Hypnobirthing doesn’t talk about risks/issues/etc. It talks about how to manage your process.
You will find that some of the presentation of labor concepts are a bit, well, :rolleyes: though. The point is that they are trying to counter some of the dramatic imagery you’ve seen on TV, or heard from moms competing in the ‘how awful it was’ game. WHile I appreciated the fairly detailed and accurate (medically) discussion of labor mechanics (used for visualizing), there was one thing that bugged me from a biology perspective. That is, I was irritated by the whole ‘cats purr while giving birth’ thing. Yeah, they do. Because cats purr when they are stressed. I just kept in mind that while cats PURR (from stress) when in labor, they do not yelp, cry, or make sounds like they do when you step on their tails. Labor is designed to be managable, if you learn to manage your process (cats can’t take advil, so they have already learned to manage their pain through other means). Labor isn’t designed to be fun and easy, just well within your skills and abilities. Only, us modern humans (at least in the Western world) tend to NOT learn much of those skills and abilities. Add in stress (which you will have as a doctor, knowing ‘too much’ doesn’t help), and you get pain. Unfortunately, if you take people who expect agony, and tell them it might be uncomfortable, but within their abilities to handle without making a fuss, it doesn’t undo their initial expectation enough. Hence the ‘cats purr’ thing. They need the alternative image to counter the pain image.
So, nature designed us to birth without a fuss. Not without effort or even discomfort (if it was that easy, we’d risk preterm births a LOT), but easy enough, managable enough. With the ADDITION of hypnotherapy, you get a lot closer to the fun and easy version. Okay, not easy, but certainly better than even the natural plan with naturally learned coping skills. It is still effort. But beyond that whole ‘cats purr’ thing, I don’t think you’ll have any problem with it.
My hypnotherapist does HB for planned c-sections, twin births where an epidural line WILL be set up automatically (even if not dosed), inductions, and so forth. She does talk about natural alternatives as a first line of approach, and the value of knowing the implications of meds. But it is very much about empowerment of the individual to make the choice that suit their labor and their process. There wasn’t an expectation of the medical staff being the bad guys. THere was an expectation that the medical staff wouldn’t know how to approach a hypnotherapy labor, though (which is true - the signs that you usually notice as part of your diagnostic process are not there! Such as knowing that a woman is hitting transition because she woke up from her nap and said ‘oh!’). There is a lot of discussion about how to educate your medical team as you go, because they often judge progress using markers that do not exist in HB moms, and use approaches that interfere more than help the approach. It isn’t hard to get them to adjust, BTW, it is just useful to know that there is a huge difference in the external aspect of the laboring mom, so the doctors need to do different kinds of checking/assessment than they expect to do.
It may also be useful to separate your medical self from your birthing self. That is, as a doctor, you must see each patient both as a data point and as part of the whole statistical model. But as a laboring mother, you are ONLY the data point. There is no telling where that data point will fall - statistics do not apply to individuals, only to groups. Odds evaluation and medical judgement based on experience is helpful in determining medical direction if you are the doctor, but is far less relevant from the laboring mother side - you have to deal with your labor, as it goes, not as it fits the model. Right? With HB, even the outward signs of where this particular data point is falling won’t match expectations of the whole model. HB should help you separate the two processes more, so that you can focus inward rather than doing the data check against the model.
I think the fear release process in HB would be highly useful to you. You’ve seen the bad and the ugly enough to be able to fear it better than most people. For you, it isn’t the fear of the unknown, but of the known that has to be handled. Birthing from Within can also help there, but I suspect that HB would be better for you in a variety of ways - you’ve got enough ‘load’ on the complications and problems side of the line that the extra fear-release processing available through hypnotherapy is bound to make more of a difference.
Probably the best approach would be to call the local HB instructor and explain the concerns you have. You might even decide that the best approach would be to do individual training (so you don’t scare the other moms with your variety of fears, and you don’t have to listen to the horror stories that so often drive women to try HB, many of which involve pretty negative images of medical staff, and so you can handle issues that are more relevant to you than to most women). Talk to the instructor, and see what would work best, in their opinion and yours. I was ‘odd woman out’ in my class, and it was sometimes uncomfortable. I work with the Pharma industry, am a complulsive researcher (I spend a lot of time reading the Cochrane Medical Abstracts…), grew up expecting labor to be fascinating, powerful, amazing, and potent, not awful and horrible and painful… and I hadn’t had a bad experience the first time, either. Just a long labor, and a stack of reactions to the epidural I opted for after 66 hours without any meds (no regrets on the medical choices, either, as they were appropriate and chosen with respect). Most of the others were there because they were scared, either of the unknown (the first time moms), or the known (moms who had absolutely horrible previous labors). I wasn’t scared, just wanted to use the method to improve things. It did improve things, even with pitocin augmentation (the OB didn’t wait 12 hours for pit after my water broke - she wanted it on INSTANTLY, despite my contractions picking up on their own). I had no pain until crowning, and then only a moderate ring of fire. And that’s with a 15.5 inch head coming out of me!
Personally, the fear release was one of the most important things for me. I used Birthing from Within, too, but without doing that approach as a class (with someone guiding the process), I didn’t get through the fear processing very well ‘just from the book’.
