“You’re getting sleepy…very sleepy.”
Imagine being at the hospital in labor, and instead of your doctor or midwife, in walks a dark man with a curling mustache. He stands over the bed and swings a shiny pocket watch on a chain back and forth in front of your eyes. After a few chants of “you are getting sleepy,” your eyes close and the next thing you know, you wake up feeling no pain and holding a newborn baby in your arms!
Well, hypno-birth techniques don’t work quite that way. But professionals in the field insist that it can provide a calm and less painful birth. To learn more about how this is actually done, I interviewed Carole Thorpe, a Mission Viejo, California mother of four, and hypnotherapist. In fact, Carole is a Hypnobabies childbirth hypnosis instructor, a childbirth doula, and a lactation educator and counselor. She also practices homeopathy and Reiki healing touch. She has assisted with over 450 natural births.
Q: How does hypnosis help in childbirth? How long will it take for someone to learn the hypnosis techniques she will need?
Carole: Hypnosis has been proven to be a powerfully effective way for people who cannot tolerate medical, chemical anesthesia to eliminate pain for major surgery and dental work simply by using the power of their own minds. Hypnosis can do the same thing for a woman during childbirth, but with a major difference: self-hypnosis techniques need to be taught. The most effective hypnosis techniques that a woman can learn for childbirth are what hypnotists call “waking” hypnosis techniques, or what Hypnobabies childbirth hypnosis instructors call “eyes open” childbirth hypnosis.
This is when a woman learns to instantly enter a deep state of self-hypnosis. With practice, she learns how to deepen the effects of hypnosis and relaxation. Then automatically, a physiological response we call hypno-anesthesia happens. Hypno-anesthesia is a lessening of sensation, not the entire elimination of sensation. A woman who learns Hypnobabies “eyes open” self-hypnosis techniques to create anesthesia, can still experience and respond to (and even enjoy) all the powerful guiding sensations of childbirth, while still being able to open her eyes and move around and get drinks of water, etc. She doesn’t experience or interpret those sensations as “pain”—but as stretching and pressure.
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