Infant Parent Healing      "We are each the union of the Mother and the Father."

       Janel Martin-Miranda, MA, LPC (IL)                    Prenatal and Birth Focused Counselor              CranioSacral Therapist

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Artwork www.waterspider.net

Assisting and supporting parents to create healthy attachment and bonding with their baby -- for a lifetime  

 

How I Came to Be Doing

Prenatal and Birth Therapy

 

 

I am honored when a parent invites me to treat their newborn or infant and I hold that little one in the highest regard. I take very seriously the vulnerability of a newborn and her parents who trust me to join with them and their precious, little one.  I appreciate and support a parent who has the courage to go beyond what is currently known by medical and social communities, who does the research about prenatal birth therapy, and who asks me questions about my work and who I am.

 

It is important that a parent ask any professional, such as an obstetrician, pediatrician, doula, childcare provider, teacher, etc. about their training and to now also ask about their knowledge of Pre- and Perinatal Psychology.  

 

It is time to encourage and expect anyone working with prenates, infants, and children to be engaged in a body-focused therapeutic modality specifically working on his or her own prenatal and birth trauma.  Therefore, I will share here my educational and professional background and how I came to be doing Prenatal and Birth Therapy. I then share my personal, ongoing journey of healing my own prenatal and birth traumas. I do so in the language of Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and birth trauma healing so that one might be able to more fully understand prenatal and birth trauma. I include sections on Emotional and Psychological Imprints, Retraumatizing Childhood and Adult Injuries, and on the Physical Illnesses and Prenatal and Birth Imprints.

 

Prenatal and Birth Therapy incorporates biodynamic and structural CranioSacral therapy concepts and techniques with the new findings and training in body consciousness and prenatal psychology and with my experience of traditional family and individual therapy and family advocacy.  I did my CranioSacral training with the Upledger Institute in 2000 and I have since done CranioSacral Therapy with infants through adults. (You can view my professional resume at the end of this page.)

 

I earned my undergraduate degree in Psychology (1983) and Master’s degree in Counseling (1985) from Northeast Missouri State University (now known as Truman State University), and fifty post-graduate hours from the McGregor School of Antioch, Yellow Springs, OH. I have fifteen years of combined experience in counseling children and families, in program development, and in grassroots and state agency organizing (AZ, IL, NY) to impact systems change in social service programs.  In those capacities I worked with children of abuse and neglect, and I strived to empower women to care for and to make decisions for themselves and to participate in and contribute to society.

 

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How I Came To Be Doing Prenatal and Birth Therapy

I left this field in 1999, feeling lost, discouraged, and “beaten down by fighting the systems” that I perceived to more often hurt, not help women and children. I temporarily felt hopeless and fearful about what I could possibly do next. After years of deep convictions and compassion working to make life/programs more effective for women and children, I wondered, “what were all of the years of education and work about?”  Soon I was led to train in infant massage instruction to teach mothers to massage their baby. I felt relief and contentment with the hope that I would just be working with moms and babies to attach and bond.  No more fighting the systems, just gently and peacefully supporting women and children to keep them out of the systems in the first place.

 

My infant massage teacher, DeAnn Elliott of Colorado, was filming a documentary on the imprinting that happens at the moment of conception, based on the cellular biology research by Dr. Bruce Lipton. Their work opened my world to a new way of looking at myself and at my work with mothers and children. It also opened my body (where everything is stored) for healing of my own traumatic prenatal and birth experiences and the subsequent life situations and patterns. I had read Anatomy of the Spirit by Carolyn Myss who discusses cellular memory and says, “Our bodies are our biographies.” This was during my transition period out of the systems work and I recommended the book to everyone. At the time, I was also completing my CranioSacral Therapy training to return to clinical work with this body/mind approach. Another book, Molecules of Emotion, by Candace Pert, an NIS researcher who made the discovery of the receptor sites for the AIDS virus, and Dr. Lipton’s scientific research in cellular biological explained how our bodies hold cellular memory and provided the scientific explanation for how CranioSacral works. 

