Holding Tension in the Doula Field
Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of contention, bickering, and at times, outright hostility online about the “right” way to be a doula. Variations of this have resurfaced again and again over the years on social media posts. Which certification or training (or not) is the “right” one, which organizations are to blame for where we are, who gets to use which title or designation, etc, etc.
As someone who has walked this path for over thirty years, within and sometimes completely outside of many different organizations at different times, it really breaks my heart that things in the doula world have come to this. No doula or organization is perfect, but this current friction seems to reflect an underlying belief that is held by some that there is only “one idealized pure right way” of engaging in birth work, just like the belief that there is only “one idealized pure, right way” of having and raising a baby.
The reality is, there is no one right way, and it’s time for idealized purity culture to take a seat.
In Nature we have tremendous biodiversity, with species and habitats that are always moving, changing, and evolving to find a healthier balance within their niche in the overall ecosystem. For example, when soil in one place becomes disturbed, we see pioneer species moving in to rebalance the area. We can and have mirrored this in the doula field by using a practice called biomimicry.
What follows is very much an over-simplification, but it offers a distilled example of biomimicry. When birth was taken from midwives and moved into hospitals, the “soil” of physiologic birth was disturbed in some ways. Twilight birth being one, and babies being taken away to a nursery and separated from their parents being another. After a while, some people began to demand change, asking to remain awake and supported during birth and wanting to keep their babies with them. Along came certified nurse midwives, childbirth educators, and doulas to fill the niches in the ecosystem of the hospital. Much the same way those pioneer plants and other species will move into disturbed ecosystems to fill niches.
We need all kinds of doulas and birthworkers, along with multi-directional approaches, to fill the niches in the systems we are navigating. And we need to learn the deep practice of holding tension in this space.
How do we as doulas hold the tension between traditional, indigenous, and culturally-specific skills in one hand, while also holding organizational trainings and certifications in the other? By recognizing that each and every one of us is seeing the world through our own lived experiences and lenses, and also by understanding that overall systems change, and even systems collapse, is not a straight and linear path.
Rather than laying blame at the feet of one doula’s approach or even one organization’s approach, we can honor and respect our uniqueness and begin to see the larger medical, social, and governmental systems we are navigating for what they are in any given moment, including who and how they are serving or not serving. And, we can name and hold accountable when harm is being caused.
Along with that, we can also begin to take personal responsibility for our choices, our self-care, and our community care in navigating these systems to the best of our ability, while recognizing that as individuals we can only do so much.
Ultimately, we need each other and our differences in order to do this work well. There are many paths and approaches to being a doula or birth/postpartum support person, and it is not only ok to have that diversity, it actually makes the doula field stronger, and allows far more access to both parents and doulas than one pathway ever could. Nature is not a monoculture, nor should we be.
