HelloBirth Hypnobirthing’s PICTURE Birth Method™ Offers Expectant Parents Confident, Informed Childbirth Education—Without the Dogma
During pregnancy, as you’re scrolling through dozens of birth influencers with countless opinions and zero credentials, feelings of overwhelm and fear inevitably creep in.
These internet personalities—mostly speaking from a personal viewpoint rather than sharing based on any formal education or training—grab our attention by naming valid concerns about the field of obstetrics and resulting problems in hospitals. They also shed a necessary light on the overuse of interventions in normal, healthy childbirth.
While it's wise to think critically about issues within the medical system, all of this can go overboard, with dangerous advice causing unnecessary harm. Caught in endless doom scrolling, some people begin to believe they'll be better off giving birth without any medical care at all! Or more commonly, Instagram birth stories may imply that visualizing the birth you want is a one-way ticket to a blissful, complication-free experience.
When that doesn’t end up happening, preventable trauma occurs. Some of these influencers even have the audacity to offer "trauma debriefing" sessions without having completed any mental health training. It's a vicious cycle.
But Guess What? You Don’t Need a Perfect Birth to Feel Powerful On the Other Side of It
You can break the cycle with HelloBirth Hypnobirthing’s PICTURE Birth Method.™ HelloBirth Hypnobirthing classes, launched in 2021 by Lindsey Vick and Jenny Bennett, use this method to structure content in a way that’s easily accessible for different learning styles, whether auditory, visual, sensory, or reading-writing.
PICTURE Birth is an organized, repeatable strategy that gets expectant parents from a place of “What are we doing?" to “We can do this!” Addressing the issue of cognitive overload, along with an approach we call pragmatic positivity—that negative thoughts are actually an important part of the mental health puzzle—are the main reasons we developed the method.
PICTURE Birth helps participants conceptualize and discover giving birth in the way that feels best for them, gaining confidence and self-compassion along the way. Our trained HelloBirth instructors and parents are provided balanced, accurate information and scenario-based training focused on the whole family unit, inclusive of different philosophies and life experiences.
Suddenly, doom scrolling stops and a new perspective is unlocked! Rather than wasting energy on deciding whether there’s a right or a wrong way to give birth and become a parent, participants learn the how-tos of making decisions for themselves—with more discernment and less fear.
Here's How the PICTURE Birth Method Works
P - Partner Training for Dads, Doulas, Second Moms, or Any Other Birth Partner
HelloBirth classes are based on real-world scenarios. With time in class for role playing, you and your birth partner, doula, or other family members will feel prepared to have meaningful conversations with your care team. You’ll know what’s happening in your body at each stage of the birthing process and what to do to take an active role in advocating for your needs.
We start with reviewing concerns that come up near the end of pregnancy, then move to what happens during the very early stage as well as the active phase of your birthing process, followed by the final stage of pushing your baby out. We finish class walking through the hours, days and weeks following your baby’s birth and how your team can continue supporting you.
I - Inclusive of All Birth-Givers and Their Families
Throughout the class materials, you’ll encounter language and imagery that doesn't isolate, exclude or ignore differences, but works seamlessly in the background to represent a variety of experiences. This achieves wider accessibility to HelloBirth's childbirth education and powerful hypnosis for birth techniques. Instead of feeling alone or that their childbirth educator doesn't understand them or their lived experience, HelloBirth students report feeling represented and seen and bonding well with their classmates who may have different preferences and ideals.
C - Comfort and Confidence for Any Birth
Other hypnobirthing programs focus on the idea that listening to relaxing audio sessions during pregnancy will automatically lead to a pain-free, drug-free birth. Based on the principles of cognitive neuroscience and hypnosis for pain reduction, HelloBirth Hypnosis for All™ increases comforting physical feelings for both unmedicated and medicated / epidural births. This is hypnobirthing you can use in a birthing tub—or a surgical setting.
T - Trust for Yourself: Learning to Tune Into What’s Best for Your Birth
In HelloBirth classes, you’ll learn how to gain and maintain self-trust, even if needs shift in a way you didn’t expect. We teach a judgement free approach to developing your resilience for the journey ahead.
U - Understand Your Childbirth Options and Access Them
Not just the education, but how to put it into practice at each stage of the birth process. We provide pros and cons of common interventions at your fingertips with the HelloBirth Guide Book™ and App, so that you can easily recall your class discussions and scenario training and make decisions in real time.
R - Real-World-Readiness for Bringing Your Baby Home
So now you know how to rock your birth. But what about everything that comes after? The final class in the HelloBirth series walks you through what happens in the real world after bringing your baby home—eating, sleeping, pooping, and everything in between—and that includes the new parents’ emotional adjustment and what to do if you don’t actually “bounce right back.”
