although i'm not a mother myself nor am i pregnant i truley believe in hypno birthing. one of my friends had her second child last sunday, a little boy called khian. she phoned me a latter that night after comming out of the hospital to tell me how it went & she said it hurt alot though it happen very quickley. it started with her waters breaking & within 1 & 1/2 hours she had had him with no time for pain relief. her first birth with her daughter was a little longer & she had pethadine. anyway, i was chatting to my fiance latter that day about the phone call & i said to him that her birth didnt have to be painful even with out pain relief. he laughed in my face & wouldnt listen to what i had to say on the matter. i understand that he would find it hard to believe comming from someone who hasnt ever experienced birth but i truley believe in the power of mind & the bodys ability to do something so natural. he wouldnt listen to what i had to say in that because women are told birth is painful it creates this fear. the body & mind has this mechanism from cave man days where if you fear something you take in more oxygen, the heart works harder & sends the oxygenated blood to the vital muscles to get away from what you are fearing, mainley the legs & arms. because your body doesnt see the womb as a vital muscle to get away from what you are fearing it recieves less oxygenated blood & you feel pain. he said he has seen child birth on tv & all the women are screaming & are in a lot of pain. it turned in to a bit of an argument between us because he really wouldnt listen to me. even though i am not pregnant & we are not activley TTC, we dont use protection. if we do get pregnant we would be over joyed but when i get my AF its just another AF, no disapointment. i do feal that if i was to get pregnant he would go against what i believe. we have talked about how we would parent children & i have talked alot about attatchment parenting. he says that he will do what ever i believe is best for the child/ren - i have never been very carear minded & all i long to be is a mother, though i do beileve that it will happen when the time is right - he says he believes that i have strong natural motherly instinct to do what what is best & he will go with what i say. but when i said to him we need a bigger bed for when we have children because we will be co-sleeping he didnt like the idea. i intend to educate him on AP when we do get pregnant, he wont listen now because he is the kind of person that takes it day by day & the only aspect of the future he is thinking of now is financially. i just feel that when we do get pregnant he isnt going to like the fact that i want to birth at home with a birthing pool. i feel this the best way to birth, the comfort & relaxing atmosphere for a relaxing painfree birth, best for mother & baby. have any of you lovely mothers on here tried hypnobirthing & did it work for you? was it an enjoyable experience & would you do it again? sorry for such a long post but my partners attitude towards my beliefe in this got me upset & kind of angry that he dosnt have faith in a womans bodys ability to birth pain free.
I agree with you to a point. But childbirth *is* painful, no matter how you look at it. It doesn't have to be as painful as those tv birth shows portray, or what most women experience in the hospital, but it still hurts like hell. The hospital way of overmanaging childbirth does make for a more painful experience, so they sell more very expensive drugs because of it. Fear definitely makes pain worse, and childbirth much more difficult as well. I do think you need to reconsider making a baby with this man/boy. He sure seems to be not ready for it and will likely feel trapped if you do get pregnant anytime soon. A supportive partner is a necessity when it comes to having an unmedicated birth, and even more important when it comes to raising the children unless you don't expect him to ever help you out in any way at all. You should be on the same page before making babies together.
I don't have kids yet, but I have had to reducate myself on birth and the first few years. I am planning to have a baby in a year or so and I have read about 100 books on everything from midwifery to AP to home birth and every nook and cranny in between. Not a single woman in my family describes their labors in any positive light. It is a horror that you need to be saved from. Not a transformative experience itself. I have also made my partner a real advocate for natural birth and the home birth arena. He knows more about placentas, colostrum and bonding than most women and I think if I didn't pump him full of the info he would not be *as supportive* when we start our family. You should really get down to the nitty gritty of how he feels about all these issues now before you are pregnant and have one view of how you should birth and raise your fam and he has a completely different.
a woman who says it NEVER hurt, either is trying to be wondermama or doesn't remember in the endorphin rush after. that is called grace. I no longer "remember" the pain, but I remember four hours of pushing that were unpleasant. I do remember the vivid feeling that i was falling backward as he came through the pelvic cradle. I suddenly had my old center of gravity back! also alot of the those screams are like kiyahs in karate. It's a LOT of effort and work. grunting and exclamations are as logical there as when raising a barn beam. Which, come to think of it, was easier.
