Dream Birth Testimonials

Parent Testimonials

My HypnoBirth Story.

When I fell pregnant with my first son, I assumed all I’d need to know about pregnancy and birth I’d be told by my midwives, including the best way to give birth. I wanted to have a natural birth, drug free that was the best for my baby and just ‘hoped’ I’d be able to ‘cope’. The reality was an induced delivery due to being ‘overdue’ resulting in a spiral of intervention including an epidural, a forceps delivery, a large pph and a pressure sore due to lack of care after the epidural that took several weeks to heal after the birth. My son was born at 42 weeks + 2 days and I walked away completely distrustful of the hospital and feeling I’d ‘failed’ my son in his first ever experience of the world. Most of all I felt that there must be a better way to give birth.

When I met Ant and she told me about the amazing birth she had with Emily, I knew that was exactly what birth should be like and I knew that was how I wanted it to be next time for me! When I found out I was pregnant with my second child I straight away booked my HypnobBirthing course with her. I loved the course, everything in it made so much sense to me and I loved doing my practice every night, it was great to make time every day to just relax and my pregnancy went so much better this time round, even with a very active 2yr old to look after! Through the course, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted out of the birth this time, how I wanted it to go where I wanted it to be. I knew I didn’t want to be induced, I wanted it in water, I didn’t want it to be in the hospital again and I knew I wanted it to be something that had the focus as the baby and our family rather than what ‘could/would’ go wrong and how they’d intervene. I chose to have a homebirth because it was the furthest I could get from the hospital, it was the only way I could guarantee a birth pool would be available and it was the best way to minimise disruption to our eldest son.

As my eldest was ‘late’ I expected my second would probably be born past his ‘due date’ too so when I reached 41 weeks in my pregnancy I agreed to a stretch and sweep to see if I could avoid the pressure of an induction and ‘get things going’. It was a Friday afternoon appointment and after having it done, I had niggling period-like cramps for the rest of the afternoon. They disappeared during the early evening while putting our son to bed, started up a little around 10pm but then tailed off after going to bed. On Saturday morning we went for a walk to the park to try and kick things off again and eventually after lunch the niggling came back. They were really short, quite close together and more like cramping but each time I visualised my cervix opening, as I’d been taught. I found that if I carried on with my day I didn’t even notice them, so I went upstairs to read my book and to focus on them as I didn’t want them to go away! Eventually, when it got to the point I couldn’t read through them, I rang the midwife at about 3pm and spoke to her, and said though I didn’t need a midwife at that point, I thought something might be happening. I continued to niggle on and off for the rest of the afternoon, again they went away around bed and bath time and finally at about 10pm I rang the midwife back and said I didn’t think anything was going to happen, and went to bed. I woke about 3am and was just really awake, I got up and went to the toilet, had a little bit of a show and the niggling cramps came back, stronger and longer but still not even as strong as period cramps again I visualised my cervix opening each time. I went downstairs and for some reason HAD to clean out the oil burner and by the time I’d finished that I’d got to the stage I had to stop for each one and properly focus on my breathing. At about 4am I went upstairs and got my husband up, rang the midwife back to tell her she should probably come and rang Mum to be there and to look after our eldest should he wake before the baby was born. The midwife said the second midwife was an hour away and should she call her and I said yes probably. I dispatched my husband to fill the birth pool and I hopped into the shower, I had it running over my back and had the plug in the bath so it was filling the bath too.

