Things You’ll Never Hear Me Say as a Specialist Doula, pt. 1
I’m a huge advocate for having doula support throughout your pregnancy and birth. It would be kind of weird if I wasn’t, being a doula myself. But as with any care provider, not all doulas are created equal. By that, I simply mean that different doulas have different birth philosophies, experiences, and practices that work for different clients. As a doula who specializes in supporting families navigating pregnancy after experiencing infertility, loss, birth trauma, or with additional medical complexities, I often find myself having a different framework for thinking about pregnancy and birth than a lot of other doulas. And that’s okay! It’s actually perfect, because some people need/want the support other doulas provide and some people need/want the support that I provide, and having choices to choose from can be empowering. Like most doulas, I want you to find the doula that feels like exactly the right fit for you.
This blog post is the first in a four-part series where I talk about some typical doula things that you’re just not going to hear me say as a specialist doula. My reason for talking about these things is not to shame or position these things other doulas say as ‘wrong,’ but rather to draw attention to how my birth philosophy is different so that you – someone looking for a birth doula in Calgary – can decide if I’m the right provider for you! Let’s start with #1:
“You just need to trust your body”
Hear me out. When birth doulas tell their clients to trust their bodies, it comes from an incredibly beautiful place. There are plenty of reasons why you would trust your body. Your heart beats for you, your lungs breathe for you, your digestive tract breaks down nutrients and shuttles that nourishment all throughout your body. Your body is actually pretty amazing, and pregnancy and birth are no exception. The fact that we can grow literal human beings from basically nothing and then act as a portal for their entrance into the world is mind blowing to me. And the system is designed to function in pretty incredible ways, with hormones acting in concert together, each with a specific and important purpose for creating and escorting new life.
And also… our relationships with our bodies are complicated. This is true for most people, but it is often especially true for people who are currently pregnant after having difficulties getting pregnant, who have experienced the loss of a pregnancy or baby before, who just don’t feel safe in their bodies because of something they’ve experienced in the past, or who have bodies that sometimes feel like they don’t cooperate. It’s okay if you don’t really feel like you can trust your body. You’re never going to get a single iota of judgement from me. It doesn’t mean that you’re a bad mom/birthing parent. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t trust your body to do amazing things. And it doesn’t mean that you’re doomed to have a crappy birth experience because you are having difficulty trusting the process. All it means is that you’re a human being having a complex human experience, and you’re allowed to have feelings about it. Hard feelings aren’t ‘bad’ and they don’t make you ‘bad’ either.
When doulas say, “trust your body,” they want you to know that you’re amazing and capable of incredible things. Which you are. But it also comes from an assumption that everything that bodies do is aligned with our goal of bringing home a healthy baby. It’s pretty safe to assume that you and your body are working toward the same goal, but it’s also true that our bodies sometimes do things – for reasons we may or may not understand – that mean we could use a little extra support from professionals (naturopaths, chiropractors, medical doctors, counsellors, etc.). And that’s not wrong either. Maybe you needed the support of a medical team to help you become or stay pregnant. Many people who have this experience feel like their bodies somehow let them down by not doing this thing on its own, the way most people’s bodies around them seem to do. Telling someone to just “trust their body” when they feel their body has let them down in the past can come across as dismissive, even when it isn’t meant that way. Maybe you’re coming into this pregnancy with a chronic illness or are navigating a medical condition that just suddenly appeared while you’re pregnant. That can be a scary thing too.
Without going on too much of a tangent, I think it can be helpful to think about ableism here. Ableism – to put it simply – is the often-unconscious belief that ‘able’ bodies which function in socially acceptable and normative ways are better than bodies that don’t. When we assume, as birth doulas, that bodies are always to be trusted to produce the outcomes that we desire (i.e. that they will function in normative and ‘acceptable’ ways), we often devalue bodies that act in atypical ways. I could spend all day breaking this down, but I’m going to try to keep it high-level for today. In a nutshell, I want the people that I work with to know that their bodies matter, are important, and are worthy of love and respect even if they do things we don’t want or understand. Even if you need medical support to get and stay pregnant, your body is a good body. Even if something is going on in your body that it doesn’t always feel like it can be trusted, your body is still worthy of love and respect. Even if you end up needing medical intervention to keep you and your baby safe through pregnancy and birth, that doesn’t mean that your body is ‘wrong.’ And it’s also completely understandable, if you are having one of these experiences, to feel worry, doubt, or even fear. We don’t have to pretend that your experience of your body is something other than what it is for us to work together or to try to craft birth experiences that feel empowering.
Doula supports labouring client using hip squeeze.
So, what does birth doula support look like if we don’t try to push trust in your body?
It can look like finding realistic body gratitude for what your body is already doing to support you and your pregnancy.
It can look like taking an honest inventory about where we feel like we need to outsource some trust and finding providers (of any kind) that we can build trusting relationships with who can help us navigate our experiences being pregnant in our bodies.
It can look like exploring all your options for birth. Just because your body is showing up or has showed up in particular ways does not mean that you don’t have choices about how you want to birth your baby. Yes, there may be some things you choose to do or are encouraged to do to support your unique situation. Even so, there are always things that you have say over that make your birth feel like its yours (because it is). We can go through all those options together.
It can look like developing your self-advocacy skills so that you can communicate effectively with your providers about things that are important to you.
It can look like finding ways to nurture and tend to your nervous system and your emotions so that we can navigate difficult feelings with more confidence. With practice, we can learn that challenging feelings don’t necessarily mean that something ‘bad’ is happening and trust that we can show up for ourselves even when things are hard.
If this sounds like the kind of support that you need or want and you’re looking for a birth doula in Calgary, you can book a free virtual consultation with me HERE and check out more information about my birth packages HERE.