My journey to becoming a vociferous advocate for calm, confident, informed birthing is perhaps surprising. I gained a first class degree from the University of Manchester in Business and Media Studies having been convinced since I was young that I wanted to be a journalist. After working at Reuters and Conde Nast during Uni I felt they’d taught me more than the academic world could (oh the arrogance of youth!) and so switched degrees to music, for a change, and fell in love with working with bands and recording music. I joined the music industry directly after university starting as a PA in a small management company. The next thirteen years saw me rise through the ranks to becoming a managing director of the company, managing world renowned record producers and working with some of the most successful bands in the world.

It was an exciting and terrifically busy life. A 24/7 job it consumed me and I revelled in it. Gigs, parties, recording studios, travelling the world for meetings, I loved it. I occasionally suffered with insomnia, insecurity and mild depression, especially when my father was diagnosed with cancer and passed away a year later in 1999, but I ploughed on through with work filling my mind and days. 

I’d always had an interest in psychology and various complementary therapies trying out anything and everything people suggested. I’d suffered with menstrual cramps and severe hormonal mood swings almost since puberty and it was an aromatherapist who helped turn my life around. It was she who commented that she thought I’d make a good therapist and in 2004 I began training in aromatherapy and traditional chinese medicine with the Institute of Traditional Herbal Medicine and Aromatherapy (ITHMA). This wasn’t really with a view to changing careers so much as to further my understanding of this therapy that had helped me so dramatically. I wanted to be able to share it with my friends and family.

I got just that chance when one of my closest friends became pregnant during my training and she became my willing case study… I would make essential oil blends and practice my massage techniques on her. She asked if I’d be with her and her husband during the birth and I agreed. Halfway through her pregnancy she called me in an anxious state, “what is it that you want?” I asked her, keen to help. “A pain free birth!!” she exclaimed. In my proactive way I immediately searched the internet for pain free birth and came across hypnobirthing. I knew Claire had successfully used hypnosis to stop smoking so this seemed like a good fit and fired off an email to her. I knew nothing about hypnobirthing really, I knew less about childbirth itself; like most people, my understanding of birth came from the tv and soap operas and sitcoms that portrayed it as a sweaty, shouty, scream-y affair.

In the early hours of July 6th 2004 I received a call from Claire, “I think I’m in labour” she said, “don’t hold it against me if I’m not but I think I am”. As she lives in Northampton and I’m in North London I jumped in the car, onto the M1 and went to meet her at the hospital. When I got there and found her in the triage ward (think of those ward rooms with 6 beds in and curtains round each one) lying on a bed looking to all intents and purposes like she was napping, I’ll confess I was doubtful. 

I knew that she was hoping for a water birth and I grabbed a midwife to enquire about getting a room with a pool and she took a look at Claire and said “It’s early days yet, this is her first, she’s a way to go yet.” I explained to her that i didn’t fully understand what HypnoBirthing was but that I suspected she was meant to look that way and perhaps she could check on progress. After examining her and realising that Claire was already 7 cms dilated a surprised midwife showed us to a private delivery room with a pool in. A couple of hours later and my godson William Robert  was born; and it blew my mind. That was not what I thought childbirth was and if I’m honest a part of me suspected it was a fluke and I was being given a false sense of security.

I returned to my hectic life, work and play blurring all too often and me displaying the effects of stress as a badge of honour. Slowly though it was having a detrimental effect on my health and emotional wellbeing. By 2007 I was deeply unhappy, searching for something to feel better about life. I tried moving to Brighton thinking that living by the sea would help, I tried various therapies and self helps books but nothing seemed to shift the cloud of depression or sense that I just wasn’t right. I developed an excruciating headache that lasted six weeks and I could barely function. MRI tests were done, I was up and down Harley Street looking for an answer, on anti depressants and various pain killers and sleeping tablets; nothing worked.

I was advised by a friend to see an acupuncturist in West London, “he’s a bit unusual”, I was warned, “but he’s amazing”. In a dingy little flat in Westbourne Park I sobbed and sobbed, he listened and did some acupuncture points and for the first time in six weeks I was pain free. It was unbelievable. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be free from pain.

Clearly something had to change and when the owner of the company I worked for announced she wanted to restructure the business it seemed life had other plans for me.

I had no idea what those plans might be however and leaving the company was traumatic. I’d been so closely connected to my work that it WAS me. If I was no longer Kat from 140dB then who was I?!?! I floundered for a few months, not having not worked in my life before, I was now 35 years old without a purpose or plan and terrified by the future. 

As fate would have it Claire was pregnant with her second child at this time and had asked again if I’d be with her. It gave me something to focus on and in early September I went to stay with her for a few days around her due date. She had a feeling something “might be brewing” on the evening of September 10th so we all headed off for an early night. She woke up around 2am with surges and I joined her at 2.30am. By 4.45am Samuel George had joined us and once again I was struck by how calm, composed and confident Claire was. She seemed to have sighed him out and I couldn’t quite get my head around it…

It was that day that Claire’s mum and my aromatherapist and now friend both individually said, “Have you thought about becoming a doula?”

I’d never heard the word before and googling it discovered in some ways I’d already been one! A doula is a professional labour companion. Someone who supports a couple through pregnancy, is with them through childbirth and helps them settle into parenthood. She is not a midwife or clinically trained but offers emotional, practical, physical and informational support. In a time where many pregnant women are far away from their families and continuity of care is no longer guaranteed by midwives, doulas offer “sisterly support” or “mothering the mother”.

The more I read about doulas the more it made sense to me and so I enrolled on a doula training course with Middlesex University. I already suspected that whilst training was important that was not what made a doula, attending births did and so to gain as much experience as I could I joined a new volunteer labour support scheme at my local hospital, the Homerton in East London. Groundbreaking at the time, the hospital recognised the value in women being supported by other women during birth and trained volunteers from the local community to work on the labour ward. I concurrently enrolled to train in hypnobirthing – the mongan method and the two happened in quick succession. I already knew that if I was going to accompany women through childbirth I wanted them to have done hypnobirthing. Selfishly it made my life much easier, to say nothing of the mother, father and baby’s!

I witnessed a huge variety of experiences on the labour ward, some calm, controlled women some unprepared, panicked women, most accompanied by anxiety ridden partners who looked like they felt completely out of place. I became familiar with the clinical approach of observing women, charting their progress and seeing birth as a series of stages to be got through. The midwives, on the whole, were incredibly experienced and utterly inspiring, Julianna Sherriff the midwife co-ordinator who helped set up and run the volunteer scheme was fond of saying “A woman should feel like a QUEEN on the day she gives birth!”

That first year, it was quickly apparent to me the difference that preparation and expectation made to the birth process. The doula clients I was working with and had taught hypnobirthing to were all calm, confident, quietly excited about birth and their babies births were almost all completely drug free and undisturbed. The two exceptions were for valid medical reasons and in those cases the parents remained calm and fully engaged, feeling positive about their experience afterwards.

I’ve since taught hypnobirthing to hundreds of couples and absolutely know, from the births I’ve attended and the stories I am constantly receiving from those I’ve worked with, that hypnobirthing works. It makes a dramatic difference to the experience of pregnancy, birth and parenting for both mum, dad and not forgetting baby.