Awakened Woman e-magazine
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Scientific studies show how birth shock affects personality.
Love breeds love
Preventing and healing the trauma of birth By Dorothy Mandel
The transition into physical form and the journey from conception through birth constitute one of the most miraculous, profound, and perilous in human experience. Conception and birth form the blueprint from which later bonding and relationship patterns emerge.
Wherever a mother feels safest is the optimum place for her to give birth. Statistically, home births have a record of being gentler, safer, and more mother- directed than hospital births.
Patterns that form life perceptions come in at conception, are made physical during gestation, and are reinforced during the birth process. Perceptions form the energetic backdrop that determines how we relate and respond to our environment and how we as organisms and people adapt to life, love, and relationship.
It is important for parents to know there are things they can do to prevent birth trauma and promote healthy bonding. If trauma does occur, the heart's response and bonding interruption can be re-patterned, and the sooner it is addressed, the shorter the time needed.
Learning to maintain a strong heart response within self, with partner, and between parents and developing child, is the most important gift parents can give to insure secure bonding and optimal physical development for their coming child.
The fetal heart forms before the brain develops. No one knows for sure how a fetal heart knows to begin beating, but it is probably a mother's own heartbeat to which her baby's heart entrains. The heart's code is essential to life, love, and relationship. Shock and trauma responses that occur during conception, gestation, and birth, may interrupt the heart's response, the body's information systems, and the bonding process.
Recent clinical research from the Heartmath Institute indicates that the heart has its own intact nervous system and brain communication network, and is the most powerful generator of electromagnetic energy in the body. The heart's energy field extends as far as 12 feet from the body and perhaps indefinitely. The electromagnetic pulses put out by the unobstructed heart response are even and coherent. They promote healthy physical growth, emotional security, and loving relationship.
Any stress or trauma a mother experiences during her baby's gestation is automatically translated through her heart's code and body chemistry to her unborn child, and to her unborn child's heart codes and body chemistry. A shock response occurs when a life threatening danger is perceived by the reptilian brain, and the survival tools of fight and flight are insufficient to insure survival. Since the developing fetus lacks the functional ability to fight or flee, many experiences that would not otherwise be perceived as life threatening are.
Unborn babies can experience shock responses in early pregnancy and they do affect heart response, brain development, and neural organization. During a shock response the system reaches overload and a sequence of events involving adrenal overload, sensory and spiritual dissociation, nervous system disorientation, and physical immobility occurs. Early shock response experiences become a core organizing factor of the psyche. Early heart response experiences also become a core organizing factor of the psyche.
Old shock response imprints are easily activated during the course of a woman's labor and are often experientially passed on to the birthing baby. Recognizing and repatterning shock response imprints in pregnant mothers permits the heart response to hold presence during and after birth, decreasing the chances that a mother will pass on these wounds to her birthing child. Even though parents may have otherwise paid attention to every detail of planning a wonderful and fulfilling birth experience, these old imprints, when unresolved, can suddenly appear and alter the course of events immeasurably.
When a mother enters labor, she is in a state of vulnerability, where reality is molded and shaped. She is also in a state of heightened arousal. When a mother is experiencing a shock response, she is more likely to need and incur interventions such as anesthesia, forceps, c-section, and induction.
The umbilical cord is an early and primitive boundary. It is the only control a developing fetus has over what comes into his or her environment. The umbilical cord can be contracted to slow the flow of unwanted incoming substance, including alcohol, nicotine, drugs, and perhaps anesthesia. It sets the blueprint for digestion of food and experience, dynamics of giving and receiving, potency of action, and for how boundary violations will be perceived and handled. The musculature surrounding and attached to the umbilical cord assists in performing this contraction.
A shock response imprint of deep umbilical holding can so severely contract the musculature around the ovaries, uterus, and the entire pelvic girdle as to make birth difficult at best and impossible at worst. This is just one of many shock response imprints that can physiologically affect birth, health, and consequently, perinatal relationship.
Midwives and doctors can assist pregnant parents by doing gentle and sensitive trauma histories, including birth, abortion, major falls, accidents, and sexual abuse. If a mother has nagging fears of being pregnant, giving birth, entering labor, or parenting, she may have a trauma history. If she has a history of infertility, or previously prolonged pregnancy or labor, these are also signs indicating early shock response imprints.