Before I had my first baby, I beleived in the "fear creates pain" cycle. THEN I went into labor. OMG. With the exception of through the urethra urinary surgery, with complications, it was the most horridly painful experience of my life. I REALLY THOUGHT that all this talk of womyn screaming and yelling ect was just sillly. I certainly wasnt going to lose control. I was going to get myself into a "mindstate" where the pain would be nearly invisible. Well, around 2.5 cm, my "mindstate" broke down, due to PAIN. I did "lose control" I had a 57 hour labor, which ended in a C Section (and I didn't even read the Section parts of the childbirth books as I KNEW that womyn who had sections ALWAYS had them becasue they let the system control them, and had FEAR.) I had NO fucking fear, until the pain of true cepheloopelvic disproportion became appearent. Can SOME womyn birth, while being in controlable pain? Sure, I believe it. Is it TOTALLY in your control whether you are one to have a painful birth or not? NO freakn way. (Not imo, anyway.) I know some womyn who have had hypnobirths, Some say there was little to no pain. Others want to KILL the person who talked them into it. The truth is, every womyn is different. Some do, and are capable of having easy (realively) births. Some of us are doomed to very painful labors, and are the ones who probably would have died 100 years ago. I think one needs to accept every eventuallity of childbirth. Two womyn can have VERY different childbirths. The same womyn can have one really easy birth, and an other which is excruiating. I know one of my clients who doesn't even HAVE contraction, her babies just literally fall OUT of her. Unfortunatly, they do this at about 20 to 25 weeks of gestation. Some live, others do not. She is the ONLY womyn I Know who has NO pain in childbirth. Her cervix doesn't "dilate" it just opens with no warning.
When I was in labor, I would relax and try to use the idea of this hypnobirthing. I didn't know of it, it was just plain logic to me, since I use that whenever I'm in any kinda pain. It did help until the nurse put me on pitocin and gave me a wicked dose of it without me knowing. That was when I got the epidural. It's not a total myth, but labor was BY FAR the most painful thing I have ever experienced! Some women can't handle the pain as well as others, or some get so exhausted that they can't think anymore. Every woman and every labor is different. Instead of fighting with your guy over what you are planning on doing, talk about the different options. If there are some definate "no-no's" then clear those out...these are things that you think may harm the baby, you, or are unnecessary. But don't rule out everything else. You never know what's going to happen when you're in labor or how you're going to feel.
Labor for me was painful, but not as painful as I believe many women have it. I was told beforehand that women who have very painful menstrual cycles don't have such a painful labor, and I used to have the most painful menstrual cycles which made me throw up and not be able to move, walk, talk. So I went in pretty confident that my labor wouldn't be so bad. Could it have been that mindstate that helped me not to feel so much pain? maybe so, or it could just be true that women who have painful periods don't have such a bad time with labor. i say probably a little bit of both. My whole birthing experience was filled with more wonder and awe than anything. Even when I was experiencing pretty painful contractions, I would breath through them and still have this pretty peaceful mindstate where all I could feel was "I'm having a baby!!". It really helped me keep my sense of humor through the whole thing, and my doctor was also wonderful and we joked around and laughed a lot with my mom and her friend. A few times I even got a big ol' belly laugh. anyways, it was nice.
I'll elaborate. Contractions, for me, were not painful at all. Just these big belly hugs, going all the way around, rather interesting, but INTENSE! Scary intense. I had to hide inside my own head because my body simply took over and I had no control over what was going on. The women I know who talk about the most pain during early labor are those who can't let go of control over the situation, and especially those who are laboring in the hospital with the typical hospital style of interventions. Maybe I was using some form of hypnobirthing I devised on the spot, but that's what I did, I was like a spectator watching the birth from a rather strange viewpoint inside my head. And yeah, I was making noise, lots of noise, even more than I make when... well, you know, and I'm pretty loud when it comes to these things. But pushing, OMG!! I thought I knew about pain, having lived with endo forever. But I knew nothing about pain, let me tell you. Nothing compares to pushing a baby out, past a swollen cervix that isn't completely dilated. I didn't tear (much) and it only lasted fifteen minutes according to midwives' notes, but it seemed to go on for hours and hours. It was like a freighttrain ripping through my pelvis. But by that point, even had drugs been available, it was too late for them. I think the pain served a very real purpose, though, because it prevented me from pushing her out too fast. I know when I got up on that birthing ball, and felt her descend past my cervix, I had to get back on the bed because she was coming out too fast. I trusted my instincts, and so did my midwives, and that is what made my birth experience such a wonderful thing. Anyway, I'd highly recommend anyone who wants an unmedicated birth make sure to take Bradley Childbirth classes with their partner. Without those classes, my DH would never have been supportive of my wishes, and without his support, I would probably had another cesarean rather than the wonderful vbac I did have.