E - Empathy Development for the Whole Expecting Family
HelloBirth’s sensitive and compassionate approach creates a unique opportunity for single parents, couples and families to strengthen their active listening skills and their decision-making process in many scenarios. By honoring the diverse experiences and philosophies that each member of your birth team brings to the table, participants can engage with each other in a productive manner with a greater chance for keeping their goals on track, leading to greater satisfaction in birth and early parenthood.
In class we read aloud real scenarios that occur in birth rooms and offer sample scripting for how you and your birth partner might respond. For example, instead of saying to a physician or midwife:
“That’s not evidence based,” you could ask, “Am I or my baby in any immediate danger? If not, I’d like to take some time to hear more about the reasons you are making that recommendation. Then my partner and I would like some time to discuss and decide what feels best for us.”
Why We Created The PICTURE Birth Method™
The formulation of the method began back during our own first pregnancies. All the birth stories we’d heard were either terrifying, an incomplete picture of what really happened, or both.
“There must be something better than being completely numb to the whole process of childbirth,” Jenny thought as she typed “alternative to epidural” into the search bar. “I thought I was searching for a pharmaceutical option,” she says, “but I came up with hypnobirthing instead.
The concept of interrupting the fear-tension-pain cycle with relaxation skills made a lot of sense to me, but I knew I would need more than just a basic philosophy and a couple of cassette tapes from 1980.”
Searching for a complete course led her to choose a popular, more modern hypnobirthing variety. After experiencing two manageable drug-free deliveries with hospital-based midwives using that method, she went on to teach it herself.
But during her first 9 years as a hypnobirthing educator and a hypno-doula, she observed her clients struggling with the text-heavy materials and the curriculum’s rigid design. Information overload, time-consuming practice schedules, and dogmatic instructions were keeping birth partners from reaching their full potential as active participants in their babies’ births. And after the births, clients were feeling disappointed in themselves, like they must have done something wrong because their birth didn’t turn out the way the woman on the audio track said it would.
The PICTURE Birth Method™ came into focus as a way to help HelloBirth clients reframe their expectations—for themselves, their partners, and their birth experiences—in a realistic, healthy and positive way. Using real-world examples and dialogue pulled from actual observations in birth rooms as doulas, we were able to create a learning experience based on active participation rather than just listening, which improves retention for all types of learners.
Our method helps expectant parents picture themselves giving birth in a way that’s best for them, without placing any bias or judgement on themselves or their experience. They leave class confident that the tools and techniques they’re learning will work for them no matter what type of birth they have. This allows them to foster a positive yet realistic outlook.
Kara & Nick: A PICTURE Birth Method Case Study
Kara and Nick gave birth to their second baby, Sloane, after an empowering 37-week induction. Elevated liver enzymes were detected in Kara’s blood work after she had experienced some unusual itchiness, which she knew from her HelloBirth class could be a sign of a concerning condition called cholestasis.
By using the PICTURE Birth Method, Kara and Nick were able to stay calm, talk through their options, and weigh the benefits versus risks of waiting for labor to begin on its own like they had done with their first baby. Although this complication was unexpected, because of their classroom training they knew how to respond and felt fully confident in their decisions.
After being admitted to the hospital, talking things over with their doula and getting settled in, Kara took a bath in the big tub and listened to some hypnobirthing tracks. Then she decided to get an epidural at around 2 centimeters dilated, so that it would already be in place before the contractions kicked into high gear.
Natural birth advocates would tell you that all of this was a bad idea. But what did the parents say about it?
Kara: "Loved it." "Great birth." "Calm, relaxed and used my hypnobirthing skills and tracks. Just wish I'd had a little more time to practice!"
Nick: "Putting what we’d learned about informed consent into practice helped us make the decision to induce with more confidence and peace-of-mind."
Hypno-doula: “What made this experience great was a nurse who was comfortable with using the tricks outlined in the HelloBirth Guide Book for optimal baby positioning with an epidural. We were able to pull the lightweight book out of Kara’s birth bag and flip to the back where there’s a whole section with options to try. In the same book, we could see at-a-glance the pros and cons of the different components of a medical induction, so that we could discuss each one separately and be reminded of the detailed information they’d learned in their classes. When the midwife suggested the possibility of breaking Kara’s water, we talked through the recommendation and the decision was made to hold off. Within a few hours, Kara’s water broke on its own and it was time for Sloane to be born!”
So what does it look like to go from “What are we doing?” to “We can do this?”
What are we doing?
Fear of giving birth and life with a newborn. Fear of sleep deprivation.
Listening to all the scary birth stories that everyone wants to share with me, even in the grocery store!
Afraid of the changes in your body. Awake at night scrolling for answers.
Meditation makes me feel antsy.
We can do this!
A realistic understanding of normal birth and newborn behavior. We now have a customized birth and postpartum plan that includes many forms of support.
Now I realize I'm basing most of my fears on other people’s stories.
A greater understanding of what I’m feeling and why. Now I know what I can implement every day to decrease the discomforts in my body and I know how I’m going to approach minimizing discomfort during my birth.
HelloBirth audio sessions help me let go and have compassion for myself.