Issue 95, July/August 1999
Women respond differently to labor, depending on the nature of their labors, their sense of readiness, their coping styles, and their goals and expectations. As you prepare and rehearse for labor, learn various comfort measures and then adapt them to suit you. Use this knowledge to develop your own style for labor. Think about what helps you to relax: music, massage, soothing voices, a bath or shower, meditation, prayer, chantin
g or humming, or thinking about or visualizing pleasant places and pleasing activities. Plan to use these familiar comfort measures to help you relax in labor as well.Unlike most pain, which is associated with injury, illness, or stress, the pain of labor is associated with a normal healthy body function. By recognizing your labor pain as productive and positive – a part of the process that brings the baby – you can help reduce the pain to a more manageable level. To cope with your pain, you may find it most helpful to "tune into it" – focus on it, accept it, and tailor your response to it. Or you may prefer to use distraction techniques, concentrating on outside stimuli, to keep yourself from focusing on your pain.
Many women successfully employ both tuning in and distraction. For instance, in early labor they relax, breathe slowly and easily through out their contractions, close their eyes, and visualize either something very soothing and pleasant or the uterine contractions opening the cervix and pressing the baby downward.
As labor becomes more intense, some continue in this way; others lighten and speed up their breathing. Then, during late labor (transition), when contractions are very intense and close, many women find they cannot continue as before. They find they must open their eyes, focus outside (perhaps on their partner’s face), and follow outside directions (their partner guiding their breathing with verbal directions, with hand signals, or by breathing with them). Sometimes more complex breathing patterns are helpful.
The following comfort measures are based on relaxation, the key to pain control in labor. Learn and adapt them to suit yourself.
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Mandy-Saint Louis Doula
