'You will feel instantaneous love' and other harmful myths.

After a long, harrowing experience where they feared for their life or their babies they thought;

'What have done???' and 'I am not sure I even wanted this baby!' and 'This was a terrible mistake'.

These thoughts are often born from a disordered, sleep deprived, traumatised mind that is literally spewing frightening, repugnant and alien thoughts.

I always explain that thoughts experienced under these traumatic conditions are never a reflection of our true heart but a reflection of a very stressed mind.

I am often reminded of a long and very uncomfortable posterior labour that I attended years ago as a doula. The brave and long suffering mum understandably began to doubt herself; the process and her ability to cope.

She started to unravel and feel out of control. We all rallied to support her in different ways. The kind midwife assuring her that she could go on, we focused together on breathing with each long, powerful surge and dad tried to motivate his partner with a perspective that is often presented to mums at various stages of pregnancy and birth.

He said ‘just think when the baby is here this will all be forgotten in a rush of instant love, elation and joy’

I thought to myself then as I now always do when hear this ‘universal truth’ ‘she might not, I didn’t.’

I didn’t feel any instantaneous love, I felt knackered. I couldn’t quite believe it when the midwife handed my baby to me. I remember clearly thinking ‘Are you serious? I can’t look after a baby I need to go and sleep for 12 hours!’

I felt this way and I had experienced a relatively straight forward, normal birth. I can only imagine what it must feel like for mums who have had difficult or traumatic births.

I guess no matter how birth has gone it is such an unhelpful statement for mothers to hear because there is a very good chance that they may not feel this way and if they do not feel the instant love, joy and elation that is guaranteed in the statement, then they maybe inclined to think that something is wrong with them. They may begin to feel guilty. They may begin to feel anxious at the absence of these feelings.

And these feelings might take hold, might fester in to something else.

I have to confess that being a doula changed my approach to how I talk about birth. As a hypnobirthing teacher I was rigidly focused on the positive and was thrilled when parents experienced their birth this way. But I could see how devastated parents who didn’t experience this were. Sometimes they felt let down, sometimes they felt they hadn’t done it right, that they were to blame in some way.

As a Perinatal Hypnotherapist I now help parents to understand the myth of 'you will feel instantaneous love' and also how a stressed, traumatised mind is primed to produce the 'worst thought ever' AND this is never a reflection of their true heart.

Next time you hear a parent struggling with guilt, blame and shame because of the 'unloving' thoughts that had during or after a traumatic birth take time to explain this to them. And then watch the guilt and shame lift from their shoulders.