The ability to have a child is a remarkable one. It never ceases to amaze me that my body can create (with the help of the other half!), grow and birth another human being. It is wonderful.
But.
What if you don’t feel like that?
What if you find out you are pregnant and you don’t feel happy at all. You wanted to be pregnant, didn’t you? So, why don’t you feel elated? Why don’t you feel how you are supposed to feel?
Maybe you feel petrified about what is going to happen to your body over the next 9 months. How it will change and how can it honestly adapt to the extent that it is housing another human being?? It could be that you feel terrified of giving birth. How will you cope when you can’t even cope with a paper cut! It could be that you feel an intense fear about things that could potentially go wrong in your pregnancy or your labour. Or maybe it’s something else.
These feelings sometimes lead to guilt.
You tell yourself: ” I should be feeling happy! Excited! Over the moon! Some people can’t have children and here I am complaining about it. What an awful, bad person I am.”
I want to tell you that feeling any of those things is ok. You are not an awful, bad person. You are having a normal response…for you. If you feel the things above, it might be that you have other areas in your life where you feel like an awful, bad person. Perhaps you don’t think you are very good at anything. Maybe you feel that things always go wrong for you. You probably tell yourself regularly that you are an “awful, bad person”…maybe you don’t even know that you do that.
I was once that person.
Terrified. Scared. Guilty. Lost.
I have always had anxiety in my life for as long as I can remember. Sitting deep inside me, burning away. My anxiety has probably covered most areas of my life. From early childhood (“I can’t do that Mummy! I’m scared”), school (“They hate me, I’m ugly, stupid and not funny- please don’t notice me”), early adulthood, (“I can’t do this job, something will go wrong and I will get the blame”), pregnancy (“it’s going to be painful, I’m going to lose control, what if I die?”), to early parenthood (I’m a really bad parent, what if something happens to my children, it will be my fault”).
These were the messages I was telling myself on a daily basis from such a young age. The result was that I didn’t have ANY confidence and I had really low self-esteem. ( It peeked when my second child was 2 but that is probably best saved for another blog.) I may have appeared to be functioning normally but most of the time I wasn’t.
It wasn’t until I discovered how to change the way I thought that I realised I could start to change the way that I felt. Hypnobirthing was the beginning of that journey for me. It helped me re-frame birth and think oh-so-positively about it. It helped me to control my body’s response to anxiety which is something I use now in any area of life I need to.
Today, I don’t think anxiety is a massive part of my life any more but its still there somewhere. Only now, I know that I’m in charge and that I really do have the ability to create an amazing, awesome, loving life with my family.
So, don’t be afraid any more.
Step into the light.
Begin your journey to a calmer, happier, better life.
Start with creating as calm and harmonious a pregnancy as you can and continue with a positive birth experience. You have everything you need to do this inside you- you just need to get rid of the stuff that doesn’t serve you.
If you want to change the way you feel about your pregnancy and birth, get in touch (via liz@enhanceyourbirth.co.uk) for a free consultation or book onto my next free Hypnobirthing taster session (12th May 2016 at 7pm), I would love to help you.