Meeting Prenatal and Birth Trauma in Children and Babies

The little boy really didn’t want to go to school. He dilly dallied putting on his shoes and seemed to do everything except put on his jacket. His parents were as patient as possible but it was getting late and everyone was going to be late for school and work if they didn’t get out the door now! The tension built. There was such a big push to get out, and Tommy didn’t want to budge.

Does this sound familiar? How many parents go through similar scenes? You might say that is just part of being with children, but actually, it is usually part of being with children with unresolved birth trauma.

Going to school is a transition. Just like getting out of bed, going to bed, getting in or out of the bathtub, or in and out of a car. We go through a transition every time we walk through a door. Our first major transition in life is our birth. How we experience it tends to set an imprint for how we will meet transitions throughout our lives.

It is often surprising to parents, and others, to consider that the way children are born can have a profound effect on their lives. It used to be believed and medically promoted that babies did not really have consciousness and could not remember their experiences. If we only consider verbal memory, this may be true, but memory is not only verbal. Long before we develop the ability to speak, we are learning about the world we find ourselves in.

We learn and remember through our bodies. Various sensations give us information and teach us how to interact with our environment. You can see this in animals, who do not use words. If a dog burns himself, he will not go near the fire again. If an animal is hit, it will avoid the person who caused the pain. Babies are no different. In fact, all of us have this kind of implicit, nonverbal memory. This is how we know how to ride a bicycle.

One particular demonstration of implicit memory, published in 1911, has always impressed me. A Swiss psychologist, Édouard Claparède, would greet an amnesic patient each day, or sometimes just minutes apart, and she never remembered having met him before. One day, he hid a sharp pin in his hand when he shook the woman’s hand so that it pricked her. Although she later still had no conscious memory of having met the doctor, she refused to shake hands with him again! How many of us are reacting to our lives in the same unconscious way? In the field of Prenatal and Birth Psychology, we see this phenomenon everywhere!

All of us have been through birth. For most of us, this important, formative time of being in the womb and then emerging from it is just a story we have been told by others. I have heard all my life that my father had told mother not to interrupt him to go to the hospital during his favorite TV show, Dragnet. My due date was the next day, but, just as he was settling into his show, it was time to go to the hospital. I’m sure you have heard stories about the time of your birth. These stories are important to the tellers, but may not relate to the baby’s experience. Similarly, the evaluation of how easy or difficult the birth was may be quite different for the parents and birth attendants than for the baby.

Remembering Birth

Babies have experience. They are sentient beings long before they emerge from the birth canal. It is not unusual for toddlers to talk about their birth, or even the time in their mummy’s tummy. Some even talk about how they were conceived. What may be surprising is the degree of accuracy with which they report events and scenes that they had no apparent way of knowing anything about.

“Most disarming of all birth memories are those expressed by very young children. Inspired by some feeling, experience, or association, toddlers may surprise their parents with explicit memories of birth. Like the children themselves, these memories are innocent, unpredictable, and spontaneous, and they constitute an important new body of evidence for the reality for birth memory.” – David B. Chamberlain, The Mind of Your Newborn Baby, p. 97

As children begin to talk, they are guided by the adults around them as to what to talk about and how. There are certain things that are not accepted. Often, prenatal or birth experience is one of them. Talking about more “real” things generates praise, reflection and feedback that encourages them to continue focusing on these types of things. Talking about their birth, like describing past lives or imaginary companions, becomes something they are expected to grow out of, just the effect of an active imagination.

It turns out that toddlers can be very accurate in describing their experience. Similarly, adults regressing back to the time of their birth often describe the scene with incredible accuracy. Their body movements in regression also accurately depict how their birth happened. How can this be?

Through implicit memory, we remember experiences in the womb and during birth through our bodies. If these memories are not reinforced or reflected back to us when we are learning to speak, our body memories don’t have a chance to be integrated into explicit, verbal memory. They continue to influence our behavior unconsciously until such time as we are able to bring them to consciousness and integrate them more fully.

