Body Confidence
Millie contacted me after her six week check-up. Whilst everything was physically fine according to her GP, what Millie saw in the mirror each morning didn’t meet with the same opinion. Despite managing labour and birth well, she was feeling low in confidence with her post birth body image.
Millie is like millions of other women who feel the same way but sadly don’t take action to dissolve their negative emotions and instead lose all the confidence they had before childbirth. New mums are constantly reading about celebrity mums who have barely birthed and are appearing photographed with wash-board stomachs as if there was never a baby onboard in the first place. All these images are both unrealistic and disheartening. If it takes nine months to accommodate a growing baby, it stands to reason that we should give ourselves the same grace period to recover our shape and regain some muscle tone post birth.
Following a brief chat over the phone, Millie agreed to attend her session in person so that we could explore her issues, clear the negative emotions associated with her body image, restore some much needed confidence and put a plan of action together to help her on her path to an acceptable and achievable post baby shape.
Millie was a trim size 12 and had many lovely features, a great smile and very striking eyes but from the moment she sat down in my treatment room, she kept tugging on her top trying to make sure it met with the top of her jeans. So this is where we started our work together.
I asked Millie to score her anxiety levels whilst thinking about her tummy area. She scaled ten straight off for anxiety, so we started to clear this emotion down. As Millie started to calm down, the fidgeting with her top stopped immediately.
Next on the agenda I asked Millie to describe what it was that she disliked about her post birth body, to which she replied “the deflated wobbly mass and the stretch marks”. When I asked her what the most dominant negative emotion was, she broke down in tears. She described feeling trapped in a body she couldn’t change which was now misshapen and scarred for life. She felt a sense of loss, resentment and grief when she looked in the mirror and said these emotions felt all wrong when she had such a beautiful baby to be thankful for. As we cleared each of these emotions we also unearthed feelings of shame and embarrassment and unsubstantiated fears that her husband would no longer find her attractive in the same way. We also cleared feelings of jealousy and resentment about two of her friends who had avoided stretch marks and seemed to ping back into shape very quickly.
Gradually we worked through the significant negative emotions and Millie was comfortable standing in front of a full length mirror, something she had felt unable to do since the birth. We worked through and dissolved the emotions she felt when she touched her tummy and looked closer at her stretch marks and finally she managed to smile. She realised that with a bit of persistence, she could now start exercising to tone up and improve her tummy and that the marks would fade over time. Millie also admitted that she was at least back into her pre-pregnancy jeans which some of her friends were far from achieving.
Whilst many of us never get our pre-pregnancy bodies back the way they once were, we can choose to work through our negative, destructive emotions, to restore our confidence and self-esteem. We can repackage these marks and changes as rites of passage to motherhood and learn how to dress to disguise our imperfections and play up our attributes and thankfully, Millie is now doing the same.
If you would like support to clear post birth body confidence issues, then the Pure Therapy Programme is the next place to visit. Alternatively, use the form below to drop me a line or call and speak with me directly on 01276 21386.
Conception & Birth Services
Pure Therapy Programme Brief therapy to dissolve your fears, phobias, anxieties and any emotional trauma. This programme focuses on calming your mind, restoring your confidence and self-esteem, giving you back a sense of control in your life as well as the clarity to make important decisions.
Essential Support Programme Regular, short check-in sessions by phone to keep you calm, relaxed, optimistic and positively focused between significant milestones from conception to birth. The therapeutic toolkit enables sabotaging emotional wobbles to be dissolved in an instant.
HypnoBirthing® Classes The ultimate in birth preparation classes to teach both you and your partner how to use hypnotic relaxation skills, special breathing techniques and endorphin releasing massage to manage the physical demands of labour and feel calm, relaxed and confident during the birth.
Parent Coaching Programme No baby arrives with a manual and few parents have endless hours to devour a ‘how to’ book. Parent coaching is a supportive route to helping you create your own practical solutions to whatever parenting challenges you are facing, in time sensitive short sessions.