Each surge that came, I focused on my breathing and relaxing my muscles, I was visualising the description given in the course of how the muscles in the uterus work and just focusing inward on letting them do what they wanted to do. Once the bath was full and I lay back in it, it was a very strong trigger for all the practice and relaxation to kick in, I’d done a bit of my practice in the bath and love the weightless feeling the water gave me and the surges I had while in there were really comfortable because I was so relaxed. The midwife and Mum arrived about 4:40am and the midwife asked me to hop out of the bath so she could examine me. I was still able to stay mostly relaxed during the examination, and though I felt the surges more out of the water, they still didn’t hurt. At that stage I was 4cm dilated. The birth pool had been filled by this point so I decided to go downstairs and hop into that, the midwife suggested I should stay out of it to see if I could to get things going, but I ignored that as I knew the water was where I wanted to be and I figured I could always get out if I needed to. As I went down the stairs I had another surge and as I’ve always had a fear of falling down stairs and being heavily pregnant I wasn’t exactly that steady I wasn’t able to relax through that surge at all and I tensed up and it really hurt! I was holding onto my husbands’ hand at the time and I sat down on the step and squeezed tight and as soon as it was over I hurried down the stairs. As I got into the lounge where the birth pool was, the next one came and I had to stand and wait that one out too, I leant on a chair and tried to relax, though I wouldn’t say it hurt, it wasn’t comfortable as I found when I had to stand to support my own weight I wasn’t able to separate relaxing my tummy while still keeping my legs un-relaxed so I could stand. I did all my practice lying on the couch or in the bath so hadn’t encountered that problem before. I solved it simply by hopping into the birth pool though and that was bliss. I was able to completely relax in there and just hold onto the sides and float. I thought I’d just lie in one spot in the pool and let the surges (and baby) come but I found I was actually very mobile in the pool, changing position all the time.

The second midwife was having difficulty finding the house so the first midwife and my husband spent a lot of time on the phone directing her. There were a lot of phones ringing that kept distracting me which I found hard and was probably why I was so restless. Because I was moving around so much I found that some surges were harder to manage than others and at one point I had a moment where I thought ‘I can’t do this, it’s not working’ but thanks to the reading I’d done beforehand I knew that’s a common thought just before entering the second stage so I chose to really focus for my next surge and I asked for the hypnobirthing music to be put on which really helped. Eventually I settled on leaning my arms on the edge and my head on my arms and either kneeling or letting my body just float out behind me. As soon as I got into the pool I felt the need to go to the toilet (typical!) but I was so comfortable in there I decided to ignore that for a bit figuring I’d have time to do that ‘later’. I remember the second midwife eventually arriving, I still have no idea what her name is as I was in the middle of a surge when she arrived and was introduced to her and I was too busy focussing on what I was doing. It was fairly clear neither midwife had any idea when I was having a surge as I wasn’t making any noises or indicating in any way. A couple of times the midwife wanted to monitor me but both times she chose to do it when I was in the middle of a surge, not sure if that’s what she intended or not, but I declined both times. After the second midwife had got her ‘kit’ in, they settled down on the couch behind me, had a whispered conversation and started writing notes.

I can remember saying I needed the toilet and the midwife said ‘thats ok’ and I decided I’d just ‘go’ as the pressure was quite strong by that stage and it had been bothering me all along. As I’d had an epidural with my first son, I had no idea how far along I was or what I should have been feeling but as soon as I’d ‘cleared out’ I felt much better and then felt my waters break and I could feel the baby coming down. I said ‘I think my waters have broken’ at which point my husband said ‘uh, yeah’ in a kind of ‘you’re not kidding!’ type of tone, apparently the birth pool water had just suddenly increased in volume and turned red. I then said a couple of times, the baby’s coming, the baby’s coming, the midwife said something like ‘that’s good’ in a ‘thats nice dear’ tone of voice and continued with her notes. Clearly she didn’t think anything was going to happen for a while. With the next surge, at the beginning of the surge, I felt the first part of the head come out, again I said ‘the baby’s coming’ with the same response then returned to focussing on the rest of the surge and used it to push the rest of the head out. I definitely was purple pushing, but the urge to bear down and push with everything I had was so absolutely overwhelming, I couldn’t not! At some level I knew there was some sort of breathing that was to do with a letter of the alphabet I could be doing at this stage (J breathing) but I was just so focused on what I was doing, I couldn’t find the information in my brain as to what it was, so chose not to worry about it Once the head was out, as the midwife was still on the couch taking notes, instead of saying ‘the baby’s coming’ again (which clearly wasn’t getting the point across!), I opted instead for ‘the head’s out’. That made the midwives react as if someone had just electrocuted them, suddenly they were both off the couch and at my side and all business! They said that due to the position I was in (I was kneeling in the middle of the pool leaning forward to the edge) they couldn’t see anything and I’d have to either move or receive the baby myself. I had no intention of moving, and though the idea of reaching down and catching my own baby seemed a little unnerving, I figured hey I’ve got this far, why not! At this point I really wanted to just push the rest of him out but the midwife told me I had to wait for the next surge, I didn’t like the idea of my baby hanging there head out body in but I figured the midwife knew more about that sort of thing than me so accepted her guidance on it. The midwife then started telling me everything I needed to know about receiving a baby underwater, such as not to bring him up out of the water until he was completely out of me, fortunately I’d read up all about that previously as though at some level I was taking it in, if it had been new information at that point, I don’t think I would have been able to follow her instructions. The next surge came and I pushed the rest of him out, he mostly came in the first part of the surge, and I must have knelt up a bit to get both hands down there to pull him up. He was slippery and hard to hold onto, but once the surge had pushed most of his body out I managed to get hold of him and help him get his feet out. I then bought him up out of the water and he gave an almighty yell! I heard Mum exclaim oh it’s a boy! (we didn’t know what gender he was) and the midwife said oh he’s big! I put him on my chest and just held onto him, to me he was tiny, nothing to hold onto at all and I couldn’t remember how to hold him. It was the weirdest thing, I wasn’t expecting him to be covered in vernix and the vernix was kind of furry and tacky and greasy all at once and felt odd on my hands and made him very slippery, especially as he was wet too.

