EPISODE ELEVEN

Please note this is a verbatim transcription from the original audio and therefore there may be some minor grammatical errors.

Dougie Jackson
On today’s episode, Andy Griffiths is talking childbirth with one of the most calming influences in the west of Scotland.

Heather
My name is Heather Dixon, i’m based just north of Glasgow, and I work with people on bringing up their confidence for birth, parentohood and beyond.

Dougie Jackson
Okay, for people who are hearing about this for the very first time, can you please explain exactly what hypno birthing is all about

Heather
Hypno birthing just really allows us to get out of our own head. It allows us to get out of our own way. Birthing and pregnancy is really a natural process for the most part. But when we live in a society where birth is depicted as something to be frightened of something to be really fearful of, you know, you just look at the movies, the TV programs, it’s never a nice experience to give birth, it means that a lot of pregnant people don’t look forward to giving birth feeling really fearful, and when we are in that place of fear, actually totally interrupts our natural process of giving birth. So hypno birthing just allows you come out of that place of fear, to build confidence in your body. And also to understand the birthing process and actually what your body and your baby do together to make the process nice and smooth and as easy as it can possibly be.

Dougie Jackson
So at what stage in a client’s pregnancy would Heather become involved. And what does she do to start that process?

Heather
People would tend to come and see me from about 20 weeks onwards, and they work with people right up until kind of 36 to 38 weeks pregnant. I have a chat with my clients first just to find a bit of background as to what’s going on what is it they are feeling and either their anxiety is coming from and also to check if they’ve got any prior trauma and their lives of any kind, you know, some people may come to me and it’s there second birth and maybe had some trauma in the first birth that they need to work through. And other people may come to me who have suffered anxiety all their life and the thought of giving birth just throws them out there. It’s such a tough thing for them to consider even doing so a chat with me first to find out what’s going on, so that I can get an idea as to how I can help them. And really then it’s quite bespoke. So I’m really I’m working with the people to lower their anxiety, so the first step of that is taking out all of the rubbish from the media, from books from films.

Heather
What you see in the movies, you know, your waters going, everybody screaming the pregnant person is on a trolley and being huddled in to theater. What’s perceived on TV is not the reality, and that is the first step for most people. That’s the first lightbulb that goes on for most people is ‘Oh Okay’, so that’s not actually what I have to look forward to. So we start there. And then what we do is we can weave in some birth information, some proper birth information, some information about the physiology, so how birth works, how the baby moves, most people don’t even know what a uterus is or that it’s two sets of muscles, one of them contracts and the other one relaxes, and that’s what a contraction is and people don’t always know this. And something as simple as that. It’s another light bulb OK so my body’s doing something that is supposed to do, it’s natural.

Dougie Jackson
Now, the service that Heather provides for a client was that grown out of her own experiences of being pregnant?

Heather
Yeah, absolutely. I put off having children until my 30’s because I was so frightened of giving birth because for me, giving birth was going to be extremely painful. It could send some serious injury. And obviously a lot of that has to do with the things that I had seen in the media about child birth however, on reflection. Now I can look back and see well actually I didn’t like to walk outside at night on my own. And I always had to have my house alarm on. And my husband worked away a lot. And there was a lot of things that I would do that on reflection were anxiety, but at the time just seemed like normal life for me. So when I started doing the work with hypno birthing, it really helped me to understand myself a lot better. So the first stage for me was, okay, I need to get this anxiety thing to a stage where I can give birth, when I’m not phoning up my widwife saying I want a C section at 38 weeks . So I had to really do something. So I decided to get pregnant, I decided that we were willing to try and get pregnant and it happened pretty quickly so I was forced to do something.

Andy Griffiths
A couple of things I’ve picked up on while you’re talking there. I generally find that people in this industry, working with people and helping people tend to end up there because they’ve been through some stuff. I think the very best of therapists are wounded healers. You said a couple of things there that pricked my ears up a bit Heather, you know, afraid to be out at night, locking the doors. Obviously, you’re not born going I need to lock the doors every night. So tell me how did you end up at this place where you’re battling with these anxieties?

