Why is Labour Painful?

Why does my body hurt? 

Really think about that question. Hint: the answer isn’t ‘because the body is hurt’.

It’s our body communicating with us. The brain feels the pain.

My 1 year old, Jasper, was playing with a loose rock on a low ledge in the garden and he dropped it on his foot -> He felt pain -> He cried -> I came and gave him a cuddle and rubbed his foot -> he stopped crying and carried on with his playing. He had a bruise for a few days and about a week after the event he was in the same spot of the garden by the rock on the ledge. He played with it. He saw it wobbling. And do you know what he did? He shuffled his feet away from the ledge. The rock eventually fell and missed his foot. 

What you see here are two purposes of the communication between the body to the brain and the brain. The brain felt ‘pain’ so that it could achieve:

1. Immediate comfort to the damaged foot, and emotional comfort.

2. Learning.

Survival is a fundamental driver in so many aspects of our biology and our choices. 

What has this got to do with birth? 

The sensations of labour - how and why you have them and what influences them, is complex. Environment, physiology, emotional and psychological states, all play an intrinsic part in what labour feels like.

But if we go back to our story about Jasper and his reason for feeling pain and we apply that simplified logic to labour, perhaps we can look upon labour sensations as communication. Instead of the word ‘PAIN’ let’s use all the adjectives in our beautiful language to describe what we feel. Let’s think about what we specifically feel and where we feel it and for how long and in the context of the other sensations we’ve had. 

Then we begin to actually listen to the communication from our body. 

This communication might tell us about the baby’s position and that we need to rock, walk, lunge. It might tell us about where the baby is in the pelvis. It might tell us where we’re holding muscular tension so that we can soothe it, relax it and therefore allow space inside for our baby. It may tell us we need help. It may tell us we need to refuel with some food, or empty our bladder or slow down. It could be telling us that our fear is holding everything too tightly and we need to relax and let go. It may tell us many things but we can’t hear if we’re blinded by a single word - PAIN and a belief that labour exists to create a right of passage of suffering through which we must scream and bite and clench.

But how can we listen? 

PREPARATION

1. Understand your complete birthing physiology and how to optimise your birth hormones.

2. Discover how to be in emotional control and banish fear from your birth. 

3. Practice using other more specific words to describe pain. Such as: pressure, bruise, scratch, stinging, heat, ache, throb etc. And if you need to use a category term switch pain out in favour of ‘Discomfort’.

4. Witness births where people are working through their sensations and smiling in between, where faces express power, strength, calm, confidence, connection. This provides balance to your expectation of what labour might feel like.

DURING LABOUR

1. Shut off the outside world...go deep within yourself and allow everything else to just fall away. 

2. Move your body. Use your space however instinctively feels right.

3. Trust your baby.

4. Trust your body.

5. Trust your instincts.

A L L • T H E • F E E L S

Do you want to understand your birthing physiology, become an expert in emotional control and rediscover a path to optimising your ability to listen to your body and respond? Discover my Hypnobirthing Birthing Programme for some hypnobirthing in Norfolk.

Ego in the Birth Room

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

As a birth doula I often reflect on what it is to be beside a birthing person as they labour. Every birth is different and every birthing person and their tiny human are utterly unique. As I wait patiently for the summoning call from my clients I prepare in all the practical ways. I think about my practical skills. I think about my biomechanics knowledge and how to apply it. I think about what I know about labour and birth and I reread some of my favourite pieces from my library. I organise my birth bag so that it’s full of things for my client and myself. I prepare my household in 100 different ways for me to leave at a moments notice. I revise my notes on my client and everything I know about them, their needs, their fears and wishes. 

Perhaps most importantly of all I purge myself of my own baggage - my fears; my insecurities; my own experiences of previous births (mine or others); and most vitally of all, my EGO.

The last one is so hard. It takes constant work to lay ego aside and keep it there. It involves constantly checking oneself and perpetual self reflection. 

