Mum's The Word! The Parenting Podcast - The Truth Behind Hypnobirthing - with Birth-Ed's Megan Rossiter

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

What is hypnobirthing and how can it help mums during their pregnancy? Are we mis-sold the realities of pregnancy? And what does the NHS need to change in the pregnancy and midwife process?Megan Rossiter who has a diploma in hypnobirthing and runs her own hypnobirthing course called Birth-Ed joins Grace Victory on this week's episode to speak about why more mums should be made aware about how it can help them throughout their pregnancy, the importance behind continuative care and what needs to change in the pregnancy and midwife process in the UK?Do you have a question for us? Get in touch on our Whatsapp, that's 07599927537.---A Create Podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome back to Mum's The Word, the parenting podcast. I'm Grace Victory and I am your host this week. This week I am very excited for our guest. So we're going to be talking about hypnobirthing and just giving birth in general. And I feel like I need this chat post-to-birth, to C-sections. And I feel like mothers and fathers actually need some more honest information in regards to birthing, especially with all of the information that we are getting fed left, right, and center.

So I am looking forward to this. When we get pregnant, especially for the first time, most of us create a birth plan and for 99% of us, the moment we get to the hospital, the whole thing starts to fall apart. Relatable. Today's guest is Megan Rossiter and she is a registered hypnobirthing expert, has a diploma in hypnobirthing and is the current co-chair of Kingston NHS Trust Maternity Voices Partnership. Megan runs the website BirthEd that has helped thousands of women all over the world

make the right choices for their pregnancies and deliveries right up to the moment the baby arrives. Having supported so many women through the process, she now completely understands how we vastly underestimate what giving birth involves and vastly overestimate what the maternity system can provide. Megan, welcome to the podcast. to the podcast. So you have two children yourself. What was your level of experience and expertise when you were going through your own pregnancies? So I was actually training to be a midwife at the time. I was in my second year when I fell pregnant with my first baby. So that was, I was very much approaching that from quite a kind of medical scientific perspective, I suppose. And I went back to that after my first child was born, he is now seven. And so I went back to it for about five or six months, and then just finances and all of the

ridiculousness that comes with being a student and the NHS meant that I paused again and in that time set up BirthEdge which is the organisation that I run now. Trained to teach hypnobirthing I used hypnobirthing tools and courses ahead of my first birth so set BirthEdge up during that sort of slight pause and basically found that I was able to support women and families in a way that I just wasn't able to kind of working within the NHS. So I decided not to go back. So I did have that kind of insight into working in the maternity system and actually supporting people in labour and throughout pregnancy, which has really shaped the kind of support that I provide now. throughout pregnancy which has really shaped the kind of support that I provide now but then before my second baby was born I had been working running birth ed full-time for I think five years by the time he was born so yeah very very much in the depths of it by then. I feel like we get told a

lot of horror stories with birthing with the nhs and a lot of you know stories that i read and you know friends and family they haven't had the best experience why do you think that is i mean it's probably two or three fold as to reasons why that is so at the moment in particular the nhs has been underfunded for a very very long time there is a midwifery crisis there aren't enough staff so even the really really wonderful fantastic midwives often aren't able to provide the information they want to provide they're like nuanced balanced personalized conversations they want to provide because they're so stretched in terms of actually just providing clinical care so the role of a midwife at the moment is very different I think than the role that most midwives thought they were going to take on when they

decided to train to be a midwife midwife when you change the word means with woman and it's very hard when you're seeing a different midwife every single appointment and you're meeting a different midwife in labour than you've met during pregnancy it's really difficult from a midwife's perspective to be able to build those relationships which is such an important part of midwifery care so there's that is the the first aspect of it the second aspect is just the kind of culture of the maternity system itself so it exists in the way that it exists now since about the 1970s the kind of medical model of care where the majority of women are going into hospitals to give birth to their babies where guidance and information