Heather
Let’s do the journey. I started doing hypno birthing very quickly into my hypno birthing working with clients I realised I’ve got to deal with some stuff and I need to go a bit deeper studying techniques on dealing with traumas and working with people who had major traumas in particular. Then I decided I needed to a bit deeper because actually I was finding parenthood quite frightening after I’d had my baby boy and I thought I had postnatal anxiety. I’m not sure I think that was just a build up of all the other things which we’ll get to. And then I decided to do clinical hypnotherapy because actually, hypnotherapy has saved me at certain points in my life. And when I started doing my clinical hypnotherapy training I did not expect anything to come out. And we’re doing a practice session and some things asking me questions and the answers that are coming out of my mouth. I was like, Whoa, what? No, I’m not thought about this for so many years. How can this be coming up?

Dougie Jackson
Okay, so what exactly did this hypnotherapy practice session dredge up? What did it reveal?

Dougie Jackson
when I was very little, my biological father and my mom had seperated years before and I went down to visit him in England. And he never took me home. He kept me and put me into a school, I think I was only just coming up for five years old maybe. And he put me into school. And I think it was there for a month, but a month to a four year old who’s really missing her mom and her sister was a long time. And I love my biological father. However, I didn’t know what was going on. And I didn’t understand what had happened. And the questions that we were asking in that test session in the group really pulled me back to that time and how that time had really impacted my views on safety.

Dougie Jackson
Now this issue of safety brought up via that hypnotherapy training session becomes a recurring theme in Heather’s life, and we will return to it. For the moment though, let’s dive a little deeper into the situation which started that anxiety and just clarify that at some point during the planned visit, Heather’s father tried to turn it into a more permanent stay, was Heather’s mum and her relatives in Scotland aware of what was going on.

Dougie Jackson
They knew where I was, but because of the difference in English and Scottish laws, and my mum had to go to court to get me back so that I remember the day that the court case was I didn’t know what was going on. Nobody spoke to me about it. My father’s wife at the time said to me, ‘your daddy has a big day today, he’s got a really big day we need to be really calm and supportive with him today’. And I was like, okay, and I went off to school. And I came back and he came through the door. And he said to me, who do you want to live with me or your mom, and I said Mommy, he then said ‘right pack your stuff and f**K off then’.

Andy Griffiths
That’s gonna leave a huge footprint. You are not emotionally prepared to be listening to this stuff, experience this stuff. You’ve got a lot of question marks going around in your head. Isn’t it bizarre how you set it off in life on this new career to help people, as part of that journey, you’re forced to deal with issues you’ve been carrying all the way through your life that to a certain extent, you knew it happened that you didn’t really know at an unconscious level they were totally affecting your behaviour.

Dougie Jackson
But it took that session to join the dots.

Heather
Exactly. And, you know, it makes all these things in this journey that I’ve been on make a lot of sense now. And actually, I can close down a few chapters now knowing that well, I can forgive myself for maybe, you know, closing that relationship, it was always going to end and I had to kind of move on from that. So allows you to figure out yourself, it allows you to really understand yourself so much better so that you can move forward and start to really heal.

Dougie Jackson
And as you heal lightbulbs switch on, which help you understand your behaviors, your thoughts, your attitudes towards other things in your life, specifically for Heather, the issue surrounding the well being of her son.

Heather
So what had happened was I rolled all these bheaviours forward to keep my son safe. How do I make sure he is never in a situation where anybody can harm or can take him away from me. So then I decided to knock away like a domino effect all of the things that I’ve been carrying through my life.

