Fear of childbirth
An interview with Karen Rothstein of Sacramento Hypnobirthing
This video is available on Instagram here.
Fear
Sometimes moms will think they have fear, and what they really have is just a little bit of worry and a little bit of anxiety. This (technology changes going Live on Instagram) was fear for me. My heart started racing; I started getting a little sweaty. I was getting ready to go into that fight or flight. And when you said, "Do you want to go later?" I was almost gonna go, "Yeah, that sounds like a really good idea." Oh, boy, that is just a perfect, perfect example of what real fear is for me--just having that visceral reaction.
A lot of women come to hypnobirthing because they are referred by their doula or their physician because they have fear. I don't get a lot of what they call primary fear people--people with tokophobia--that's really a fear of childbirth--because usually those people don't get pregnant.
Distinguishing between worry, anxiety, and real fear
But what I do get is a lot of secondary fear people, and those are people that they may have had a birth trauma, or maybe they lost a pregnancy, and they have high anxiety, and they have real worries that this time it's going to be just a replay of what happened last time, so they get referred to us. We don't diagnose because we're not therapists or educators, but we need to do an assessment and see if they have worry, if they have anxiety, or if possibly they have real fear. When it comes down to real fear, I would say about 70-75% of women have real worry and anxiety.
Worry
It's important to make a distinction, because a worry is something you can do something about. So here's an example of a worry. Your sister-in-law gives you her used car seat, and she paid a lot of money for it, but you're just not quite sure it is safe for your baby. You end up doing a lot of worrying about it, and you have double worry right?
If you get a new car seat. You might risk offending.
If you don't get a new car seat, then every time you put your baby in that car seat, you're gonna have a little bit of angst.
A worry is something that you can do something about. You can bite the bullet. Tell her "thank you very much", and get the car seat that makes you feel comfortable. In the long run, that is going to be far healthier than worrying every time you have to put that baby in the car seat.
Anxieties
The next thing we get are anxieties. Anxieties usually come up somewhere in pregnancy and it's most likely when you go in for one of those checkups and your doctor, or maybe the physician's assistant, or the nurse says something that you just really don't understand, but you're already a little anxious, or you have that white coat anxiety. You don't have a lot of resources in that moment to make decisions in the executive brain, so you don't ask for clarification. You go away from the room, and what happens to you? You just keep running the conversation over and over and over in your head. So by the time you get to me and you've been running that conversation for a while, it takes a little bit of practice to calm that nervous system down. So that's why we think, no matter how you're going to birth, one of the best things you can do is give yourself hypnobirthing education. Together, we start from the beginning, with little mini exercises that help you to calm your nervous system. I mean just breathing alone—that's what I was forgetting to do when I was trying to get on here. If I only stopped to calm my breath, I would have been able to change my whole physiology. But, you know, I didn't do that. Because all of that blood was going away from my brain. And it was getting ready to help me take flight.
Scary birth stories and what Lara calls “mood spread”
So Lara, have you ever sat in a scary movie and been really afraid? That’s what we call a movie trance. Even though you knew that wasn’t real, you still had that reaction, right? Where you started breathing a little heavier, perhaps your heart started beating faster. The subconscious mind doesn't know the difference between what's real and imagined. Anxiety is really worrying on steroids. So one of the things that happens when you have anxiety is that you keep replaying it in your mind, over and over and over gain. And pretty soon your subconscious mind takes it as the truth. So you can have little fear or little worries stacking up, and then what it turns into is what I call scary fear. So even if you're not particularly fearful of birthing itself. You can start running your fear trance. That takes the whole joy out of pregnancy. And well meaning friends, when you say that you’re going to do hypnobirthing or that you’re going to have a natural birth, they have to give you their advice. They go on to share their scary story, and that causes fear in you. Or you attend a reveal party and you’re obviously pregnant. And so somebody strikes up a conversation with you, and then before you know it everybody is sharing their scary birth stories. The people who are saying “I had the best birth experience…” those people usually remain silent.
What can we do?
Breathing
So what we can do first thing is to harness our breath. Any time you take a deep breath in and you take a longer breath out, you’re going to be calming your Vegas nerve. We ask women to take a deep breath in to the count of four, have a pause, and then slowly let it out to the count of eight. Just a few breaths like that—as short as 30 seconds, 45 seconds—and you can change your whole physiology, calm your nervous system down. And you can go about your business. Sometimes you can come up with something brilliant to say. Blood has not drained from you head, and you’ve stayed off the fight or flight treadmill.
Counting breaths
Lara: It gets me thinking about what works. One of the things that worked well for me in labor was that my husband would hold up a certain number of fingers and I had to take that number of breaths.
That's just really excellent because what that's doing is it's asking you to focus. You're changing your thought pattern as you focus on that and then you have to execute a task, which highlights a different part of the brain. And although women like to think that we can hold two thoughts at once, we really can’t. So that helps you to get down off that platform of fear and have your own focus, which is really important.
Stroking & touch
And another thing that we teach that's really easy for people to do is to just stroke yourself softly, allowing yourself to feel this type of movement. It's really nice when your birthing companion does it but if they haven't gone into the appointment with you or if they're not standing there when somebody is telling you a scary birth story. Research shows that stroking your skin will do the same thing as taking those calm breaths. It soothes the nervous system. So just when I'm doing that I just kind of go into a light trance.
Yawning
The other thing that works is yawning and stretching out, because those are things that you do when you’re relaxed. We are changing the physiology of the body. So if you force them, then you’re going to go into that relaxation response.
Breath breaks
We are so stressed as women. We have busy careers. At the time that we're getting pregnant, it's usually the time that many of us are trying to climb up that corporate ladder. Are we going to say no? No. So we have the stress of the looming deadlines, the stress of all of the hormones changing in our body, and we just don't take time to think "I deserve some self love, I deserve some relaxation." So that's one of the things that we stress in hypnobirthing is that every day you need to take breath breaks--five breath breaks a day where you are mindfully breathing. And then when you come home, you want to practice your self hypnosis, because that's gonna put you in that relaxation, what we call the healing room. Just allow yourself to be in that bliss state. And the more you practice going into that state, the easier it will be to get in that state, and the more natural it will feel. Right now our stress state feels natural. In fact, many of us don't know who we are without stress.
Get started
The next Sacramento Hypnobirthing class starts Monday, October 4, 2021. There are still two slots left. I keep the class size small, because some things translate better when you’re in person. I want to give people an opportunity on a Saturday to get together and do some in person learning, but we want to be COVID cautious too.
