Once labour starts, there are many factors that have the potential to influence the woman's perceived intensity of her pain. Labouring women are very sensitive to their environment, the people around them and being faced with unexpected complications or a labour that was mentally unprepared for.
Some factors that can influence a woman's individual perception of her labour pain can include:
The type of labour the woman is having- progress in labour
Exhaustion
Complications arising
Pain relief not meeting expectations
The caregivers Influence
The support person's influence
The type of labour the woman is having -
progress in labour
Women will usually approach their labour with unconscious time frames on how long it will last. Certainly this is one aspect that is often talked about in childbirth preparation. How strict the woman is with her own 'time frames' will impact on how painful she perceives her labour to be.
For women with an understanding that their labour (for 1st babies) should last for 12 to 18 hours (this does not include the prelabour stage of labour), labouring longer than this can cause feelings of frustration or beliefs that their body has 'let them down'. Perhaps the expectations were unrealistic and anything more than 6 or 8 hours then becomes an issue.
Unmet expectations can lead to less tolerance of the pain and possibly more acceptance of medical pain relief, as she tenses and 'fights' the labour she is experiencing, rather than accepting that 'this is how it is'. To counteract this the woman may keep reminding herself that 'my body knows how to birth, in the time it needs to'. This can take away the pressure of 'performing to time.
Other women may perceive their labour as progressing well, only to feel despondent and disappointed if an internal examination reveals that their cervix is dilated less than expected.