 

While completing the Upledger training, I began to study prenatal psychology and birth trauma healing (William Emerson, Suzanne Arms, Thomas Verny, and David Chamberlain) to understand and to put words to my experience.  In particular, Reclaiming the Spirituality of Birth: Healing for Mothers and Babies, by Benig Mauger and Birth without Violence, by Frederick LeBoye, MD were instrumental in getting in touch with my own violent birth and my son’s violent birth. I began to see how medicalized birth creates and reinforces the imprints for many of the social problems that take children and adults to medical and psychological therapy. I saw that modern hospital birth contributes to current social issues.  For a period, my experience focused on the obstetrical medical system as needing to be reformed and in the process, I re-created the traumatic experience in my marriage (ironically, he was an obstetric resident.) 

 

As I healed my own birth experience, in the context of my conception and prenatal imprints, I learned that my "anger" at the medical birthing system was at the doctor, who both hurt and saved me. I learned that I had “anger” at “feminine betrayers in white” (nurses) because of the injections of drugs that contributed and because of not being supporters of the feminine power in birth. I learned that this was all the manifestation, the experience, the projection of my own inner wounding at conception and prenatally through birth. I became compassionate towards doctors working to save the lives of babies and women. I experienced in my own healing, and as a therapist with others, the resistance of babies to cooperate with doctors trying to save their lives. Doctors and nurses don’t tend to know this. It's important that they do.

 

I learned that my conception had the imprint that “when men love, men hurt” and this was re-experienced in my birth and in every intimate relationship with a man.

 

It is now known in Pre- and Perinatal Psychology that the experiences of conception and attachment to the uterus will be re-experienced at birth and attaching to the mother. I learned the experience of “anger” that I have tended to exert inordinate amounts of energy to avoid (I didn’t like confrontation and I didn’t want to hurt anyone was else) was actually a physiological and nervous system response. This was a response to the action of having my biological impulse for birth stopped and then started by outside forces (doctor and nurses). What I learned was that I didn’t want to hurt myself by getting angry and the birth imprint prevented me from being able to behave as an adult in a way I would have like. This redefines “anger” for me in that I recognize it is just an imprinted, energetic response that I continued to perceive, project, or re-experience with other persons and situations.  I believe this work has huge potential for working with infants, children, and families within the traditional psychotherapy and treatment professions, and in particular in domestic violence. Colleagues in Ireland have a page on anger at http://www.holistic.ie/amethyst/document6.htm.

 

I have experienced severe domestic violence and I have worked in the field. I have noticed how truly and sincerely an abuser does want to not do what he or she is doing. I have likened this to trying to will oneself to not have diarrhea. It doesn’t work because there is something that is causing it and the body responds, regardless of the thought processes. The prenatal and birth therapy work explains how the early imprints continue to overrule everything. In spite of our best efforts, one often finds him or herself in the same situation. One friend describes it beautifully… "same candy, different wrapper."

 

I have been convinced for a while that a person who has been violent or has experienced violence can heal even though our traditional, socially accepted therapies don’t seem to accomplish this. Society is spending more and more on treatment, shelter, programs, and prisons. Traditional approaches to violence and anger don't even really expect healing to occur. Traditionally, therapy promotes separation, banishing of the violent one, the abuser; and so more loss and pain in families, not healing. The severity in many families reveals the generational impact of not healing — of not asking the right questions and not looking to heal the roots that cause the exchange of receiving and inflicting violence.  This prenatal and birth trauma work can prevent and heal the trauma that seeds and grows violence. 

 

While completing my CranioSacral Therapy training and doing my own prenatal and birth healing work, I was having profound experiences with babies. I wanted to learn from the pioneers in the field. I feel grateful that I have had the personal and financial support for the past four years to spend extended time with several leaders in the prenatal and birth field.  I met and spent time with Suzanne Arms in her home and working in her office in Durango, CO in August of 2001 and I remain in regular contact with her.  She will be the featured speaker in an event in Peoria in the future. In 2002 I spent six months in Nevada City, CA where I was a member of David Chamberlain’s newly forming group, Birth and Early Parenting Awareness, where I met Gayle Peterson and Michael Mendizza, two professionals and authors in the prenatal field that I highly respected. Also in 2001, I had professional counseling supervision experience with Michael Trout, Director of the Association of Pre and Perinatal Psychology and Director of the Infant-Parent Institute in Champaign, IL. 

