Feel sad about my birth experience. Failed at hypnobirthing.

[Cocopops2010]

Hi everyone I could do with some advice (and maybe a shake).
Dc is 5 months old and is a lovely baby. Sleeping and feeding well so I have no excuse to feel low. However over the last few weeks I’ve got really down about the birth. I can’t stop thinking about it.
I had done a hypnobirthing course and listened to the MP3s a lot, did the practice breathing etc. I tried to keep an open mind but really wanted a low intervention birth. (I guess everyone does, so I know i’m being silly.)
Anyway baby was two weeks late so was induced. Pessary worked and the breathing really helped. However then my waters broke and the pessary came out and then I was told I had to go on the drip.
It was awful. I tried really hard to keep my breathing and visualisation going but my contractions came on top of each other and I felt totally out of control. After three hours I had an epidural. Anyway the short version is that epidural failed after a few hours on one side, 12 hours later was finally fully dilated failed ventouse and ended up with forceps and episiotomy. 36 hours from pessary to birth.
I don’t know why I feel so sad now. I feel I failed which I know is silly. All the hypnobirthing practice I did told me it didn’t have to be painful etc but I just couldn’t cope on the drip at all. I really wanted to give birth in a UFO position which my NCT class had taught me about but ended up on my back feet in stirrups.
I need somebody to give me a shake and tell me to cheer up.

Poor maternal effort doesn’t meant you weren’t trying. It means unfortunately your efforts just weren’t progressing things as much as they like.

Did you post on December about this? Your comments seem really familiar?

If yes, please ask your GP for a referral for a midwife debrief as this does seem to be really concerning you and you need to move past this.

@katnisskringle that sounds horrendous. Well done on getting through it. Labour is bloody hard isn’t it?
@hollowvictory you are totally right - I know that I am very lucky so I am annoyed with myself for feeling sad. However this thread has been very useful.

@blueberryfool123 yes I did post about poor maternal effort in December/January. I was upset and confused about that comment but I felt ok about the birth. Yes I think a debrief would be helpful. This thread has been really helpful though.

Listen to Babdoc. In fact print out her post and memorise it.

And all the other wise women on this thread for that matter.

Your experience is very very similar to that of my first labour. There seems to be this weird expectation being bandied about that women can somehow control labour. That you ‘should’ be able to breathe your way through it, and if you don’t you’ve somehow failed at it. What tosh. There are so many factors and pain threshold doesn’t come into it. My second labour was textbook, like a bloody animal in the woods but I’m the same person, birthing another massive baby, but this time it all happened as it ‘should’ because my second was in a perfect position, I went into labour naturally, no sweep or drip or manually broken membranes and most importantly, no back to back baby with his head tilted. You just aren’t in control of what happens, whatever the perfect birth brigade preach. I hope you’re ok? My dreadful birth and awful healing process descended into PND after about four months, do speak to your gp or health visitor if it’s really getting you down or if you need help to put it into perspective. You made a perfect baby love, and got it here safely and are now the person keeping it alive, you did and are doing brilliantly x

I had drug free births. I was lucky.

I've told anyone who ever asked me if they had to have the drip to be induced to take the pain relief.

You did a marvellous job. Your baby is well, your well. Job done. There's nothing heroic or special about giving birth. It doesn't make you special or a mother. It didnt prepare me for being any better at teenagers...(now that's hard). Enjoy your baby, you did a marvellous thing - you grew a person.

Hypnobirthing and other measures that women take in preparation for childbirth really have one main function: to stop you feeling overwhelmed with terror when faced with a situation over which you realistically have next to no control.

That’s not to denigrate those methods - even just feeling a bit safer can be worth it. If hypnobirthing relaxed you even a little bit then that’s great - it helped. Your birth sounds traumatic and I’m sure you needed all the help you could get.

The natural childbirth movement has a lot to answer for. I have read and listened to many, many stories from women who feel like ‘failures’ for having had interventions, and this has a knock-on effect on their wellbeing postpartum. As if the psychological and bodily trauma of labour wasn’t enough, we’re also made to feel deficient if we experienced common complications, over which we have zero control, or found the infamously unbearable pain of childbirth to be, well, unbearable.

You are not a failure. Like billions of other mums before you, you are a hero. The pain and horror that you experienced is testament to your love for your baby. Your body is incredible, but making a baby is hard, and sometimes we all need a bit of help. Be kind to yourself - you deserve it.

OP I was really set on moving around, minimal pain relief and intervention but I had to be induced. The way it was explained to me was that because it happens more quickly rather than your body making labour happen naturally, the body's ability to manage the pain is compromised - it comes on too quickly with the drip. She told me most women would need an epidural as a result.

It all sounds pretty hard going for you and that you did amazingly well.