is very much kind of almost obstetric led now in the UK rather than midwifery led we still have a midwifery led system but I think it midwifery led system, but I think it's something like only about 20% of women are actually only accessing midwifery led care. The rest have a doctor involved in some way in their care. And there can be a real kind of at odds between a medical system and a medical model of care versus a model of care that is prioritising experience and physiology. And sometimes they don't match up in the way that we might want them to and the way that they could, if we were just a little bit better at talking to each other from a kind of care provider perspective. So I think that's part of it. And that's, I think, something that

with the right information and the right understanding of how that maternity system exists who holds responsibility who holds power that when women and families have that information then you are actually in quite a powerful position to be able to go make the most out of the system and work out actually who can I ask if I want this what are my rights what are my choices but frequently women don't have that information sometimes things aren't presented as a choice in the way that they should be presented as a choice sometimes the conversations around informed consent and things aren't happening in the way that we expect them to and quite frequently there's something that exists in maternity care that we refer to as the cascade of interventions and when families aren't

aware of this we don't realize that the choices that we're making during pregnancy the choices that we're making during early labor everything around what scans we're having what tests we're having what screening we're having where we're choosing to give birth to our baby all of these things what pain relief we're choosing or not choosing to have all of these things have potential implications for something that then might be needed later along the line and when conversations are so short and consent is gained based on really kind of immediate physical risk or benefit we don't have the kind of foresight to go have a conversation about actually if you have a stretch and sweep at 40 weeks of pregnancy that might make the first part of labour a little bit longer it might then mean that you move on to have an induction of labour an induction of labour might

not work you might have a cesarean birth a cesarean birth carries risk so it's when conversations aren't holistic and they're really really focused focused on the very, very immediate outcomes, I think we lose sight of it there. And it's when we're not honest with women about that, with information about what to expect from their birth, going into an induction of labour where you know it might end in a cesarean birth, where you know an instrumental birth is now more likely, where you know the sensations of labour are going to feel different than if you'd gone into spontaneous labour, but you've decided that the induction of labour still feels like the right thing for you to do, that is very, very different emotionally than somebody who is basically scared into having an induction and then gets there and is like, what?

I had no idea that all of these things could actually happen, even if the actual pathway that their births take are identical. The way that you feel about them can be very different. I feel like you just maybe gave me the vocab just then about how I feel because my first birth obviously went tits up you know I was in a coma with Covid afterwards but I think because of that situation that impacted my second not in terms of like the trauma necessarily but the way my care was presented I immediately had a consultant I immediately had like the top top people on my team I was grateful for but

my midwife Jackie I love her I definitely feel like she was sort of just pushed to the side and it was my consultants that were leading everything so yeah it's very interesting because I feel like I would have maybe had I mean my second birth was positive but even more positive if both teams worked more together yeah because I think for a small number of births, there will really be medical complexities where the involvement of obstetricians is very helpful and very welcome. And we know obstetricians are specialists in pathology. So if somebody is unwell, you definitely want the support of a doctor to help you with your illness. And midwives ultimately are the specialists in physiology. But physiology is important, however you're giving birth, and whether you have illnesses alongside it or not. And when we start to focus on it wholly as a medical

experience or as an illness, we lose sight often of the actual, I suppose, like transformative emotional experience that birth is. However you give birth, whatever that kind of looks like, whatever choices you're making, there is a transformation give birth whatever that kind of looks like whatever choices you're making there is a transformation and a transition that you make as you birth your baby that's going to happen whether we like it or not and if we can really respect that transition and the the sort of say I suppose sacred nature of that transition then we I think could improve birth for so so many people that are being let down by the system as it currently exists. Do you think that we're being missold the realities of pregnancy and birth by

the media, influencers? Do you think that we're not told the truth about birthing? Because it is a natural thing, but it seems to be I don't know sometimes I feel like we're over complicating it we definitely are and I think that goes in both directions I tend to see at the moment there tends to be like two popular conversations around birth you've either got the oh my god it's, it's absolutely awful. Just turn up, hand yourselves over, let them do whatever they need to do to get the birth experience positive but also on the whole birth is not an emergency event for I think what we see the World Health Organization says that in countries where the cesarean rate goes over 10% we don't see a difference in outcomes so for around one in 10 people we are improving outcomes by having that basically emergency intervention.