 

By the spring of 2001, I had been accepted into the Ph.D. program in Pre- and Perinatal Psychology at the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute for the fall class, 2001. Additionally, I had created a couple of life situations (crisis=opportunities) that fall that led me to fully realizing the depths of my own conception, prenatal, and birth trauma. I decided I wanted “to go to the deepest depths to heal in my body” before pursuing the PhD training.  In September I postponed the Ph.D. program until the fall of 2003 in order to study with Dr. Raymond Castellino, an internationally respected pioneer in the field of prenatal and birth trauma resolution for infants, children, and adults. I am currently completing his two-year foundation training, Castellino Prenatal and Birth Therapy™ training, in Santa Barbara, CA (www.castellinotraining.com).  Dr. Castellino studied with William Emerson and he has incorporated CranioSacral, polarity, chiropractic, and psychotherapy into prenatal and birth healing.

 

My research and dissertation interests are in the impact and interactional aspect of conception and birth traumas on lifelong psychological development. I am interested in the empowerment of women in their birth process and a woman being a partner with her medical care providers in hospital or home birthing. I am interested in research on the psychological implications of prenatal and birth trauma looking at the prenatal imprints and birth experiences of individuals who chose to do clowning. This is of personal interest to me because as a child I was a comic and class clown, as well as the family clown. I did semi-professional clowning for a short time, amidst my “fighting the systems”, just prior to embarking upon my CranioSacral Therapy training and birth healing.

 

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My Personal, Ongoing Journey of Healing My Own Prenatal and Birth Traumas

Immediately in my CranioSacral Therapy training, my own conception, prenatal, and birth traumas came forth to be healed, as did my horrifically traumatic birth of my first child at age eighteen. His birth reflected my own birth that was quite traumatic — conception trauma, prenatal trauma (mine included the loss of a twin) and prenatal imprints in reaction to dysfunctional family dynamics (that was common to life in the 50’s). 

 

I was born two weeks past my due date, my mother feared for my life, the cord was around my neck two times, my arm was up by my head, and after labor had started naturally, drugs were used to slow the labor for the physician’s schedule (a very common intervention today).  Partly, as a result of this intervention and because of my arm position, I was later unable to come on my own. The doctor attempted to move my arm position, and he used forceps. Forceps cause lifelong headache, neck, and shoulder pain, sometimes hip pain. The use of forceps and pulling me out in a motion that was not how my body was biologically geared up to go through the pelvis resulted in a shear from my left neck to my hip. The turn also resulted in an additional half turn of the cord around my neck and more oxygen depravation. I died in the womb, came back, and my clavicle was broken at birth. My parents were unaware of the extent of my injuries and they were just relieved I was alive, which is often the case after a traumatic birth. Regardless of the baby’s experience, an alive baby is considered enough to be “a good outcome” from the medical perspective. 

 

After birth I was too injured and too shocked to cry much (unable to express my needs or tell my story). Not being seen and not crying, and not being to fully express myself were significant imprints throughout life that are associated with the cord, positioning, forceps, and broken clavicle imprints.  I was in my mid-thirties when “retraumatizing” life situations led me to the place of re-experiencing and releasing this shock and took me into the process of prenatal and birth healing.     

 

As I healed my prenatal and birth experiences (and the memory of my son’s birth still held in my body twenty-some years after his birth), I came to realize that I was searching for my own empowerment through “fighting the systems.” Unfortunately, it was my repressed anger that resulted in bringing violence into my life, either in the work place or in relationships. I was seeking over and over to protect myself, and my own children, and to be seen and acknowledged. In prenatal and birth trauma healing the sense of support, safety, and belonging are key to healing (Castellino).