Supporting Little Ones

We can support our children in not having to stay locked in prenatal and birth patterns as we may have throughout their lives by first of all acknowledging that they had an experience. Talking about their time in the womb and at birth, not only from our perspective but inviting theirs can be profoundly healing. Babies often feel unheard and poorly met in this early time. At birth they cry to communicate their pain, terror, rage or aloneness. It helps when they are picked up and held, but what helps even more is to acknowledge their feelings. We all appreciate being heard. We all want to be understood. Babies want that, too. They also need reflection to feel safe. Their survival depends on their caregivers perceiving their needs. If they feel missed too often, babies begin to shut down. There is not much else they can do.

Understanding how babies (or anyone) responds to stress can be helpful in supporting them. Our autonomic nervous system, which controls our stress responses and basic metabolic functioning, consists of three parts. According the polyvagal theory of Stephen Porges, we respond to stress in relation to how these parts developed in evolution. Our social engagement system, which enables us to talk and listen to each other, make eye contact, and generally engage socially, is the latest to develop and the first we humans employ when encountering potential threat. We immediately look to see if there are other humans or friends around and how they are responding. Toddlers check to see how mother responds, to help them know if they are safe or not. Our social engagement system also enables us to cooperate with others to protect ourselves. Where a baby is unable to run away from a predator, a mother can carry the baby to safety.

Running away or fighting relates to the next level of response, the sympathetic or fight-flight nervous system. When activated, this system directs blood to the big muscles of our arms and legs to enable us to fight or fly. Our muscles tense up. Our jaws prepare to bite. We feel anger rise to protect our boundaries. Babies are not big or strong enough to fight or fly, but we can sense the anger or rage in their cry. If you listen to a baby cry, it will first sound like the little one calling out, “Mom, are you there? I need you.” If there is no response, the cry becomes louder and more forceful. “Mom! Where are you!” Newborns cry like this when they are handled roughly or in pain, separated from mom, or not responded to when they cry more softly. After some time, if they still are not responded to, they stop crying. They may then become a “good baby.”

These are the babies to be most concerned about. The third level of the autonomic nervous system is the parasympathetic. When we feel safe and settled, this is the part of our nervous system that supports rest and rejuvenation. Blood that has been directed toward the limbs for fight-flight and speed, now returns to the organs. Digestion that was put on hold during the threat can now resume. The rebuilding of the body becomes a central activity. In extreme or prolonged stress, however, the parasympathetic nervous system slows us down more extremely. This is where animals “play dead” to avoid being eaten by a tiger. If the tiger persists in its attack, the animal is spared the sensation of pain. This is a state of dissociation or freeze, where our awareness of our bodies and their sensations is lessened, along with our sense of aliveness. Good babies who are in this state, do not resist anything their caregivers want to do with them. They are not present enough to resist. They are not in touch with their sympathetic anger and resistance. That would give them strength to resist, but they are not really home or able to object.

Just to clarify, some babies are good babies because they are genuinely happy and peaceful. These babies have a sense of aliveness and tone in their bodies. Dissociated babies feel like they aren’t quite there. They may not make eye contact or have a vacant look in their eyes when they do. Their bodies may feel relatively limp or stiff. They may have a particularly pale complexion. They often have health problems and an underactive or overactive immune system.

I find it useful to have this knowledge of our stress responses so as to recognize what state a child is in and to support them being able to engage in the next level of response. A child lost in dissociation may need to find a way to push and resist. A child who is always having tantrums may need help to socially engage, to find words, to hear sounds, to make eye contact.

For toddlers and older children, games can help support this nervous system expression. Babies and toddlers can be supported by moving through transitions and making changes slowly, explaining to them what is about to happen and why, listening when they cry, putting into words for them what they are expressing, and, most of all, being clear that you really want to know what their experience is. And, yes, babies do understand what you are talking about! I have worked with newborns who look at me with obvious relief and joy when they realize I understand that they are expressing their birth and am interested in it.

Little Ones Showing Us Their Birth

Babies and children act out their birth experience so often. Babies will show you their birth by turning and pushing through your hands, if you support their weight and respectfully follow their movement. Toddlers and older children seek to resolve or master their birth by climbing into boxes, tunnels, cubby holes, baskets or anything they can fit into. If they were born prematurely or their birth was induced by medication or other interventions or circumstances, they may need time to just be in their chosen box, their invented womb. They need to make up for the time they missed. They then need the opportunity to find their own way out of the womb. This applies also to children born with forceps, vacuum extraction (ventouse), caesarian section or other forms of assistance. They need to find their own timing and their own way out.

