2011 - Talk Birth

Pinkola Estes
Every woman who has given birth knows something about birth that other people don’t know. She has
something unique and powerful to offer.
As birth professionals, we are often cautioned against sharing our personal stories. We must remember
that it is her birth and her story, not ours. In doula and childbirth educator trainings, trainees are taught
to keep their own stories to themselves and to present evidence-based information so that women can make
their own informed choices. As a breastfeeding counselor too, I must remind myself to keep my own personal
experiences out of the helping relationship. My formal education is in clinical social work and in that field
as well we are indoctrinated to guard against inappropriate self-disclosure in a client-helper setting. In each
environment, we are taught how to be good listeners without clouding the exchange with our own “baggage.”
The messages are powerful—keep your own stories out of it. Recently, I have been wondering how this caution
might impact our real-life connections with women?
Nine months after I experienced [1]a powerful miscarriage at home at 15 weeks, a good friend found out
at 13 weeks that her baby died. As I had, she decided to let nature take its course and to let her body
let go of the pregnancy on its own timetable, rather than a medical timetable. When she emailed me for
support, it was extremely difficult to separate our experiences. I kept sharing bits and pieces of my own loss
experiences and then apologizing and feeling guilty for having violated the “no stories” rule. I kept telling
her, “I know this isn’t about me, but I felt this way…” I told her about choosing to take pictures of the baby
and to have a ceremony for him at home. That I wished I had gotten his footprints and handprints. The
kinds of personal sharing that may have been frowned upon in my varied collection of professional trainings.
After several apologies of this sort, I began to reflect and remembered that what I hungered for most in
the aftermath of my own miscarriage was other women’s voices and stories. Real stories. The nitty gritty,
how-much-blood-is-normal and did-you-feel-like-you-were-going-to-die, type of stories. Just as many women
enjoy and benefit from reading other women’s birth stories, I craved real, deep, miscarriage-birth stories.
These stories told me the most about what I needed to know and more than organization websites or “coping
with loss” books ever could.
I had a similar realization the following month when considering the effectiveness of childbirth classes and
trying to pin down what truly had reached me as a first time mother. The question I was trying to answer
as I considered my own childbirth education practice was [2]how do women really learn about birth? What
did I, personally, retain and carry with me into my own birth journey? The answer, for me, was again, story.
On this blog, I have a narrative about my [3]experiences during my first pregnancy with being able to
feel my baby practicing breathing while in-utero. More than any other post on the site, this post receives
more comments on an ongoing basis from women saying, “thank you for sharing”–that the story has validated
their own current experience. In this example, rather than getting what they need from books, experts, or
classes, women have found what they needed from story and, indeed, most of them reference that it was the
only place they were able to find the information they were seeking.
And finally, as breastfeeding counselor, during monthly support meetings, I cannot count the number of
times I’ve seen mothers’ faces fill with relief when another mother validates her story with a similar one.
So, what is special about story as a medium and what can it offer to women that traditional forms of
education cannot? Stories are validating. They can communicate that you are not alone, not crazy, and
not weird. Stories are instructive without being directive or prescriptive. It is very easy to take what works
from stories and leave the rest because stories communicate personal experiences and lessons learned, rather
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