 

William Emerson, Ph.D., a respected thirty-year pioneer of the field of prenatal and birth trauma healing, reports there is “an interrelationship between prenatal trauma, birth trauma, bonding, and aggression” and that “pre- and perinatal traumas shape how subsequent life events are experienced.” Dr. Emerson discusses the impact of interactional traumas, those childhood experiences that reinforce the prenatal and birth traumas. According to him, a baby unconsciously perceives later events or chooses similar life situations that may reinforce prenatal traumas that can result in relatively chronic symptoms. I have experienced reinforcing traumas and I have identified them in my work and relationships as an adult. I have also become aware that my parents’ love and my father’s protection, (and the loving involvement of a large, close extended family network) provided a significant mediating effect in my childhood years and on my very traumatic birth.  This was not necessarily true for my five siblings because of their different prenatal experiences. The prenatal and birth trauma imprinting information has explained for me why siblings in the same family will have such different personalities, perceptions, and experiences.

 

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Emotional and Psychological Imprints

A significant contributor to my traumatic birth was that my left arm was in a defensive posture in the womb. This led to the difficult birth and I resisted the life-saving efforts of the physician.  I now realize I lived my entire life both needing and resisting help and I needed to distinguish between help and support. I observed that I physically meet the world from my left side in a defensive posture, particularly with men and authority figures. I have learned that my cord trauma and my arm position were because of emotional reactions to family issues during the prenatal period. Consider that it is fairly common for babies to be born with the cord wrapped around their necks and that mothers are not routinely informed.  Cord trauma is considered to be of no consequence by medical attendants; yet, it is known in Pre- and Perinatal Psychology to create significant and serious life long psychological imprinting.

 

One of the psychological impacts of cord trauma is what Emerson calls “completion ambivalence.” It is the result of incredible forces (contractions, drugs, attendants pushing and pulling) that push the baby forward,  and the self-preserving act of pulling back.  This results in fear, terror, and suffocation. Pulling back in order to preserve air and life results in being able to maybe breathe, but results in a number of feelings related to the giving up and the inability to accomplish the birth (task). This creates a feeling or imprint of inevitable failure. The feeling of urgency or drive towards an accomplishment and then pulling back in fear becomes a life long pattern if left unresolved after birth. It certainly described my life pattern. Ironically, the medical term used when this is happening is likely to be “failure to progress” and that’s pretty accurate!

 

There are many possible life patterns that can develop in response to cord trauma and forceps delivery. For me it was feeling alternating anxiety and low-level depression with happiness and creativity. I found a good amount of success in life, but not happiness in the accomplishment of big endeavors.  I tended to get very excited about new ideas and developments but to just not be motivated to follow through in the long term. Then I ended up profoundly disappointed until the next exciting idea or activity (attempt). Birth trauma also leads us to success.  The question is, "At what price, though?" I was successful in my professional work of taking new project grants or programs from idea to implementation but I quickly became bored, disappointed, scattered, and/or avoidant/confrontational in the long term.  I tended to do artistic (graphic arts and quilting) or writing activities to feel a sense of accomplishment. Personally, I felt (and appeared to others) scattered and I now know I often needed aggressive outside forces (deadlines, others) to push me forward in life and to resist against.  Ironically, even with all of my intense compassion, commitment, and my endless energy and effort, I needed the force from the outside to move me forward to something that I already wanted to do or accomplish. Sometimes I looked like I was a “procrastinator”, a label I really disliked, because my mind was always working top-speed, never stopping. That is an imprint from drugs during birth. 

 

I often appeared to both resist and avoid what I wanted. Now I know that this is a contributor to confusion and “mixed messages” in personal and work relationships.  It created frustration and anger in my work. In a program director position I was leaving (for my health and sanity) someone said to me, “I knew you’d leave; you’re such a 'mover and a shaker,' and they never stay here.” Dr. Castellino shared the effects of forceps as a place of experiencing being jammed and the sense of oscillating the mind is going full force and the body is stuck. Years later in my prenatal work, I realized that I chose situations (work and relationships) in which I perceived intense resistance (not necessarily real) to my perspective and effort.  I either created resistance by my own perceptions or I found situations where the structure and attitudes would not be conducive to accomplishing my goals.  For the longest time I had the recurring feeling that I undermined myself, but during my prenatal and birth healing work I came to realize that I found others (men, jobs) to blame for my inability to move forward in my life in the way I truly wanted. The pain of this, particularly around the loss of love in my life brought me to my healing in prenatal and birth healing. I found it was a profound experience to recognize this and to take responsibility for it. The acknowledgement and owning of what it is in my life in the external world is the result of my inner world, led to the ability to resolve it.

