by Melissa Strong

Created on: September 28, 2008

Birth painful? I do not doubt it is for some. For many though it is less than painful. It can be intense, to be sure, however, not always painful.

Let us talk about pain. There are many different types of pain. If you smash your finger with a hammer there is pain. If you get an infection in your tooth, there is pain. If you have an emotional hurt, that is also called pain. If you are stressed and tense, you can have pain in your muscles or a headache, which is also pain. The pain is there to tell you something is wrong and needs to be fixed. Going to the dentist to get your tooth fixed can heal the cause of the pain. Medications can mask the pain, making the symptoms go away until you heal, such as a couple of Advil after you hurt your thumb with that hammer. If you speak with the person who made you feel hurt, you can heal that pain. If you relieve the stress causing your muscles to tense, your pain will go away without any other treatment.

This regarding childbirth. A misconception is birth is supposed to hurt. Therefore, it does, because that is what we expect. A lot of education' abounds on how to prepare for birth, most of it with how to deal with the pain. Birth stories of the agony of it all are common experiences given expectant mothers. Learning the truth about birth, and how to let it flow naturally would do a lot more to help women have painless births. Families are only told scary stories, so they go into the whole experience already full of fear. "What if this or that goes wrong?" "What if something happens with the baby?" Fear creates tension, which has already been mentioned to cause pain.

Relieving this tension will go a long way to reducing the pain of childbirth. Teaching women how to concentrate during labor and embrace the power that is surging within them and their babies can be very helpful. Moreover, while it can be a life or death situation, concentrating on the preventing of death is more of the fear-tension-pain cycle. Celebrating the beginning of life goes a lot more to the way of changing a woman's views of how to feel during the birth. Being more relaxed and sharing of exciting emotional times can flip the feeling the sensations we commonly call contractions from pain, to working with the electricity surging as we prepare our babies and ourselves for our first meeting.

Another difference of whether we feel pain or intensity during birth is how we are treated during our pregnancy and during the birth process. If we are stuck in a bed with tubes coming out of us, uncomfortable belts wrapped around our babies and us we, are more likely to feel pain. If we are given drugs because the process is not moving along by some standardized opinion, we are going to feel pain. If we are starved and dehydrated, our muscles get tense and do not work well, and we will fell pain. Of course, if we are stressed, angered, or frightened, this will give us a well-known response called fight or flight, where our nonessential organs drain of blood, the uterus being one of them. When we are expected to move at will, eat as desired, relieve ourselves as needed and otherwise be comfortable and encouraged, we will have less stress, our organs and muscles will work optimally and pain will naturally be decreased. Our own bodies will make our own pain medications, released naturally from our brains, that will heighten our awareness of ourselves and our babies, thereby increasing our own confidences, there will be less pain.

Pain during childbirth. It just does not have to be that way.

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