What was it like to give birth for the first time?

The birth of your first baby will stay with you forever and hypnobirthing can ensure that this memory is a positive one, full of joy!

It doesn’t matter whether your first birth was a few weeks ago, or many, many years ago - you will remember it with such a clarity that it could have been yesterday! The memory has the same intensity as the birth itself.

Sadly, my story of my first (and only) birth isn’t that great. I knew very little about labour and birth, despite going to my antenatal classes regularly. When it came to the birth itself, I was excited and looking forward to meeting my baby but I was also scared witless! Because of this, I was already anxious when I arrived at the maternity ward and this was made worse by my midwife, who was the midwife from hell! She ignored everything that was on my birth preferences list, strapped me to a bed (for no other reason than it suited her). She scared the shit out of me when she told me I was having a breach birth, when a few hours earlier I’d been told baby’s head was fully engaged, and told me to shut up as I was making too much noise - this, after she’d completely freaked me out with her attitude and actions.

Now, I know that 99.5% of midwives are not like that but this one was. And because of all this, my one and only labour and birth was bloody awful! I remember that birth as if it had only just happened. I remember exactly how I felt at the time. I also remember how I felt the minute my baby was born and I held her - the joy at hearing that I’d had a daughter (I didn’t know the sex of my baby until she was born) and the absolute love I felt the moment I set eyes on her. All of this helped to mitigate the shit labour but I remember it all. And this was 30 years ago!

I teach hypnobirthing because I don’t want other women to go through what I went through. I acknowledge that some women have it even worse than I did, but that’s not the point. The point is that birth shouldn’t be a shit show - it should be positive and joyful and something you look back on 30 years later and think ‘wasn’t that fantastic!’. I know my daughter feels like that about the birth of her first child - I’ve heard her talk about how awesome it was and I also had the privilege of being at the birth so I saw how she managed her labour because of her hypnobirthing experience.

When you look back at the birth of your first baby, the final steps to you becoming a mother, you want to look back at it with affection. Hypnobirthing will change the way you approach birth, it will change your mindset so that, whatever happens during the birth, you will know that you had control over the decisions that you made.

Using visualisations, affirmations, self-hypnosis, breathing and NLP, you can have the birth that you look back on positively - you can’t control the birth but you can control how you approach it and how you feel about it.

Hypnobirthing is an evidence-based antenatal education programme. Give me a call if you’d like to know more or email me to book in a call!