5 Mistakes New Doulas Make in Their First Birth Support Session (and how our course prevents them)

Stepping into your very first birth as a doula birth support person is a moment you remember forever. 

Our founder, Bianca Sprague, shares her memory back in 2007 at her first birth: ‘I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of the hospital frantically reading through these photo copied handouts from my doula training thinking what do I do? I was so scared to go up to my client’s labor and delivery room.’

Before you waking into the delivery space, you are standing at the cusp of something intimate and powerful that you’re about to witness. It is extraordinary and beautiful and it is a lot. 

Almost every new doula we meet arrives in that first birth support session carrying both excitement and nerves and that is completely normal. Anytime we do something for the first time our brain flags it as scary… this is an evolutionary mechanism to keep us safe and keep us doing familiar things. 

Ok, so the trouble is not that you feel nervous – because we all did! The trouble is that too many new doulas are walking into those rooms without the preparation they deserve. Not because they are not committed or passionate but because the industry has allowed far too many programs to hand out certificates after a weekend of slides and limited role plays. You know we are not quiet about this. We wrote an entire open letter to the doula industry about why practice based education fails new doulas and fails families.

Real birth support asks so much more of you. It asks for skills you cannot learn in a weekend and emotional steadiness you cannot develop without mentorship and a real learning system and program. So, today we are naming the five most common mistakes new doulas make in their first birth support session and showing you exactly how our Maternal Support Practitioner program prevents them.

Before we jump in, if you are brand new and still exploring whether full spectrum care might be right for you, start with this post on choosing your doula path. It will help you orient yourself before you dive deeper.

Bianca recently shared a podcast episode where she shared her 10 biggest mistakes through birth stories. It’s a powerful episode and eye opening to see why she created a comprehensive program like she did. 

Let’s get started.

Mistake 1: Jumping into the room without a clear understanding of the client’s context

This is one of the biggest mistakes we see in new doulas. You meet a client. You do the prenatal sessions. You show up on the big day. Then suddenly you realize that you do not actually understand the full story of how all of this goes together… your clients lived experiences, their conception story, their fears and biases, the staff and hospital’s biases and goals. They typically have a lot of friction and you can be shocked to not understand where you fit in all of this. 

Families need a birth support person who understands their history. They need someone who knows where the soft spots and triggers might be. They need someone who can anticipate tension points and work to protect clients from staff biases and harm. 

Incomplete context happens because weekend trainings skip entire areas of care. Fertility. Antepartum. Loss. Trauma. They rush through these topics in ways that leave new doulas unprepared and families held only at the surface.

In our MSP program, you learn full spectrum doula care from the very beginning. Our lesson on understanding client history does not stop at birth preferences. We explore the journey to conception, medication exposure, family dynamics, chronic illness, systemic barriers, trauma responses, and more. By the time you walk into that birth, you carry a deep understanding of who your client is and what safety looks like for them.

If you want to read more about how learning the full story changes your practice, check out What I Wish I Knew Before Starting My Doula Training Online.

Mistake 2: Trying to be the expert instead of the guide

New doulas sometimes feel pressure to prove themselves. They want to show they know everything about positions and pain relief and stages of labour. They want to be helpful and they want to be impressive and liked. But here’s the truth, birth is not the place to impress or make any part of it about you. Birth is the place where you make space for someone’s autonomy and intuition and don’t make any part of it about you. 

Bianca found this to be one of the hardest lessons for her as a new doula. She used to say she wanted to be the best and most famous doula in the world (she was in her mid 20s, so we cut her some slack). For her, she felt a lot of shame about her doula work since her plan was to be an Ob/Gyn. She knew she wanted to protect birth, but she also wanted people in the room know that she COULD have been the doctor but she quit her medical school path when her daughter was born and she discovered how much harm came at the hands of the professionals she had been working so hard to become. 

This egoic battle was agony for her and did not serve her clients! She struggled with being treated so poorly by the doctors and people talked to her like she was uneducated and referenced her as ‘just the doula’. 

It took about 7 years for her to sort it out, heal her shame and trauma and get clear that she was committed to fighting for birth justice and was proud of the role she took in her career. Protecting birth and families is the goal of the work she does and fame has absolutely nothing to do with it. 

Because of this struggle, she has healing and understanding ego in the birth space as one of the first lessons in the bebo mia doula training. 

So, the evidence is clear when it comes to client care, families are the experts about themselves and we need to honor that. Families who feel in control and informed during birth have better outcomes, lower rates of trauma symptoms, and higher reported satisfaction. A study published in the journal Birth found that perceived control during labour was strongly linked to reduced risk of postpartum mood disorders. This is where doulas shine when we allow clients to be their own experts and we anchor them in this being the centre of their care.

Trying to be the expert usually comes from a lack of confidence or something that needs to be healed within that doula. It comes from training that taught you the list of things doulas do instead of teaching you why they do them and where you really fit in the space. It comes from education that skips critical thinking and context and nuance. 

In our training, we spend time unwinding the impulse to fix or take over. You learn how to get comfortable with silence, how to ask consent based questions, and how to help clients navigate decisions without inserting your opinion. This is why our grads consistently tell us that supporting a birth feels grounded and calm instead of frantic. 