And absolutely, for anybody that falls into that one in 10, or anybody that wants a cesarean birth or a birth with more intervention in it, absolutely, we are I feel very, very grateful to live in a country where that is ultimately freely available. And in other countries, it's not. But we also know that around 80% of women are experiencing intervention, not necessarily cesarean birth, but intervention in their births. And that also another 80% of women want a ultimately straightforward vaginal birth. So there's basically probably somewhere between what 60 and 70, 80% of people that are being massively let down somewhere along the lines because what they wanted isn't what they're getting on the flip side we can't just say oh yeah birth always works as long

as you think positively and breathe nicely which is the other conversation that happens like oh just get yourself a pool go to a lounge and you'll breathe the baby out for around one in ten women no like mother nature plays a role in it and sometimes there are complexities that do come up in pregnancy and birth and the conversation that sometimes happens on the other side is the sort of like if you've had intervention then you've done something wrong and again that responsibility shouldn't be falling onto the shoulders of the person that's giving birth because sometimes it's genuinely needed sometimes it's a lack of care that they've been provided with, or any multitude of things that can kind of contribute to why that has happened. But I

definitely think you're right, there's space for honesty in the middle around what birth actually feels like, what the birth experience is actually like, the kind of safety of birth for the vast majority of people. And I don't think we're having conversations around that, that aren't just massively sugarcoating it, that aren't just being like, oh, it shouldn't hurt, you know, that's, you know, some messaging that sometimes comes with hypnobirthing makes it sound like, oh, as long as I do it right, then it's absolutely gonna be fine. But actually, it hurts. But so what, you're really strong, you're really capable, you can manage something that hurts. There's blood. Yeah. But it's those things that we're like, oh, no, that's gonna scare people,

that's gonna scare people. So we don't want to talk about them. But you know, everybody that's ever had a baby knows the reality. And then we could try to keep it very kind of secret. So there's that reality to share. But there is also the reality of like what does the modern maternity system look like now and it is letting down families and we need to know that it's letting down families so that we can work out how to make the most of it and there are particular groups of women that are being let down at an even higher rate than others. Black women are being let down at a higher rate than white women. So it's those kinds of things that it is important to know, but they can be quite scary conversations to have if you are actually pregnant.

Hi all, it's TV's Gail Porter here. I am so excited to tell you that I am joining the Paranormal Activity family and will be hosting a number of live podcast recordings across the UK. The first is on the 6th of March at London's Haunted Richmond Theatre. Expect terrifying tales, audience interaction and hopefully a spirit or two. I can't wait for you to join me and to hear your own paranormal experiences. You can find tickets at www.paranormalpod.co.uk There needs to be some sort of educational system pre-pregnancy because when you're told stuff when you're pregnant you feel scared but I feel like if you know things before you're pregnant you go into the pregnancy

more informed so my second I've had two c-sections first c-section was an absolute medical emergency we both would have died the second one was because I had infection markers in my white blood cells they couldn't see where it was coming from I had a fast heart rate so did my little girl so I get also why they said we suggest a c-section based on your medical history completely get it but I still have feelings of disappointment. I wanted, you know, a V-back and I wanted to feel contractions because I've never had that. Two children and no contractions. And I think I'm definitely going to grieve that for the rest of my life, probably. And a lot of people do grieve, you know.

