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.
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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
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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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