Children crawling through a play tunnel will often stop at the point representing where they were stuck in their birth. Reflecting this back to them in simple words like, “Oh this is where you got stuck,” can facilitate their integration of this experience. Children born by cesarian section may have a difficult time getting all the way through the tunnel, or completing things they begin.

I remember one little boy I worked with years ago who would always push his way up out through a hole in the tunnel half way through. He needed to re-enact his cesarian birth several times until he began to see that there might be another way through. He would then go a bit further each time he went in the tunnel, until, finally, he went all the way to the end. Up to that point, he sped up and became anxious midway through. Each time he popped out through the center, he was held and reassured by his mom. This was an important re-patterning of his actual birth experience, where he was taken away from mom and put in an incubator. When he had been reassured enough, and also encouraged to find the strength of his anger when it arose, he was able to get through the tunnel and felt very proud of himself. His issues with transitions shifted dramatically after that.

Children also play out their traumatic past with toys. They will push them through a tunnel and create resistances for them. They will perform surgery on them, pull them with forceps or give them needles to be empowered in relation to drugs and medical procedures they experienced. Providing medical types of toys, with doctors, nurses, hospital beds and equipment can facilitate this kind of play.

Children can work through the trauma of separation from mom at birth by playing with mother and baby animal toys. It is important in addressing prenatal and birth issues that children be allowed to choose their toys and activities in play, rather than being led by an adult. Birth traumas inevitably involve being disempowered and having our own needs, timing and boundaries disrespected or ignored. Children can find these again and reclaim them through their play. Witnessing their play can be helpful, including reflecting back to them what they are doing. Oh, the bear is moving through the tunnel now. He is finding his own way through. Oops, he got stuck there. How is he going to get out now? It’s not always necessary during this play to interpret each action in relation to the child’s birth. It may be easier for a child to process these events through symbolic play, where the actual story may be overwhelming.

On the other hand, children often want to hear the story of their birth. Acknowledging what was difficult or scary can be extremely helpful. Keep an eye on the child’s reactions as you speak. An overwhelmed child may become anxious or over-active, or may dissociate and feel less present. If the child shows any signs of distress, pause the story and check in. Give the child time to express and process. Speak slowly. Take time to play, to cuddle, to reassure, to be with what arises.

There is so much to talk about regarding how to support babies and children in working through their early trauma. While there is not space here to go into every detail, I would like to cover one more important piece. That is how you are present with the child. Most of us have our own unresolved prenatal and birth traumas. If your own trauma is touched while being with the child, it is essential that you have support to work through your own history.

Children, like any of us, need to be heard and seen. When we are meeting them from within our own history, we are much less able to hear and see what is actually being presented. Daniel Siegel has an excellent book, Parenting From the Inside Out, to guide parents in working through their own issues that arise.

If you are a parent or spend time with children, you have probably noticed that your issues will arise in relationship with them. I see that as one of the gifts babies and children bring to us. Our own childhood is reflected back to us, offering us an irresistible opportunity to heal. Our own healing can be one of the greatest gifts we offer to the little ones coming in.

Meeting Our Inner Embryo

8 weeks after conception; photo from Wikipedia

Our first eight weeks of life are amazing! While being in stillness and really doing nothing much, we accomplish perhaps more than we ever will the rest of our lives. We create a complex body from one cell.

What could be more miraculous? The more you know me, the more you will know of my passion for the mysteries of embryology. I have studied embryology with fascination since 1997, when I incorporated it into my self-designed doctoral program in Pre- and Perinatal Psychology. At that time I reasoned that, since little ones learn through their bodies, understanding the little body was an essential key to comprehending the psyche associated with it. I still agree with that, but my appreciation for the gifts embryology has to offer has deepened and widened over the years.

As I was completing my PhD, I began formally studying Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, which I now teach. Biodynamics is based on the importance of universal, or biodynamic, forces, which guide our formation in the womb. We perceive that these forces continue influencing our formation and re-formation throughout our lives. The specific events of embryo formation are perhaps less important than the underlying principles of development directing those events.

