Ready to help your clients have their best birth? Use positive affirmations for birth. As a doula, your clients are looking to you to provide support, positive encouragement, and preparation for birth.
We cannot guarantee any specific birth outcome. Birth comes with many variables. However, we can help our clients have positive birth experiences regardless of how their birth unfolds.
How? By ensuring they are confident, feel cared about and respected, and they’re an active participant in their birth. Positive affirmations are one way to help them prepare.
What Are Positive Affirmations For Birth?
“You are powerful and are an important part of maternity care!”
Read that out loud. Read it to yourself ten times. How do you feel? Chances are you are feeling good about your role as a doula right now. Why? You’re reminding yourself of a positive truth.
Helping your clients with birth specific affirmations is a great way to help them feel good about their birth. It will help them before, during and even after birth.
Here are 5 Positive Affirmations For Birth:
#1: “My Body Is Made To Birth This Baby”
This positive affirmation is simple but important. The body is truly made to grow and birth a baby. Even when birth unfolds differently, every pregnant person gives birth. Even if a c-section occurs, it is still a birth. Her body still played an important role in birth.
For many, this affirmation will simply mean their body is made to give birth naturally. That is a wonderful, true, and simple interpretation. However, adding a little tidbit about c-sections still being births can be helpful so there is no sense of the body “failing” regarding birth.
#2: “I Trust My Instincts”
So often we are influenced by care providers, books, and our cousin Sally. Your client is likely to question her gut feelings, her instincts, in many areas of birth. We do not live in a society which regularly uses and values instinct.
Birth, however, is a very instinctual process. Our bodies know how to give birth. Even more so, our bodies tend to know when something is off and we may need assistance.
In fact, “sense of impending doom” is a real medical symptom. Why? We have instincts. Birth is no exception. Encourage your client to recognize and trust her instincts. If they deal with anxiety, remind them to use the coping skills they have learned from their therapist to separate between instinct and anxiety.
#3: “I Am Surrounded By Love And Support”
No matter how birth unfolds, knowing you are surrounded by love and support can make for a positive experience. In difficult moments, when things do not go as planned, remembering you are supported can be a great way to cope.
As a doula, you are there to love and support your client. You can help their other support people to do the same.
#4: “I Am Fierce But Flexible!”
Helping your clients understand their strength and fierceness is an important part of being a doula. We want to prepare our clients in a way which lets them know how capable they are.
However, we need to also help prepare them for the reality that birth has many variables. This affirmation helps us build our client’s confidence while educating about the birth process.
We absolutely want to be positive in childbirth preparation. However, when we create unrealistic expectations for birth, we set up clients for a negative experience. Birth can be beautiful, it can feel magically, but it is often aptly named ‘labor’ as it involves work.
The flexible part of this affirmation reminds them that they can navigate the variables of birth. Even if birth does not go as expected, they are fierce and can tackle the unexpected.
#5: “With Each Deep Breath I Feel Better And Better”
This affirmation is a wonderful one as it applies to all birth situations. If your client is anxious prenatally, they can practice this. Facing an induction? Perfect, this can help.
Rocking that natural birth but hitting transition? This affirmation can be hugely beneficial. Deep breaths are important for relaxation.
As a doula, you are there to prepare for and support during birth. Positive birth affirmations help you do both. These five are just examples of affirmations. When you work with your clients, you can assist them in coming up with their own.
While you are at it, be sure to create a few positive doula affirmations too!
Author: Aliza Juliette Bancoff
Aliza Juliette Bancoff is a well-known doula and doula trainer who has been providing doula services to families for over a decade. She is the founder of Main Line Doulas, a doula group providing doula support in the great Philadelphia area for the last decade, the International Doula Institute, which provides online doula training and lactation training and certification programs and the International Breastfeeding Institute which provides lactation training and certification. She is the co-founder of United Birth, a company devoted to increasing access to doulas across the country to make the perinatal time safer both physically and emotionally. “Every birthing person deserves access to quality doula support. And we are working to make that a reality across the country. The work we are doing to get doulas to every birthing person will decrease the black infant and maternal mortality rate significantly by 2030.” Says Bancoff. Aliza is known for her compassionate and empowering approach to doula work, and she has been featured in numerous media outlets, including United Nations Maternal Health Report, Parent Magazine, CafeMom, theBump and many more. Aliza's journey into doula work began when she gave birth to her first child and felt a strong calling...