theVBACpodcast: The Number One Factor in Birth that can sabotage your VBAC plans

Listen to the new episode of theVBACpodcast to learn how fear can sabotage your chances of a positive vaginal birth after cesarean birth experience

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TRANSCRIPT

Hey mama bear was your last birth A C.

Section and you have been dreaming of a vaginal birth ever since.

Maybe you are newly pregnant and planning of back but struggling to get straight answers and support If you're dreaming of a healing positive and peaceful vaginal birth after cesarean.

You're in the right place.

Welcome to the VBAC podcast.

I'm your host Jamie Zaki and I am a licensed practical nurse,

international Board certified lactation consultant and birth doula.

I'm also a mama to four little bears and a three time VBAC mama.

My mission is to help you cultivate confidence for a positive and peaceful vbac.

This is a disclaimer that any of the information experiences opinions and stories told on this podcast are with the intention of inspiring,

educating and informing parents.

This information is not intended to treat or diagnose any medical conditions.

If you have questions you must consult your provider.

Jamie's Zaki does not accept liability for any decisions that you make after listening to this podcast.

Welcome to today's episode of the podcast Today.

We will be talking about how fear can sabotage your VBAC.

If you have checked out my free VBAC class,

you've probably heard some of this already.

If not we're going to talk about it today and if this is a repeat for you,

that's okay.

I encourage you to listen to it again because there's no such thing as too much encouragement right?

There is a lot of fear that manifests itself inside of the VBAC conversation and that fear comes from all kinds of places.

That fear comes from society,

a society who doesn't understand birth,

let alone VBACd a society that perpetuates fear of everything.

Like a society that literally thrives off of fear right?

Like our society will scare you into making all kinds of decisions.

There's the phrase fomo fear of missing out.

Like everything is about fear.

We have doctors who are human beings,

which means no matter how much they try to separate themselves from emotion or whatever.

There are doctors who are practicing from a place of fear over evidence,

they're practicing from a place of fear of litigation,

fear that they're going to make a mistake and someone's gonna get hurt fear that a really bad thing they experienced last month is going to happen again and they overreact to it and even their own birth traumas and personal and private situations and life experiences can create fear and that can impact how they practice and sometimes fear and compassion go hand in hands.

But that's not always a good thing.

It can be hard to be a healthcare provider.

I'm not a doctor,

but I have worked as a nurse,

I do understand what it's like to have to kind of callous yourself to some of the challenges of that line of work.

So as much as you might hear me say sometimes like,

oh doctors and as much as the natural birth community kind of craps on O Bs for good reason.

Sometimes I think we're not really doing anything good by continuing to just brush them off as these horrible,

terrible people.

Like we need to remember that they're human too.

And sometimes their fear is tangled up with compassion.

It's not that they lack compassion.

It's that they have fear.

The fear version of compassion versus the faith version of compassion.

I kind of went off on a tangent there,

but my point was that fear is often controlling the decision making.

A lot of the policies and opinions are coming from a place of fear.

And then of course we have our fears,

our fears,

our spouses fears,

our fears.

I mean the fears that come along with vbac,

you know,

there's a set of fears that come along with any birth,

especially when you've never done it before.

And then there's a set of fears that come along with vbac that is just like everything on steroids,

right?

It's just all amplified.

The secret is learning how not to be controlled by fear and it's not easy.

It's not an easy thing.

But when we stop letting fear have control of us and we shut down that fear,

we can have a better birth.

And I'm going to explain why fear sabotages birth.

This is not talked about enough.

This is not talked about enough because everybody is so busy promoting fear that we never really stopped to realize how that fear is impacting birth.

Um there are a lot of variables in birth,

scientific variables,

but the one variable that probably has the biggest impact that is the most underrated and impossible to study is mindset,

it's mindset.

So what we do know about fear is fear can increase your stress levels and your stress levels work against the labor hormones that can make labor seem harder,

scarier and it can even make it appear as if you require medical intervention and then you start to have these medical interventions and that kind of puts you in a mindset of,

oh my body is not working or you get afraid of the side effects of those medications and it just kind of spirals,

it spirals into a difficult challenging experience.

It can spiral into an emergency repeat C section or you can have a vaginal birth still and still feel like disappointed with your birth experience because you felt so out of control and there's always going to be things that we cannot control.

And that is why I teach the three pillars of confidence that I teach because we have to learn how to control what we can and release the rest.

