an integrating experience (hippie wisdom)

I started doing research on labor and birth over a year ago as Baine and I began to approach the possibility of having our own kids. The more I read, the more excited I got about the significance and process of birth. I felt extremely connected to what I began to learn about myself, mother-infant attachment, psychology, sexuality, gender, and culture in my research on childbirth. It's as though this topic began to help me integrate so many things in my life that previously felt fragmented and disconnected. (More on the details of those connections in future posts, I'm sure.)

The result of this integrating (i.e., healing) experience is that I embarked on a new journey last weekend… I began my training to become a certified doula. What the heck, you might ask, is a doula?

"Doula is a Greek word referring to an experienced woman who helps other women. The word has now come to mean a woman experienced in childbirth who provides continuous physical, emotional, and informational support to the mother before, during, and just after birth." She can provide this support for women in any context (hospital, birthing center, or home birth), working alongside any form of medical care provider (doctors, midwives). A doula often works with the birth family during pregnancy and can act as an advocate for their needs during the emotionally-laden process of labor & delivery.

The work of a doula is based on the traditional, age-old practice of women being surrounded and supported by other experienced women during labor and delivery.

Our current medical model of childbirth in the United States has lost this important part of the mother’s birthing experience. But the more I learn about birth, the more I’ve come to believe that forgetting how women have given birth since the beginning of time is a huge mistake. The presence of a doula is just 1 way that we can begin to re-integrate the wisdom of birthing women from ages past.

That wisdom is gradually gaining credibility in the medical field. Recent studies have shown that the presence of a doula during labor and delivery can decrease...

the overall cesarean rate by 50%
the length of labor by 25%
the need for forceps by 40%
the use of oxytocin (drug to induce labor & contractions) by 40%
the use of pain medication by 30%
the requests for epidurals by 60%
feeling dissatisfied with the birth experience by 33%

So, I'm doing a birth doula training now and hopefully a postpartum doula training this summer (providing a similar kind of support for the mother but in the home during the first few months of the infant's life). At this point, I’m not sure what my therapy/doula career will look like, but I’m excited about this journey and path of self-discovery that is already becoming a means of deep integration for me.