Fear and anxiety with childbirth is not uncommon. Fear and anxiety in general are closely related. Often clients with heightened anxiety about one issue will hold fear over things unknown. Anxiety feeds fear and fear feeds anxiety. So what’s the difference?
If you are falling off a bridge, (without bungee ropes!) the natural response is fear. It is happening to you, now. If you anticipate the fear you would feel when falling off a bridge (and again, we’re not talking thrill seeking) then you are creating anxiety. And if you keep focusing on that unlikely event (unless of course you are booked in for a bungee jump :)) then you are creating a pattern of fear around heights.
When in fear, when it’s happening, now, you are being subjected to the event. When you create anxiety around the possibility, you also feel as though you are subjected to the fear, but this is an illusion. The wonderful thing about anxiety is that you are creating it. That means that it belongs to you, you made it, and you can control it!
Delphie’s Fear and Anxiety with Childbirth
We’ve all heard horror stories around childbirth. Perhaps yours was a difficult birth and your mother often reminded you of that fact. In my case, my mother developed a permanent blood blister on the side of her nose when she was in labour with me. Tiny as it was, she would often remind me accusingly: “You gave me this” she would say. And we all saw those hideous videos at school, clearly designed to put us off intermingling with the opposite sex. We grew up thinking that childbirth was frightening. Some women have developed considerable fear and anxiety with childbirth, and Delphie is one of them.
Let’s get some perspective. Some women give birth without pain, experiencing only discomfort. Others describe it as a muscular workout, which is essentially what it is. Pain is a tricky things to analyse, because it is highly subjective.
“Rather, it’s affected by a person’s fears, mood, memories, and personality, as well as factors like the duration and overall experience of the pain source,” according to Healthline.
The fact that pain is subjective means that hypnotherapy can often help. The plan to help Delphie overcome =her fear and anxiety with childbirth went like this:
- Deflate her general anxiety with regression techniques exploring the source of her generalised fears
- Reframe the story around pain in childbirth – whose story is this? We have all heard the term easy labour but we focus on pain because it is more memorable.
- Introduce a birthing process through hypnosis to assist Delphie in mentally and emotionally experiencing the event so that it is no longer an “unknown fear”, but something known and natural
- Allow Delphie’s future self to guide her through her aprehension, with the prize of a beautiful newborn as a clear incentive.
Whether you hold fear and anxiety with childbirth or anything else, understand that hypnotherapy can probably help you, because it is psychologically caused.