I aquired this book when a friend whom I had helped several times professionally as a hypnotherapist asked me to help her prepare for natural child birth.The book proved invaluable not only in the way it assisted in the deprogramming of the negative expectations and fear of chilbirth pervading our culture, but also as a basis of ideas from which to negotiate and plan a bespoke approach to preparing her and her birth team for the big event.It's not complete in itself and really does need to be used by someone competent in hypnosis, (we used other techniques form other disciplines as well) but it's a superb resource and I envision recommending it to many more people.And by the way, my friend felt no need to use pain relief, reported no pain, only "sensations", and she wasn't in any way attempting to mask the pain and the midwfe recorded second stage as lasting approximately 2 minutes!