Unmediated obstetrical interventions are one of the leading causes of birth trauma and interrupted bonding patterns. Obstetrical interventions include c-section, forceps, vacuum extraction, induction, anesthesia, and drugs of all kinds. These interventions are not only a physical risk but also have potentially enormous and long term emotional and behavioral consequences.
The experience of forceps, for example, is usually recounted by regressed clients as one of being forcibly and painfully pulled out, and manipulated. Corresponding subsequent behaviors may include intense resistance to authority or to anyone trying to assist or change their course, along with an intermittent but persistent need to be rescued. They may set up situations in which they need rescuing or assistance and then inadvertently perceive help as painful or as criticism they are "doing it wrong", and react with extreme rage and anger. They often perceive they are being manipulated and commonly report severe headaches and/or neck and shoulder pain.
Anesthesia may have been experienced by some as a relief from intense pain and terror or may have been experienced as immobilizing, nauseating, and frightening. Either way there is a loss of bodily control and a numbing of experience. Psychological correlates of the rescue perception might include being drawn to drugs as pleasant and rescuing. Psychological correlates of the negative experience might include extreme avoidance and moralizing about drugs and alcohol. The numbing experience may develop into periods fading in and out or awareness, spacing out, or intermittent dissociating. People who have experienced anesthesia trauma often feel that something is missing or they are isolated from themselves in some way and not experiencing their own experience.
Induced people may have a lot of trouble getting started and a lot of anger about being told what to do. The problem of not being able to get going may become debilitating. They may have a hard time knowing what they want, how they feel, knowing the "when" of any situation.
While these interventions are sometimes necessitated by circumstance, many can be prevented and many can be mediated. Mediating obstetrical interventions includes staying in spiritual heart contact with the birthing child and predicting in as much detail as possible to both mother and baby what each step of the process will entail. Spiritual midwives and birthing mothers often take on this role but dads and baby doulas are also options. Obstetrical interventions are much less frequent in a home birth setting but when they do occur they need to be addressed also.
Behaviors in children that have been clinically linked to shock response imprints include ongoing anger, anxiety, ADD, hyperactivity, attachment disorder, withdrawal, and suicidal feelings. Many of these signs have come to be considered common, expected, and normal in our culture.
When a practitioner and/or parent can accurately recognize and compassionately mirror a baby's experience back to him, a very profound change happens. As that baby feels deeply seen, perhaps for the first time, a noticeable heart response and deep interpersonal contact usually follow along with an increased sense of mutuality and trust. Clinical research indicates that it is this sense of connection, mutuality, and trust that is missing in both attachment disorder children and sociopathic criminals.
I remember in my early training watching one of my mentors interview a couple with their 3 month old baby and talking about the brief 2 days they had been considering abortion because of social difficulties. The baby began to cry intensely and inconsolably. When the terror and grief in his response was acknowledged, mirrored, and empathized with in a heartfelt way, he made deep eye contact and continued to cry until he was done, at which time he calmed down and had substantially more heart contact and presence. In that moment I was given a deep knowing of how psychically and emotionally aware babies are in a way I have never forgotten.
As I have learned to listen more deeply, I have seen in my own practice how themes of being unwanted or even ambivalently wanted are some of the most annihilative and frightening for unborn babies. Addressing such feelings has far reaching consequences for the prevention of attachment disorder and the development of healthy perinatal relationships.
Repatterning shock response imprints unlinks the memory from its original sensory experience and its original perception of the event as life threatening. The memory can still be intact but it no longer carries the life death imprint and shock response. The person no longer needs to live in protective mode. Prevention is, however, always the best choice when it is an option.
By providing the optimum loving intention, safety, and security from conception and throughout the birthing process, we can begin to create a paradigm shift back into heart's response.
For more information, contact:
Dorothy Mandel CCHT (707) 542-2439, birthbus@ap.net
Santa Rosa Center for Hypnotherapy and Early Imprint Repatterning
1549 Pacific Ave Santa Rosa, CA 95404
>>>Next page: In which the author recalls her birth.
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