The NHS recently announced plans to reduce the growing number of caesarean births granted to women on request.
As a hypnotherapist and a Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, I am not surprised that women are becoming increasingly reluctant to give birth naturally. However, I believe it’s going to take more than an NHS refusal to create a shift in the current desire for a ‘celebrity-like’ birth, to one that is ‘just like nature intended’.
Unlike countries like Holland where the majority of births still take place at home, in this country we have chosen to hide our births away in hospitals. As a result, the only experience of birth for a whole generation of women has been what they are exposed to on television.
TV births in popular programmes such as Casualty and Holby City, tend overwhelmingly to take place in traumatic situations accompanied by the sound of sirens and much screaming. Cars break down, requiring women to give birth in muddy ditches, with alarming regularity. Having a baby is being increasingly portrayed as something horrific that should be feared. Repeated images of such scenes do nothing to allay the fears of modern mothers or show them that it is possible to give birth in a different way.
The use of hypnotherapy and the visualisation techniques of Neuro-Linguistic Programming can have a powerful effect on helping the mother-to-be to put a different picture in her mind, thereby making birth easier. Quite simply ‘what you see is what you expect to get’.
We seem to have forgotten that it is the mother who ‘gives birth’ and have grown used to thinking of birth as something that happens to her and over which she has no control. The power of the mind is one of the most important tools when giving birth and learning how to use it to advantage, can greatly affect the outcome.
Top athletes and sportspeople have used NLP techniques for many years proving time and again that they really work. No Olympic gymnast would attempt the parallel bars without first mentally rehearsing their moves and visualising their success over and over, until they truly believed they were able to do it. Top golfers are willing to pay a lot of money to learn these techniques – it’s because they work.
The NHS is right to question the high number of caesarean births taking place in our hospitals, but should also be looking to help women by offering hypnotherapy and NLP along with antenatal classes.
With confidence and positive pictures in their minds, mothers and their babies will then be able to have the kind of births they really deserve.
