#324 | The Impact of Beliefs on Birth: Changing Our Thoughts to Serve Us

Drawing from our their personal experiences, your words, and our intimate birth story processing sessions, Cynthia & Trisha delve into the neuroscience around beliefs and birth. Our brain constantly wants to make sense of things, but it often lands on unhelpful conclusions. This episode is about recognizing those negative beliefs and actively replacing them with empowering ones. It's about taking charge of your internal narrative to foster healing and confidence, no matter your  story. Join us as we explore the conscious and unconscious stories we tell ourselves about birth – "my body failed me", "my births are cursed" – beliefs that, whether objectively true or untrue, can deeply affect us and our future experiences. 

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Transcript

I'm Cynthia Overgard, owner of HypnoBirthing of Connecticut, childbirth advocate and postpartum support specialist. And I'm Trisha Ludwig, certified nurse midwife and international board certified lactation consultant. And this is the Down To Birth Podcast. Childbirth is something we're made to do. But how do we have our safest and most satisfying experience in today's medical culture? Let's dispel the myths and get down to birth.

This is really important conversation for every human being, every mother, yes, every human being, I guess, as background, Trisha, before we get into the Instagram post and the question that you put out there for women to answer, I want to give some background on this conversation, because you and I, on Fridays, we take a maximum of one woman per week to do a birth story processing session with us, and there's so many interesting things that happen when you have a deep, intimate conversation with a woman about her birth story.

Sometimes they want to ask clinical questions, and you're there to answer those. But it always gets interesting when we start to uncover the particular emotions that a woman is struggling with, and they really vary a lot. Some women have anger, some have guilt, so many different things, a feeling of failure, a disappointment, whatever it is. We sometimes hear that woman declare in front of us what she sees as a fact, and you and I are always there like that's not what we're seeing at all. And she's convinced, for example, some women say I I just don't understand why my body failed me, and yeah, or I grow small babies, or I grow big babies, or I go late in my pregnancy, or I have long, difficult labors, or, like, I don't understand why my babies don't Come down, or I don't understand why or why my body doesn't go into labor. Let's say a woman reached 41 and a half weeks and was induced, and she might actually say, I need to understand why my body doesn't go into labor. And this is the most tragic thing that can come of a birth where we're already struggling, because if she forms a belief about herself, she's going to feel worse just by virtue of her own belief. And if she has another baby, she's very likely to carry that right into her next pregnancy. So you want to be careful of your language, like, Why do I, why do I have breach babies? Or, why does, why don't I go into labor? So we put out there, right? You put out there something in a more general sense, right? About stories we tell ourselves. Yeah, I came across a interesting post on somebody's Instagram account about the neuroscience of the brain, because this is not like the fault of any person that their brain does this. This is just how our brains work.

Somewhere, I remember reading a statistic that said, by the time we're age 35 95% of our thoughts are like, fixed. Oh, yeah, we have like, I think Deepak Chopra always said that, like, 90 something percent of our thoughts are the exact same thoughts every single day, which I think no one would believe. How boring is that? Let's like, Why? Why are our brains wired to do this, and but our brains are flexible. We can actually change our thinking. We can actually change our thought patterns. But the first thing is that we have to really become aware. And this is so subconscious. It's just, it's so ingrained in our brain that it's, it's the work. The work is on a subconscious level. So should I read the post for some context? Yeah, but, but, you know, my my evidence that I have the same thoughts every day. I mean, I'm probably guilty of that like anyone else, I hear myself making the same comments to my dogs every day, even if it's with humor or this like it's I talk to them as we go about our day, and I hear the exact same things coming out of my mouth, like, what? Oh, like, I have one brilliant dog. I don't like having a brilliant dog. I would never want a dog this smart again. It's very difficult to have a brilliant dog. And then my other dog, it's just pitiful how he's the opposite of brilliant. I keep you know, he's like a silver lab. We rescued him. And when you have a dog that's overbred, they're breeding them for their looks. We're not into breeding. We're into we've always been into rescuing, but it's like he's just so unbelievable. It's so sad. And throughout the day, I'll say things like, it's not easy being you, Roscoe. Is it or Roscoe, you don't know what's going on to you or or don't let her push you around, Roscoe. I just, I can hear myself saying the same things as we go about our day, and it's just like, wow, I'm not. Why am I not saying something original, the same old, exact, same comments, same affectionate terms, whatever it is. And think how many times that's happening silently in your head, the things that we say about ourselves. I mean, it's one thing to say the same thing out loud to somebody else, but we're not even aware how often throughout the day we are telling ourselves silent stories in our minds, like, Oh, there I go. Running late again. I'm late again. I'm always late. Or, you know, getting dressed in the morning, looking in the mirror and like, oh, you know, my pants are tight, like I'm getting, you know, I'm always getting a little too heavy.

