What if, as well as being a beautiful, deeply bonding experience for you and your baby, your labour and birth could also be an opportunity for your own deep healing? Imagine starting your parenting journey from a place of strength, empowerment and profound self-knowledge.
If you’ve read Birth With Confidence, you’ve begun reframing your attitude to functional pain. You understand how important your choices of birthplace and support team are. And perhaps you’ve started to think about what ‘wild cards’ you might be carrying into the birth.
In Beyond the Birth Plan we delve deeper into this all-important emotional preparation.
The habituated stress responses that we all develop from infancy, through childhood and into our adult lives (our ‘fight’, ‘flight’, ‘freeze’ and ‘fawn’ responses and unique styles of attachment in relationships) can have huge impacts on our labour.
But the birth of your baby is also one of the most powerful opportunities to recognise and shift all our less-than-helpful patterns.
Says Amelia: Reading Beyond the Birth Plan made me realise that even calling in the most amazing supportive birth team could only take me so far, unless I dealt with the ‘wild cards’ that Rhea mentions. I sought out listening, debriefed my first birth and learned deeply about my imprints and how I show up when the going gets tough.
In Beyond the Birth Plan we look at the parasympathetic nervous system, styles of attachment and ‘wild cards’, and how these play out in labour. I also share stories drawn from the hundreds of women I have supported in birth, to illustrate how impactful life experiences, such as loss, grief and abuse, can influence pregnancy, labour and birth – and how healing birth can be.
So, if you feel there is more for you to understand in your birth preparation, join me to go deeper.
