This week Richard & Fiona have a returning guest, Sharon Mustard, to talk with them about how our psychology can easily get in the way of a better birthing experience.
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This week Richard & Fiona have a returning guest, Sharon Mustard, to talk with them about how our psychology can easily get in the way of a better birthing experience.
Links
Submit a question
The Richard Nicholls Podcast
The Brookhouse Hypnotherapy Group YouTube Channel
Richard's Social Media Links
Twitter Instagram Facebook Youtube TikTok Threads
Support Richard on Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/richardnicholls
Yippee ki yay, Muddy Funsters! What do you know? It's yet another episode of Therapy Natters, the weekly podcast all about therapy, mental health, and personal development, presented by a couple of psychotherapists who are happy to brave the cold of public scrutiny, but not the cold of a December morning. How you doing, Fiona? Multiple layers on this morning?
Fiona:Absolutely. It is a little bit chilly, isn't it?
Richard:It is. Now when this comes out it'll be a couple of days after Christmas. Maybe it will have warmed up then. But today? Oh, minus two overnight I think it was here.
Fiona:Yes, it usually does warm up at Christmas so that we just have a wet and bleh sort of Christmas,
Richard:it's strange how just a couple of hundred miles can make such a difference. This weird little spot in the Atlantic that you go up the north And it drops six degrees, and you come down into the south, and you've got an extra six degrees compared to us in the Midlands. Well, that's where I am, anyway. We've got a guest today, Sharon, who didn't grow up round here, you grew up more northern. Was it colder there?
Sharon:Yep, yep. Colder, wetter, and it gets dark half an hour earlier at this time of the year. So, just imagine another part of the UK, like as you were talking about North and South and we're relatively North, but we're also a bit West in, in Northern Ireland, and it gets darker half an hour earlier.
Richard:We don't have a flat earth, after all, but it's amazing what people believe when they hear it enough times. I've introduced the guest already, sorry Fiona, that's normally your job.
Fiona:that's absolutely fine. Yes, we have Sharon, who's our first returning guest.
Sharon:Ooh! Privileged!
Fiona:We have invited Sharon back who talked with us before on the early days of parenting but this time got a different topic. We're going to be talking about childbirth and Sharon has her own brand of using hypnosis for childbirth called EasiBirthing. Hello Sharon, nice to see you. And would you like to introduce us to this method and why people might be interested?
Sharon:Oh, absolutely. Well, easy birthing has been my passion. Funny enough, with Richard mentioning Northern Ireland ever since I was a tiny child and growing up on a pig farm whereby I was, shall we say exposed to birth in the non human form from a very early age. They used to find me at age three away from my bed and they learned not to panic because I would often be with a sow who was having a piglet, well, I said a piglet, so they didn't just stop at one. And my passion actually grew from there. What's really interesting about that moving into the easy birthing method, which started in a very rudimentary form 27 years ago when I first became a hypnotherapist and psychotherapist. That we knew that it is very easy to hinder what our body knows what to do. So hypnobirthing is more about not hindering rather than helping. And of course, conversely. You, you help as well. So it's about building confidence that your baby and your body can do this because your baby is an active participant in birth. Lots of people think everything happens to the baby and it's got no active part at all and that is not true. So it's building that confidence in your baby and your body and the whole process of that. It's very much having that trust that you've got the right support around you. Both from a personal level, birth partner being the obvious one there but also from the professionals around you. And also it's building up what ends up being a very complex toolbox because we want everyone to be able to, to adjust really to any eventuality in hypnobirthing. So the third thing that hypnobirthing and particularly the easy birthing method is building a toolbox for all of those circumstances, including not going according to plan, by using that kind of non thinking the cognitive mind and the worries that can become as part of that not interfering with what's going on. So, that's really what easy birthing is about and I've also got rather a large family in Northern Ireland, and so birth has kind of been around me, and I've always seen it as something that we as humans just do in the same way as anyone in, or anything in the animal kingdom.