This time of year, whatever it is, I don't know these thoughts are on repeat in our brain, and we don't even realize it. Oh, for sure, yeah. And when it comes to pregnancy and birth and parenting and motherhood, we have so many opportunities to tell ourselves the same old story and repeat the patterns that are not helpful to us, and we got great feedback from our community about the stories that they tell themselves about all of these things. So let's share and discuss and give any wisdom that we might possibly find or have relate or relate. Yeah, the same thing. So it's just, it's a very interesting conversation, and it always comes back to awareness being the first step. We can't change anything about how we think, how we live, how we behave, until we become aware. And when awareness is actually very hard. Oh, it's so hard. We all think we're aware. We all the word mindful is thrown around so much. You can, you can, it's so difficult to truly achieve and experience mindfulness. You have to really practice meditation. You have to manage. You have to experience the separation of the mind from the self it's you have to practice it every day. You really, I mean, that's why meditation is, is actually so beneficial, because it does Train the brain to rest and separate and bring awareness, but you can also practice it in everything that you're doing, just by practicing presence. So Okay, let's read the let's read the post. Okay, I think we spend a lot of time thinking about things we don't really mean. Do you actually regret what you said or what you did? Do you truly dislike yourself at the crux of it, when you really think about it, what do you actually despise? Because often the thoughts in our heads are practiced conversations, ones you've repeated over and over again, a narrative you've created based on what others have said about you. You've taken their words as evidence and created a story from them.

Create your own story. That's what the other woman posted, right? That's what says the account posted. Yes, okay, so we shared that and asked our listeners, what's the story that's on repeat in your head, in your life?

And here's what we got, my body can't make a baby, so it has to be a team effort instead of special intimacy.

That's that's a good example. That's a painful belief to have, and it happens to women when they can't conceive. They really that. You know, it really does happen to women who believe that they form those beliefs. It's understandable, though it might be completely false. Well, we have lots and lots of evidence that it's completely false for many women, because the minute they let go of the idea of it needing to be a team effort, and by that, she means external, not not man and woman, it is a team effort.

You know, are you saying she doesn't mean an orgy? Trisha, I'm not quite sure what you think you're demonstrating with your Is that what you're getting at we knew that she didn't mean that. Trisha.

I think we all knew that. Okay, go ahead. I like, I just, I still amused. Okay, yes, so when you make us laugh, you're saying that, like, as soon as the adoption paperwork is approved, or, like, as soon as they let go of trying, as soon as they give up the fertility treatments, as soon as they say, you know, we're putting this on the back burner. Let's just forget about it. Yeah, one or two cycles later, they're pregnant. Yes, she's pregnant. Yep. Another one reads, My births are cursed. Oh my gosh, I had a full term fatal cord prolapse. Then my next baby was undiagnosed, footling breach. Well, okay, now let's just think for a minute.

The first one was fatal. She was so burned by that she formed such a powerful belief the word cursed. I was expecting her to say her second baby also died. Her second baby was simply a footling breach now, if you take a woman who has a footling breach baby for her first baby, you will almost never hear that woman think in terms of her birth having been cursed.

