Before we start
1 min 30[Read this segment in your ordinary speaking voice, not the slower one — it is consent, and consent should not sound like an induction. Do not run this session with someone whose fear traces to a previous traumatic birth or to assault without checking what support they already have; refer on rather than improvising.]
This is a session about fear, so you may feel some while we do it. That is the session working, not the session going wrong. [pause for 10 seconds]
Nothing here asks you to say anything out loud. Nobody else in this room needs to know what comes up for you. [pause for 10 seconds]
You can stop at any point, and stopping is not a failure of the exercise. Open your eyes, look at the room, and you are back. [pause for 15 seconds]
Settling, with one hand free
2 min[The free hand is the whole safety mechanism. Agree what the signal means before you begin, then actually watch for it for the entire session. If you are recording this for solo use, replace the signal with ‘stop the recording’ — a raised hand with nobody in the room is nothing.]
Get comfortable, but keep one hand out where it can be seen. On the arm of the chair, or on your knee, palm upward. That hand stays free. [pause for 15 seconds]
If at any point you want to stop, lift it. You do not have to explain it, you do not have to say anything, and you do not have to open your eyes. [pause for 10 seconds]
Now let your eyes close, if they want to. Let the next breath go out slowly. Let the chair take your weight — it will hold it. [pause for 30 seconds]
Naming what is there
2 min 30[Longer pauses here than feel comfortable to sit through. Naming takes time and the temptation is to fill the gap with your voice — if you are in the room, say nothing at all during these.]
Somewhere in you there is a list. Things you have not said out loud about this birth, because saying them felt like inviting them in. [pause for 15 seconds]
Let one of them arrive. Do not go looking for the biggest one. Take whichever turns up first. [pause for 30 seconds]
Give it words, silently. Not a feeling — a sentence. I am afraid I will not cope. I am afraid of being cut. I am afraid of being left on my own in a room. Whatever the real one is, in your own plain words. [pause for 40 seconds]
Now see whether there is a second one standing behind it. There often is, and it is usually the older of the two. [pause for 30 seconds]
The ones that are doing a job
2 min[This is the step most fear release scripts skip and the one that keeps the session honest. If what a client has named is really an unanswered clinical question or an unhad conversation with a partner or midwife, the work is to name it as that and help them act on it — never to talk them out of it.]
Look at what you have named. Some of it is not fear in the way we mean it here. Some of it is information. [pause for 15 seconds]
A fear that is telling you to ask a question, or to change something in your plans, or to say a thing to somebody before the birth — that one is working. Keep it. It has a job to do and it is doing it. [pause for 20 seconds]
You can tell the difference by what each one asks of you. The useful ones ask for an action. The rest only circle. [pause for 25 seconds]
Setting the rest down
2 min 30[Never say the fear is gone, or that it will not come back. If a client asks, tell them plainly that it may return and that returning does not undo any of this — a promise you cannot keep is the fastest way to lose them at three in the morning.]
Take the ones that only circle. Put them somewhere you can see them. On the floor in front of you. In a box with the lid off. On the far bank of a river. Anywhere that is not inside your chest. [pause for 30 seconds]
You are not destroying them. You are setting them down. Things that are set down can be picked up again, and one or two of these will be, and that is allowed. [pause for 25 seconds]
Say to each one, silently: not today. Not for this. [pause for 30 seconds]
And notice that you are still here. The room is still the room. You did not have to believe any of it for the last few minutes to be perfectly safe. [pause for 20 seconds]
Coming back
1 min 30[Bring them all the way back before anyone stands up, and leave time afterwards — some people will want to talk and some will want to leave quickly, and both are fine. Note anything a client kept in the sorting step and follow it up in the next session.]
Bring your attention back to the hand you kept free. Move the fingers. Feel whatever it has been resting on all this time. [pause for 15 seconds]
Take a fuller breath, and let the room back in. Sounds first, then light. Open your eyes when you are ready and not before. [pause for 20 seconds]
You named things today that you had been carrying without looking at. You kept the ones worth keeping, and you put the rest down. That is the work, and it is done. [pause for 10 seconds]