Soon after completing my foundation training in Biodynamics, I found myself being urgently drawn to immerse myself in the fluid investigations of Continuum Movement. I learned from Emilie Conrad, somatic visionary and founder of Continuum, that our tissues form in relation to their context. This is a basic embryological principle that Conrad had seen in her practice of Continuum. As she and her students applied the breaths, sounds, awareness and gentle movements of Continuum, their tissue patterns apparently melted. Within the restful, creative, accepting context of Continuum, tissues took on different shapes than when engaged in everyday fetch wood carry water activities. Conrad noted that, in the speed and focus of everyday life, our tissues become more dense, solid, and rigid, and our perception narrows. We have less access to the rejuvenating vibrations that form all things in nature.

Here we return to a basic Biodynamic concept. As the Austrian scientist Viktor Schauberger recognized, all things in nature form as spiraling forces around a mid-line. The embryo is no different. You and I, now old enough to write and read this page, are also no different. Biodynamics involves orienting to these deep, formative forces, rather than to just their effects as outer form. When we slow down, whether through Biodynamics, Continuum or other awareness practices, our tissues begin to dissolve. The patterns we have lived in relation to begin to become less important as we remember and return to more essential and original intentions. How do we lose touch with these?

Longing for Original Intention

Have you ever had an urge to know your true nature and purpose? Or felt you weren’t quite living your life the way you intended, really deep down? Years ago, I used to teach a workshop called, “Express Your Essence.” The other day, in the midst of talking yet again about the amazing potential and original intention of the embryo, that title came back to me. I think I have always been after the same thing.

Original potential. Original intention. What does that mean? Where did it go? How do we get it back?

As we float quietly in our private amniotic sea for about nine months, our rapidly changing, growing bodies are not only influenced by universal Biodynamic forces. They are also impacted by conditions around us. The context affecting our formation, includes both universal forces and the world around us. In the womb, our context and our world is primarily mother.

Abundant research now shows that ongoing or extreme prenatal maternal stress profoundly affects the prenate’s nervous system. Levels of cortisol, a major stress hormone, relate to the mother’s stress during pregnancy. Individuals exposed to high maternal stress prenatally tend to be much more sensitive to stress throughout life.

Cell biologist, Bruce Lipton, explains that genes in the unborn child are turned on or off depending on mother’s perception of her environment. If she experiences being safe and supported, baby prepares physiologically to enter a safe, supportive environment. If mother feels threatened, unsafe and/or unsupported, baby prepares to enter a dangerous world. This may reflect being pregnant during a war, in relationship with a violent partner, or even feeling overwhelmed by such everyday stresses as taking a subway to work, feeling unappreciated by one’s boss, or extreme financial stress.

An additional stress for pregnant parents is the tendency for their own prenatal history to emerge during the pregnancy. Stresses that might have been more manageable at another time can be overwhelming for someone unconsciously immersed in their prenatal trauma. It can be helpful to remember that little one’s in the womb are not meant to be dealing with finances or subways or violence. When our prenatal history has not been acknowledged or processed, we tend to slip into it unconsciously in situations that remind us of that time.

The little one is not able to differentiate between their own feelings and those of mom. They tend to identify with the feelings. If there is anger, they become the anger. If there is fear, they are fear. When we return to a prenatal state, we also tend to become our feelings. Our ability to be with them from a witness state becomes less accessible. Just understanding this situation can help us to differentiate between then and now. We then have the possibility of meeting our inner embryo, rather than becoming him or her. As a relatively capable grown up, we are capable of witnessing and holding the little one within us, offering what is needed, rather than wallowing in the pain.

Accessing Resource and Support

If any of these ideas are provocative or disturbing for you, I suggest you really take your time to read about them. Pause and take a few deep breaths. Allow yourself to feel your body, your feet on the floor, the seat under you. Take a moment here and there to stretch and be with your current, grown up body and being. Remind yourself that you are here, now, that, whatever happened back then, you are actually o.k. in this moment, with many skills and tools you didn’t have back then. When you feel settled, read on.

