More often than not the birth partner is overlooked at birth, but they have an important role. They need to support their birthing partner, be their advocate, help them get into that calm birthing zone, help them get back into the calm zone if they come out of it and relay any communications to the medical team, if required.  During my course we talk at length about the birth partners role and what they can do to help them and their partner have a positive birth experience.

Recently I have had a couple of birth partners talk to me about how grateful they were for attending my course, and after they had finished relaying why they were thanking me I said "please can you write that down for me?" 

So here is what they wrote - thank you Ben and Lloyd! 

  "Firstly, I will hold my hands up and say I was a little skeptical at first, I mean women have been giving birth for thousands and thousands of years and therefore considered that whilst it’s definitely “hard work” for mums it’s one of the most natural things to go through.

Well I am really happy to say that my skepticism was put to bed very quickly.

This is my third child and my partner, Lucy’s first so I felt that I had been there, seen it, done it etc. However it’s amazing what you forget in a decade!

Debbie was fantastic, she took each of our respective concerns and bearing in mind this was a pandemic pregnancy with the real worry that I wouldn’t be able to attend the birth, there were a few, and broke them down and helped to massively alleviate them.

She provided really effective techniques to make the birth more manageable mentally and helped to provide a calm that perhaps had been lacking previously. She also provided me with several different tools, to help Lucy get through the labour even though for the majority of it, as suspected, we were kept apart.

We did the course over video call, as again the pandemic thwarted our plans of face to face sessions and after each of them we felt better equipped to deal with whatever was thrown at us.

I think the biggest gain from the sessions, was the confidence it provided Lucy to deliver our daughter Mia under any set of circumstances, but also for me as a partner who couldn’t be there for arguably the most important landmark of our relationship.

Lucy was amazing and adopted many of the techniques she had learned and practiced from our hypnotherapy sessions for the several hours until I was called in to the hospital and 1 hour and 45mins after I arrived she delivered our perfect little bundle of joy Mia.

I would highly recommend Debbie’s hypnobirthing course for both parents...we found it invaluable especially in these testing times."  
 - Ben, January 2021


“As a first time father-to-be, I came into this experience about as ill prepared as I’m sure many first time fathers are. Combined with a global pandemic which has stopped many pregnancy and NCT type classes, I was not confident in my knowledge or my ability to help my partner. 

Debbie was fantastic at communicating with us throughout the pregnancy, she established exactly what our concerns and issues were, structured her course to our wants, needs and fears, and really helped both of us believe in ourselves and our ability to have this baby, and find a sense of confidence neither of us had before.

Working with Debbie over Zoom during the pandemic has been smooth and easy, and whilst face to face contact is always nice, I don’t think either myself or my partner felt anything was missing from the experience. 

Debbie is clearly incredibly knowledgeable about all aspects of childbirth. She was the most comprehensive and best source of information I found during the whole pregnancy. She had the time and patience to talk us through things even our midwife didn’t have time for.

I would unequivocally endorse and recommend Debbie to anyone I knew who might be expecting a baby, I really cannot emphasize enough what a help she’s been!”

- Lloyd, February 2021

Women have given birth for thousands of years, since our time on earth began. Birth was viewed as an empowering, enlightening, powerful and natural event… so how have we got to this place where THE most normal and natural event in the world has become one of the things that many women fear the most?

It is not because your body was designed badly, or that your baby is not perfect for your body. It has more to do with how the events over the last few hundred years have shaped our beliefs and experiences of birth.

This timeline overview helps to put that in context of how this fear has built up over the years:

1. Natural world.  Before Christianity (and still in non-Christian parts of the world), birth was a wonderful celebration, a connection with mother earth, a pagan ritual, birthing women were adored, revered, birth was magical, wonderful.

2. Christianity.  With the development of Christianity in the middle-ages, giving birth became connected with sex and as sex was considered carnal sin, the position of women began to be demeaned.