Here's how beliefs work. They are neither good nor bad, they are neither right nor wrong, but they either serve you or they don't. And what happens when you form a belief of any kind is it's like a groove. You form this little groove, and as soon as anything comes along that can fit into that belief, you deepen the groove. So if a child believes she's bad at math and gets.

A few problems, right? She's going to make excuses for why she got them right. Well, that's only because this is easy. Well, everyone gets these ones right, then she gets one wrong and goes see. And the opposite happens when people believe they're good at something.

The same exact thing happens or whether they're attractive or unattractive, or whether people generally like them or generally don't like them. So she had cursed so deeply ingrained in her mind that she simply had a footling breech baby and attributed that to being cursed. We have a perfect example of this with the one of the women that we recently did a birth story processing session with who had a footling breech birth and a cord prolapse, and her baby survived, and she survived and and her perspective on that birth was, wow. My body is a miracle. Look what you know. Look what happened this potentially dangerous situation, and me and my body and my baby were okay, like, Look how amazing the body is it's the same scenario, just a different mindset. And in every situation, you have that option, everything, right? That's right, you can see it one way, or you can see it the other way. Yep, exactly. And it's not to say that everything, it's not like the toxic positivity, it's not like certainly not everything is perfect, always, no matter what happens, no matter what bad things happens, this is a good thing always. It's not. It isn't that. It's but it is about taking something from it and creating a forward belief. Right for the woman who lost her baby, what you want to be aware of, if you can, is speaking in terms of just plain facts. That woman that we were talking about did experience a tragedy, and nothing takes that away. It is completely legitimate for the thing is, it's objective. Everyone can agree she experienced a tragedy, but if she uniquely believes her births are cursed. Now this is a very different experience. She's that's not a fact. So we want to be so careful of beliefs. It's okay to have them, but you want to have beliefs that serve you. Right? Women are afraid to go into birth first pregnancy thinking it's all going to go beautifully, because they're so afraid if they'll be disappointed in the end, it'll be double the blow. It's not actually how it works. It serves you more to go into it believing and expecting and anticipating that will go beautifully. It increases the likelihood of it. So we want to choose our beliefs to every extent possible, and change negative beliefs into positive beliefs. And we have to be so careful to the to the point of the post about what other people say. That woman could have had somebody said to her, Oh my gosh, your purse or curse. So true. So now she takes that belief and she runs with it. Yep, other people's words that they put upon us are so powerful and absolutely our subconscious takes them in, and if we don't have the awareness to just reframe that, it festers, it sits in our subconscious and it grows.

We have to shield our minds from other people's words and comments, we have to protect our minds and then from our own, from our from having us form beliefs like that. So we have to be so careful of beliefs that are formed. And I hate to talk about this so casually, about a woman who suffered a tragedy, it is not to dismiss a painful or negative experience in any way. That's the whole thing about, you know, toxic positivity. Oh, it was just meant to be. Everything is just meant to be. It's all okay. That's not it right. Deep. Feel the grief. This is painful, this is horrible, this is tragic. You You must feel that. But that doesn't mean that you take that pain forward into your life and establish in your brain that everything from here on out is going to be, what did she say, cursed? You don't take that forward into your life then believing that everything is cursed, that your pregnancies are cursed, that your births are cursed.

Okay, next. The next one says I failed because I had to transfer to a hospital and ended with a C section. This one is so common, failed, a failed home birth, yeah, because I transferred, yep, fail is not the right word. Oh, absolutely not. Not even close, not at all.

You protected yourself and your baby by making a wise decision to get help where help was needed.

That is why we that is why we have hospitals. That is why we have somebody there to monitor.

Our births.

I'm racking my brain trying to imagine what it would look like to me, for me to believe a woman failed at her birth, and nothing is coming to mind. I can't even imagine what that would mean. How can a woman fail at her birth?

