#197. Arlene's long labour and c-section to Aurora

So I have spent a lot of years and I think we've touched on it in the other podcast.

I spent a lot of years reprogramming my ideas around birth because I was always really scared of I wasn't going to have kids for a long time.

Part of the reason why I'm an older mum.

having my first older, because I wasn't going to have kids for a good chunk of years because I just couldn't bring myself to actually have to go through the process of giving birth.

But about when I, in my last relationship, when I first started thinking about the possibility of having a family, I decided that I needed to start reprogramming my thoughts and my fears.

And so I spent a good 10 years doing that.

And I felt like I was pretty...

Felt like I was pretty well there,

sorted, changed.

Can I ask, what did you do in that 10 years?

I listened to a lot of podcasts.

I watched a lot of videos.

About births.

Births, yep.

So basically you were desensitizing yourself to it.

Yeah, and I was almost trying to flood the bad stories with good stories and good images and good experiences so that it was almost like the ratio was off.

All of these stories I'd been told and seen growing up, I just flooded them with heaps and heaps of podcasts and videos and stories of good experiences so that...

My idea was so that I knew that it was possible to, like my brain saw that it was a higher ratio of good outcomes than bad outcomes or experiences than good experiences.

Do you think as a child you'd been programmed with a lot of bad or negative experiences?

Oh, 100%.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that came from, and you're probably aware of where that came from.

We don't need to lay the blame or point the finger at anyone.