Home HypnoBirthing® How Hypnosis Eases Childbirth
Deliverance
As an alternative to painkillers, women giving birth can be taught to put themselves into a state of relaxation
By Michelle
Kearns News Staff Reporter 3/30/2004
Before she figured out how to hypnotize herself into staying so focused and calm that giving birth didn't hurt so much, Sheri Shepker tried other things to avoid the pain that once had her screaming for drugs.
She took a Lamaze breathing class. She tried hospital childbirth lessons.
"I wanted to bring my daughter into this world without having drugs in her system," said Shepker of her first pregnancy.
But her plans went awry. Shepker got a dose of labor-accelerating medicine called Pitocin. Fierce contractions followed. She got so tense and scared that she cried out for painkilling medicine and frightened her fiance. Her daughter was born crying with her arms and legs tense and scrunched.
"That was a real bad experience," said Shepker. "I really wanted something else."
When she got pregnant again, she signed up for a hypnosis birth class that she had heard other women talking about. More than just lessons in hypnosis, it is a contrary approach to a modern hospital routine that some believe is too quick to use medicine and surgery to help a birth along.
The techniques, which one approving doctor describes as simply learning how to stay focused and relaxed, kept Shepker breathing deeply. The 25-year-old Hamburg mother concentrated on the goal she'd learned to keep running through her mind: "Make it natural. Be calm. Do everything as best you can. It will be over soon."
It worked. The hours of listening to soothing visualization tapes - "Remember you're going to bring a healthy baby into the world" - helped her stay in control. Hospital staff agreed to hold off on the medicine.
"I could feel my body, but it wasn't like the pain," Shepker said of her son's birth last year. "It's kind of like you're not even in that room."
Her son was born sprawled out and relaxed, not crying.
While birth hypnosis proponents do say the technique is catching on, it is still not well known. Bruce Rodgers, the director of maternal medicine at Women and Children's Hospital, had never heard of it. But he agrees that the more educated women are about birth, the easier and the less frightening the labor.
"You can release your own endorphins by calming yourself," he said. "You probably will have less pain."
One University at Buffalo-trained doctor was drawn to hypnosis because of the cool distance mothers experience. Lorne Campbell, who has a family practice in LeRoy, studied hypnosis and visualization in hopes of finding a way to make labor and delivery go easier for his patients.
"All hypnosis is just relaxation coupled with suggestion," he said.
Campbell, who is certified by the American Board of Hypnotherapy, eventually discovered and settled on the same "HypnoBirthing®" course that Shepker took.
The lessons, which include training for a birth "companion," such as the father, can lead to what Campbell describes as the ideal - for a woman to give birth comfortably and with less stress or fear, as if she were sitting by a crackling fire. "You're relaxed and you just don't care, but you're paying attention to what's going on," he said. "Normal birthing does not hurt."
But it takes training and homework. The 12-hour class, taught locally by a Lackawanna nurse, was developed by a New Hampshire educator and former college dean in the late 1980s, in an effort to undo society's emphasis on pain.
People expect it during delivery because of gruesome tales they hear from couples who have been through childbirth, said Campbell. He tells his patients to hold up their hand and say, "I'd rather not hear about your birth just yet."
Such stories, he said, convince pregnant moms that giving birth is excruciating. "It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy," he said.
"We fall into this thing that women have somehow lost their innate ability to have a baby," he continued. "If a cow can do it, you can do it, too. The problem is our thoughts have gotten in the way."
On one Sunday afternoon, Kari Kukoda explained this to five couples gathered in her Lackawanna living room. The labor nurse at Women and Children's Hospital had decorated with small candles on tables and along the cabinet for the TV, which would show video clips of women as they delivered babies with closed eyes and dreamy looks on their faces.
Kukoda described the importance of working with a doctor who is willing to go along with an unconventional, natural approach.
"Some are more flexible than others and that is the doctor you should be seeking out," she said. Before she explained how hypnosis worked, she talked about anatomy, physiology and the mind-easing effect of gentle language.
"If we use negative words, we're going to expect the negative," she said. Instead of "contraction," she said, use "surge."
"If we're fearful, our bodies tense," she said. This triggers a-fight-or-flight response, or what she calls the fear-tension-pain syndrome: The mind is scared so the body drains blood away from the uterus and sends it to more essential organs. "Any muscle that's deprived of blood and oxygen - you have pain," she said.
To get women to think positively and forget the birth "battle" stories of others Kukoda used pleasant words.
Drawings she passed out showed the uterus looking like a seashell. Its lines were the muscle fibers that pull up and open when a baby is delivered.
"What you want to picture when labor's going on is these blue satin ribbons pulling everything up," she said. "Imagine gliding a turtleneck over your head."
Kukoda said a woman's birth "companion" - husband, boyfriend, mother - should try to do light-touch massage when labor starts. It can help women in labor feel happy and content and secrete the feel-good hormones called endorphins. "We want those during labor," she said.
She explained hypnosis by asking everyone to close their eyes and think about cutting a lemon and then tasting it. "Watch as the juice runs down and begins to make small puddles," she said. Afterward, people said the description made them salivate.
"That just shows you the power of the mind," she said. Next, Joanna Tripi of Clarence volunteered to get hypnotized by Kukoda. She sat in a chair with her eyes closed as Kukoda read the script that everyone was supposed to start practicing daily.
"The muscles in and around your eyes are relaxing, forehead smoothing out, and all the little worry lines beginning to fade and disappear ... you are teaching your body how to thoroughly relax and go within, just as you'll do when you are bringing your baby into the world."
The routine is eventually supposed to help the partner's voice and touch have a relaxing and soothing effect during labor, without the script. As Kukoda read, she lifted Tripi's arm and it fell limply to her lap. At the end, Kukoda asked how it felt.
Tripi opened her eyes, smiled and said, "It's relaxing." Tripi, a pharmaceutical sales rep, had been pleased with the class so far. She liked how relaxed the mothers on the videotape looked. "It's nice to see," she said. "Everything looks so smooth."
Women in the room said they'd come wanting to avoid the need for a cesarean section, to make the birth easier on a problem back and to make labor seem less scary.
Sherrie Hesse of Fort Erie, Ont., had come because women in her yoga class recommended it. Her first birth had felt out of control after she received a narcotic painkiller. "It just made me feel confused," said Hesse, who wanted to be more aware during her next birth. "It shouldn't be such a medical experience."
Her husband, Jim, beside her said he had been puzzled by the idea of hypnosis at first, but he was willing to go along with it.
"The less pain she's in, probably, the less pain I'll be in," he said, smiling.
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