It has been said that it takes a village to raise a child. New mothers in the modern world rarely receive the kind of support they need to be resourced enough to easily nurture their child. This begins even before conception, when preparation for becoming pregnant is not the norm. Some couples intend conscious conception, preparing their bodies and their homes, and engaging in prenatal and birth therapy to resolve or at least bring to consciousness their own early traumas so as not to unconsciously pass them on to their children. More than half of pregnancies, however, are unplanned.

Even for parents desiring a child, discovering an unplanned pregnancy can be shocking. There are bound to be feelings of ambivalence and questions of readiness for this profound event. Such shock and ambivalence is part of the context in which the little one forms. The psyche may register the experience as an imprint of not feeling welcomed. The individual may spend a lifetime seeking home, seeking to be wanted, longing for welcome and a sense of belonging. Such an imprint is particularly strong if the pregnancy is not wanted, with abortion or adoption being considered. Fortunately, babies are highly fluid, resilient beings. When they are later welcomed, celebrated and loved, much healing can occur. This can happen at any age. Even as adults, we can offer such healing acceptance to the little embryo self still floating somewhere in our psyches. It is never too late, as they say, to have a happy childhood!  

Haunted by History

There are other stressful influences within the womb, besides mom’s experience during pregnancy. Prenatal and birth therapy pioneer, William Emerson, describes the little one in the womb as marinating in the unconscious of the parents. Where parents have not resolved issues from their own early life, these become part of the context in which the little one forms. Unresolved issues may also include such tragedies as the loss of a baby prior to this pregnancy. Our modern western culture doesn’t tend to support grieving the loss of loved one very well. Grieving the loss of an unborn baby seldom receives the space and support it needs. After a miscarriage, a couple may be told to wait awhile so the woman’s body is strong again and then try again. This is not bad advice, but what about the couple’s feelings? It can be devastating to lose a child at any age. It seems that the younger the child, the more intense the feelings of loss. Losing a baby shortly after birth is more acknowledged than the loss of an unborn child, but in any case, the feelings can be massive. There may be feelings of guilt and inadequacy as well as the loss itself.

Looking deeper, it is not unusual to lose a twin in the womb. We now know that more than half of conceptions are multiple, while the rate of twins being born is much lower. This means that many of us have had a sibling in the womb. When a twin dies before birth, its little body may be resorbed into the uterus or absorbed into the surviving twin’s body. Often the only one aware of the vanishing twin’s existence is the surviving twin. The loss then becomes a shadow within the survivor’s psyche. There may always be a longing for someone who can really be close and understand them. There may be a sense of something missing or not quite right. The loss has usually never been consciously or verbally acknowledged. Therefore, the memory of it is not available on a conscious level. The feelings cannot be fully processed.

Twin loss can affect anyone. If a parent has a miscarriage, one of the feelings that may be touched is the primal feeling of loss of a twin before birth. The intensity of having lost a child then becomes multiplied by the unresolved and usually unacknowledged feelings of loss of a twin. Such feelings of loss can be confusing and overwhelming. If unprocessed, they remain present for the next pregnancy. The new baby then grows within a haunted womb.

The new parents may have difficulty fully welcoming their new baby when they discover the pregnancy. They may be distracted by unresolved feelings from the past. Unable to face their difficult feelings, they also may not fully embrace the joy of having conceived. They may be so terrified of losing another baby that they avoid becoming attached to this one.

The little one marinates in all of this. The context for this little one is extremely challenging. The universal forces are still present directing development. Without them, the little one would not survive at all. In these challenging conditions, however, the conditional forces strongly compete with the universal. Babies may be born with various physical challenges where the body has not formed in resonance with the universal forces. Growing in a field of unresolved grief affects the new child’s physiology. Being awash for months in maternal bio-chemicals profoundly affects the little one’s psyche.

Beyond Personal History

There is so much that can happen on the way to birth. I won’t go into all of it here. It would not only take too long to read, but would also be too overwhelming. Our hearts would burst in resonance with the pain of coming into being.

I believe at least part of our pain at perceiving such suffering relates to our innate knowing of how it could be otherwise. Along with the trauma, there is potential. There is an original intention and intelligence that knows how to form us. When we remember ourselves as little ones, it is tempting to either completely deny any pain or to be so seduced by personal history that it is hard to function. Through many years of healing my own wounding from that time and facilitating this healing with others, I have learned the importance of remembering the potential. Our early days may have included overwhelming pain and trauma, but they definitely also included a mysterious connection to source.