Because her expectation was that she was going to give birth at home and other women give birth at home. So if one woman can give birth at home and I cannot, my body failed. It didn't achieve the thing I intended it to achieve. Every woman in that situation will try to make sense of it, and they'll go about it in all different ways. One of them will say my body failed. The other one who will never say her body failed, might say my provider did be wrong. She'll turn it all around rather than blaming herself, she'll blame someone else. Someone else might just assign it to the stars and say, I've been so unlucky.

The brain is seeking a way to make sense of our experiences, and it's going to come up with something. When you realize what it comes up with, ask yourself, Is this factual? Is this actually factual?

And is this belief going to serve me or not? So try to limit the belief to just what those soul experience was, rather than a global experience about yourself and your life.

Our brains are so tricky. It's like they just always have to have an explanation, or the first thing that our brain wants to do when something difficult happens is blame someone or figure out why or how to fix it. It's just like, immediately goes into task mode, right? And that's it's just how our brains work. But I think your point was perfect, that you have to take those thoughts and then get more objective about it and say, Is this serving me? Is this helpful or is this harmful? And if it's harmful, discard it. What's the point? It doesn't solve anything to focus on a harmful thought the easiest way to relieve yourself of a negative belief is to come up with a new belief. That's the way to do it.

So you it can take some conscious practice, but you have to choose your belief.

And then when you have identified the new belief you are comfortable with, then every time you hear that old belief pop up, you have to catch yourself and replace it. You just replace it in the mind over and over and over. And you replace it because the other one will creep up. So it's conscious effort to replace it. And then the new belief becomes stronger than the old one. When a belief is replaced, then the new one does become stronger, which is interesting, but that is interesting, they know that and don't, yeah, and you don't believe the new belief at first, right? It's it's not real to you. You don't have to believe it. You just have to keep training yourself and your brain to accept it. And over time, as you train your mind and you and you say it, and you start accepting it, you start to find opportunities that affirm it, and as you have those opportunities that affirm it, it strengthens it. It's like a muscle. Well, this is exactly actually how propaganda works. There's a lot of information about propaganda, and it's pretty terrifying. We see it all the time. I mean, I'm often speaking out against things like that propaganda, and they it was a very clever strategy in in World War Two, actually how they were. Even the United States, there was propaganda and it it really works. If you repeat something enough times to anyone, almost anyone, they will not only accept it into their subconscious, they will believe it and they'll defend it.

So anything repeated enough, this is why, the example I always give is, how weird would it sound if you saw someone, a political pundit, talking about vaccines, and if they said vaccines are effective and safe, you'd almost be like, wait, what? Aren't they safe and effective? Like your brain almost doesn't hear it right, because they simply reversed the exact same two words. But there's such a there's such a pattern recognition that it would even like if any of them were saying that as original thought. One of them of the millions of times that's been repeated just might have been in the reverse order, but no there, you can tell they're just saying it unconsciously at this point. And so many things work that way. People will believe the impossible if it's repeated enough, we see that all the time.

So we, too, do believe the impossible.

Yeah, go ahead. Okay, so what else? What else is there?

I only have sons, because I would be a bad mother to a daughter. Oh my gosh. What a thing to believe. And she's gonna have daughters in law one day. Well, where does that come from? I mean, how? How? Because she probably wanted $1 daughter, I guess. And why should I rationalize it like, God, didn't want this because she would be a bad mother to a daughter, like she's trying to make sense of why she wasn't, quote, given a daughter. I can't imagine why anyone would believe such a thing. You can't be a good.

