To think that Hypnobirthing is a load of crap

[Poppy1774]

Just that really. I did all the affirmations, breathing exercises, meditation, etc. In the end needed lots of intervention for the safety of me and my baby (and we were both healthy afterwards, thank goodness).
However I felt disappointed with my 'birth experience'. I wish I had never heard of hypnobirthing. If I hadn't, I'd have accepted what happened much more quickly. I wasn't naive about childbirth - I knew that things could go wrong. Yet somehow hypnobirthing got into my head and made me feel that intervention = bad = failure. I wasn't positive enough/calm enough etc. Difficult to be positive and calm when in absolute agony and baby in distress.
Two of my friends have also had the same reaction after births that did not involve breathing a baby out in a birthing pool.
I feel hypnobirthing is not just nonsense, it is also actually damaging to women's self-esteem after birth.
And before you tell me it helped with your second birth after a difficult first birth...second labours are often easier!
Rant over. Thoughts?

It hasn’t occurred to me to judge myself on the birth I had (instrumental). Actually people often feel sorry for me and I act all nonchalant about it and in a way it makes me feel pretty good like “I’m ‘ard”.
In hindsight there are things that may have helped but who would ever really know?
I get it tho that a lot of women do feel bad.
Where does this self-judging come from? It’s part of the state of being female isn’t it, it’s expected of us...over think everything, blame ourselves for everything, put self down. Other females angst over it so it’s the “done thing”. We see our mums do it so we do it too.

It would be nice to change the culture around this because in the male world they congratulate themselves for farting. If they were able to give birth you’d never hear the end of it.

It sounds as though different hypbobirthing courses have very different objectives. The one I followed was definitely more focused on staying calm and being open-minded and informed about what could potentially happen during my labour. It did try and give you confidence in your body and try to ease your fears, but certainly nowhere did it ever say "if you do these affirmations and stay calm, you will have the perfect birth."
For me it allowed me to explore different paths my labour might go down, some with interventions some without.
Sorry you had a bad experience, no woman should ever feel like she's 'failed' at labour.

I think it's unhelpful to start threads like this because it's dismissive of other people's good experiences with hypnobirthing.

For one thing, everyone is different.

For another, every course is different. Would you say 'the school down the road isn't good therefore all schools are a load of rubbish' no...

I agree with a previous poster that it's probably most useful for women on their second or third baby, because they are likely to have more realistic expectations of what hypnobirthing can achieve. A couple of my friends had awful first births and found the breathing techniques from their hypnobirthing classes helped them to stop freaking out the second time round. Which obviously is great. However, I felt that the hypnobirthing class I attended was setting first-time mums up for a fall, because the instructor was so fanatical about pushing the idea that childbirth doesn't hurt, women only "think" it hurts because film and TV sensationalise birth. I suspect that a lot of women who took that class were cursing the hypnobirthing teacher when they went into labour and discovered that it does indeed hurt like fuck for the vast majority of women.

Like a previous poster, I was also troubled by the focus on encouraging women to refuse inductions (although I'm happy to accept that this varies across hypnobirthing classes). Of course, there are pros and cons to any intervention, but it was all very "don't listen to your doctor, he's just trying to ruin your birth experience.". Anecdotally, I'm aware of several women under the care of my local hospital (which hosted the hypnobirthing classes) who lost their babies after they turned down inductions. The common theme seemed to be that they weren't monitored properly after going way past their due date, or were turned away after expressing concerns about reduced movement. So I thought it was irresponsible for the hypnobirthing teacher to tell women "don't take the induction, it'll all be fine, you'll be really closely monitored" when, in reality, the hospital was failing to provide that monitoring due to understaffing and lack of resources.

@sar302 Thank you for your comments - I think you are right, I do need to find peace with my own experience and let other people be. Thank you again

Hypnobirthing didn’t seem to be a thing when I had my babies over 20 years ago. I think the closest I got was the relaxation and breathing techniques I learned at NCT which I found awesome. It didn’t stop the pain, it still hurt like a bastard, specially first time, but it definitely helped me relax and summon up energy from somewhere in my body