I think something that a conversation that we really don't have around birth, particularly the kind of immediate postnatal period, is that, like, sometimes really conflicting emotions that you can feel. So for example, feeling like I've made exactly the right decision. I'm very grateful that my baby is here safely, and that I am healthy and well. But simultaneously, I feel overjoyed that I've got my baby. But I simultaneously feel disappointed. I feel let down. I feel what if. And there's not many moments in life, I don't think, until you have a baby that you can

feel such conflicting emotions at the same time. Similarly, after I had my first baby, I had hoped for a home birth. That had been our plan. But we had decided it had been very much been our decision to have an induction of labour. So he was born in hospital. And ultimately, the birth itself was reasonably straightforward. And it felt like a positive experience. But afterwards, I had that like real conflict of disappointment, I didn't get what I had pictured versus still feeling like it had gone very well and I was very happy with it

and that just sits in your body so weirdly doesn't it? Yeah and I did hypnobirthing for both of mine so the first one that was just out the window but the second birth I had you know all my oils with me and my headphones I was doing my breathing exercises. I was very calm. Even when they came in and said, somewhere in your body, you are not very well. I did feel a bit funny. You know, we're going to take you down to theatre tomorrow, et cetera, et cetera. I still felt very calm. And I think that is because of hypnobirthing, knowing that I was in a safe space. My team are here. I know them. I'm centred. I'm grounded. grounded I'm capable hypnobirthing I think is incredible you are an expert can you tell us more about hypnobirthing what it is and how it helps people

give birth so the easiest way that I can break down hypnobirthing is to split it into two parts so you've got the hypno and you've got the birthing. So the birthing aspect of it is simply an approach to antenatal education. So it's providing you with an understanding of what happens in your body as you give birth to your baby. It is giving you an understanding of what all of your options and choices are. So everything from where you might give birth to your baby, pain relief options, your comfort measure options, including possible interventions that might occur. A real focus, certainly in the way that I teach it on working out how to make decisions. So how do you decide when an induction feels right, when a cesarean feels right, when an epidural feels right, when a home birth feels right? And really giving you tools to kind of take back control of a lot of those decisions and and an understanding of how the maternity system works, and how the choices that you're making,

and the conversations that you're having are likely to kind of go. And that's definitely like a real focus of my work is like, if we have those interventions, what can we do to still make them feel like good, positive birth experiences, rather than sometimes the feelings of failure that we can associate with them if that's not what we had pictured as our kind of top birth. And then you've got the other side of it, which is the hypno side of it. This is the part with the stupid name that everybody like rolls their eyes at. It's the bit that's probably the most off-putting because it just sounds a little bit strange. But the word hypno is coming from the practice of

hypnotherapy. So hypnotherapy is used for all kinds of things like fears, phobias, quitting smoking, losing weight, hypnotherapy can help with that. The aim of hypnotherapy within hypnobirthing is ultimately to reframe the subconscious thoughts and ideas that we have got about giving birth. Because whether we think so or not, we will have been taking in information about birth for all of our lives from our own story of being born that we might have heard to friends families brothers sisters experiences of being born or giving birth all media stories so right now we're seeing like an awful lot in the media about maternity services

about midwifery crisis all all of this kind of thing. Everything we see on the TV, you know, Bridget Jones's baby, her waters break, they scoop her up, they rush her to hospital, all of this, even the kind of comedy stuff, it goes into our brains, and it sits in that subconscious part of our mind. And the reason that we need to be aware, or the reason that the information that is in our subconscious mind is relevant, is because everything that is in there influences both our voluntary decisions and actions, and our involuntary decisions and actions. So all of the things, the decisions that we feel like we're actively making, and all of the things that we do without even really noticing

that we're doing them. So we want the information that is in there to be building our confidence, to be building trust in ourselves, and to be based on like fact and realistic information rather than fears or assumptions, or ultimately sometimes just completely incorrect information that we might have taken on at some point in our lives. So it's like hypnobirthing is like the mind empowering women, they are stronger than they think, stronger than they know. And then kind of pairing that with the physiological aspect of giving birth. Yeah. And a lot of the talk when we're talking about the kind of the mind and how the mind works is that ultimately your mind and your body are connected completely in every way the thoughts that we're having the words that we're saying the things that we're hearing cause involuntary actual physical responses in our body