Mother to one sex and not the other. Anyway, no, it's this. It's it's the same your mother, of course, whether they're it doesn't matter. It may be something with her relationship with her own mother playing in there. I mean, this is certainly one way that we get many beliefs formed in our life, is via our parents. And so we have so much power, and we have to be so careful as parents about how we how we speak to our children, and what we say to them so casually. And you know, we're not going to be perfect. Of course. No, nobody is but the repeated comment every morning, you're always late for breakfast, or you never dress well enough for school, or you're always whatever it is. Like those things are, they become ingrained in their brains. Even if you say to your child enough times you don't drink enough water, they will have it in their mind as they go through their lives they don't drink enough water, and therefore they won't drink enough water. It's not that they're going to go looking for water because they don't drink enough. They have to make that belief. They have to reinforce that belief and UN it's all unconscious. Unconsciously, they'll go about their lives that they're the person who doesn't drink enough water. It's that simple. It's very powerful. So what's the reframing of that? It's not you need to drink more water. I hydrate my body every day well as, as the, as the parents speaking to the child, if, if the, if the thing is always, you don't drink enough water. You're always, you never eat enough breakfast. You eat. So slowly, I say that to my son all the time, you eat so slowly. That's healthy. That's okay. That was not well. Now, when you're late for school, it's not, you don't take breakfast because of it, that's okay. That won't hurt him in life. That is, it is better to eat slowly than quickly with the water. One it's, it's have a glass of water. Or, you know, get in a good habit, wake up and have a glass of water. But don't make the global statement. You blank. You don't drink enough water. Because, if you especially in the present tense, this is another aspect of how it works in neuroscience, the present tense is actually what we need to form a new good belief, and it's what harms us the most in a negative belief. So I don't drink enough water is much more harmful than I won't drink enough water like I give birth like this. So if you're pregnant for the first time and planning your birth, you want to find what you're looking for and say it in the present tense, as weird as it feels, you're going to say, I give birth feeling calm and trusting. I trust in my baby and my body, not I will trust not I will give birth. My birth will be beautiful. If you ingrain that in your unconscious, it won't particularly hurt you. But when you're in labor, it's still unreachable. It still will. It's in the future. You want to embody it. So I do give birth this way.

So in the mornings, I will now say to my son, you eat your breakfast perfectly. Breakfast in perfect time, but you just missed the bus, and now I have to drive you to school.

Okay, we're all learning as we go, worth we have more. We have more here

that my worth as a mother is found in the productivity or behavior of my kids, such a common one, totally I put that pretty much unavoidable productivity is one I put on myself, but absolutely, absolutely, I remember my dad saying once I forgot how it came up at the dinner table when we were young. I don't remember if my brothers learned something at school about another society or what Something came up, and my dad said very emphatically, if my, if my, if I have a child, whoever steals I want, I should go to jail, like he made a comment like that. I should go to jail like he made such a claim about how he was responsible for the kind of children that he and my mother were raising. And that did form a deep, positive belief in me. It gave me a very strong sense of responsibility about the human beings that I'm bringing into the world. But when it comes down to how they behave, and if they say their thank yous, and if they blah, blah, blah, that's a whole other thing. That's a whole other thing. We're not talking about who they are as human beings. We're talking about whether they make you proud or whether they embarrass you, that's where it can get really it can turn around and get really messed up and ugly and harmful, don't you think, yeah, and you can create a people pleaser real fast with that type of shaming of your kids if they do not behave a certain way, I saw you very, very very poised in moments of one of your children, I know exactly what many I know. I don't just mean the public ones. I mean in many occasions, in my home, many occasions. 

She is how she's not changing her behavior, it's rolling off her it was just like superhuman. I cannot believe how you were able to do that. And remember, there was even once I got a little bit mad. I pushed back. That's the moment I'm thinking about. That was the funny one, right? Yeah. She was like, I don't know if you want to talk about on the podcast, but I but, but I don't care. Yeah. Like, yeah, your daughter, like, caught us having lunch once, and kind of flipped out in a beautiful restaurant. And while she was like, yelling at you, she picked up a food off that that we were sharing, she picked up a food and started eating. I was like, Ruby, that's our lunch.