When I say ‘EGO’, I’m not talking arrogance, I’m talking about the worries I have about being a good doula or how I feel and my emotional states or my personal judgements and thoughts about my clients choices. 

None of that serves my client. And actually none of it serves me. I can’t be a good doula if in my head I’m making it all about me. It blocks my ability to see clearly. To tune in to the needs of my client. To BE what THEY need. To recognise that sitting at the back of the room watching with loving intention is just what they need, when to do it and when not to fill the time with action as a need for my ego. 

A phrase I say to myself always is: “who does this action/this thought/these words serve?”

Birthkeepers, what do you do to prepare for each birth? If you’re a midwife, do you give yourself time and space to reflect/purge/refresh? 

If any of this resonates with you, get in touch or visit my Doula page to find out more about working with me.

The Clitoris - Why a clit flick is good for birth

C’mon Siobhán, you’ve finally gone too far… talking about the clitoris on a birth page! 

I haven’t…I promise, and this is why:

1. My page is all about celebrating every single part of a woman’s body

2. Clitorati is one of my favourite words and I wanted an excuse to put it in a post

3. It’s part of your birthing equipment

Did you read that last one? It’s part of your birthing equipment. 

And here’s how:

The clitoris is like an iceberg (not the cold and effected by global warming bits), what you can see actually only accounts for about 10% of the entire organ. 

The remaining 90% of the clitoris nestles behind the vulva, its wishbone shape encircling the vagina. It has large tear drop shaped bulbs (bulb of vestibules) that sit either side of the opening to the vagina...or, from a birthing baby’s perspective, they sit either side of the exit. And it has arms that spread out up to 9cm into the pelvis and the clitoris nerves are huge, reaching way further in and around the pelvis than you’d expect!

Citorfacts

Here are some things we know about the clitoris:

• It is currently believed to be the only organ in any human’s body which exists for the sole purpose of pleasure.

• The majority of women require clitoral stimulation to achieve a large enough release of oxytocin to orgasm.

• We don’t know a lot about the clitoris...the full size and shape of this little beauty was only discovered in 1998 and then finally pushed into public consciousness in 2005! (Don’t even get me started on why that’s an issue!)

Let’s take it as writ that the human body is a masterpiece of evolution. Many thousands of years of nature tweaking, selecting, prioritising and honing to create the ever evolving human form we are currently walking about in. Everything has its place and purpose, right. 

So why would a woman/birthing person have 90% of an organ which is apparently only for pleasure wrapped around her birth canal?

What’s it doing THERE and not somewhere else? 

Well, there’s more than one curiosity about the fact that all of a woman’s major pleasure centres are in her birthing equipment (it can’t just be for reproductive pleasure?): The G-spot is positioned in a place where the baby’s head will push hard against it on the way down the birth canal thus releasing a huge burst of oxytocin. The vaginal walls are full of the same amount of erectile tissue as a penis and, when engorged, that tissue caused the vagina to expand making space for the baby. (Don’t worry, there’ll be more on this stuff in a later blog post.)

And then there’s the hero of our story, the Clitoris. It is a well known fact that stimulating the clitoris in labour results in a huge release of oxytocin, the birthing hormone. Many people instinctively touch their clitoris as their baby is descending but some do it consciously, knowing that it can have an easing effect on this birthing stage of labour.

When the clitoris is stimulated, those bulbs of vestibules swell, becoming like thick, squashy cushions placed perfectly between the pelvis arch and the vulva. The baby’s head descends and instead of knocking against the hard bones of the pelvis at the front, that soft head is cushioned against the clitoris. And we don’t even know what all those nerves do that sprawl out into the pelvis.

So is the clitoris for pleasure alone? Maybe. Does its design have a purpose during birth? Almost definitely. But I’m going to take a punt and say that what we currently know about the clitoris isn’t even tip of the cliterberg (see what I did there).

If any of this resonates with you, get in touch to find out more about working with me.