Hypnobirthing - advice please

[Meredith2010]

Hiya,

Sorry for long thread but need to give the background!

I had a very intense, hectic labour with my LO; my contractions were every 5 minutes from the very beginning and very quickly were every 2 to 3 minutes apart. I went into hospital at this point and was experiencing pain I never knew existed, was throwing up and had chronic diarrhea between contractions (TMI, sorry). When I was examined it turned out that I was only 2cms dilated so wasn't allowed any pain relief, which I fully wanted to have. This went on for about an hour, with me going absolutely crazy and writhing around all over the place. Then something funny happened - I have no idea what or how it happened but I sat in a chair with my eyes closed, imagining myself surfing (don't know where that came from) with the peak of my contraction co-inciding with me being at the top of the wave in my brain. I sat in the chair for 45 minutes pretty much without moving a muscle and whilst I could still feel the pain, it was a million times easier than what I was experiencing less than an hour before. My husband said I went into "psycho mode" as I just sat there and blanked out everyone, and wouldn't talk or interact at all.

Was this some form of self hypnosis? I ask because if my next labour is similar then again I won't be able to have pain relief, and I'd love to be able to replicate whatever I did then. I only managed to keep it up for about 45 minutes and then lost concentration and the pain came back again, but whatever I was doing had the most incredible effect on the pain. I'm thinking of going down the hypnobirthing route next time, as if that's what I somehow managed to do then it was amazing.

 

[Mervs Mum]

Yes it does sound like you were using self hypnosis and visulatiation which is what the Hypnobirthing techniques are essentially about. That and learning the physiology of birth so you can understand why you need to do particular things etc. The start of your labour it sounds like you may have panicked if you felt it started off quicker or more intense than you were ready for and in nutshell, panic increases pain. These are all the things you would learn on a hypnobirthing course

 

[Hippietea]

When we are in a calm state, labouring women naturally go into a kind of bubble anyway, and hypnobirthing reinforces that. I think you are likely to be successful if you try hypnobirthing next time if you naturally did it with no practice before. I was sceptical before I tried it but it did work for me.