Hypnobirthing and The Subconscious

Everything is relevant to helping you prepare to give birth because, in the vast majority of cases, people approach this time of their lives surrounded by fear. More often than not, it’s fear that’s been embedded from way before you were even thinking about having a baby.

Beliefs, memories and emotions

Being or putting someone in a hypnotic state allows direct access to the subconscious, new beliefs and memories relating too birth can be created. As mentioned birth is viewed as dangerous and frightening by society.

Every time a birth is portrayed on TV or on a film it is accompanied by lots of people screaming.  Women are shown in incredible pain, usually on their backs with legs in stirrups, and something usually goes wrong.
Our birth education should start in school where we have an opportunity to show birth as this amazing journey and contribute to our beliefs about birth.  For those of you that follow my instagram account know that I share video clips which show gentle, calm births.  Having taught Personal and Health Education in a school setting the curriculum is rather limited and with thought this could be developed to be so much more.
When we receive negative messages they stay in our subconscious, confirming and compounding the belief that birth is a frightening prospect. How your parents talk about their experiences when they gave birth to you also contributes to how you perceive childbirth – even if it is just a throw away comment about how many hours they were in labour.
Society reinforces that birth is painful and traumatic therefore encouraging women to ‘fix it quick’ – assuming that women will choose pain relief to give birth.  We would have an anaesthetic to have a tooth pulled, why not when YOU are having a baby? Why would women want to crawl around on all fours when giving birth, when they could be nicely and decently tucked up in bed? It may be you are not even aware of how you feel about birth until you became pregnant and the impending realisation this baby has to get out somehow, becomes unavoidable. If fear and anxiety are the leading beliefs embedded in your subconscious, then you’re going to pick up on every single negative story from your friends or strangers you meet in the supermarket, in the newspaper and on television increasing your fear more and more on a daily basis.

Hypnobirthing can change those beliefs and create more positive ‘memories’ associated with birth (remember the subconscious is just going to accept the suggestions because in a hypnotic state, conscious criticism is quietened down) and because the subconscious is now primed to notice positive stories and images this in turn will increase your confidence in your ability to give birth.

Language

Language is all in the subconscious. From the moment a baby is born they copy the sounds they hear from their parents. All the ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ is them mimicking the noises they hear and when a parent repeats it back to them it reaffirms that these sounds are good sounds to be making. If parents are bi or multi-lingual, then this is the best time to teach them other languages – a baby will pick it up so much quicker than waiting until languages are taught at school. However, as well as emotions, language also feeds into our belief systems, and gives ‘direction’ on how something is viewed.
For example; a woman in a position of power is often described as ‘cunning’ and ‘manipulative’ but if she was referred to as ‘clever’, then it puts a very different emphasis on the situation. A student could be labelled ‘argumentative’ and ‘obstructive’ or he could be identified as ‘intelligent’ and ‘questioning’. It’s very difficult to change all of these pre-existing and, in many cases, long standing beliefs and behaviours etc., just by talking to a conscious mind. By using intended hypnosis we’re able to create new beliefs and memories and better responses to emotional triggers in the future because hypnosis allows access to the subconscious when all our frames of reference have been temporarily removed so it is much easier to make changes. This is done via the use of post-hypnotic suggestions.

Post-Hypnotic Suggestions

Every action has a reaction – if we’re hungry, we eat; if we’re thirsty, we drink; if we’re stressed, we might bite our nails and so on. So much of our unwanted behaviour is down to triggered responses based on our past experiences. On a conscious level, we may not even be aware of why we do certain things or why we have certain responses to a particular object or situation, which is why we may find habits, phobias, addictions etc. so hard to break or change. However, by using hypnosis, we can re-train the mind and create new and better responses to the trigger in the future, as long as the new responses are beneficial to us.

Hypnosis scripts are the method by which a person is taken into an intended hypnotic state and within that script will be two types of suggestions. There are direct hypnotic suggestions which are related to the things you’re told to do during a hypnosis session, making it more likely it will be a success, such as “close your eyes”, “focus on your breathing” etc.

There will be post-hypnotic suggestions, the ‘magic’ behind hypnosis, and what makes it different from other relaxation techniques such as mindfulness and meditation. They work on the basis that when you’re faced with the situation currently making you anxious, you’re unlikely to be lying down in a trance-like state, so a post-hypnotic suggestion is one given to a person whilst in a hypnotic trance, for an action or response to take place in the future after the hypnotic experience has ended. Anything which would have previously caused anxiety is re-worded into a positive trigger that can promote calm and relaxation. The more these post-hypnotic suggestions are heard, the more the mind accepts them as reality. In fact, the brain will create new neural pathways to show this new (and preferred response) has become learnt behaviour. So, when faced with the situation which was previously causing distress, we don’t have to think what to do to make ourselves feel better, it will just happen automatically, i.e. we’ve reached the state of unconscious competence.