 

I learned I was drawing to me experiences that reflected, re-enacted, recapitulated my birth experience of coming into the world with fear and fighting for my life — the ever present need to survive, and yet, resisting the life-saving help (especially with men who loved me) to get here.  As in birth, I resisted support and I felt most help in my life as intrusive and painful, but inevitable and not optional because it did ensure my “survival.” 

 

I have learned in my own healing process with Dr. Castellino that when a baby is delivered by using forceps, the baby will look for both help and resistance in their life and activities. The little one knows she is alive, and in a relationship, only when there is resistance and only when there is another outside force applying the pressure, simultaneously hurting and rescuing. This is also true of babies born with vacuum extraction and c-sections, particularly unplanned c-sections when the baby labors unsuccessfully and then must be dislodged by outside forces. For me, this created a lifelong feeling of “struggling” to get there, anywhere, trying to make it my way. The life-preserving need for the resisted help created feelings of inadequacy and I have a history of feeling angry with those “helping” me.  The healing of my prenatal and birth trauma on the central nervous system level has allowed me to shift my life from a “life threatening struggle” imprint to “my life is easy, peaceful, and gentle” imprint. Long wished for changes in my life continue to naturally unfold as a result.

 

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Retraumatizing Childhood and Adult Injuries

I have experienced retraumatizing childhood and adult injuries to my left side that I know now are not accidents.  Recall that there is “an interrelationship between prenatal trauma, birth trauma, bonding, and aggression” and that “pre- and perinatal traumas shape how subsequent life events are experienced” (Emerson). In my own prenatal and birth healing work I discovered that my lifelong tendency to injure my left side (that eventually lead to physical symptoms of neck and shoulder pain in my forties) was related to my prenatal and birth traumas.

 

As a child, I was “resilient” as we think most babies and children are. I now know that rather than being resilient, the human body learns to physically compensate as the stored cellular memories store in layers. I was a happy, but shy child and overly attached to my mother. I was quite active my entire life: dancing, water skiing, tennis, and biking throughout my childhood and motorcycling as a teenager and young adult. I was a bit of a daredevil and I enjoyed the feeling of freedom, recklessness, and risk that skiing and motorcycles provided me. 

 

I repeatedly hurt my left side, and my left arm in particular, in a manner consistent with my birth:  as a toddler, while helping me up from a sitting position, my beloved grandfather (who would not have ever even spanked me) pulled me up by my arm and my elbow dislocated; around age eight a large stone knife sharpener fell on my left side injuring my left hip and ribs. It was one of those situations where no broken bones meant I brushed myself off and went on. However, my body remembered it.  I have slipped in the shower and fallen on the left side, twisted that side dancing, bike and motorcycle riding, and weight training. At age twelve while playing duck-duck-goose at summer camp I was pulled so fast by the boy with whom I was “tagged” that I fell to the ground and he literally dragged me around the circle (we still won the spot).  I still have scars on my knees from this and a motorcycle wreck.  As an adult, I was twice dragged violently by my left arm by an angry male partner.  I once busted down a door from the left side (shoulder and arm) in order to get to a child.  In my twenties I fell down a stairway and broke my left foot. In my thirties and after my fourth child I found myself carrying a purse and diaper bag and my child on my left side.  I then began to have chronic left side neck, shoulder, and hip pain, left side weakness, and my left eye vision changed while the right side stayed the same. Perhaps, my most embarrassing injury was the sudden, burning rip I felt through my left hip as I was demonstrating to my young teenage son how I could do the Macarena dance.

