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My first experience of hypnobirthing
When I was pregnant the first time around I honestly felt like I could not be doing more to prepare myself (and my birth partner).
When I was pregnant with my first (2019) hypnobirthing had been around for a while!
Whilst most hypnobirthing courses and books stem from the 1990s, hypnosis in birth can be seen as early as the 1850's!
However, in 2019 hypnobirthing was becoming more 'mainstream' and commercial, with affordable online courses popping up everywhere and being advertised on social media.
I attended an in-person group taster session with my partner and my Mum. This session consisted of a group meditation and some breathing exercises.
I bought the book 'Mindful Hypnobirthing' by Sophie Fletcher as an audiobook and listened to it in my spare time, practicing the meditations when I could - I still recommend this book to my clients!
However I was tempted by a cheap online 'Positive' hypnobirthing course, I have to say it was the price that attracted me, in-person or one-to-one courses seemed excessively expensive to me at the time, especially because I had already paid for an NCT course as it was 'the done thing'.
The 'Online Hypnobirthing' Course
Dutifully my husband and I sat down 2-3 times a week in my second trimester to watch the short videos.
This was the first time my very logically-minded husband had learned about how birth works, for me (with a biomedical science degree) the information was basic, but for him, it presented well and appealed to his sense of being able to categorize things into 'stages'
There was some mention of 'Informed choice' and using the B.R.A.I.N tool to make decisions.
This particular course heavily discouraged the words 'pain' and 'contractions' suggesting we replace them with other less 'negative' words. In fact, it taught us that if we do the 'pre-work' to re-wire my brain and use the tools they provide us, my labour would not be painful......
The idea of no pain during birth is of course very appealing, so we were sold!
They even provided us a suggested 'schedule' of how often to 'practice' their relaxation techniques, something again that felt familiar to us (let's do our 'homework').
The group came with access to a Facebook group, in which you could read 'positive birth stories' from people who had done the course. Only stories that didn't use the word 'pain' and were seen as positive would be allowed to be published.
We went to our NCT class, slightly smug that we already knew everything as we had done our hypnobirthing course, and the NCT class reinforced the stages of birth and taught us a bit about baby care and breastfeeding.
Birth prep is DONE! - What could go wrong?
Hypnobirthing in my first birth - Where was the real-world information?
Our first issue was that neither the online hypnobirthing course nor NCT classes had actually prepared us for walking into an NHS hospital to give birth.
Though the online hypnobirthing course had told us to use B.R.A.I.N to make decisions, we did not understand the level of advocacy my husband would need to uphold should we want to stick to our preferences.
We did not know how lacking true informed consent was in maternity care, that everything in birth is a choice and that we could participate in decisions.
Crucially I (with my scientific brain) did not realize that the majority of guidelines in maternity are not based on grade A evidence, but are based on 'expert opinion' - I would certainly have questioned this had I known, as I had worked in clinical research since university.
At no point had either course challenged our preconceived ideas about the safety of birth in a hospital vs homebirth. Hypnobirthing had encouraged us to reframe how we felt about birth by avoiding watching one born every minute but did nothing to challenge us about planning to walk into that very same environment.
One size fits hypnobirthing
Of course, pre-recorded online hypnobirthing videos are very limited in the information they provide being adapted to individual circumstances.
However, our online course seemed to be very breathing+positivity= painless birth, with no mentions of normal variation.
Once my contractions started, we dutifully started timing them on the contraction timer developed by that very same hypnobirthing company.
Pretty quickly the App told us that I was in active labour and we should head to the hospital, ignoring the internal instincts that were telling us that I was coping fine, my husband was terrified that I would give birth in the car, so we headed into the hospital.
At no point had anyone mentioned that not all labours follow the 'stages of labour', not everyone gets contractions that are 3 in 10 minutes, and not all contractions are regular, or consistent in length.
So when we didn't fit the mold, when my contractions were 3 in 10 but I was not in active labour (3cm dilated when I went into the hospital) we started to unravel.
Sure that we must be in active labour we decided to stay in the hospital, as things started to ramp up, I started to feel pain EVEN THOUGH we were using all the techniques we had diligently practiced.
Because we felt more and more panicked by the pain, when my waters broke and there was meconium in them we did not think to challenge the fact that we were put on the CTG, and then told a fetal scalp electrode was needed. This action from the medical staff reinforced our feelings something MUST be wrong because of the pain. We didn't know that we had just entered a cascade of interventions, we handed over control, panicked and afraid, and hypnobirthing went out the window as I suffered through hours of coached pushing, a postpartum bleed, and a retained placenta.
Toxic positivity had pushed us into the fear-tension-pain cycle, the very thing hypnobirthing tries to avoid.
We know now that our expectations of the 'sensations' of birth and the standardized teaching of the 'stages' of birth had set us up to fail.
We both had done the very superficial work of doing our hypnobirthing homework, without doing the deep work of challenging our preconceptions of birth as a medical event rather than a physiological one.
We felt we had studied so we would ace the test.
When things didn't go the way we were led to believe they would, we panicked, which caused tension and pain to increase in a never-ending spiral.
We didn't have the mental stamina or the knowledge to choose to step away from the cascade of interventions that followed.
And I never submitted my birth story to the Facebook group, I felt it wouldn't be accepted, I felt I had failed.
A more realistic second birth - empowering hypnobirthing
The second time around I recognised that I had been underprepared.
I used my research brain and social media to understand the real story behind maternity care in the UK, the current state of the NHS, and the lack of support for physiological birth.
I found another online hypnobirthing course, this time steeped in 'realness' and empowerment rather than positivity above all else.
Let me tell you I walked into that birth a different person and walked out of it a different person again.
An empowering prepared birth changed me for the better and showed me the difference between using a hypnobirthing course superficially to tick off birth preparation and doing the required internal work.
The Smart Doula - Hypnobirthing Essentials
Now I KNOW that since 2019 there has been a wealth of great pre-recorded online hypnobirthing courses out there, I have a few I regularly recommend to people I work with who want a full hypnobirthing course.
I also know that there are great live, face-to-face group or individual courses out there as well. If you want to do a face-to-face course in your local area I recommend you have a call or meet up with the instructor before committing to ensure their style of teaching fits with your needs.
But once I began working with families as their Virtual Doula I saw an opportunity to be able to utilise that relationship to deliver a hypnobirthing essentials course that is tailored to their individual needs.
My hypnobirthing essentials course provides enough information for you to identify the areas in which you need to do your research and self-work.
It provides information about birth rights and combines traditional teachings about 'the stages of labour' with more representative variations of normal that can occur in physiological birth.
It covers breathing, relaxation and visualization techniques, but encourages you to find what works for you rather than a one size fits all approach.
It teaches methods to help you step out of the fear-tension-pain cycle, should you find yourself trapped there.
I offer this as an add-on for my Virtual Doula families, but also as a stand alone course, you can find more information on it below:
Hypnobirthing is a fantastic tool to have in pregnancy and birth, but it is not a 'sticking plaster' for deeper work that needs to be addressed.
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