Richard:Well, there's been studies that showed there's a there's a correlation between the the ease of the birth. The experience, a more pleasant or easier experience for parents and child in the farming community compared to the non farming community. Simply because they've got a belief early on that well this is quite a natural and relatively easy process and isn't something to worry about and that belief like I was saying earlier on trying to shoehorn in the the topic of conversation. If you hear that the world is flat enough times, you believe that it is, until someone shows you evidence that it's not. But we still hear about people who believe that the earth is flat, despite the evidence, because nobody likes to think that they've been wrong all their life. So, to say to a 28 year old woman, oh, you've been wrong all your life about How worried you need to be about being pregnant and giving birth. Well, something's got to shift there. Either I've got to be strong enough to admit that I was wrong, or you're wrong. And actually I'm right, and no, I should be absolutely worried about this, because it is actually a difficult process and it is going to be super painful and it is going to be dangerous and all the fears and worries and things, all of a 20 year plus belief that you've heard on a,
Fiona:Well,
Richard:necessarily a daily basis, but regularly.
Fiona:I was going to say, our society really does not help with this. The majority of births you ever see on TV in soap operas or there was a baby being born on Only Fools and Horses I
Richard:I was literally about to say that. That popped into my mind, and she was screaming at him. Get away from me, Del! I
Fiona:it's always portrayed the same as being horrendously painful and unpleasant, because that's drama. it seems to be that The worse your birth as a mother, the more kudos you get in the toddler groups and so on. And if you have a really good time, you get looked down upon. So, it's, it's, it's a bit backwards. And,
Richard:Hmm.
Fiona:so, this perpetuates this belief that you're talking about, that it's going to be terrible. And, of course, if you believe it's going to be terrible. It will be. Combined with the things like you don't know what's happening don't understand the process. I mean, I, I remember with my second child I had a, a tape because he's going to be 30 very soon so it's a long time ago. And it was in the time of tapes and I had a tape which was hypnosis for childbirth and all this thing. did was it said you will be prepared. Well, I wasn't. I said it's my second, but my first was born by a caesarean, emergency caesarean, so I hadn't really done it before. So I wasn't prepared. So telling me that you're prepared, that just didn't help. We need to understand what's going on so that we can trust the body. so when we use the easy birthing method and really sort of hand it over to the birthing body to do what it needs to do and stop thinking, but you have to have the trust in order to be able to do it.
Sharon:Yeah, you do, you do. And, and the knowledge as, as well. It's interesting you talking about knowledge and beliefs both Richard and Fiona there were talking on that and we absolutely know that that self fulfilling prophecy of expecting it to be long and difficult and painful and all of the things that that media portrayal. Creates can you know, lengthen labor can increase the chances of complications. I mean, the clinical evidence in this area of hypnosis is, is really quite substantial. There is a wealth of evidence out there about, the benefits. And of course we've got very Distinct measurable outcomes here in, in terms of being able to say, okay, so what's hypno birthing mum that has been fully prepared? And I agree with you, Fiona, it's about now having the, the knowledge as well. And we don't just teach toolbox of hypnosis, it's also about that knowledge as to what's happening in your body, because if you don't have the confidence in that, then you're gonna come in with all of the beliefs no matter how wrong or misguided they might be and, you know, that self fulfilling, prophecy kicks in definitely. You have then the ability to develop a way of thinking about your body and believing in that natural process that you can then go along with it. So, of course, there are thinking in terms of being able to reframe some of those negative beliefs, but it's about thinking, definitely not getting in the way and letting it happen. And we called our method, easy birthing I mean, that name came into fruition just over 17 years ago now and it's a registered trademark, which is a real confidence as well for clients that are actually using easy birthing practitioners that they know that they've been fully qualified and are also hypnotherapists, so they're able to use a very wide range of, of toolbox. But we called it easy birthing, not to say birth is always easy, and there's never a complication. There's never a difficulty at all. What we're actually saying is, if you believe it's difficult, Then you are vastly increasing the chances of that happening. Yeah. We know, for example there are many, but one of my favorite statistics from our clinical evidence is that birth on average with a hypnobirthing mum is 3. 23 hours shorter. This is for a first time mum, by the way than a woman not using hypnobirthing. Yeah,
Richard:hours.
