Preparing for pregnancy

What does your mind have to do with giving birth anyway? EVERYTHING!

Sharie is a young woman in her late twenties, and like most of us, she’d had events in her life that had caused her pain and distress. She had been trying for a baby for a couple of years and finally, after 4 rounds of IVF, she conceived.

Her pregnancy was filled with anxiety, fear and birth stories that told of pain, suffering and complications.

When the time came to give birth to her baby, Sharie found it scary with care providers she didn’t know and who didn’t know her. They didn’t know the stories that had come from her maternal line. They didn’t know that feeling out of control caused her to panic.

Sharie couldn’t go inward during the birth because she didn’t have a sense of who she truly was. She didn’t have a sense of her own power. She saw herself as a failure in some ways. She couldn’t rely on herself. So, she wasn’t surprised that she didn’t dilate fast enough and ended up having a caesarean section. When breastfeeding didn’t work after a few weeks of trying Everything (!), she felt the guilt just kept loading onto her shoulders. She knew she loved her baby, but somehow, she just couldn’t connect with her… Oh, she had heard about post-natal depression during her pregnancy, but she had wanted her baby so much that she honestly thought it would never happen to her.

It did. But why? And how can we stop this from happening?

How can we give ourselves and our baby the best chance of a stress-free pregnancy, optimal health during this important developmental time and a fantastic start to our parenting journey?

How can we experience this time as extraordinary, wonderful and empowering instead of it being a time fraught with anxiety from even well before conception?

Most of us now know about the body/mind connection, i.e. our mind impacts our body. Let’s take this a step further. Did you know that our past impacts our mind and our body?

Let me explain. We all go through distressing events in our life.

Consciously we probably know that ‘Well, that distressing event is over… THAT happened years ago.’ And that’s great. But, here’s the thing – our conscious mind knows, but our unconscious mind sometimes doesn’t know it. Our UC mind thinks that THAT event is still happening. That event was when I was 6 yrs old. Or that event when I was 10, 26 etc. Our UC mind thinks, ‘I’m not safe!’ and keeps us stuck in the fight, flight, freeze survival response.

And the UC runs every process in our physical body. So our body is reacting as if ‘I’m NOT safe!’

Consciously we’re not aware of what’s going on in our UC mind. All we are aware of is what’s happening in our body – that fight, flight, freeze response:

• we may feel like something bad is about to happen (the fight, flight state of anxiety)

• or we feel so shut down (the freeze-like state of depression.)

• or we may experience various systems in our body not working as they should because they’ve been shut down as we don’t need them in order to survive right now.

Body functions such as digestion (because we don’t need to digest breakfast when we’re running from a tiger!), conception (because we’re not safe just now, and we can do that later), the frontal lobe (because we don’t need to do higher maths right now), the immune system, etc. all are shut down when we are NOT Safe so that we can survive.

It makes sense then that getting pregnant, giving birth, producing milk, and bonding with our baby, will all be so much more difficult if our whole body is in this state of ‘I’m NOT safe!’, in this state of fight, flight, freeze.

It also makes sense, don’t you think, that if we can turn off this ‘I’m NOT safe’ response, this fight, flight freeze response, and return to the deep calm of ‘I’m Safe’ – then conception, pregnancy, birth, bonding etc. will all go so much more smoothly.

My body and my baby’s body will be so much less stressed and calmer. My body will be free to do what it knows to do, without all those stress hormones etc. running around interrupting everything, without my whole being screaming ‘I’m NOT safe!’

Distress during pregnancy is closely linked to adverse pregnancy outcomes, higher caesarean section rates and long-term physical and neurobehavioural effects on the baby. It can also affect subsequent generations.

This distress can easily be resolved. And it’s best to resolve it – even before conception.