My mom underwent vein surgery in her legs several years back with "hypno-tapes" of some sort. She's allergic to anasthesia as well as just about everything else, so the only other thing she had for pain-relief was regular strength Tylenol. She absolutely swears that it was completely painless. I think she's lost a few brain cells somewhere. But nonetheless, I do know someone that has used hypnotic music for surgery. Childbirth though - I just can't comprehend how it would work. It's not like you can go to your "happy little place" while in labor; your body is trying to rearrange itself and your mind is very much a part of the process. maybe it can help relieve a little of the pain/discomfort in the earlier stages of labor, but I'm a bit skeptical that it would help at all once you hit the "REAL" pain. love, mom
I was very positive about my birthing experience. I was almost a little cocky I would say. I was GOING to have my baby at home and I was GOING to be able to handle it! HOLY MOLY! It was the most painful and intense experience of my life. It WAS manageable though, until I found out it wasn't progressing. Fast forward to so tired I couldn't think and we went to the hospital. After an epidural and some much needed rest I pushed him out. I DO believe my positive mind set helped me not to tear at all. My doctor was amazed I pushed out my huge baby unscathed. Back to the OP, I feel like my confidence made it hard for me to accept and deal with the pain when it arrived. I was just totally unprepared for it. We don't want to change your mind about hypno-birthing. Natural birth is totally do-able. I would just council you to keep an open mind! P.S. When faced with my pre-birth cockiness my own Mama said to me...."It's gonna hurt some, no matter how you cut the mustard."
It hurts. But I think if you look at it as a good pain, not a bad one, it takes the fear and the oomf out of it. But it still hurts. Like, when I think back to my labour, the parts, the pains, that hurt to think about are when I was sitting up in a car seat during a contraction while we went over a bump in the road, trying to walk downstairs during a contraction, and the pain in my yoni at the very end DURING AN EPIDURAL. But contractions by themselves didn't hurt to me. They did, but I concentrated more on how they felt and why they felt that way, and the fact that they don't last. Once I looked at it that way, I was fine. Plus, instead of going through pregnancy telling myself it wouldn't hurt, I told myself it's going to hurt A LOT. It could hurt like severe back pain, or tummy pain, or yoni pains, or the ring of fire. It's just going to hurt. That helped.
This may be true for some mamas, but not me. I have had endo, and excruciating periods since I was 12. My labors hurt like hell. So, for me, there was no releif at having had painful periods. I am not sure what mechanism may cause womyn with bad cramps to not have painful rushes, as they are the same chemical at work, but I suppose, in some womyn, it is possible. My guess it, though, it is the luck of the draw.
I have heard that some women with painful periods are much more prepared for the pain of childbirth and therefore have less pain. I don't remember where I read that but I believe it was in one of Ina May Gaskin's books. Definatly read Spiritual Midwifery and Ina May's Guide to Childbirth if you haven't already. I have not given birth yet but I am due in 4 weeks so I have been reading up on natural childbirth as well. I would have to agree that childbirth is painful for most people but there are various techniques to manage the pain and I do believe that it will help to go into labor without fear. I'm not scared, in fact I'm excited. I want to know what it feels like and to see how I react to it. I think another thing that will help is the fact that I have a very supportive husband. At first he didn't believe that I could do it naturally but now he is on my side about it. I was still never able to talk him into a home birth though, but I have educated myself enough that I think I can have a hospital birth and still have it the way I want it, even if I have to put up a fight. Keep reading and definatly don't fear childbirth. It is a very natural and beautiful thing. I have heard great stories about hypnobirthing and though I have not been instructed on it I don't see any harm in trying it. I think we all have a natural way of dealing with pain in a sort of hynotic way if we try.