 

My first son’s labor reflected my own birth and physically retraumatized my left side and early head injuries. My son’s labor was thirty-hours, drugs were given to induce when it was slow, as were drugs for pain. I was forced to be in bed and my legs were strapped down.  No one but my son’s father was allowed to be with me in the labor room, not even my mother. I was heavily drugged. At birth I was given gas. My cervix had not fully dilated and had a lip on it; yet, two nurses pushed on the top of my abdomen to push him out.  In my own prenatal birth healing I have learned he was breech. I had a poorly stitched episiotomy.  My ribs felt like I’d been beaten the next day.  The next day the housekeeping lady came into my room. She said she was surprised at how good I looked because she’d “never cleaned up so much blood after a delivery.” During the birth I was in and out of consciousness.  I only knew he was here because I heard the nurses talking about his weight and how chubby he was.  He was taken away immediately for the better part of the first day. The nurses tried unsuccessfully to stop me from breastfeeding.  When my second and third children were born I refused any drugs.

 

In rebirthing my son (25 years later), my body went into a side-line position to labor and then into a squat to birth him. I never knew for several years what healing had actually happened internally. In 2002 I attended a home birth where the mother was free to move as her body needed to.  Towards the end she laid in bed on her side. The midwife checked her and told her she had a lip on her cervix. She assured her that she was in exactly the position she needed to be in for the baby’s head to resolve the lip. Because I had worked through my trauma around this I did not unconsciously go into a fear response myself (as Dr. LeBoyer describes happening with birth attendants at most births). Rather, I was amazed and blessed in the healing work I’d done with my son’ s birth.  I was reaffirmed and learned why my body was so desperate to go into a right side lie during his birth. My body knew what position to get into to let my son’s head resolve the cervical lip. Because I was tied to stirrups, I couldn’t turn and my left side was retraumatized. Also, in that healing session, my baby was given to me to hold and bond with rather than taken away. I was not aware of the grief I had about that until that moment and from where my Mama Tiger protection of my children had come.

 

The peeling away of the layers of an onion is often used as analogy for healing work. Weeks before an intense session with Dr. Castellino in process workshop where I experienced healing several of these layers of my left side, I fell down a stairway. I twisted left, grabbed the railing with my left hand, and my body continued down the stairway still holding the railing. This totally re-created the entire hip to neck/head birth injury and, I believe, led to the healing of it that week.  I was not seriously injured with broken bones but it totally activated the injuries from my birth (left hip, left rib cage, left clavicle, tendons and muscles of the left shoulder and arm, and left neck and head). In this session with Dr. Castellino we learned that the trauma from my own birth was layered together with my son’s trauma and this was further resolved. 

 

I have come to realize that the layers created by situations, relationships, or accidents, etc. that re-injure the same place over and over are how our body gets our attention when we don’t pay attention.  Unfortunately, the majority of physicians and chiropractors do not work at the level of the earliest cause of the most recent injury, the prenatal and birth period. This also means that I/we can intend to heal our earliest traumas without the body needing to scream it at us. We can see a child’s earliest traumas in the injuries he or she experiences.  I believe healing these in the early months of life can prevent the life-long injuries. Within the hour of writing this paragraph and the one about my experience of forcing my daughter’s birth, she fell and hit the side of her face on an oak dresser. Ironically, a colleague stopped by shortly after that and we treated my daughter and found that her right side of her face had articulated with my pelvic bone.

 

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Physical Illnesses and Prenatal and Birth Trauma Imprints

My early cord trauma contributed to early childhood throat issues and I had a tonsillectomy at age five, chronic sore throats as an adult, and difficulty “speaking out” (physically or emotionally) or at a loud volume.  As an adult, I have experienced head injuries near my left eye twice and to my left back of head and shoulder by violence.  In my twenties I experienced gallbladder attacks  (I have a family history of gallbladder surgeries) and I was able to minimize my attacks with diet changes and doing my emotional work. I learned that the attacks occurred when I was under stress or angry.  A gallbladder attack became a barometer for me to know I was “stuffing” something emotional. I realized my own learning disability in thought processing and verbal articulation had a name during a meeting with my daughter’s speech teacher and that it also fit my mother.  My daughter, like me and like my mother, prefers to write or create art to express herself. As I have healed myself I have seen the changes in my daughter and in my relationship with my mother — generational healing happens.