I can't really help as much as some of the other pp's but just wanted to say you did a great job, you definitely didn't fail & I hope you feel better in yourself after reading all these lovely supportive posts

I did hypnobirthing twice. First time it worked like a dream. Second time not at all. Why? First birth was fast and straightforward. Second birth I was probably back to back and my midwife was a bully. I think hypnobirthing can work but not miracles when the birth is traumatic. You did not fail.

Thank you for all your kind and sensible replies I feel much better. I haven’t told anyone how I feel because I worry it sounds so ungrateful but your advice has really helped.

Your feelings aren’t right or wrong, they just are.

But you have been fed factually incorrect , anti scientific and misogynistic views which you have inadvertently taken on board. And that’s coloured your thinking.

You are a victim of unhelpful Propaganda. You are not stupid, it’s easy to get sucked in when it’s all around you.

Thanks @imogen. Do you really feel it’s misogynistic? That’s interesting.

@IM0GEN @Cocopops2010 since my DD's birth I've been thinking about that a lot, is the value placed on 'natural birth with no pain relief' misogynistic, or at least partly sexist? There isn't a medical, life-threatening procedure that men are encouraged to do 'naturally' - imagine a 'natural' vasectomy! But then I wonder if it's a simplistic way of thinking about it. There's something reassuring about believing you can 'breathe the baby out', and the idea of a natural birth is less 'scary' than a medicalised one. Also there's a pervasive belief in lots of areas that 'natural is better' these days - look at the anti-vaccine movement, people's distrust of 'chemicals', the justification of diets like paleo or fasting being 'eat how we did thousands of years ago' as if this is automatically and obviously better than how we eat now ...

So I think maybe it is a whole mess of things that all converge to explain the appeal! I think about myself I had no real reason to be 'against' epidurals - my obstetrician advised me to have one when we discussed birth choices as 'what is the point in suffering when you don't need to?'. I thought 'it's not like that' and ploughed on with my water birth fantasy but I realise now essentially my response WAS 'I do need to suffer, I'm just not sure why'

Thanks again to everyone who commented. I went through my discharge notes and remembered a few things I had forgotten. They were concerned about his heart beat as it dropped after each contraction and also I was stuck at 3cm for a number of hours before I had the drip. So I can see why I needed the drip. I also spoke to my dh and he made me feel a lot better and reminded me how much pain I was in before the epidural. It was a shame it failed on one side but to have it was a sensible decision at the time.
As many of you have said breathing just wasn’t going to cut it with my birth!! Without intervention it might have all gone horribly wrong. I think I also did get sucked into the whole natural birth movement even when I told myself I wouldn’t.
Thanks so much again for your replies. This morning I looked at my dc and reminded myself that my body made him and it’s amazing.

I wanted a nice, calm, relaxed water birth with my second DS.

Unfortunately I had to be induced at 37 weeks due to pre eclampsia, had a very very fast and painful birth with no time for pain relief, with them being unable to find DS' heartbeat at one point. And then a hemmorage!

It's taken me a long time to get to a place where I'm sort of accepting what happened, he's 18 months old now and I still feel very anxious when I think of his birth. BUT he's here, and happy and safe, that's all that matters.

You almost feel as if you've been robbed don't you, then really ungrateful that you have this beautiful baby when others aren't so lucky. But then you realise it doesn't really matter how they got here, just that they are ❤️

Debrief and, if it's not too 'woo' for you, some kind of ritual where you mark all this stuff and lay it to rest. Around our babies' first birthdays me and a group of other women met up to honour our journey and talk about the shit that happened around birth and since.

There's value in natural birth stuff because the alternative is a system in there's no check on doctors' instinct to intervene and think they can improve on nature. The way it used to be done with routine episiotomies, stirrups etc was also shit. But the idea that all births can be fairy lights and puffy breaths is unrealistic.

I think of birth as landing on a shore from a boat - some woman get a sandy shore and a rowboat, some women get a battleship and a load of rocks in stormy weather. Not bloody fair but it's not your fault either.

Totally agree with everyone else, you have not failed.

I had similar with dd1 (18). My mum and SIL had straughtforward spontaneous vaginal births so my birth plan was the same however she was induced at 42wks, first with the pessary, then with drip. I don't think it's possible to breathe through drip based contractions there's no break between them! I had an epidural. She was back to back, ventoused out and I was left with a 3rd degree tear and episiotomy. I felt a total failure too, then I struggled to breastfeed, another 'natural' thing I didn't manage.

9years later I had dd2, my birth plan was give me a csection rather than stick me on the drip again. However fortunately her birth was spontaneous, so there was a gradual build up. I still had an epidural though.

