Welcome to the show notes for the first episode of The Positive Induction Podcast!
You can listen here, or find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify etc.
In this episode I covered:
- A little of my story and what inspired me to create this website
- What positive birth means to me
- The emotions around making a decision about induction
Further Reading
Making decisions about induction:
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) – You’ll often hear people talk about NICE guidelines; you can search for the relevant topic here.
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) – you can read information on recommended clinical practice, searching for the relevant topic on the website and read papers and ‘Green-top Guidelines’, which are created for health care professionals, but are a great resource for learning more about the options presented to you.
Transcript (Note this is automatically generated and may contain errors)
You’re listening to the positive induction podcast, a podcast for those who have chosen to have an induction of labor or for those interested and how they can make induction a more positive experience. I’m your host, Jeff Gordon, clinical hypnotherapist hypnobirthing teacher, and positive induction coach. As always, I want to remain to you positive breath means different things to different people and maybe feeling in control,
being respected and formed. It does not mean perfect. My aim here is to bring you tips, inspiration and real life experiences. So let’s get started. Hello and welcome to the first episode of the positive induction podcast. I’m your host, David Gordon, hypnotherapists psychotherapist and induction preparation coach. Since we’re on the first episode, I want to start from the beginning,
which for me means sharing a little of my own adoption story and how it inspired me to create the positive induction Facebook group in 2017 and to start positive induction.com and supporting those going for induction, of course, but to begin with, I wasn’t even in the induction of birth world in any way. So I want to share with you a bit about how this came to be.
And since this is going to be one of our main focuses here, I also want to talk about what positive induction really means to me. So my story starts in 2013, when I was pregnant with my first child, it was an exciting time. Of course, I had a rather typical pregnancy, some morning sickness, et cetera, but generally fairly straightforward.
I knew I wanted to do something to make my breath more positive. And I read a lot of blogs. I read a lot of books and at the time I was researching the Bradley method after reading a lot of blogs in the U S that mentioned it. And I was really inspired by the idea that there were things we could do that could help us have a more positive experience.
I think one of the themes that comes up again, and again, is feeling of wanting control or more control. I definitely was in a place where I had a lot of control over my life, and I quite enjoyed having that control over my life. And the idea of birth seemed like something that was very hard to control. And so doing something that was helped me take back,
some element of that was definitely attractive. There were any Bradley options and the Northeast of Scotland at the time. So instead I ended up doing hypnobirthing with it, decent doors of skepticism. Let’s see, I knew I needed more than the standard hospital or doctors antenatal classes. I really wasn’t sure if doing a hip, what related class was it? Of course,
everybody already told you I’m a hypnotherapist now. So I’m sure spoiler alert. This really worked for me and I do. They love him therapy, but at the time I was working as a geophysicist, working in oil and gas exploration, the hypnotherapy or hypnosis side of things was relatively new to me. It was out with my zone of normality or I was comfortable with,
of course it was a C I fell in love with all things hypnosis, but at the time it was something new to meet for sure. I loved my hypnobirthing classes and I felt really prepared at the end of them and ready for my wonderful birth center breath. My midwife led unit breath. I had planned the idea of giving breath in a pool. There was a center really near me that was at the time really ahead of the game in terms of breadth,
breast pools and supporting water birth. I was ready to use all of the things I had learned in class. And I felt really prepared and confident. Fantastic until my blood pressure started to rise a little beyond my today. Everything went really well. My friend Lucy out tonight, Judy, it was like, perfect. You know, other than, of course the normal niggles morning sickness,
all of that stuff, like everything else was kind of textbook. I even avoided a single stretch mark until I woke up on the deify GT and suddenly it was covered in them, but also my blood pressure started to rise. Definitely. We focused on this Judy, as if it’s like this really date where everything changes and it’s generally not too most of the time.
It’s just another day. And only a tiny proportion of babies are actually born and there to date. But for me, it was the date that everything kind of changed in my pregnancy and things went from being really straightforward, to be a little more special circumstances or out of the origin really, or medically different or aid any kind of have any medical intervention.
So of course, when my blood pressure started to rise, conversation turned to induction. Now, as I said before, a really dead love hypnobirthing. It was amazing, but what are the main takeaways for me, from my course from the books I read was that it would be a terrible experience to have an induction. That induction was a really bad idea.
It’s something that would be pushed on me that would not be necessary for me, that I had to do everything I could to avoid that kind of fight flight freeze. That kind of argument of anger like pushed back from induction induction as equals bad. And of course, like, as we know, it’s sometimes a good option. Sometimes a viable option is sometimes an important option to have that gives us the opportunity to have a birth experience.
More like what we did originally planned rather than glue shape. This is Adrian. So then I asked you to, of course is really different, but right at that moment, that main focus for me was this is going to be terrible. It’s going to be long. It’s going to be hard. I’m going to have no control basically is going to be terrible.
And I should have been avoiding this at all costs. So when it was discussed at my appointment that this was the best way forward, I was devastated. And that seems nice. I just, at the time I was just lost in this devastation. Now it just seems like I can look at it from a different perspective and it may sound really extreme at the time.
That’s really how I felt. It definitely increased my stress levels. I felt like I had to fight against it. Like this was a terrible choice. I felt I did feel pushed into induction. There are like looking back. It was the right decision to have, but also it’s true that I was pushed into that decision and it was definitely coercion there.
I was frustrated by the way it was presented to me. Of course, we want to have those open, honest conversations with our healthcare practitioner. We want to have that information to make an informed choice. Yes, I was frustrated by that, but most of all, I was frustrated with my body for just not doing what it was supposed to do.