We sat in the pool for a while and I was trying to cover him with my hands because I was worried he was cold. We waited for the cord to stop pulsating, and then my husband got to cut it. I handed my baby to his Dad and got out of the pool to deliver the placenta. I’d agreed to a managed third stage because the midwife was rather stressed about the large blood loss I’d had with my first son. (For a while they were reluctant for me to have a homebirth at all because of my previous blood loss but I assured them I was not going to insist on bleeding to death just to have a natural birth and they eventually relented). They then stitched me up and half way through our eldest woke up. Once they had finished stitching, I started our new baby on his first breast feed while my husband went to get our eldest to meet his little brother.

The moment I bought our baby out of the water after he was born I said to him ‘we did it, I can’t believe we did it’ over and over and I really couldn’t. Despite how much I loved the idea of hypnobirthing throughout the course, and despite all the work I’d done to release the negativity of what had happened to me the first time round there was still a part of me that held a little doubt and felt that if nothing else, hypnobirthing would probably help me in my labour by giving me something to do during my labour to ‘take my mind off it’. When I finally had our baby in my arms, I can’t begin to describe not only how elated I felt, but how proud I was that I’d done it, what a sense of achievement it was.

Each surge I’d managed to successfully relax and breath through, there was a little voice in my head that was almost assessing it as if to say ‘yup, ok I can handle that level, let’s crank it up a bit more’ and then suddenly there he was and I still felt for the surges where I used the breathing and relaxation techniques the sensations I felt were the same as or lighter than period cramps.

My son was born at 6:19am after a 2hr 19min labour, he was 9lb 4oz and the most painful part of the whole thing was being stitched up under general anaesthetic as I tore in 3 places. I had visualised for about the last 3 months, going into labour on a Friday or Saturday night, labouring through the night and giving birth in the early hours of the morning before my eldest son got up and that’s EXACTLY what I got. When our eldest woke up at 7am, his Dad went to get him up as normal, he was rather bemused to find his Granny, 2 strange ladies, a pool and me and a new baby in the lounge but he came to say hello to his new brother, went off with his Dad to get his toast for breakfast as he always does in the morning and quite happily accepted the new addition to the family. My baby is now 6 months old and he is the happiest, calmest, chilled baby I’ve ever come across. Where my eldest would fuss and cry and was clingy and insecure, my hypnobirthed baby is happy, calm and content, he only cries if something is really wrong. The things I learnt on the course didn’t just help with the birth either, my pregnancy was much more relaxed, I’m much more relaxed and my household has benefitted for that change too. I now use the relaxation techniques to keep my calm and rebuild my energy if I’ve had a hectic day, I use the time distortion to maximise my rest during the broken nights feeding a newborn and I use the anchoring and hypnotic suggestion with my eldest to anchor in his happy times to use when he’s being a bit grizzly and to boost his confidence and security by using hypnotic suggestion to tell him how loved and amazing he is. I would love to have more children, and they will definitely be HypnoBirthed. For me, HypnoBirthing isn’t ‘some weird cultish mumbo jumbo’ it’s about keeping calm, trusting in yourself, your body and your baby and doing what you’re made/designed to do.