether or not it’s important and saving anything it thinks is relevant. Your brain then uses all of that stored information to inform your belief systems.

For example, anything you have ever seen or heard about sharks is stored in your brain and for the majority of us, that will mean our brains are predisposed to treat sharks as a terrifying threat to our safety.

Now, what I sometimes hear from people who are really fearful of birth is that they are avoiding thinking about it; they are not actively engaging in anything to do with birth.

Here’s the thing though - just because you’re not consciously taking in any information about birth, doesn’t mean your brains not on the look out for anything birth related. So, when you choose not to seek out your own birth resources, what that means is that all of the information your brain has to go on, the only birth data it is collecting, comes from what you just happen upon - your colleagues semergency caesarean story; the crappy births on TV; people in the supermarket telling you to take all the drugs.

You genuinely can rewire your brain and change the way it thinks about things by curating the information that you feed it. However, if you do not consciously do that for yourself, if you choose to ‘bury your head in the sand’, your external environment will do the wiring for you.

What I’m saying is that, whether you choose to think about something or not; you cannot stop your brain from taking in the information it is fed from the world around you.

I don’t want you to be scared or intimidated by that information. I want you to feel empowered by it; you have the power to change your brain. And I’m not in anyway saying that this is an easy task. It does require effort and it takes a while to become habitual but it can be done.

So after accepting where you are with your current feelings, I want you to think about this place as your starting point. Here is where I am now, and then consider how you would like to feel instead: calm; safe; optimistic; positive; or maybe just fine & not scared.

And the next step we' want to take is to think about safeguarding that future feeling.

There are 2 parts to safeguarding that feeling:

1 is avoiding inherently negative information about birth as much as possible

And 2 is inputting more positive messaging

The first part of this is definitely more challenging, because most of us are socialised from a young age to be ‘good’ and polite and not interrupt.

But the problem is, our brain loves stories about things because it allows our brain to envisage different scenarios and consider them as possibilities for ourselves… and we instinctively cling on to negative stories & information because our brains think that will help to keep us safe in the long run.

So it’s really important to try and protect yourself from the barrage of negativity that the world throws at you about birth - while it’s easy enough to not watch one born every minute (and you could try Yorkshire Midwives On Call instead!) but stopping people from giving you their take on birth is a bit harder.

If it’s someone wanting to share their birth story with you, unless you know for sure it’s a positive one, I’d suggest you try to cut them off. And this is not to invalidate their experience - it is to protect yourself.

Make a joke about wanting to enjoy sharing stories with them over a bottle of wine once you have your own to tell, and immediately change the subject to something else baby-related like did they use a carrier or what essentials did they need in the first few weeks or do you really need 100 muslins. People love to talk about their own experiences so this still gives space for them to feel like they are giving you advice, without putting more anxiety in to your head about birth.

In terms of trying to input more positive messaging, I really think it’s important to try and find a role model for birth. Think through your friends, family, acquaintances that have given birth… can you think of anyone who you know had a good experience? Someone who will chat to you about birth in a way that might help you relax.

If you can’t think of someone in your life - and I’m telling you, even someone distant (a friend of a friend of a friend) will be delighted to share their experience with you, especially if they have had to do a lot of mindset work themselves. The vast majority of people who have given birth will understand how you are feeling and be more than happy to be a bit of light in your dark tunnel of feeling super anxious.

But if you can’t think of someone you already have a connection with to reach out to, then use the power of the internet. Use local facebook groups - here in Edinburgh there is an amazing facebook group called EGG and I know that if someone were to share in there ‘I’m terrified of giving birth and need a pal to share a positive journey with me’ there would be an influx of people ready to take you for a coffee and have a chat.

If you have experienced a trauma in a previous pregnancy or birth then you might find the Birth Trauma Facebook group a good place to connect with other people in a similar situation. I would say to be quite cautious with this; these groups can be quite triggering.

Doing these things will help you to create a support team for yourself; people who know your situation and can talk to you about birth in a way that is appropriate for you. I would say it’s also worth popping a mention of this in your maternity notes, or asking your midwife to do so for you. This just makes anyone caring for you in pregnancy aware straight away of your circumstances, without you constantly having to do so.

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Now I want to finish up today by saying that these are my suggested first steps. And they are exactly that, a suggestion. I want to now remind you that you are the expert in you. You know what is best for you, and only you know what you are ready to do.

And once you get to a place where you are ready to move on to working towards actually thinking about birth, I would strongly suggest working with a birth professional one-to-one to ensure that you get support that centres around you and your specific circumstances.

Financially, this can be a big investment, and I completely understand that that will be a barrier - but I also know that many birth workers will offer reduced rates if you are finding it difficult to afford; they will also usually offer payment plans so you can spread the cost over a good few months; some also have a pay it forward scheme, where those who can afford it pay a little more, so that birth workers can afford to work with families who can’t afford to pay full price. It is always worth getting in touch, explaining your situation and see if they have any suggestions of how you can work together. Birthworker’s are a friendly bunch and while we are running businesses, we do want to help people so we’ll usually have a few ideas of what we can do to help.

And remember, it truly is never too late to turn things around folks. It can feel daunting to take the first steps towards making a change but there is always time to do something and make a bit of a difference to your experience.

❤