Pregnancy: finding inner authority within the dark feelings
Nora Swan-Foster

Pregnancy is a major life transition for a woman. She is either taking on motherhood for the first time or expanding and redefining her role as a mother with a subsequent child. The prenatal months are a natural time of significant psychological adjustment, preparing the woman emotionally and physically for the arrival of her child. This inner work of pregnancy arouses satisfaction, adjustments and also necessary amounts of stress and anxiety that inspire new possibilities.

Although there are many things a woman can do to facilitate a productive pregnancy, there is no right way to undertake the journey. Only she will know what her path must be. One thing is almost for certain, everyone around her will be happy about her pregnancy while she may surprise herself by having doubt, conflicted feelings, disappointment, sadness, confusion, or even fears and anxieties. And of course, she'll also be happy. She may wonder how that contradiction is possible when prior to pregnancy she felt so certain about her path into motherhood.

Once a woman is pregnant she suddenly realizes that she has set out on a personal journey that no one else can complete but her. She is alone in a way she never imagined. Her inner experience is personal, hidden, and often private. Honoring the time of pregnancy, which is a rite of passage and a feminine initiation, means acknowledging the feelings that pregnancy presents to the woman. Rather than marginalizing or minimizing her experience by telling herself it will be over in 9 months, she can embrace this turning point through engaging with the challenges alongside the joy. To make the journey a bit more complicated, couples are faced not only with the obvious changes inherent with becoming a pregnant couple and with expanding their relationship to include parenting, but they must also become educated consumers in a medical world that is initially quite foreign. All of this within nine months! Consequently, it is not surprising that in our busy pragmatic world, the emotional experience of pregnancy is easily sidelined and forgotten. Yet, feelings or conflicts can grow as quickly as the baby grows within. Fear is one feeling that a pregnant woman meets on her path.

Every woman has fears whether she acknowledges them or not. Some fear is necessary. It is a natural protective emotion without which few of us would remain alive. Fear serves as a way to adequately evaluate situations. If the pregnant woman works to befriend her fears, then the woman naturally deepens her experience of the pregnant process. Her courage to go "into" the pain of her feelings is good practice for going into the "pain" of labor. The pregnant woman needs to rally her courage to persevere through the suffering and sacrifice that comes with the joy of birthing new life. In addition, a depressed mood or increased agitation during pregnancy can often precede emotional difficulty during postpartum. Now research is showing that attending to her feelings during pregnancy can often help sort out her situation before the baby arrives, when she feels the most upset in her life and her biochemistry is in flux.

A common visualization technique is to let the fears or negative thoughts float off in a hot air balloon. This is useful in certain situations after the woman has deepened her understanding of what she wants to place in the balloon. Simply doing the visualization may not free her from internal tension if she first needs to listen and learn something from her fear or anxiety. If she ignores the conflict, the emotional material is stuffed into her body and she unknowingly creates more tension from thinking her feelings are unnatural or will hurt the baby. Also, the pregnant woman has neatly avoided the creative depth of her internal emotional well, which means the opportunity to explore and change her fears and conflicts into clarity of purpose and meaning. Parenting begins during pregnancy: the pregnant woman models healthy self-care for her baby by working with her own feelings and holding them with an attitude of curiosity and respect.

Gayle Peterson says in her book Birthing Normally:
"… acknowledgment of fear and receiving support for such expression is a great tension reliever … to experience fear and to hide it from one's self … create[s] a double tension-one based in the fear and a second layer of tension rooted in the covering up of this fear from one's self and others. The result is free-floating anxiety … a constant level of persistent tension.

It's helpful to remember that this tension or stress is carried in the body-a new situation like pregnancy and childbirth can naturally stimulate the stress hormones, but by acknowledging the tension, the woman relieves her body from carrying MORE than it can handle simply because she has given the opportunity for the fear and stress to shift and move to a pathway of transformation. If the stress is carried for prolonged periods in the body, the fetus is affected. To have normal stress during pregnancy is expected, but when fears or conflicts are ignored, highly charged, or left to fester without support, this can lead to unhealthy prolonged stress that affects the woman's body chemistry, reinforcing a chronic pattern, that may have its roots in historical experiences as well. Pregnancy is an excellent time to begin imagining a new pattern, creating new pathways in her feelings and thoughts.