Sharon:3. 23. Workout 0. 23 of an hour. I've never tried to work it out, but there we go. Yeah, over three hours.
Richard:That's a lot you could do in those three hours.
Sharon:There's a lot you could do, like getting to know your new baby.
Fiona:time with your new
Richard:Yeah,
Sharon:yeah.
Richard:yeah.
Fiona:two other real benefits that I've perceived and, you know, there was part of me that once I had trained in this, that I wanted to have another baby, just so I could do it. But it's not really a good motivation to create a new human being, so I didn't do that. But there are two other really good benefits that I can see of, of this. One it's probably something that most people wouldn't really think about, but it gives the birth partner actually a role, birth partners can be anybody. But I suppose the majority of birth partners are the baby's father and we all know and again it's something that we see in TV programs and what's that program about birth on The TV.
Sharon:yeah,
Fiona:Yeah. On, on that, you often see the, the, the fathers, just use that term for now, that, that they are at a loose end and they don't know what to do, and they're a bit lost. When they have a particular role, which is to be the conscious mind of the couple, so that really adds something for them that they know what they need to do and if the mother trusts them to do that, again, that, helps her to not think because she knows somebody else is doing it. And the other real benefit is the effect on the baby. Babies who have been born using hypnobirthing are typically much more relaxed, much calmer. I remember one client that I worked with with this. The midwives actually called the doctors in to say there's something wrong with this baby because it was too calm. They just didn't, didn't recognize that the baby can be this, calm. There was nothing wrong with it. It was just a happy baby. I Also went to a conference in the States where there was a mother with a one week old baby in the conference room. The baby was due to be born about two weeks after the conference and had arrived early. But she was able to attend this conference because the baby was so calm. It would wake up, say hello, I'm hungry. Not exactly, but it would make a noise to indicate such a thing and. It would be fed, and cuddled, and have a little natter with mum, and go back to sleep. And, well, I don't know, but certainly my kids, you couldn't have taken them into a conference when they were newborn babies.
Sharon:Mhm. Mhm.
Richard:A lot of people talk about anecdotal evidence rather than something properly researched and studied. This has been properly researched and studied. Yes, you did. That was an anecdote. That was anecdotal research. I know somebody who
Fiona:and that's fine.
Richard:it is when you talk about the good stuff, but how many times do the anecdotes really only focus on the difficulties? And The APGAR scores, as they're called, of babies, it has, this has been researched for decades and decades and decades and decades, that mums that have been practicing these sorts of techniques, that have learned how to soften their body and their mind, learned how to be a bit more relaxed, those babies have better APGAR scores. I forget exactly what goes through the APGAR scoring, but because there's quite a few different things about startling the baby and see if it responds and things like that and
Sharon:that's right, they're, they're kind of five different areas in APGAR,
Richard:I forget. I've got them written down somewhere from when I did a hypnosis for childbirth course. But it fascinated me looking at all the studies, because it's undeniable. But it doesn't matter sometimes whether something's undeniable that That this is a, that this is real, this is genuine, this is a genuine effect, unless you really dig deep into your ancient lifelong beliefs and challenge them.
Fiona:for any therapists who are listening to this, sometimes I hear that therapists can get a little bit burnt out by all the negativity of their clients. You know, they come along with, problem based stuff and some really awful traumatic experiences and so on can be quite difficult. If you add easy birthing into your practice, you have the opposite. You've got real highs. It's, it's just, I mean, I said to Richard just before you, you came on. Sharon, that's such a lovely topic to talk about. It's so positive you are helping clients to make a really important and pleasurable, positive experience better. So that's, that's a wonderful thing.
Sharon:Yeah,
Fiona:Just makes me smile and, and feel all warm all over just the idea of it. Because babies are lovely things, and yeah.
Richard:Hmm.