every day if you were to be watching the tv and you saw somebody say something funny an involuntary physical response from your body would be to laugh. If somebody said something that embarrassed you, involuntary physical response is that you might blush. So your mind and your body are intricately connected. And a lot of the conversation around hypnobirthing is how what is going on in your mind is actually impacting the physiological changes that are happening within your body. And the understanding of that is important, however you're giving birth. When we say the word physiological, it literally just means what is happening on like a biological level in your body. So yes, that refers sometimes to physiological birth, so a vaginal birth, but physiology is happening all the time. So even in a cesarean birth, physiology is still happening,

your baby is still making a physiological transition from the inside of the womb to the rest of the world, you are still going from being pregnant to not being pregnant. So there are still physiological changes happening in your body. And we can influence that and control that by what is going on in our mind. So if we are able to feel calm, feel confident, then we are able to produce hormones like oxytocin which is our love hormone and in labor that's responsible for initiating your contractions regulating them the length of them the frequency of them birthing the baby pushing the baby out but it is also responsible for bonding with your baby for contracting your uterus back down after birth to stop you from bleeding too heavily for establishing breastfeeding if you

want to breastfeed like there is so much beyond just contractions that it's responsible for making you feel happy for making you feel good so we would like those physiological changes to happen literally however we're giving birth which is why I think heavenly birthing is relevant for all kinds of births yeah I definitely agree with that. Do you think it's accessible though? Because there's a lot of people that I know that just don't bother with hypnobirthing. And I'm like, why?

It's the best thing to do. Do you think that it's, is it the name that puts people off? Like what is it that makes people not know about hypnobirthing as such? I definitely think the name is idiotic. The first time I heard it, I was like, oh no, this is not for me. Strange turn of events meant we ended up doing it, but it

wasn't something that I like willingly went into. I thought it sounded a little bit alternative, a little bit unscientific, but ultimately it's like grounded in common sense, the vast majority of it. So I definitely think the name plays a part. I do also think that when taught badly, hypnobirthing has the potential to add a layer of trauma to somebody's birth experience sometimes. So hypnobirthing is not a regulated practice. So there isn't like a registry board that you have to be registered. Ultimately you could crop up tomorrow and be like, I teach hypnobirthing. So it's not regulated. So different teachers, different books, different courses, will all have slightly different approaches, will all have slightly different aims, will all have slightly different ways of teaching. You can say you've done

hypnobirthing and you can have an hour long session tagged onto your antenatal course you can do hypnobirthing that is like very very focused on the hypnotherapy and not so much on the antenatal education sometimes it's presented with a kind of putting home water birth on a pedestal and making everybody else feel like anything else is wrong or bad I very much sit like middle of the road is like, actually, how can we make sure you're getting the right birth for you? And if intervention is needed, or is wanted, what can we do to support the physiological transition, the emotional experience, and get the best birth for you? That's very much my take on it. But that's not everybody's take on it. And so I think it's probably a combo of

the name being strange and sometimes it feeling maybe more attached to a slightly more I suppose spiritual natural focus of birth which it will very much depend on who you've chosen to learn hypnobirthing from as to kind of which approach they might be taking. It's about empowerment, isn't it? I feel like hypnobirthing just gives you a little bit more self-confidence and yeah, self-belief that you are capable because I feel like when doctors get involved and it becomes really medical, your self-confidence is taken away and you kind of put it in the hands of you know doctors which you know is understandable but at the same time it's your body your baby you're capable if you can like

wave a magic wand with birthing what would that look like because I do feel like the more we've spoken I'm like yeah there are many things going wrong in this country like how do we fix it i mean like a five billion dollar injection of cash to the nhs would be a helpful place to start if anybody's got any contacts in government that'd be helpful i mean the things that are currently not in our control that would be very helpful number one would be that what basically the single biggest thing we can do to improve outcomes for women is to give them continuity of care from a midwife throughout pregnancy and birth. And in the late 90s, when we were born, that was it. There was like a midwife in our little town. And all of my friends from school, they were all looked after by this midwife. And you'd see her in Tesco's and everyone'd be like,