When the pregnant woman is overly stressed she is likely to experience physical and/or psychological setbacks during labor and/or postpartum. Dr. Dick Reed saw how emotional tension was directly related to uterine tension that halted labor. He observed this in women who stopped labor during the bombing raids in WWII in London. Since then the research has continued to advance towards understanding that uterine inertia occurring in the second stage of labor may often be the result of unresolved fears or conflicts.

There is an assortment of fears that arise during pregnancy. They range from fearing another miscarriage, loss of the baby, to the loss of her established identity with a community or a job. She may fear a deformed child, worry about body changes and self image, the responsibility of parenting, childbirth or simply fear the unknownŠthe list goes on. One approach to these fears is to view the fear as a metaphor for something more personal, rooted in an unresolved conflict that is asking for attention and exploration.

A successful approach to working with feelings is to draw them. This literally gets the feelings out of the body onto paper. For over 20 years, I have witnessed pregnant women move their feelings to new places of meaning by allowing the birth of images onto paper or into clay. The moment is very intimate and personal because she is engaging with emotional depths and landscapes that feel unwanted, chaotic, and transpersonal. The process is also a simulated birth experience that allows her to practice opening up and letting go. Sometimes this work can be done in groups or alone, but other times a woman wants or needs professional support, guidance, and a witness that can validate her inner most process, a process that suddenly becomes vulnerable in a tender moment. These images reflect back to her aspects of herself that have never been visible before. How the images are held in this tender moment is similar to the moment of her baby's birth. The images require a respect and presence.

For example, a woman may fear that something is wrong with her baby's health, that the baby has a deformity. This fear may be unfounded but still persists, haunting the woman's quite moments alone, making her feel quite crazy, especially since no one will listen to the concern after tests that show the baby is fine. Exploring this fear from a personal perspective through images gives her an opportunity to name her own experience of łfeeling˛ deformed, during pregnancy, or in her history as a woman. She may also anticipate feeling deformed as a mother because of how her own mother lived her life. Feeling deformed can imply a psychological or emotional deformity that needs extra support of some sort. If she can befriend this fear by considering her previous memories or associated feelings, she will be better prepared for labor and motherhood when the unresolved issues are typically exaggerated until we take them seriously. The fears and anxieties that arise during pregnancy are normal conflicts that offer opportunities to find deeper meaning, freeing us from the past and allowing us to move forward towards our possibilities as a woman and a mother.

Pregnant women may also experience increased nightmares as a way to release fears and anxieties. Some research shows that those who do their "work" through dreams may have shorter labors. It seems that the tension that is stored in the body has been acknowledged through the energy of the dream and is less likely to surface during the time of heightened stress on the body, namely childbirth. Through the dreams, resolution takes place. However, sometimes dreams may be complex, stimulating increased concern or worry. This suggests that emotional support with a trained professional would be beneficial to unearth the depths of what is trying to come into consciousness.

In the end, there is no right way to go through pregnancy. No one can tell you what to expect or how to do it right. Each woman must find her own way and she alone must figure it out. She does this by listening to her instincts, to her inner voice and giving her experience a story that is seen and heard. This personal experience is not about right and wrong, better or worse, success or failure as so often one might believe. Those with training do not have more power than the pregnant woman-her job is to find the road of inner authority and follow it through to accepting her own empowerment. It is through these emotional experiences of pregnancy, the seemingly negative emotions, that she finds this inner wisdom. She becomes oriented in her pregnancy by acknowledging and supporting her prenatal emotions just as much as her physical growth and her preparation for childbirth are acknowledged and supported.

Yes, pregnancy is 9 months of physical growth and preparation for a baby, but it is also a valuable and crucial time for a woman to explore, grow, and heal emotionally as she expands into another phase of womanhood. Emotions are on the surface, more available, making pregnancy a unique opportunity for deep and lasting changes, and a time to discover new inner resources such as discernment, right rhythm, clarity and courage. For many women, pregnancy is like an open window in a room, letting in new light and air for a short period of time. These opportunities of openness are rare in our life time and typically arrive during major transitions. Her challenge is to not fall into despair or denial regarding her feelings and fears of the unknown, but to surrender and soften to the wonderful possibilities of growth that are fused with the challenges and tasks of pregnancy, childbirth and beyond.

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