Andy Griffiths
So what you were really looking for, but you didn’t know you were looking for it was this safe space, where you could process this stuff. And so often I find with working with people, the issues are all from childhood, we are carrying stuff. Sometimes we can’t remember it. Sometimes we can vividly remember it, but we struggle to go, I’m a 40 year old adult now with a job a house responsibility, children of my own, I’m not that four year old anymore. But you’ve got four year old beliefs, behaviors and understandings playing out. So basically, the rules that were written back then during the trauma are still playing out now. So when you’re walking down the street at night, and it’s dark, and you’re like, I don’t feel comfortable here, that’s the four year old. Do you think a lot of people out there have this feeling that something’s not quite right at some kind of level, and then do the classic of brushing it under the carpet?

Heather
If you are doing something that stops you from living your life fully from enjoying your life fully, whether that’s a physical behavior, or whether you’re holding yourself back from doing certain things. Actually, these are behaviors that seriously impact our relationships and our jobs. So if you’re doing anything that just does not feel even the slightest bit, right, then go and speak to somebody, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. And once you find somebody that you’re really comfortable with, you will find that you’ll feel much, much better once you’ve cleared all this, you can actually see the sun when it shining.

Dougie Jackson
So how did all of that work from for Heather in relation to alarm systems being on her own and of course, the safety of her son.

Heather
So for my son, it’s meant I can allow him to do more things like going on a horse, for example, his dad was like he’s going on a horse. I say, okay, fine, he’s going on a horse it’s fine we’re okay. And so we’re still working through that fundamentally, I know my sons safe with us. In terms of myself I sent a text to my mentor, one day and said ‘I’ve not switched the house alarm on for days, and my husband was waya at work. So I just found that I stopped doing it.

Andy Griffiths
So what is it you do nowadays to stay mentally healthy?

Heather
I do breathing techniques. I listen and record relaxations. And actually working with my clients helps me as well working with my clients gives me that really good feedback loop.

Andy Griffiths
Do you think that your journey with the things that have happened to you and your anxieties have made you a better hypno birther?

Heather
I think anybody who has been able to acknowledge their anxieties and then like I say is lucky enough to deal with them and then goes on to help other people is going to be able to get just that me but more?

Dougie Jackson
What about postnatal help and assistance? Does Heather continue to see her clients after they give birth?

Heather
Yes, so I do some postnatal sessions with my clients, just to see how things are and offer any support they need.

Andy Griffiths
So I’m building that journey up in my mind as they go towards the end of pregnancy if they’re doing the work, preparing themselves for labor, but also they’re setting themselves up for the mind and the body balancing after they’ve given birth. The likelihood of that being a smooth journey is so much better rather than than going through the birth and then trying to start the work afterwards. Would you sort of say to moms, if you want to make this the best experience as possible, start the work early and have the foundations in place. So everything just becomes easier, preventative maintenance rather than ah hang on a minute things are going a bit astray here. I need to do something about it.

Heather
Yes, let’s sort everything during pregnancy. So we’re not going to have tho fix it or you know, work through it when you’re a new parent dealing with all of these extra pressures because that’s when we see things like postnatal depression.

Andy Griffiths
Having a child is a partnership, you know, husband, wife, partner, partner, obviously, they’ve both got a role to play, is there a role for the father or the partner in that whole hypno birthing cycle? because surely, they’ve got to be working with each other rather than against each other at times, you know, you hear these comical stories of just get out of the labor room your doing my head in. So does the partner have a supportive role that you help them and sort of mentor them through?

Heather
Absolutely, you’ve got to remember that our partners in the birth room is quite a modern concept, right up until the 1900s guys and birth partners are still outside the room they were not allowed in. There’s still a lot of people who are carrying that like I don’t know what to do have nothing to give to this person who’s delivering a baby. So I work with the birth partner to make sure one that they understand that so that doesn’t send them off into a spiral. Two I work with them building their confidence and all the choices around birth and giving them anchors for calmness so that if a question comes up from a doctor or a midwife, they can answer it for the birthing person.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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