Horror birth stories – why you need to stop listening
As soon as you fall pregnant, EVERYONE wants to tell you their horror birth stories. You’ll hear about how excruciating this was…. How scary it was when… And maybe even how mortifying it was when …
But honestly, the best thing you can do is not listen.
As with most things in life, the way you BELIEVE something will happen is the way that it usually does. If you expect the worst, your beliefs are often confirmed. I’m talking about why you need to stop listening to the horror stories in today’s video.
The way that you think about birth and how you expect it to be is going to have a big impact on your experience.
If you imagine birth is going to be a painful horrible experience, you are actually creating that reality for yourself.
Many women say things like painful, scary, messy, hard… Some even say things like agony, traumatic and horrible.
Their ideas about birth have often been shaped by how birth is portrayed in movies and tv shows, through negative stories they’ve heard from their friends and family, or from their own negative experiences with birth.
If this is what you believe birth will be like – you’ll go into your own experience feeling afraid. FEAR = TENSION = PAIN
When the body is feeling fear it tenses and sends the blood and energy away from the reproductive system to the legs and arms instead (the survival systems to run or fight).
This automatically makes birth more painful (your body tightens around your baby instead of relaxing and releasing) and your uterus has to work harder without the blood and energy it needs to birth your baby.
Bottom line. If you’re feeling afraid of birth or have any fears at all around the experience (which is COMPLETELY NORMAL by the way. It came up for me again during the birth of my third son, even though I’d had a beautiful experience with my second) you need to do some work to release the fear and learn how to relax your body and work with it during labour and birth.
Instead, surround yourself with positive stories. Visualise the birth you do want and take the time to educate yourself on how your body works during labour and birth to feel empowered going into this intense experience.
My first experience of birth wasn’t the greatest, but my second and third were the most empowering experiences of my life. I share all the tools that helped me in my birth education course ‘Yoga Wisdom for birth’. It includes everything you need to educate yourself on how your body works and know how to work with it and the medical system. You can access the whole course via my Online Yoga Circle with a free 30 day trial. The Online Yoga Circle is also full of yoga classes for all stages of pregnancy.