Building Birth Confidence
Building Birth Confidence is the podcast for anyone who is pregnant after a difficult birth, pregnancy loss, or traumatic experience, and who is scared, exhausted, and trying to find a way through.#
I’m Katie, an NHS Mental Health Midwife and Perinatal Trauma Specialist. Every week I bring you honest, clinically informed conversations about the things that rarely get said out loud: the fear, the guilt, the disconnect, the grief that comes with pregnancy after trauma. And the tools, the understanding, and the realistic hope that can make a real difference.
This is not a positive thinking podcast. This is a podcast for people who need more than reassurance. You deserve support that actually meets where you are.
New episodes every week. Start wherever feels right.
Building Birth Confidence
Fear Doesn’t Have to Run the Show
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So many people preparing for birth after a difficult experience are carrying two fears at once: the fear of the birth itself, and the fear of being too scared to cope. In this episode, Katie talks honestly about why the standard advice to eliminate fear before labour is unhelpful for anyone who has been through something traumatic, and what a more realistic, useful approach looks like instead. This is the episode for anyone who has been told their fear is the problem and has quietly started to believe it.
In This Episode
- Why hypnobirthing tools genuinely work, and the three places where the standard framing needs adjusting for people with a traumatic history
- The problem with being told that fear makes labour harder, and why that message puts an impossible pressure on people whose nervous systems are already primed
- What a different approach to fear actually looks like in practice, including environment, support, communication with your birth partner and team, and the role of distraction
- How every step of birth preparation builds evidence against the belief that you won’t be able to cope
- A listener question about whether anxiety in labour affects the baby, and what Katie actually thinks about that
Practical Tool This Week
The personal toolkit exercise. Think back to any moment in your life when you felt frightened or overwhelmed and something helped. Write down what that was. Then think about whether it could be available to you during your birth. This is not a generic list of coping strategies. It is yours specifically, and it is one of the most useful things you will bring into the birth room.
Resources Mentioned:
Free Trauma-Informed Birth Plan Workbook | Birthcare with Katie
30-Day Calm & Confident Birth Challenge (free)
https://birthcare.co.uk/30-day-mindset-challenge
Better Birth Anxiety Workbook — The Birthcare Collection
https://birthcare.co.uk/products-list
Birth Without Fear: Essentials for a Better Birth
https://birthcare.co.uk/birth-without-fear
CONNECT WITH KATIE:
Instagram: @birthcarewithkatie
Website: https://birthcare.co.uk/