To an outsider, it appeared as if Kate Lloyd-Birt had had fairly typical hospital births in Milton Keynes for her first two children but, on the inside, she felt “traumatised” by the “awful, awful” experiences.

It didn’t help that both pregnancies were complicated by symphysis pubis dysfunction (SPD), which meant that whenever she walked the two large bones at the front of her pelvis grated together. Because of the hormonal softening of ligaments as the body prepares for birth, SPD occurs in 1 in 35 women, and Lloyd-Birt, 33, suffered in all three of her pregnancies.

As she reached full term with her first two babies, the hospital offered her an induction to alleviate the painful symptoms, which kick-started contractions “so strongly that I asked to be taken up to the labour ward for an epidural” (anesthesia to numb the lower half of the body). She worked her way through all the pain relief, including gas and air, and pethidine. Tom, now 4, was delivered by forceps after a 26-hour labour, and Harry, 1, with ventouse (a suction device on the baby’s head), after 18 hours’ labour.

Soon after the births, she was separated after from both babies because of complications and had to spend time in hospital.

When she fell pregnant with her third baby, seven months after Harry’s arrival, she talked to her obstetrician about a Caesarean rather than repeating the ordeal. Her obstetrician advised against it; giving birth naturally is believed by some doctors to be better for the baby’s health. So Lloyd-Birt looked for an alternative. It came in the form of Alison Day, a colleague at the manufacturing company where Lloyd-Birt worked as an office manager, who introduced her to the American concept of HypnoBirthing. Still relatively new in this country, few practitioners in the NHS have even heard of it. Day claimed to have enjoyed an easy eight-hour first birth at home and described it to Lloyd-Birt as “fantastic”.

After visiting the HypnoBirthing website, Lloyd-Birt enrolled with her husband, Richard, who had also “hated the previous two experiences”, on a course, a 45-minute drive away in Northampton, which lasted for four weeks, each weekly session lasting three hours.

There were six other couples on the course “and all were taught first and foremost that hypnosis was not about standing up on stage and turning into a chicken”, says Lloyd-Birt. Because the other mothers present were first-timers, she questioned the instructor, Jenny Mullan, rigorously, who, in turn, used Lloyd-Birt’s previous experiences to demonstrate how the body can tense up during labour.

Partners were engaged to help the women go into a deeply relaxed state, using words from a script delivered in a calm voice as they went under, and counting them down from five in a more lively voice to bring them out. Couples were encouraged to practise the steps three times a week for half an hour.

As well as learning breathing techniques, they were also shown diagrams of how the muscles in the uterus worked and were taught visualisation exercises. The mothers-to-be were also given relaxation tapes to listen to, which can be played during labour to trigger calm. Lloyd-Birt used the tapes to relax and fall asleep to every night.

When she went into labour two months before her due date, she was taken to hospital. Although she was given steroid injections to prevent the contractions, they appeared not to be working and the doctors thought that the baby was going to be premature.

As a last resort, she decided to try the visualisation techniques she had been taught by Mullan to stop the birth coming early. “Instead of the cervix opening up like a flower, I imagined it staying closed and pulling back up, and I used my breathing to hold the pain of the contractions,” she says.

“The midwives couldn’t believe how strong the contractions were on the monitors, and how I wasn’t in any pain or dilating.” The contractions abated and after five days she was allowed home and stayed there until she reached full term.

When labour started spontaneously two months later at 4am, instead of rushing to hospital, Lloyd-Birt chose to have a bath and relax while listening to the tapes. “I wasn’t even sure if I was in labour; I thought it might be a tummy upset.” At 7am she got up, dressed the children for nursery and made everyone breakfast, with her contractions coming every seven minutes. She agreed to go to hospital only because Richard insisted. But she stopped for breakfast en route and arrived in the delivery ward with toast and hot chocolate from McDonald’s.