Dd3 my birth plan was I like epidurals i want one. She was induced at 42wks but because by that point it was a path well travelled (by big babies) they induced by breaking my waters and she was born quickly, but obviously not painlessly!!. I wanted an epidural but there were no anaethetist! It was a good experience though, the polar opposite of my first.

I think the problem with hypnobirthing is people can attribute 'good' births to the hypnobirthing whereas perhaps they're just lucky. Much like when your baby is a good sleeper and you think well done me! Then you have another (2 in my case) who won't sleep.

Anyway talk to someone if you need to and congrats on your baby. And after all my twittering I am expecting number 4 in August and I did sign up to PBC early on as I'm still hoping for a breathing calm painless birth

This is about misselling expectations. You feel you failed only because you expected the birth to be easy. Many births are not easy, and because we have life-saving interventions, many mothers and babies don't die in the process. You had a traumatic birth, and because of that, you have a live baby. You were sold an illusion that often cannot work, for reasons outside of the control of the mother, eg presentation and many others. Retell your story. You did not fail.

Thank you @confusedbeetle. I have tried to rethink my story today and frame it differently. I didn’t think birth would be easy (my mum had lots of trouble with me) but I just thought that I would be able to ‘do’ it. I’m not sure what I even thought I meant by that. However there was nothing I did or didn’t do that made much difference to my baby’s birth - it happened how it happened and I realise I need to be happy about that.

Glad you are feeling better and able to look at things a bit differently.

I just don't think inductions and hypnobirthing are compatible!

Hi OP,

Lots of good advice already. Our births sound so similar, I had an epidural at full dilation after g&a and pethidine before a theatre forceps deliver. Was on that bloody drip for 9 hours and when they took it out while prepping for theatre, my god, the difference between that and a natural contraction was night and day.
DH always points out how much worse the pain would have been without the hypnobirthing techniques and he's right. After feeling like a bit of a failure in weeks after birth I now feel like I did pretty awesome to get through it. Be kind to yourself and glad you're feeling a wee bit better about it all.

This is a therapeutic thread for me. It's so easy to internalise the idea that you somehow failed, did something wrong isn't it.

Things I taking from this:
It is not my fault baby was back to back
I managed contractions for 48 hours without any pain relief with hypnobirthing which is actually a success
It is not my fault that I didn't dilate quickly enough and needed the drip
It is not my fault that hypnobirthing techniques are not sufficient to cope with the pain the drip creates
It is not my fault that baby's heart rate was dropping on the drip for so long

I think the doctors made me feel like it was my fault that I ended up with forceps, episiotomy and tear, pph, sepsis. After I'd been in labour for 72 hours, on drip/epidural for over 12, vomiting and shaking uncontrollably for ?6 (can't remember), baby repeatedly in distress, the doctors wanted me to come off the drip & epidural, wait for a few more hours for it all to wear off, then push for ?hours. I couldn't do it and begged for them to deliver the baby. They said if I wanted a c section I could request one but they wouldn't support that decision and anything that went wrong would be on my head (basically). They didn't want to deliver the baby at all and we really had to push for it because I was beyond beyond exhausted and I couldn't carry on. They essentially behaved like I was being weak and pathetic and didn't I realise that labour was hard? I still feel like I failed and caved in and so it's my fault I had the forceps. But realistically I know if we hadn't pushed for delivery something bad could have happened either to me or my daughter. She was born not breathing and luckily was rescuitated.

God sorry for that essay. I guess what I am saying is that I know how you feel. And that it is so easy to feel like a failure. But we are warriors.

I hypnobirthed with both kids. First was similar to your experience, forceps and epi etc, although I had a very quick labour once it got going and I did not have an epidural and just had g and a. Second was more what I wanted the first time around - water birth, just gas and air in last 45 mins, no intervention. I think being induced really makes a difference. It hurt both times, but I think you feel a bit more out of control when you are induced as it feels a bit more intense. I think your whole body feels the labour and fights it a bit as it is induced.

I still felt proud of myself the first time around and didn't feel I failed and neither should you. You have just grown and birthed another human being and you're both doing well! Although I agree with some of the natural birthing ideas, I think it can be quite destructive at times and make women feel guilty, and a lot of first births can be quite difficult too, so it's not always helpful to elevate people's expectations on what a normal birth is.

If you have another baby, like me, you may find yourself chuckling to yourself when you listen to the hypnobirthing CD for your second child and it says about turning the pain dial down and how the 'sensations' may even feel 'pleasurable'. Despite this though, both times hypnobirthing was great and I'm so glad I did it. I was far more able to put it into practice the second time around, but this was because my body wanted to be in labour and I knew what to expect and had less anxiety about birth. Please don't feel like you have failed. The type of birth you get is out of your control and it sounds as though you did really well given that you had a very long labour.