oh, look, there she is, the local midwife. And it just goes to show how important relationship building is in birth for birth to work we need to feel safe relaxed unobserved and undisturbed and we are much more likely to feel that if we are supported only by people that we know and you see that you recognize need to be in that room with you yeah and that goes however you give birth right like if you're having a cesarean and the person that's up by your head is talking to you and they're like oh grace look you're gonna meet your baby and you know we talked about this and we talked about that and you're like oh that's what happened to me yeah it was my team member in all my photos her hand is like on my face wiping my tears away and I hemorrhaged with my second and she yeah was there making sure

that I wasn't having an absolute meltdown and she yeah seeing her face and knowing she was there and everyone in the room knew who I was and it helped the situation so much. Yeah it is so massive I went to a conference once and they basically said how much money it would save the NHS if they just put enough money into that. And it was like the in the billions, it reduces everything from intervention to like babies needing special care, and then the paying for all of that. And if you look at it like really long term, the support that those babies might then need at school, like it was in the billions, the amount that you could say, just by giving women continuity of care. So you can sometimes

work that to your advantage, there might be teams at your hospital that work under a continuity model. So you could literally ask, is there a team that I can be put under so that I see the same midwife every week. And some people will be getting this and it's amazing sometimes like home birth teams will have it that you're seeing the same midwife every time so sometimes it exists similarly sometimes like our local hospital has got a birth after a cesarean team that is if you're planning regardless of whether that's a VBAC or a planned cesarean again, that again, that you're seeing the same midwife, and that makes a huge difference. It's worth asking for. Beyond that, it's tricky. And I don't feel like the responsibility should fall onto the shoulders of the people that are about to have their babies. But at the moment, it kind of does. So there are things that we can do, like doing, you know, our

hypnobirthing course is very much focused on like making the most of the system, who to ask if you want this, who to ask if you want that. But it's anything that is going to build the trust that you have in yourself. I'm not just talking trust in your body's ability to birth, but trust in your body's ability to tell you when something isn't quite right, and believing it. Because sometimes we'll be like, oh, it didn't, I knew it didn't feel right, but nobody believed me. So I shrugged it off and I ignored it actually if your body is telling you something and it's communicating with you or your baby's communicating with you and you've got that instinct it's believing that and trusting that it's trusting your ability to make

decisions it is trusting your ability to choose the team of people that you feel comfortable having around you. So yeah, anything that you can do during pregnancy, whether that is a hypnobirthing course, like the birth ed one, or even mindfulness, meditation, reading lots of stories, whatever it is, building that self trust. I think as women, we have basically spent best part of 20, 30, 40 years by the time we've given birth, basically ignoring our bodies, trying to please other people and really not prioritising ourselves,

listening to what our needs are. And it takes practice to be able to do that and that not to feel uncomfortable. I feel like we could talk all day about this project. I really care where can people find you because I feel like a lot of listeners are gonna want to stalk you first of all but just gain more information around you know what you specialize in so main on social media i mainly am on instagram we're at birth underscore ed on instagram we've also got a podcast which is if you want hours and hours of

this kind of chat um it's the birth ed podcast and you can sign up for our online pre-recorded hypnobirthing course at www.birth-ed.co.uk thank so much, Megan. It's been so insightful and also like affirming as well. So thank you. Good. I'm so glad. Thank you for having me on. Thanks for listening to Mum's The Word, a parenting podcast. Make sure to hit the subscribe or follow button so you never miss an episode. We love to hear from you. Get in touch on WhatsApp where you can send us a voice message for free, even anonymously if you want, at 075-999-27537. Email us at askmumsthewordpod at gmail.com or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. We'll be back with another episode, same time, same place, next week.