Of course my body was busy doing exactly what it was supposed to do, which is keeping baby and safe and well until baby signals that they were ready to be born. But that’s not how I phrased it in the moment. No devastation may seem like an extreme word to you as a set, or perhaps you can relate to that either way. It’s exactly how I felt.
I remember going home and picking up the cat. And so, and like just cuddling the cat, just feeling like completely, like everything had gone wrong. And it was very understanding companion, happily listened to all my worries and disappointments, but I felt like all hope of a positive breath had gone and that’s pretty bad, right? Let’s be honest. That is pretty bad.
I did go on to have a very positive labor experience, but at the time I just felt like there was no hope for a positive breath or terrible way to approach your breath, just to feel that complete hopelessness this moment, remembering back to that devastation to that feeling like there was no hope is the motivation for the work and support that I do around induction.
Now, wherever I need any motivation around this, which is rare normally. So focus in the world of induction whenever I need a reminder of why it’s important to me. I remember how dreadful I fell in that moment and her far, we, that positive breath felt. And that inspired me to create something so others didn’t have to feel that way so that they could find a way to feel hope and to take back control of their experience of the dead,
because that loss of control was a common thread, right? Induction preparation. So the next steps and my breath journey and volt, we researching induction hunting through the internet everywhere, mostly kit for positive stories and working out how I could take some more. So control back. Basically there wasn’t anywhere positive. I could find other than the very occasional positive comment on some of the breath forums,
a couple of breast stories, snippets here and there, but really there wasn’t a lot out there. And I really was like, how could I learn? What can help you here? As a result, I approached my induction appointment with fear, stress, and basically expecting the worst if really fairly my body had failed. And the, I had lost all control of my experience.
I had the odd stat against me from a mindset point of view, but thankfully I did manage to use my hypnobirthing tools and my labor was actually fairly positive. I didn’t even consider the epidural. I expected to neat and actually started to work fairly quickly. It was not a perfect birth. It was not at all. Like I had imagined. There are lots of things that I wish I could tell myself that clear I can travel and type.
There are definitely moments I would have handled differently from the position I met. No for all in all my induction and labor went fairly well. I use a lot of hypnobirthing tools for my toolbox and using these hypnobirthing tools actually inspired me to cheat as a hypnobirthing teacher with a focus of supporting those going for induction. There are two main challenges around induction. Currently.
The first is a coercion involved in induction. As I mentioned, I experienced that myself, the pushing to have an induction, the wording used to persuade people that emotional blackmail use to persuade people, to accept induction the lock of informed choice. These are very real issues. And part of having a positive induction is helping people and making that informed choice. You will hear me see choice a lot.
I do not have any ties. I’ve already mentioned the word choice, but it’s something that’s going to come up often because it’s really important that we can make that informed choice, whether to have an induction or note. This is a very important issue. It’s not one that we’re going to focus on a lot in this podcast. This podcast is going to be aimed at supporting those who are already chosen to have an induction.
But if you are in that first Castaway where you’re feeling like this is something that’s going on for you at the moment where you don’t feel you have that control that option to make an informed choice, head over to our show notes@positiveinduction.com forward slash podcast one. And you can find some additional lengths that can support you in making that choice and in helping you in your,
in this position. The second challenge is then for those who do choose an induction, once you’ve made that choice, you need support to move forward. This is a situation I described myself in when I was searching for those stories. And I couldn’t find anything when I wanted tips and information. And I couldn’t find anything. Once you’ve made that choice to have an induction.
Once you’ve made that informed choice, you need support to move forwards, to be able to learn how you can make this easier or more positive, to understand your choices, to know that are still options. To know that you can still have a positive experience, even if it looks different to what you first imagined. And I just want to point out every time I say positive,
I do not mean perfect. And I want to talk more about what positive means shortly. The second challenge is a C as the main focus for us here. I want to create that environment, those resources for people who’ve made that informed decision to have an induction. So to me, positive birth is about being respected, informed, and feeling like you’re part of your breasts experience is about breastfeeding something you do rather than something that happens to you.
You know, I’ve mentioned hypnobirthing many times already, and I really believe that hypnobirthing was a thing that made the biggest positive impact on my induction. But for many, it makes them fearful of induction. I experienced also, and for many people, they need support with mindset repair and adapt their hypnobirthing. So if you’ve been to hypnobirthing and you feel ready and prepared for induction,
amazing, but if you’ve been in Hypnoparenting and you feel like, oh, I just feel like in Nome, good to have this induction. I’ve got this disconnect. I can’t work out how to make these two together. This is a great place to be. We’re going to be talking about that a lot more. So this podcast, isn’t going to focus on hypnobirthing specifically,
but is a common theme that comes up and breath preparation. And also in the breast stories shared here. So you will get tips and tools and ways to adapt that to your birth. There are lots of resources available to you if you’re planning or considering an induction, the positive induction Facebook group, which now has almost five there’s a members is a great place to ask questions and meet others and hear the stories.
The positive induction website, positive induction.com has laws of bloke, post tips, information as well as a positive induction story library. And of course the positive induction course, which is a three hour hypnobirthing for induction course, everyone going for an induction should take, of course, I may be slightly biased there, but it’s really good to have these tools and techniques specifically for induction and having that course that you can do in lessons,
see errors, issue the helpful if for comfort induction, Lita to dear tomorrow. So you can find them all@positiveinduction.com, but do feel free to reach out to me. If you have any questions at all, you can find me on Instagram at positive induction, or you can email me jade@positiveinduction.com. Thanks for listening. And I look forward to sharing more with your sin.
We have lots of breasts, always lined up and information about hypnobirthing and changing from home breath to induction. So yeah, make sure you subscribe and enjoy