Sharon:They definitely are. And on, on the dad front, because I know there was a a talk there about most birth partners are fathers, definitely. Of course, it could be mothers in a single sex relationship, et cetera. But if we use fathers as I know we all know that, but if we use fathers as, the kind of the general term, if you like, there That with Dads to be actually using hypnosis, not only are they an advocate and someone safe within the room so that there's a lot to the woman's brain as well as to her nervous system that she is safe. So they're an anchor in the room, a familiar anchor in the room to help that process. But we know that the other parent, the non birthing parent using hypnobirthing. That they are also producing oxytocin which will help with bonding, with one of its nicknames, it's got two, but one of its nicknames as the most important hormone in, in birth and the progress of the process of birth, is The Love Hormone, as it's nickname, and so it's there in times of intimacy, even if you're hugging your friend you know, right through to sexual intimacy, but also the intimacy of bonding with your baby. And so that bridge to parenthood being birth. You know, you, you don't give birth to a baby by, via whatever mode of delivery and they say, okay, we'll give you a week to get used to it. We'll take your baby away. You know, your baby is yours to look after and they are asking to be looked after straight away. So with new parents, you're kind of thrown in at the deep end, if you like in a huge new phase of your life. And so the more that that bonding hormone can be part of the non birthing parent and their profile as well, that can only be a very, very good thing. And we find that that adjustment period postnatally is much easier with parents doing hypnobirthing as well.
Richard:Can you explain a little bit for our listeners about that process, because there's still a lot of people out there who don't fully understand what hypnosis even is. They hear the word hypnosis and they do still think of the running around on stage pretending that you're a chicken sort of amateur dramatic stuff, which has its place. Hypnosis is quite good at helping people feel a little bit more calm and relaxed, so the stage is a perfect place to show off if you feel the urge. But it's not the hypnosis that makes people act like chickens, it's being in front of an audience and everybody looking at you that makes you do that, and you think, I might as well just play along. But in the consulting room, in the therapy world, it's obviously very, very different. But What can people learn through hypnosis that can actually help them give birth?
Sharon:Okay. So, different elements. So, you were talking there about relaxation and being calm. One of the most fundamental things that we're teaching is what we call the ideal mental state within birth, which is calm, confident, and in control. So with those three elements, what we're actually doing is allowing someone to be in centre stage, which may seem silly when you're the birthing woman, that of course you're central stage, but very often people don't feel supported and empowered and in control. So that calm, confident, and in control, we kind of anchor everything else around. We do teach what we call anchors which is both from a mental anchor point of view to kind of get you back to that ideal mental state. It's also about facilitating the most ideal hormonal environment for birth. But we're also teaching discomfort management techniques. The reason I'm using that word discomfort is that pain is not an inevitable part of childbirth. And again, many people believe that it is. We don't know what each woman's experience is going to be. And we don't know what each woman's going to experience is going to be with each baby, you know, because that in itself could be different. So along that continuum, if you like, from entirely comfortable to to painful, there are a lot of gradients, if you like, along that way. And we know that the more tense, the more fearful someone is the more likely they are to be further towards that painful end, then they would need to be, if you like, within that experience, whatever their experience are. But because we're all hypnotherapists, what we're also able to do is to teach some pretty hardcore pain management techniques as well. All right, but we call it discomfort management because if you feed any of those salient words like pain into your subconscious, of course, they will start to look up the library in there. It's a bit like doing a Google search and all of the ones that say that, you know, This is going to mean that you're going to die. You know, all of the threat stuff is going to come up first rather than the, the reassuring stuff. So this is a problem if you put a salient and a negative word. I mean, many people don't think pain is a positive word. There might be exceptions, but unlikely. So that negativity is already there and you're already thinking about the time you've broken your leg, which, you know, was very painful or the time that this happened. So again, your anxiety and your fear of going up and up and up. So we're teaching preventative discomfort management as well as reactive discomfort management.
