Diane writes:
>
>
>I remember my own first experience trying to help a woman latch a baby. We
>spent (blush) 45 minutes, with me trying to give her the right words, but
>nothing worked. And all the time, I was making a sort of scooping motion
>with my lower jaw. "What is it I'm doing with my jaw?" I wondered, but had
>no words for it and no way to translate the idea for the mother.
>
>Finally I pulled out the couch she was sitting on, stood behind it, and
>"became" (with her permission, of course) her arms, holding her baby and
>breast as if they were my own. And whoosh! The baby went right on.
I wrote before about how in NCT we train our trainees to do hands-off
- though I have no problem with hands-on *in the right hands*! It's
just what we feel is appropriate for a clinical practitioner and
appropriate for a volunteer counsellor. The relationship between the
mother and each of them can be different, and should be allowed to be
different.
We train our counsellors to enable them to have the right words, to
be able to explain verbally to a mother what might help....remember,
a lot of our encounters are over the phone, and we never see the
mother in order to help in a hands-on *or* hands-off way anyway.
We have lots of analogies to help us get the message across. We
*listen* - boy, do we listen!!! - to what the mother is telling us
about how it feels, about what it looks like, about what she is doing
when her baby comes on, and about what has been told to her so far.
Then when we do face-to-face, we listen again and we look. Sometimes,
I will use a doll, or I will pick up a teddy or something that might
be hanging about, and with the right words and gestures, *mostly* I
get it across to the mother what she can do *herself* to make it
right.
On almost all ocasions, if the mother doesn't get it 100 per cent
right, she does get it 'righter'....enough to practise by herself.
Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc, Newcastle upon Tyne
UK
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