This role ends up being so much easier because we’re a resource not a source and your clients are the experts. You get to hold the space and guide! That’s a great job to have. The pressure comes off and clients experience the most empowerment in these situations.

To dive deeper into developing this kind of steadiness, read The Truth About Doula Work That Most Courses Skip.

Mistake 3: Showing up with tips and tricks but no trauma informed framework

This one matters more than anything else.

So many doulas come out of short trainings with comfort measures, counter pressure techniques, and a few laminated printables… but they’re missing the trauma informed foundation needed for real birth support. 

Trauma responses are incredibly common in birth spaces. Birth is intense and lots can come up for folks in the moment. The rates of some sort of abuse in their past is so high for women and queer folks, and we don’t know how that will impact birth.

For those of you working in the postpartum period, you’re getting the aftermath of harm from the medical system.  Research shows that as many as one in three parents describe their births as traumatic and anywhere from fifteen to twenty percent experience trauma symptoms afterward. These numbers have significant under reporting in our opinion, and we suspect the rates are so much higher. 

Trauma informed care is not optional. It is the core of doula work since we are the stop gap and the doctors and nurses rarely practice this.

When doulas do not have a trauma informed framework, they often freeze in their first birth. They second guess themselves. They misread cues. They do not know how to respond if a client dissociates or becomes overwhelmed. They sometimes miss moments that needed grounding, advocacy, or a shift in the environment.

In our MSP program, we teach you to recognize trauma responses, to support regulation, and to protect client dignity in moments when things get intense. You learn how to navigate unexpected interventions, clients with a history of trauma or abuse, how to assist a client who feels pressured or unheard, and how to advocate in ways that do not escalate tension with staff.

If you want to understand more about how listening shapes trauma informed care, visit How Learning to Listen Makes You a Better Doula Than Any Textbook Ever Could.

Mistake 4: Freezing when medical coercion appears

Every new doula has a moment when a provider says or does something unexpected. Maybe it is the classic line that “the baby could get tired soon.” Maybe it is “we want to help this along.” Maybe it is “when it gets bad you will want an epidural and it could be too late.” These statements create fear. They often bypass true informed consent. They’re rarely true. They push our clients. They coerce.

New doulas who trained in a weekend program often do not know how to respond. They were never taught how to identify coercive scripts. They were never taught how to lean into advocacy in a regulated, supportive, empowered way that keeps their client at the center.

Heck, this skill is one that is really hard to understand and takes so much practice to recognize and to know what to do next.

So what happens. They freeze. They doubt themselves. They worry they will step out of scope or be disruptive or they might be wrong. And their client looks at them with fear in their eyes needing the doulas help.

A doula birth support person needs the skills to navigate through these moments. They need to know how to bring everyone back to the client’s autonomy and preferences. They need the confidence and training to slow everything down so actual evidence based information is discussed and informed decision making can happen.

This is where comprehensive education matters. It takes time to learn how to identify misleading language. It takes practice to use grounding phrases that support autonomy. It takes mentorship to feel steady advocating in a room where everyone else has more institutional power. The doula needs to ensure that the tension doesn’t climb so that the person in labor has a calm environment. 

If this resonates, read When Your Doula Clients Do Not Call: What It Means, Why It Happens, and How to Cope to learn more about client centered care.

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Mistake 5: Walking into birth without a true support system behind you

This one is heartbreaking because so many doulas feel alone during their first birth. They walk into the room hoping for the best because their training did not include real mentorship, ongoing guidance, or a structured community of experienced practitioners. They step into a high stakes environment without backup and that’s a scary feeling. 

No one should start doula work alone.

Your first birth support session should feel supported. You should be held by faculty be peers who believe in your capacity and skills. You should have a peer group to text when things feel confusing. You should have a community where you can debrief and be understood.

This is one of the biggest differences between our program and the weekend model. The weekend model gives you some basic content. We give you mentorship, community, support, and skill building over several months. Families feel that difference immediately. You’ll feel that difference within your care, your mental heath and your doula business.

If you want to read more about how mentorship transforms new doulas, visit From Learner to Doula Mentor.

How our MSP program prevents all five mistakes

Real doula training takes time. It takes structure. It takes space for questions and reflection and real life application. It takes more than a weekend because families deserve more than a weekend. This is at the heart of our open letter calling on our industry to end practice based education and protect the integrity of doula work.

Our Maternal Support Practitioner certification was built intentionally. It includes full spectrum training. It includes trauma informed frameworks. It includes skills for advocacy, communication, and regulation. It includes faculty feedback. It includes community and accountability. It includes business training. It includes free trauma processing group therapy. It includes free lifetime continuing education. It includes everything you need to walk into that first birth session ready to hold someone through one of the most vulnerable and transformative days of their life.

If you are ready to learn in a program designed to actually prepare you, to protect you, and to set you up for a sustainable doula career, take a look at the MSP certification. The sessions start in March and September and it would be an honour to welcome you into this work.

Birth changes people forever and a great training changes doulas forever.