We have to accept that there are things about birth that we cannot control and all we can control is our mindset.

That's not to say that,

you know,

you experience the uterine rupture,

nobody had control over that and that's going to be extremely scary for you and I'm not saying it won't be traumatic to some degree,

but I believe there is a level of peace that can come with knowing you did the best you could have done,

you made the best decisions for you because just like you didn't know you would rupture,

you have no idea what could have or would have happened if you planned a repeat c section,

there could have still been complications.

Like I think in life we always have these kind of thought processes where it's like oh this bad thing happened with the decision I made that means I made the wrong decision and that's not true.

It's just not true because sometimes bad things just happen and bad things can happen if you made the other decision to maybe a different set of bad things,

but bad things could still happen and you have no way of knowing that they wouldn't have.

I'm really like going off on a tangent with this episode,

I'm like wow,

I could go down so many rabbit holes but I think it's important for you to understand that everybody around you is going to be talking about fear with vbac.

Everybody is going to be experiencing some level or some degree of fear and you cannot control society.

You can control who you listen to what you listen to,

you can control what you do with the information that is given to you but you cannot control what people say to you,

you cannot control your provider and their opinions or their experiences.

You can have well educated conversations with them and you can take control of your own fear.

You can encourage them to consider whether or not they are operating from a place of fear over faith.

Fear is a tricky subject and it's one of those things that we all experience.

Fear is a good thing.

Our bodies are supposed to experience fear to protect us.

It's a survival mechanism,

but it is not good when we depend on fear.

When we make all of our decisions based out of fear,

we need to trust God,

we need to trust God,

we need to trust his plan,

we need to trust his design and we need to understand that his plan is not always the same as ours.

We need to understand that he does not will bad things to happen,

but we live in a fallen world and bad things do happen and when we can just start to understand that everything is not so freaking personal,

we can kind of take a step back and start controlling that fear and I'm not sure if that makes sense to you right now,

but I think as you work through the three pillars of confidence and you start building those pillars up and strengthening those pillars,

That statement is going to make a lot more sense.

Um there is so much about birth that is just,

it can't be quantified.

It can't be taught.

There's so much,

we can learn about birth,

but there is so much that we cannot be taught and we cannot learn until we experience it,

but I want to help you go into those experiences a little more prepared,

a little more resilient and a little stronger if this sounds good to you,

if this sounds like something that makes sense with,

I'm laughing because I'm like,

I just remember going through my pregnancies and having different fears each time and having to work through them.

It was like a different set of fear with every pregnancy and I know that if somebody had said these words to me,

it would have pissed me off to an extent,

but I would have also known like she's not wrong,

but it's not always the easiest thing to hear.

So it's not always the easiest thing for me to say,

y'all,

I just want you to remember that Fear does not come from God.

Fear doesn't come from God,

God designed you,

God is giving you this baby make your decisions based on your faith in God.

Fear is not,

it.

Fear brings nothing good.

I mean,

fear can be good,

right?

When it works as a protective mechanism,

but we cannot live in fear.

We cannot stay in fear.

Instead,

we need to use that fear as a catalyst to learn more,

a catalyst to grow a catalyst to trust,

let's use fear as a tool and not a crutch,

Those are my words of wisdom for today.

I feel like today's episode was a little less tangible.

So it can be a little weird,

especially when you are in that place of vulnerability right now.

And I'm coming from the outside looking in,

having been there,

but I'm not currently there.

It can sound a little idealistic I think and I understand if you feel like I sound idealistic right now,

but I want you to know that you can overcome fear.

You can shut down these fears and I'm happy to help you do it because it is not easy to do on your own.

I don't expect you to do it on your own.

I think you can do it on your own,

but I'm here for you.

I'm here for you to help overcome these fears.

So if you want to start overcoming your fears,

you want to process your previous C section so that the fear of another experience like that one is not nagging on you and weighing on you and labor you want to practice overcoming your fears and maybe even talking to your provider about their fears.

I'm happy to help.

Thank you for joining me on today's episode of the podcast.

I hope you feel seen supported and inspired if you haven't already make sure to check out the free.

I said free combatting fear during vbac class at little bear lactation dot com slash links that's little bear lactation dot com slash L.

I N.

k s and real quick.

If you could take a moment to leave a review of the podcast,

I would so appreciate it.

Reviewing the podcast.

Can let more VBAC mamas to be know that I can help them the same way I'm helping you.

Can't wait to hang out with you again soon.