Vocalization

Being quiet and keeping a stiff upper lip can be detrimental to the course of your labour. Letting out low-pitched sounds such as "oh" or "ah" during a contraction can relieve muscle tension. Keep your mouth relaxed to provide you with a new focus.

Emotional Expression

You should be encouraged to express feelings of love, anger, gratitude, fear, anticipation, or sadness as they come up if this seems appropriate to you. This can sometimes get a "stuck" labour moving again.

Support Systems

Very crucial to you as the labouring woman is the loving support and encouragement of your husband, partner, family member or close woman friend. You will find that loving support persons are a much more effective tool for coping with pain than pain-relieving medications.

Support persons can wipe your brow, breathe in rhythm with you, help you relax, suggest a change of position, give you a word or sound to say together, encourage you to express your feelings, and remind you that there is a baby at the end of the labour.

No one, including yourself, should judge your labour like a performance, in terms of good or bad, success or failure.

Pain Relieving Medications

These are only other tools in your bag, but ones to be used with great care and discrimination, and without guilt or self-blame. Medications must be used sparingly as they can stay in the baby's bloodstream for days, can affect the baby's breathing, and can cause the baby to be drowsy.

The Best Laid Plans...

Remember that in every labour, there is an element of the unknown. You should be prepared to let go of your image of the "perfect birth" in order to adapt with as much flexibility as possible to whatever happens during your labour and birth.

Visualization: Can You Handle It ?

The following exercises may provide you with some interesting insights into how you handle pain:

• Imagine the sights, sounds and feelings at a time in your life when you handled pain poorly; and one in which you handled it well.

If no examples come to mind, make up some examples in your mind's eye. What was the difference between the two?

• Now imagine yourself going through labour fearful and out of control.

Then imagine yourself going through labour calm and experiencing strong painful contractions but coping with well with them.

• What resources did you draw on in the second example?

• What breathing techniques, positions, sounds and attitudes did you find helpful?

• What did support persons say to you that helped?

• What did they say that didn't work for you?

• What resources came out in this example that you didn't know you had?