My work these days is about supporting that connection. I find that, when we are able to remember the potential of that early formative time, our old wounds can begin to dissolve and heal in a gentle way. We can hold our inner embryo with love, appreciating how we made it through whatever happened, and remember the miracle of how we formed from one little cell. We can hold ourselves how we may have wished we could have been held, perceiving our beauty, our potency, our creative forces, and the larger field in which we grew.

There was another field there, not just the historical one relating to our parents’ issues and relationship - a greater field existing prior to our parents, before our bodies, and beyond our little personalities. We can remember the spiraling forces directing our formation and allow our curiosity to lead us deeper. Just take a breath, perhaps offer yourself a little humming sound, and notice what else might be available. We are, and always have been, so much more than our history!

In future blog entries, I will be writing more about how to support children and adults in resolving prenatal and birth trauma. In the meantime, if you would like to learn more, I invite you to listen to an interview I gave last week as part of the Infinite Waves of Health Virtual Summit on Embodying Embryology: Accessing Our Original Potential. Click here to register and access the recording.

You are also invited to join me next week for a three-week webinar series on the same subject. To learn more and register, click here. Or you can still register this week through Infinite Waves of Health for a significant discount.

You can also read more in my two chapters in the recently published book, Foundations in Craniosacral Biodynamics: The Sentient Embryo, Tissue Intelligence, and Trauma Resolution, now available at Amazon.

Meeting Suffering; Deepening Compassion

I am writing as a I begin to settle in at home in Devon after an extremely full month away teaching in Canada and the U.S.A. The final week of the trip, I witnessed the shockwave passing through New York City as we met there for Seminar 3 of the Craniosacral Biodynamics training. People were still recovering from the wake up call of the recent hurricane, called Sandy, when another Sandy event occurred.

It began as we returned from a lunch break with an announcement that there had been a horrible shooting in a primary school close to where some members of our group live. Regardless of where home was, the parents of young children in the room were rocked into various degrees of fear and terror. The children affected were as young as six years old. The shooter was the son of a kindergarten teacher! She had been the first target of his outbreak. How could this be?

Our work with Biodynamics begins with attention to our relational field with the client, based on the understanding that a client’s system will not settle enough to address core issues unless there is sufficient sense of safety. We all did our best in the unsettled field after the announcement to help each other to deepen under the shock, to remember our resources, to allow ourselves to be present to the whole of our experience, not just the shock or fear.

For so many of us, even if we can settle into some semblance of presence and beingness, events like the one at Sandy Hook, are like slaps in the face. What can we do? How can we help? Why is there so much suffering and why would a son of a kindergarten teacher act like this and why would there be guns in her house, just waiting to be used?

In my meditation practice, I have learned to send loving kindness out to all those in need. We begin with ourselves.

May I be happy. May I be peaceful. May I be free.

We intend to cultivate our own peace, happiness and awareness, and then share it with others.

May all beings share my merits. May all beings share my happiness. May all beings share my peace. May all beings be happy, be peaceful, be free.

 

If there is anything in the way of me sharing that, I intend to be with that and come to terms with it.

May I pardon all those who may have hurt or harmed me in any way, in thought, speech, or action. May I be pardoned by all those I may have hurt in any way, in thought, speech, or action.

Life presents many opportunities to practice! A shocking event like the one last week is like a mid-term exam, perhaps an initiation.

I look at myself in the mirror as I brush my teeth. I think of the parents too frozen to even feel their grief yet. And I cry. I cry as if crying the tears they are not yet thawed enough to feel. Part of me wants to freeze, too. It is too much! It is too much to imagine all this meaningless carnage. Young innocents, cute children, little ones trusting the safety of their school surroundings … murdered… I take a deep breath and stop my mind’s extrapolating on what I have heard. Children have been killed. Women have been killed. School is not always safe. But I am safe in this moment. I can still breathe, feel my body, ground into the earth, brush my teeth. Life goes on. In this place, I can begin to find a way to help. If I freeze, too, I become part of the enormity of the wave, reinforcing overwhelm.