Because I was so mad that she was doing that we were having such a nice time. But what I think about you a lot in this way, Trisha, because she's outgrowing that for sure now, oh yes. And what it tells me about you is you had so much trust and faith that she was going to outgrow this. You didn't get nervous and anxious and say, oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm raising this blah, blah, blah. You just you weren't embarrassed, particularly in front of me. You didn't apologize after she left. You wouldn't you weren't going to apologize for her behavior. You just like, well, that's how, that's what she did. There it is. It's out. There you were okay with it, and you trusted. You just trusted the moment was going to move through your life and be gone. And it was, and I think that was really incredible, because I know if I had ever behaved that way, my mother would have been absolutely furious at me. I mean, just, she just would have been so angry if I ever did such a thing like, you know, hijacking lunch she was having with a friend a nice restaurant, and start unthinkable that my mother would sit there and --

Oh, it wasn't. It wasn't my proudest moment as a parent, that's for sure, but it was, I actually think it's a moment that you should be proud of. Oh, it's a, it's a, it's something I admired in you. I would have hated to be you in that moment. I don't know how I would have felt, or what I would have done, but I look back and I'm like, wow, I really, really admire how you got through those moments. And you wonder what like when the mother gets embarrassed, that becomes the interesting part of the story. That's like, oh, Trisha was so embarrassed. Her child did such and such. You never added to the story because you never became embarrassed. It was very interesting. I mean, it's just really something. I think that shaming children is really harmful. You know? I think shame is such a powerful emotion, and it's so easy as a parent in a powerful position to shame, and I don't think it teaches them anything. When we left that lunch that day, you better believe I told Ruby how inappropriate that was to do that. And you don't do that, you don't interrupt, and you certainly don't take food. You don't take something no matter how hungry you are. You Wild Child, wild child, I accept that about her. Did you just say, you wild child, you wild child? Yes, yes. I mean, that's her. That's who she is, and it's going to serve her well, but to shame her in the moment wasn't going to help, right? And I don't always have that self control, but you know, plenty of mornings in my house, if you saw the frustrations and the yelling at my kids, it happens, for sure, but it was a little easier, I guess, because we were in public. But I just whole point is I just don't think shame is the technique to teach children. It's the way to teach children to dislike themselves and the woman who shared the one whose comment you read last was going so far as to say it's a reflection of her, and when you went through very difficult moments like that repeatedly through a couple of years, you you didn't seem to ever indicate it was a reflection of who you are or who you are as a mother. And that was your decision. Yeah, it was your decision not to judge yourself for it, just to judge her, or more, to forget, I think, to forgive myself. I certainly have judged myself when I kids have misbehaved or if they didn't achieve what I expected them to achieve at some points, but I forgive myself really easily for it, and accept that if I give them the right environment to feel safe and secure, they are going to become whoever they are going to become, and I can't control every aspect of that, and that's very freeing as a parent.

Without being avoidant of responsibility. I still take responsibility, but the pressure, you know, they're their own being. They are their own beings, and my job is to create that safety space, to allow them to become that and put down some firm boundaries when they cross a certain line, okay? And that's that's it. What's next?

Um, yep, my body is ugly after two kids, and that my husband is lying when he tells me I look good. Well, I'm sorry she feels that way, but good for him, I believe him.

It men are, in my opinion, very, very easy to please visually. I don't think they're nearly as hard on women as women are on themselves. And I had a woman in my postpartum group years ago who happened to have been who happened to have been a very beautiful woman. I think it's a little bit irrelevant, but she was grieving one day because her husband said to her, you know, why don't you get a tummy tuck? And she was fit and attractive and simply postpartum, 456, months. And I just thought, what kind of relationship, what kind of man can a woman live with who speaks to her that way? I just couldn't even believe it. I just My heart broke for her and in what good was her beauty? What good is her beauty if she isn't enjoying it and comfortable in it?

