"A lot of it is really down to your mental attitude and the whole fear, tension, pain cycle. If you approach the birth process positively and have prepared for it then you will be able to cope better with the pain."
This annoys me tbh.
Yes, fear and tension can make pain feel worse and an positive attitude can help loads. I can see how my second, complication-free birth could have been harder to manage had I been fearful or tense. It is important to do all we can ourselves to help with the pain, and to know that tension can make it worse.
However, no amount of fucking positive attitude would have made my first labour not feel like I was being ripped in two. I was induced and the epidural did not work. I endured hours and hours of agony, the like of which I did not know existed. By the end, if someone had offered to cut the baby out with a rusty knife, with no anaesthetic, I would have agreed in a heartbeat.
Someone else wrote on a thread here that they found themselves wondering, during their labour, if this was what it was like to die on a battlefield and I can relate to that.
It annoys me when people who obviously have no fucking clue how bad it can be imply that all we need to do it think our way out of the pain. If it's absolute agony (and most especially if they've dosed you full of Syntocinon) that's just not gonna happen.