 

None of these were major illnesses or issues for me (an aspect of denial and acknowledgement). I use medication or medical interventions sparingly. After a few attempts in two decades at medical help, I have learned that when they don’t know what it is, they refer you another specialist or tell you it is nothing (to worry about). But the body still hurts or I have found it sort of goes away until the next accident or flare up somewhere else (i.e., tail bone injuries eventually show up in the jaw and neck).  I have a personal example of this. I mentioned my tendency to carry everything and my daughter on my left side.  When she was two (only months after my Macarena hip injury was feeling better) the elevator at work was out and I carried her, and everything on my left side, up five flights of stairs.  My left knee went out.  I had an MRI and learned there was nothing to be done except physical therapy. I learned to “walk correctly” by walking on Styrofoam cups.

 

My most serious medical experience was in my early twenties. At age sixteen I had a serious motorcycle wreck where I hit my head on the concrete (in the no helmet and no baby car seat days). My knee and head were x-rayed and nothing was found. I was sent home with no treatment.  My body then compensated over time until several years later when I had my first child it seemed to be exacerbated. Shortly after his traumatic birth I began to have a weird visual experience. My eyes would suddenly jerk from the left to right side about once a month but I had frequent left-side weakness. Three years and another pregnancy later, an osteopathic physician sent me to a neurologist and I had a series of neurological tests including an angiogram to rule out brain tumors and aneurysm.  The tests revealed nothing wrong — no answers, and the neurologist “diagnosed” me has having “ocular flutters” and prescribed Dilantin even though I’d never had a seizure.  I didn’t want to take this drug, nor did my physician want me to take it and he referred me to another osteopathic physician specializing in cranial manipulation.  My symptoms that had been plaguing me for about four years by then were gone after a few months of cranial manipulation with her. I was in my early twenties, so for the past twenty years I have trusted the holistic, non-medical approach of Osteopathic Medicine and I have pursued alternative methods for healing. Healing my own physical symptoms of this led me to training in CranioSacral Therapy which is from Osteopathic medicine.

 

These physical and emotional situations and symptoms I have just described are examples of how my birth trauma was re-experienced over and over.  I am reminded of how in my life I have just pushed forward as incidents occur and how this is a part of the pattern of not being acknowledged at birth and not expressing it outwardly for others to see and support.  In spite of these situations and experiences, I have always been physically active, funny, and happy. I have been dedicated to significant accomplishments, particularly motherhood and academic achievement.  

 

In my own birth trauma healing I realized I have had a life long need for self-acknowledgment and self-nurturance…to heal the trauma that prevented my experience of secure self-attachment at birth. This was in response to the violent experience of birth and the left posterior rib trauma, and broken clavicle that was never acknowledged or treated. My powerlessness and pain was never acknowledged.

 

The result of these experiences and imprints was a feeling that no one was ever there for me the way I am there for them. In my healing I became aware of the realization that I have not been able “to be there” for myself. It began with a prenatal imprint that I am wanted and here to help the family and make them happy. This is a common response to the discovery of a pregnancy. And, so, gratefully, I have discovered the prenatal and birth imprints that led to choices and difficulties in intimate relationships and in my work.  I have learned and began to heal the roots of relationship issues with myself, my parents, my siblings, and with significant others. This has led me to huge changes in my personal life and in my work in healing birth to heal our children.

 

As I have healed my traumatic prenatal and birth experiences I am more present in my body; therefore, I am able to be present with babies and mothers in listening to and healing their traumatic experiences.

 

I have come to know that a child born to a woman who is empowered in her birthing process and bonded with her infant is our best chance to create compassionate children and nurturing families. I am committed to working with babies to heal their traumas early, not after decades of creating layers of problems and relationship issues.

 

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 A Baby's Birth - is a continuum of critical periods  of physiological development that begins even before conception and completes at the mother's breast, in the arms of the father, and will be lived  throughout life.                -- Janel Martin-Miranda

 

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My Professional Resume

My Art Work

Praise for the Work

Stories From Parents

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

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Janel Martin-Miranda, MA

Prenatal and Birth Therapist

CranioSacral Therapist

Mother and Baby Doula

Columbia, MO  

573-424-0997

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© 2003-2004-2005 Janel Lou Martin Miranda, MA. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.infantparenthealing.com • Columbia, MO • (573) 424-0997 • janel_miranda@yahoo.com

 

Content last updated: November 1, 2005;  October 29, 2003

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