Fiona:There are other words as well, aren't there, that are linked to childbirth that are not helpful, like calling it labour, which, you know, labour! That's work. And if you, if you do, to use that phrase again, hand it over to your birthing body, you're not working. You're not working. It's happening within you. It's not happening to you, it's just happening. So, labour doesn't help. And contraction, as well, is a word that sounds nasty. It sounds like it's got a pain element in it, whereas do you use the word surge? That's the, the Mickey Mongan's the hypnobirthing from America, that's where I got the word surge from. If you think of it as a surge, that describes the process of what is typically known as a contraction so much better, and it takes away the negativity from it.
Sharon:there are studies about this. That language in birth, both from our own internal language, as well as midwives as well as our birth partner, of course, as well, has a huge impact on the process of birth, or certainly can do. And so words that we use are very important. We, over the years, have kind of morphed it a little that we don't ban words because the problem with kind of banning words altogether, like contractions or labour, for example although I completely agree with you, Fiona so we do use the term surges we do use the term birthing your baby, you know, we do use all of those terms, but we're also aware that terms like labour and contractions are in the general public, they're not just in the, the profession. So what we don't want to do is to create a rift, if you like, or a rupture between the relationship between the woman and her birth partner. And I know, and Mickey Mongan method in the early days, I don't think they do it now used to go in with a list of saying, don't say these words to me. Which of course immediately is going to put you on a, okay, I'm not sure if I want to be supporting this woman, you know, as a birth partner, usually because of their, their own fears. So we've kind of found a way of both maximizing and optimizing, language use whilst also making sure that the primary focus is on that relationship and then feeling safe within that. Yeah. If that
Fiona:That makes that makes a lot of sense.
Richard:I'm remembering so many stories that people have talked to me about, about the sex education classes at school when they were teenagers, and about how in order to try and prevent teenage pregnancies, people would come into the school and start talking about how horrific pregnancy is, how horrific labour is, as a preventative, as a contraception, really. And, As we all know, the younger you are, the easier it is to learn something, and the more emotional you are, the easier it is to learn something. So if you're a 14 year old who's terrified, guess what? You're gonna soak it all up like a Sponge! And believe it for the rest of your life, and even if then there's challenges to that belief, your brain still says, Yeah, but I know the truth! Diluting that down is um, quite a lot of work, but hey, you've got weeks. It's not as if babies just happen. You've got a fair few months notice, really. When do you
Fiona:too long when you're, when you're, when you're desperate for the baby to arrive.
Richard:Sharon, when do you suggest that people start learning these techniques?
Sharon:so, in most cases, we would say from about 24 to 30 weeks during the gestation period of pregnancy. And that in itself is a balance because we want women to have enough time to be able to practice. We all, we always say you want to be familiar to the techniques. Almost to the point that you're bored with them, you know, you don't even have to think about what you're doing. You kind of, you know it so well. But we also don't want to go too close to the birth. For a start, babies can be born early 37 weeks in the UK. And interestingly, this. changes when we go just across the channel to, to France in the UK, 37 weeks is considered full term. So in other words, the baby's organs are considered fully developed, including their lungs, which is the last organ to develop. So they're ready for breathing basically independently. So if a baby's born from 37 weeks onwards, they may be born before the 40 weeks estimated due date. But that they're not considered premature. So we want to make sure that all of the hypnobirthing classes or the entire course is actually done way before that. But also, babies can be premature, so we want to make sure that women that are faced with the circumstance of a baby being born before 37 weeks also has the ability to do that. What we would say though, there's one caveat to starting between 24 and 30 weeks, is that if a woman has tokophobia or a severe or extreme fear of birth. Then not to kind of wait because we'd much rather be working with that woman early on. And to be honest, it may be more than the kind of the standard hypnobirthing training. In fact,
Richard:Well, I would suggest working on, if you're from the client's perspective, working on that before conception, to be honest.
Sharon:Wouldn't that be lovely?
Richard:As soon as you notice that you've got this severe reaction to, to thinking about being pregnant, that could, that could even interrupt your sex life. That could spoil so much. No, get that sorted as young as you can, you know. Nip that in the bud.
