10 Honest Truths Not Every Doula Will Tell You
One of the things I care about most is how YOU FEEL in your pregnancy, during your birth and through your postpartum. You deserve to feel supported, whatever you choose and however your birth unfolds. But as a natural straight talker I liked this social media trend!
There is so much more nuance to each of these points than you can fit in a bullet point. I’ve attempted to add some more of the nuance below than I did in my Instagram post, but would love to explore further. If any of the points I make resonate, or you just don’t know how on earth I have come to think this, perhaps we should chat?
1) If your partner isn’t committed to learning about birth, they may sabotage yours
You underestimate the role of the birth partner at our peril. Sometimes clients take on the whole responsibility for birth prep themselves, and that simply isn’t sustainable. Here is an invitation to get partners to step up. If they don’t know what matters to you, and “the why” behind your choices, they can’t meaningfully advocate for your choices during your labour.
Often clients hire me because they value my approach to including and involving partners. Stepping into the responsibility of supporting you during the powerful yet vulnerable experience of birth with an experienced ally on their side is invariably a game changer for birth partners.
2) Don’t waste your time trying to make perfect decisions, you can only make the choice that feels most right for you at the time
I often see people agonise over choices, going outward a lot, seeking evidence, external opinion and validation. Whilst evidence and lived experience are hugely valuable, I come from a perspective of firmly believing that you know what is right for you. Tapping into your intuition is a powerful practice. The more you can lean into this, the more confident you will be in your choices and indeed your whole approach to pregnancy, birth and parenting. I invite clients to build in pauses to sit with how choices feel. Knowing what your gut instinct has to say can save a lot of hand wringing.
3) If you can’t step into your power and self belief in pregnancy, it is likely that your birth will reflect the current stats in your trust
On the flip side, if you do take ownership of your experience & step into self belief then it might just transform how you experience your birth.
I’m very up front. It doesn’t fill me with optimism to work with people who’s intention is to engage in maternity services and “just go with the flow”. The flow is medical and interventionist. The compassionate truth is that “the flow” is also resulting in iatrogenic harm and that an unacceptable proportion of both birthers and babies are coming out the other side of maternity care harmed, emotionally and physically, by the "care” they received.
This isn’t about me as a doula advocating for saying no to all interventions (needed and/or wanted interventions are wonderful), or taking a “them vs us” attitude to my colleagues in the NHS (my aim is always to work collaboratively, with your right to make autonomous choices at the centre of my advocacy).
It is an invitation to think critically about what the NHS has to offer. You can be clever about how you navigate it, in order to get the best possible care you can. Hopefully you will have a birth that you can reflect on with incredible pride afterwards, however it unfolded.
4) Labour will probably be the greatest physical and emotional challenge of your life
I am a hypnobirthing instructor, I really believe in the power of reframing birth sensations, using your mind as a tool in labour, meeting the sensations of labour with effective comfort measures, all of that. Do some people have pain free births? I believe they do. Would I ever sugar coat the intensity and challenge of labour to my clients? No.
Labour is HARD for most people. But also, you can do hard things. I believe in you!
5) You can do all the right things, and sometimes you still wont get the birth you hoped for
This is a really tough reality. I have so much faith in you. But sometimes our bodies or our babies throw us a challenge, sometimes intervention is needed. It’s ok to grieve the birth you wanted. How you were treated when you needed help matters. The feeling of doing all you could and still needing healthcare is very different to the feeling of being an inactive participant in your birth. Support as you navigate these complex emotions and this unique duality of truths is one of the amazing, under-discussed elements that make doula care so vital and transformative for those who access it.
6) Any unhealed traumas you carry will come to the surface during your pregnancy, birth or postpartum
I don’t mean this as an extra pressure on you to be “fully healed” from all your life experiences before your birth. Rather, bringing awareness to this antenatally can be life changing. Know you might be a people pleaser? Now is your chance to set boundaries that will serve you and hire someone (a doula, maybe me!) who will support you to uphold them. Know VE’s might be challenging, get that individualised care plan in place with you healthcare team, so they know that you need extra support around this.
7) If you wait for permission to have the birth that you want, you probably won’t get it
YOU are the one who decides what’s right for you.
8) If you’re scared of homebirth you are scared of birth
Maybe that’s ok. I don’t believe that we need to be fearless of birth for it to work. Exploring your fears around birth is really helpful, wherever you ultimately give birth.
Most of the people who approach me for birth support say their ideal birth is a physiological birth. Many of them don’t realise that home tends to be the place that is safest and gives you the best odds of achieving this. Homebirth is just birth, at home. In any other field it would be uncontroversial to consider attempting a challenge in the place where it is most likely to be successful.
9) That NHS affiliated course you are doing (to make friends) is grooming you to be a good patient and accept interventions you may not want or need
There are many great things about NHS maternity care, however it is a very process driven model, it is not typically person centred and there are numerous constraints on staff availability, time and funding. My experience of NHS antenatal education, personal and professional, was that it taught us what would happen to us, what we would have done to us, under which circumstances we would be allowed to access x, y, z.
Newsflash- all maternity care is an offer and the person giving birth is the one who does the allowing!
There are so many great independent antenatal options, you deserve to have unbiased info & your rights centred in your experience. Language matters (you will be offered a vaginal exam vs you’ll have a vaginal exam) personalised care matters, your autonomy matters. Book yourself antenatal support from someone who puts your experience first (maybe me!). There are lots of much better ways to meet other like minded parents in your community (and I can help with that too).
10) I am not an insurance policy
No doula can guarantee outcomes. If anyone does, that’s a major red flag.
Booking great support doesn’t negate the need to take responsibility for your birth. I talk about the compassionate truth of the realities of standardised NHS care for this very reason. The stats are there. If you don’t want your birth to reflect those stats you need to forge your own path. It’s not without challenge, but you can do it and I’ll be there to support you and advocate every step of the way, whatever you choose.