Working with our own trauma in this way, staying in present time, with awareness of breath and body sensations, and whatever supports us in this moment, enables us to be present with whatever arises. As I look in the mirror, I hear my inner meditation teacher become critic complaining that I should be able to be with anything. Orienting to the judgment and criticism there takes me further from that goal. Practicing being with what I can be, I find myself a moment later with a sense of my heart softening and widening to hold more. I cry and am present. It is appropriate to cry. It is a sad event. It is not helpful to freeze the tears in this moment, even though I learned to do that as a child to stay safe. I acknowledge, in this moment I am safe. I have a deep heart longing to support all beings in also being safe. How can I help?

In this more restful state of presence, my mind begins to make some connections, which I think are useful. I want to share them here.

I draw on my studies in Prenatal and Birth Psychology, as well as my years of work with my own and others’ trauma and shock from that early time in our lives. I think of the work of Lloyd deMause, who wrote a book called Foundations of Psychohistory. He describes how societies historically held and raised their children related to the way of understanding childhood at the time. Birth practices connect to how children are perceived within a culture.

In modern, western culture, children are perceived as possessions – my children. Empathy for children has grown over the years, but they have not always been perceived as fully human. Only relatively recently has our modern, western culture acknowledged that babies feel pain and are sensitive beings. Until the late 1980s, surgery was performed on babies without anesthesia! These little ones were left to struggle with their un-named PTSD. Some earlier cultures, like the Spartans, treated their babies roughly to ensure their success in a rough world.

I am reminded of a brilliant book by medical anthropologist, Robbie Davis-Floyd. Birth as an American Rite of Passage meticulously describes common medical interventions to birth, and shows how they are generally not necessary for health (or even undermine health). Instead, they appear to be perfectly designed as an initiatory rite for both mother and baby into a culture where doctors are sacred authorities. In other cultures, where women, and other people, are more valued in and of themselves, birth may happen differently.

In Prenatal and Birth Psychology, we see research demonstrating and beginning to explain the profound effects of modern birth practices. We see increasing numbers of children unable to self-regulate their emotions, challenged by learning difficulties and insecure attachment patterns. We now know that brains develop differently when babies designed to bond with mom immediately after birth are put on cold tables, handled by strangers wearing masks instead of faces, separated from mom or birthed surgically as a predictable outcome of anesthesia or other drugs administered to the mother during labor.

When I feel my own anger and judgment arising as I think about the young man who murdered all those children and his mother, I can more easily find my way to compassion when I think about how he may have come into this life. It takes extra work to be emotionally intelligent when our first social imprints at birth, or even before, are impersonal, unwelcoming or ambivalent. We humans are incredibly resilient beings, but even our ability to be resilient depends on our sense of safety and welcome. If we did not have it in the womb or when we were little, it can be developed later, but it does not then develop as naturally. We need to work at it and we need support. We need a safe, relational field.

I find it hard to imagine that this young killer lived in a safe, relational field. Owning guns suggests to me the likelihood of some level of fear, some sense of threat. Reading the news after this event, I see comments about the need for guns for teachers so they can defend themselves in school! Perhaps, this kindergarten teacher felt a need to protect herself from angry students! I don’t know, but I suspect she did not feel safe. I also suspect that communicated to her son and that he did not grow up feeling safe. I base this on years of experience as a therapist with people who have felt unsafe for too long, as well as the multitude of writings and research on the topic.

What would it take for a man like this to feel safe? Research suggests that it would be easier if he felt safe in his early years. Then the question becomes, what would it take for a child to feel safe? We actually know the answer to that one! Children feel safe when those around them, especially mom, express and provide a sense of safety. It seems that the greatest thing we can do for our children is to ensure that their mothers are safe and well taken care of! If we could take all the money put into having more guns and defense and put it into supporting pregnant and new mothers, I suspect our next generation could rest into being, and that the rest of us could more easily rest into being with them.

And for those of us who have not had the ideal birth or childhood, it is not too late to learn to shift our orientation from the pain of the past to the potential of the present. Our brains literally change when we practice mindfulness, being with what arises in present time. May the wake up calls touch us deeply and help us to awaken. It is not too late.

May we all be peaceful.

May we all be happy.

May we all be free.