It was, I mean, so sad, yeah, and we live in a culture of incredible body shaming. I mean, it is, it is really hard for women to look at themselves, one way before children and another way after, and not see it as and not see it in a positive way, because our culture just has taught us that a body must look a certain way.

There's so much toxicity around that. And I think there's been some, some good effort out there to try to change body image and respect different body shapes and sizes.

Yeah, sometimes it's, sometimes it's a little extreme, yeah, sometimes it's a little extreme, like you might say proving points or something. I mean, we want to be healthy. I don't think, I mean, some, there's actually a sect of this movement that is, like, too far is celebrating abject, the antithesis, antithesis, a healthy, yes, like, that's the body type, right? That's not how we get to progress. That is not progress. And that's, you know, that that that's not healthy, and sometimes there's such a strong counter culture with something. But they did do research, and they found that when women rate their own attractiveness and then other people rate that woman's attractiveness, the women rate their attractiveness lower than the people around her. And then they did the same thing with men, and they found that men rated themselves higher than the people around them rated them. And I thought, good for men, good for them, because who is served better by their belief? Everyone would be better off believing that they're more attractive than they actually are, according to the judgment of all the people around them, more intelligent than they actually are so good. I don't think men have been subject to the same type of body image pressure over in society that women have, and that's not every man and every woman, but like societally, it makes total sense. Yeah, you see it? I know. So a fact is, it's fact your body is going to be different after having children. There's no way around it, and it's absolutely okay and normal, and the body does change, we must just accept that it doesn't have to be what it was before having a child. It never will be. Even if you're thinner, it's still never the same, right? Yeah, when women talked about this in my postpartum groups, once in a blue moon, every few months, someone brings up how they're feeling about their body, and then everyone wants to talk about it, because everyone's thinking it and feeling it. We I always try to bring the conversation eventually, after they all say what they need to say. If you just shift your focus to wanting to look healthy, feel healthy. I want to look strong, and I'm going to feel strong. I'm going to move like a strong person. This, to me, is more exciting to me than staring at photos of myself 25 years ago and feeling horrible about the changes that have occurred. Like, that's a whole, that's what most women are doing. All we have to do is shift. Like, what is it you really want? And you just said it, you know, what everyone really wants? They want to feel. Well, it's like, that actually is what everyone wants, and that's what makes you look well. I mean, think about when, think about when you freshly fall in love. You know how people just have a glow about them? It's like, what? What's going on with you? Are you doing something different? Something different with your hair, your skin? Like, what is it? No, you're just feeling so good. And when you feel so good, you look so good, so true. You really differently, totally. Your energy is just your it's there's a glow in your energy. And of course, we can't feel like that all the time.

And that initial love doesn't last, like that initial infatuation doesn't last. But when women are postpartum, you know they are not it is harder to feel like yourself. So we have to accept that too. You are in a state of extreme giving and not a lot of getting back in those early postpartum months, and so some of it is just understanding that it takes some time too. You're not gonna there's no bounce back. There's no three months after I have a baby, I should be looking and feeling amazing, right? Forget that. Yeah, you're in your season. It takes time. You know what you just reminded me of. It's like I'm veering a tiny bit off track, but it's, I still think it's worth, worth saying. M Scott pack, the author of The Road Less Traveled, which I think is just I learned I read as a young adult, and I just grew so much by reading that book. It just taught me so much. And there's one thing in there that he says that I that always stuck with me. It was always very interesting. He talks about infatuation and how infatuation isn't love. And there's a chapter, and I think he names a chapter after this, called Love is not a feeling. And his point is, love is a verb. It's not a feeling. You can So one example he gives is like the parents who are hyper possessive, and when their kids grow up, the parents throw a fit and cry and say, don't move away. How can you want to move across the country, but I love you, but I love you. And his point is that's possessiveness, and people confuse that with love. So I really learned a lot by reading that book was awesome to read as a young woman entering adult life, and he said a comment about marriage, where he said he feels that the way humans are made. This is his theory, we're designed to fall in love, kind of to trap us into getting married, and then we find out if these two people really love each other, they're kind of, now they're locked into the system that they participated in, and now the love begins, because the infatuation will change into something else. And the big question is, does it evolve into love? Do you stay through your hard times? Do you work things out? Do you actually show up and have the discipline to take care of your marriage and love each other? And he says, We have to fall in love first, because what else would possibly convince anyone to get married, if it if dating were like the experience of being married at 10 years. So it's kind of an interesting theory that love is actually what comes later in many marriages, if it's going to come at all while everyone's always trying to chase the infatuation. Again. Big digression, but a very important point, though, yeah, as we're off topic this, you know, this is the way we kind of chat on Patreon sometimes. But I just felt like we might as well have this episode just chat and let ourselves go on maybe, maybe we'll continue that conversation in our Monday night random chat on Patreon. That's a good idea. I love talking fascinating. Okay, the last one that I am incapable of, basically anything that's about as harmful as a belief can get.

