Lori's Story - How HypBirth Was Created

When I first started to study the affects of hypnosis in childbirth I was completely unaware that I would be creating a program for women to use--I simply wanted to offer my clients pain reduction in their births. Every once in a while I would see women giving birth easily and comfortably. I began to study these women to find out if they were just lucky or if all women could reach this potential. The breakthrough came with a client named Susan. I assisted Susan with her two previous births and now she was expecting her third child. We played around with some generic scripts for childbirth hypnosis. Low and behold, when she gave birth this time she was smiling and commented that her cervix felt great pulling over her baby's head. I was blown away! This was not the same woman I had previously helped during childbirth. I knew in that moment that every woman could achieve this, but how? Obviously, I thought I had found the fountain of childbirth pain control until I tried it on another client. No such luck. I didn't, however give up. I was on a mission!

After trying every hypnosis technique out there, from the most popular to publish works of long ago, I was always disappointed in the inconsistency of its effectiveness; sometimes it worked, other times it didn't. I began to research the science of what was physically and hormonally happening in the body during labor and how that affected pain management. That's when I discovered catecholamines, the stress hormones that are largely responsible for pain during labor. I had skimmed over this information before but never paid much attention to how important it really was. Most books skim over this issue. Trust me, it needed more than a paragraph; it needed its own program!

I spent thousands of hours creating this program, the aim of which is to offer all women in labor the ability to "turn off" catecholamines and "turn on" endorphins. Hundreds of births later the program became consistent. The missing link was having a facilitator during labor. Many times a woman could not access her program during labor. Even though she had prepared well with her tools, I even had clients calling me while in labor telling me the hypnosis wasn't working. It only took me a minute of speaking to them on the phone to pull them back into hypnosis. I assure you it wasn't me personally, it was my voice! They had been training with it for weeks on recorded tapes. They had already developed the tools, they just needed a facilitator with the same voice that had conditioned them.

A new idea emerged. What if I could record an interactive program that lets the client interact with my voice during the contraction, giving them exact instructions and facilitating their hypnosis. Every woman has a different sequence of timing throughout her labor, so I had the idea to develop the program so each woman could start and pause the Labor Companion CD before and after her contractions.

I remember the day the newly recorded sample of the Labor Companion CD was dropped off. Someone was in labor and I couldn't wait to see if my crazy idea would work. The first contraction using the CD was an improvement and the second contraction was perfect. She was as relaxed as if I was personally talking to her.

The next challenge was to see if it would work on women who trained with the program but didn't work personally with me. After several months of anxiously receiving the outcomes, it was a hit. Not only did it consistently work, but across the board 80% of the women giving birth for the first time were giving birth in less than 6 hours. I even had women using the program who just wanted early labor relief, before receiving their epidurals and some of these women ended up giving birth without any drugs at all.

I now have a staff of birth doulas who become very anxious if they think our client isn't practicing the program. The difference is night and day. Let me give you an example of our own client base. We had 15 women at The Birth Connection give birth last month using our program. Thirteen of them (9 were first-time mothers) gave birth naturally with no drugs in less than 6 hours. One was induced and was able to hold off on epidural use until 8 centimeters. Finally, 1 woman had a C-section for a baby that was too big (her trial labor lasted over a day). Since consistently using the program I have also noticed an interesting decline in posterior and breech babies. This is due to a relaxed uterus' ability to provide ample space for anterior, head down position.

My heart and soul is in this program. Literally hundreds of women developed it and I am so grateful to all of them. Their births were my guide and my teacher. I hope that this program also helps you to achieve the birth of your dreams.

Lori Dorman