Fiona:Absolutely. But also just to take it away from the, the, the extremes somebody who's learning hypnobirthing, easy birthing will benefit during the pregnancy because they will be able to relax more being pregnant and enjoy that process more because if it takes away the stress, the fear, that's great, but Just literally being able to chill out and, and relax more. That's just such a benefit. It just helps in every area, doesn't it?
Sharon:It does. I agree. Yeah. and, Rich is quite right that if, if someone has a severe fear even before they're pregnant, I said that would be nice, that, unfortunately, unless someone is wanting to get pregnant because very often with tokophobia, as you say, it, it interferes with so much including your, your relationship that maybe the avoidance of even thinking about getting pregnant means that someone doesn't feel they can come to a therapist to do anything about it. But certainly when you're pregnant right from the beginning, especially if there are fears there then working early on with the therapist, there are lots and lots of one to one things we can do even outside of the easy birthing program that can be really beneficial early on.
Richard:Excellent stuff. Wonderful.
Sharon:SO just a, a couple of things that is important to say, hypnobirthing is not just for a vaginal birth or the intention, if you like, of a vaginal birth within a vaginal birth program of hypnobirthing, we would also be teaching people what to do if circumstances change and there is an intervention, including the potential of a surgical birth through a c section, we would teach tools to be able to adjust to that. And one of those is about decision making tools and choice making tools so that they still feel completely empowered, even if something outside of their control is, is happening with the best mental state in the world so that they continue to feel empowered. But also we do hypnobirthing for planned or sometimes known as elective c sections. So in other words, For whatever reason the choice is not to go for a vaginal birth at all. It might be a medical reason, it may be a personal reason, whatever. But we work with planned and elective c sections, because a lot of people still see hypnobirthing where it was in the early days, that unless you're actually intending to have a vaginal birth, there's no point in doing hypnobirthing, and that is not the case. Not the case.
Fiona:For all the reasons that we've already discussed as the, the benefits to you, the baby, etc, etc.
Sharon:Yeah.
Fiona:applies.
Sharon:Breastfeeding,
Fiona:Yes. Oh, actually breastfeeding is something that we haven't discussed and it hadn't popped into my mind during this, but that's something where hypnosis can be really helpful because for anybody who hasn't had a baby, they probably think that babies just know how to do it, and they don't, and the mother doesn't, and the baby doesn't, and they have to learn together. And there can be all sorts of blocks there. So hypnosis can be really useful for that process of learning to
Sharon:it's something that we teach for all of our hypnobirthing mums, whether it's plan C section or whether it's as most of our hypnobirthing mums are going for, for vaginal birth that we will teach breastfeeding techniques. And it's right back to the 1960s that there are clinical studies on hypnosis, being able to both promote lactation. So the production of milk but also to suppress it. And that's really important because we teach those techniques, even if again, for whatever reason a mum has decided she doesn't want to breastfeed. Or she's had a breast reduction, for example, and therefore can't breastfeed. Yeah. So, we can teach that in a I won't go through the technique, but we can teach that in reverse to actually suppress lactation as well.
Richard:Amazing stuff. Well, everybody I suppose we need to wrap up and finish this off for another week.
Fiona:we do.
Richard:Sharon, we will put your contact details into the show notes so if anybody wants to look up you and EasiBirthing, they know exactly what to do, so go and have a look have a peruse around Sharon's EasiBirthing website, and spread the word, because this is definitely something that we can all benefit from, whether we're being born because of this? Because you could be, this could be, this is going to sit on the internet for decades. This is 20 years in the future. There's going to be babies that could well be listening to this that are now 20 ish years old and go, oh wow, that's where my mum got that thing from. You never know, you never know. Right, anything to do, anything to say before we disappear, Fiona?
Fiona:No, just that I've enjoyed, uh, nattering with you, Sharon, as always, and thank you very much. And you as well, Richard. yeah, yeah. yeah.
Richard:Ho ho Merry Christmas. Speak to you next week, everybody. Take care, folks. Bye!
Fiona:Bye.
Sharon:Bye.