Yeah, I heard completely out of perspective, completely, you know, her, her brain is deeply in suffering and pain of some sort. To see it that way. I mean, I'm sure this woman is managing so many things every day, any mother is incredibly capable.

Just getting up and taking care of your baby, day in and day out, feeding the family, keeping your baby safe, keeping everybody well, demonstrates incredible capability.

It's hard she needs. I mean, this is easy to say from the outside, because we're not in her brain, but she could probably sit down and write a list of 20 things in five minutes that she is incredibly capable of doing, yeah, and doing well, you just wonder how this happened. And it's the classic, probably the classic childhood abusive comments that have been so common, like the kind of thing, like, if a parent ever said, Can't you do anything? Right? If you say that to another person, especially a child whose brain is developing, that will go deep, and some people are extremely achieved and successful. And they are that way because some of them just don't stop. They they're authors, they have PhDs. They just can't stop because they're still chasing the belief that they can do something, that they're good at something. And it's, it's so sad, and someone did a job on that person. Now you're an adult, it's your responsibility to change the belief they're hard to change, but that's what you have to do, and the way to change that is to get objective. It's not easy, but get objective and start wrecking.

Hypnotizing and acknowledging all the things that you are capable of. Well, that was good. That was a really important conversation. And this is why I'm even in this field of work now, because that's sort of what HypnoBirthing did for me. I used to when I decided to have a birthing center birth, I faced my fear of a natural birth, and when I explored that, I found all these beliefs birth is painful, you know there, it's like you just have to get through it and endure it. And that those beliefs terrified me, and it was changing. The beliefs that changed my births and changed my life before I had my son, I remember being overwhelmed with a feeling of being so grateful I was a woman, not because I thought birth would necessarily be easy or beautiful, but I thought there's no way I would trade this. It's ahead of me. I'm I don't have all the confidence in the world, but I feel ready and I feel curious, and there's no way I don't want to be birthing mother, the breastfeeding mother. I wanted that as part of my life experience, so I was only able to reach that those true feelings within me that have now lasted ever since by replacing old beliefs that we are made to give birth, that nature has designed this process to perfection. Again, we're not here to judge whether the new beliefs are right or wrong. The only question is, did those new beliefs serve me or did they not? That's the only way to approach beliefs. So thank you everyone for participating in this conversation. If you want more conversations like this, well, first of all, come hang out with us on Patreon, but even for the podcast, shoot us a message on Instagram, talk to us about it, because this is how, this is how we hang out and talk anyway.

Thank you for joining us at the Down To Birth Show. You can reach us @downtobirthshow on Instagram or email us at Contact@DownToBirthShow.com. All of Cynthia’s classes and Trisha’s breastfeeding services are offered live online, serving women and couples everywhere. Please remember this information is made available to you for educational and informational purposes only. It is in no way a substitute for medical advice. For our full disclaimer visit downtobirthshow.com/disclaimer. Thanks for tuning in, and as always, hear everyone and listen to yourself.