3. Witches.  Between the 14th and 17th century, early midwives, or women who were the helpers of women during birth were considered witches, heretics and helpers of evil – millions of these women were executed. As a result, the inherent knowledge of supporting birth women began to disappear and so complications began to arise, sometimes leading to death, therefore women became more fearful of birth. Women were often left alone to birth or had a religious man to attend them.

4. Male Doctors.  The rise of medicine, lack of knowledgeable women and the dominant male role put an end to a great deal of women centered birthing. So much of the medical model, terminology and procedures were created by men who were coming at birth from a medical perspective.  The invention of forceps and then other medical interventions led to women birthing on their backs which in itself caused many problems so making birthing more painful and dangerous.

5. Hospitals.  The creation of hospitals in the 17th century represented a huge shift in the location of where women gave birth. These early hospitals were rife with disease and poor hygiene. More women died from child-bed fever due to poor hygiene conditions than any other cause… fueling the fear of birth even more.

6. Urbanisation.  During the industrial revolution, as urbanisation and cramped living conditions increased, women’s health deteriorated rapidly, they were no longer as fit, healthy and well-nourished and so their failing health led to complications during pregnancy and birth.

7. Use of Drugs.  By the 18th century many women had become so fearful and traumatised that the introduction of chloroform and other drugs seemed a welcome move, however it made women even more immobile and disempowered. Queen Victoria had chloroform administered when she delivered her eighth and ninth children. The queen’s experiences helped popularize the use of anesthesia among London’s upper classes.

8. Litigation.  More recently in history there has been a growing fear of the medical profession getting things wrong and the suing culture has grown so that fear has crossed the barriers to the medical team who are now often more fearful of litigation than they are of feeling confident in the woman’s ability to birth her baby.
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9. Antenatal care.  In our society today, from the moment a woman becomes pregnant, she is treated as high risk - constantly focusing on what ‘could’ go wrong. She needs scans, blood tests, urine tests, blood pressure monitored etc.   So from the very first appointment, there is an element of fear. What if the tests come back negative, what if my blood pressure is too high? She is bombarded with all the things that could damage the foetus, all the things she MUST not do, what to eat, what not to eat, how to sleep, how to exercise and so on.

During the 1940s through to the 1960s Grantly Dick-Read drew attention to culturally induced, or a ‘learned’ fear of childbirth in our society, in which stories relating to pain and endurance are handed down from mother to daughter and from older women to young girls, stories which find a place in our literature, films, TV and more recently, social media.

Fear of childbirth and fear of the pain in childbirth in particular, is a collective belief in society, built up over time, rather than an absolute or given truth. Although the women’s body has not changed since prehistoric times, the fears surrounding birth have.

Generations of women have gone into labour feeling and being frightened and scared. Even though there are no wild animals in their birthing space and, according to the powers that be, hospital is considered the ‘safest’ place to have a baby, women’s bodies have still responded physically to their fears.
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In essence, women are now faced with mental and emotional fears of what might happen, rather than real physical threats or danger (from wild animals).   Remember that your nervous system does not know the difference between real or imagined danger and fear and so your body will respond in the same way to both – your body will experience real physical responses to a fear created in your mind.

By learning and practising hypnobirthing techniques you can release this fear, let go of those negative beliefs and build up the trust in your body to grow and birth a healthy child.

I have been busy in January writing my new FREE guide to help you to understand WHY WE FEEL PAIN in labour and some simple ways YOU can help reduce it. 💜

Pain is not something you want to talk about when you are pregnant, and yet everyone you meet can’t wait to tell you all about how very excruciatingly painful birth is, right?!

Well, I too want to talk about it (sorry!) BUT I want to share some of my knowledge of why we experience pain during birth and offer you some simple ideas that you can do to help reduce it.

My free guide is 4 pages long with lots of really important information about why you may feel pain and TEN bits of useful and practical advice on what could help you fell less pain during your labour and birth.

Click on the link below and it will guide you through how to download it for FREE. 👇