|
. Thanks to Ms. Findeisen for allowing us to share this paper with you! . . . The entire spectrum of birth, from conception through parenthood, reaches the deepest level of the human psyche: emotionally, culturally, and spiritually, as well as biologically. Intra-uterine, birth, and early bonding experiences are one of the most fertile areas in which to discover the etiology of a wide range of psychological problems. When early experiences are either physically or emotionally traumatic, they leave survival imprints that cast a dysfunctional shadow, lasting into adulthood. . Adoption, abortion, drug abuse, miscarriage, infant or maternal death, mental or physical illnesses, emotional rejection, and even anesthesia have the potential to create life-long feelings of separation and loss. Healing these wounds is possible, but not until mental health professionals acknowledge the causal connections between a human being’s first imprints and later behavior and development. It is clear that of all the types of prenatal and perinatal injury, the most traumatizing is separation of mother and child. . Indeed, many adults retain a terror of being abandoned or rejected, because of pre- or perinatal experiences of separation, rejection, or the lack of positive maternal bonding. These fears influence attitudes and behavior. . To become a parent is a lifelong commitment. Any separation of the infant and its mother causes grief and fear in the baby. Rejection in utero or after birth is a painful experience for the infant. Mother and child are a couple, intimately connected biologically and psychologically. What happens to one affects the other. Changes in the emotional states of the mother cause hormonal and psychological changes in the mother’s body that reach into the womb. The prenate experiences those changes and reacts to them. Unfortunately, because of society’s lack of awareness and education, the pain of the child is largely ignored or denied, especially if it is prenatal. . Ideally, no newborn should be separated from the mother at birth, except in a medical emergency. The period immediately following birth is a critical time for bonding. Although early imprints remain for a lifetime, this bonding window has the power to help correct earlier trauma and to secure a positive relationship between mother and child that is vital to the well-being of the child. . The termination of a pregnancy or the loss of a child at any age also engenders emotional, physical, and spiritual pain in the parent. Loss of any kind causes grief and needs to be consciously processed in order to avoid later physical or psychological problems. Repression, denial, and displacement of pain may manifest at a later time in psychosomatic and psychological symptoms. . Adoption . Adoption is one of the many causes of loss and grief relating to birth. Suzanne Arms in Adoption: A Handful of Hope writes that "There is tragically little understanding of the importance of the biological mother/child bond, of the psychological devastation that results from breaking this bond, and then acting as if it had no value ..." (Arms 1990). These may seem like harsh words, but denial of these issues only creates larger and more intractable long-term problems. A newborn recognizes its mother’s voice and smell. After all, the child has been within the mother’s womb for nine months and is a conscious being. . Many adoptions bring blessings to everyone. The birth mother feels she has done the right thing for her child and for herself. Adopted parents have the adventure of having children, and the child grows up in a loving family. But this experience can be subverted by the traditional practice of lying to the child about its familial origins. Indeed, that has been the experience of the majority of my adopted adult clients. Many older adoptees grew up not knowing they were adopted. One client found out when going through papers after her parents’ death. Another woman found out when her mother screamed the truth in a fit of anger. The betrayal and hurt in these cases can be very deep. . Betty Jean Lifton, herself an adoptee, writes in Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience, about the "double role" the adopted child is forced to play, because of unanswered questions. Lipton feels the abandoned or adopted child is frozen in time, remaining in an eternal childhood and waiting to be found (Lifton 1988). This psychically frozen child wants to be seen, acknowledged, and integrated. Much of this pain can be avoided with sensitive and gentle transitions between biological and adoptive parents. As the awareness of prenatal and perinatal consciousness grows, healthier ways of adoption are being developed. . The Replacement Child . Another painful problem is that of the "replacement child," when one child is expected to replace another. It is an ongoing tragedy in the human family that children are frequently objectified. People have children or adopt children for a variety of reasons, not all of which are healthy, especially for the child. Carol had been relinquished by her mother at birth. She had a series of seven "mothers and fathers" before she was finally "taken in" by a couple who had lost their only child. They waited to legally adopt her until they were sure she would "turn out." She was then 21. She was what I call a "replacement child," and her eight mothers never let her forget it. Carol grew up always being compared to the ghost of the idealized son of her of her adoptive parents. . Josie was also adopted by a couple to be the little girl they had lost. She was relinquished by her biological mother at the age of five. Years later when Josie herself became a mother, she attempted to drown her own baby. Shortly after that she began therapy. Josie came to Pocket Ranch for residential treatment for anorexia and a sudden onset of muteness. The pain of being given away by her own mother literally had left her speechless. . The syndrome of a replacement child, who may be biological or adopted, is found in many circumstances when a previous child dies, when there has been an inability to conceive, or after an unsuccessful pregnancy. Parents are rarely aware of their unconscious needs, but replacement children intuitively know. They may grow up feeling rejected, not good enough, not really acceptable. Forced denial of the Self is a heavy burden. Trying to be someone else is a Sisyphean task. Loss of a child, at any age, is perhaps the greatest loss a parent can experience. This pain needs to be grieved to reduce the possibility of unconsciously seeking another child to replace the "lost" child. . Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in On Death and Dying speaks of the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. To reach the stage of acceptance by the route of denial and repression is impossible. Unfortunately, in our western technological culture, almost all feelings, especially if they are deemed "negative," are suspect. We have a treasure trove of tricks in order not to express our pain. . Replacement children walk through life trying to be somebody else or to make up for "the loss." They lack self-esteem, often feel isolated and guilty, not OK with themselves, not knowing who they are or how to find out. They may be high achievers, compulsively seeking to prove their worth. The unresolved pain of the death of a neonate or an infant carries over to the replacement child. Replacement children are locked into a hopeless situation. They can never make up for the loss and they can never be themselves. . Death Of An Infant . Unresolved grief from a miscarriage, stillborn birth, or death of a baby is very painful to both parents. When the loss is not grieved, it can inhibit the ability to love the next child. Bob’s wife gave birth to a premature baby who died three days later. Two years later she gave birth to another endangered premature baby. Bob was unable to connect to the second child. "It hurts too much. What if he dies too?" Having not processed the loss of the first child, he was afraid to connect to the second child. . The infant spent several months in an incubator at the hospital, leaving very little opportunity for bonding for either parent or child. The boy grew up being the family black sheep, never able to develop closeness, constantly rebelling, in and out of trouble. To this day, the relationship between Bob and his 24 year old son is distant and uncomfortable. In therapy, the son is distrustful and resistant. He has difficulty relaxing and when he does, a panic attack ensues. The loss of opportunity to bond to either parent after birth lies at the root of his psychological and behavioral issues. His ground of being is fear. . Abortion . Abortion is another form of loss. Sometimes it is a painful loss filled with shame and remorse. Sometimes it is a great relief. Not every woman who has an abortion experiences trauma, particularly when the woman has no ambivalence or guilt about her choice and it is performed early in the pregnancy. For other women the experience brings years of unresolved anguish. . The task of abortion counseling is to assist each woman to make her decision clearly within the privacy of her own conscience. In our hearts we all do know our highest good. I have sat with women during abortions, as I have attended women at the births of their babies. I have supported biological mothers finding suitable adoptive parents. Whatever my clients choose, I am deeply moved by the depth of their willingness and courage to confront this very difficult decision. . When a woman facing a difficult child-bearing decision comes to me, I first take a prenatal and perinatal history. Her own birth may have created patterns of fear which need to be processed. It is important to talk about earlier pregnancies and their outcomes. In order to make a clear decision, women need to understand unconscious patterns. Otherwise the pattern is repeated. Prenatal and perinatal trauma can cause irrational and unconscious fear of pregnancy and childbirth. At discovering pregnancy, panic may erupt, causing a woman to act against her deepest desires. The aim of therapy is to uncover repressed memories and release old pain. By this process, decisions may be made based on present-time reality, free of guilt and fear. . When women are not given the choice of a safe abortion, they often resort to "back alleys and do-it-yourself" methods, which put them in very vulnerable positions. What is not so well known or accepted, is the effect on the infant when the abortion "fails." Many of these survivors wish they were dead. Even some of the most "healed" feel they are forever struggling up-stream, fighting some compulsive belief that they should not be alive. They were born into families or to mothers who actively sought to end the pregnancy. Even legal and religious constraints were not strong enough to keep this woman, or the couple, from wanting to be rid of this child. Is it any wonder that these children are so often abused? . Here is a quote from one of my clients: "I have always wondered why I had difficulties accepting love and praise. Over the years and endless hours of psychotherapy, I have learned that I was conditioned to prove my right to life doing things rather than being. Twice my mother tried to abort me unsuccessfully. Imprinted on my psyche is the sense that I was not destined to live; I was not supposed to ‘Be.’ All my life I have been driven to prove myself and my worth. Since I do not know how to be or who to be, I have focused all my attention on what I do, primarily my work. It is not a surprise to me now that I became a workaholic working 16 to 18 hours a day until my body could no longer stay awake. If I did not keep up with this stringent regimen, I suffered from debilitating migraines. My obsessive work habits have been dealt with in therapy, but to this day I find it hard to be with me without doing something. I also have never been free of the notion that I was not meant to live on this earth; I am alive by default." . These early imprints are difficult to change. It takes time and perseverance to end years of habituated beliefs and attitudes around which our defenses and personas have been built. Validating ourselves so that we can accept the love given is a gradual process. . One of my clients insisted that she had no feelings at all about her four abortions. I took her back through guided imagery to the first time she knew she was pregnant. She had been overjoyed! There was no one to support her in having the child. She denied any sense of happiness and had her first abortion, cutting herself off from her feelings. In therapy she finally felt the grief and loss of the baby she had really wanted. Subsequent abortions were a repeat of the first one, mechanical, robot-like, no feelings! Following the therapeutic work about her abortions she expressed a new desire to have a child, a buried wish that she finally acknowledged. . Betty, another client, came into my office in an agitated state after discovering that she was pregnant from a causal affair. Marriage was out of the question, and she was clear that she wanted to terminate the pregnancy. She became calmer as we talked, and we explored a number of possibilities, but none of them felt right to her. . I asked Betty to lie down and breathe deeply for a few minutes. She sank into a peaceful and relaxed state and I asked her to invite the spirit of the child to be with us. I requested her to explain in detail all her feelings and thoughts about being pregnant and to dialogue with the consciousness of the child. . Two days later, Betty called to inform me that she had a spontaneous miscarriage. She believed that the infant’s soul had chosen to leave, perhaps to come again at a later time. Betty is pregnant again, and this time happily so. . When abortion is illegal, women are forced to lie about the experience. With no support, feeling guilty, angry and judged, they are robbed of the opportunity for counseling and healing. But it is never too late to heal these wounds. . Florence was in her 70’s when she came to see me. She had a long history of alcoholism and had been in recovery for several years. In the process of therapy, she told me about an abortion she had when she was a young woman. She was in love with a young man who was totally unacceptable to her family. Her father, a prominent physician, threatened to kill the man if he caught them together. When she became pregnant, she was terrified. She found a doctor who agreed to perform an illegal abortion. In his office, with other patients waiting outside the door, he terminated the pregnancy. He admonished her not to make a sound and never to tell anyone. He gave her no anesthesia for the pain. Ashamed, humiliated, alone, and in pain, she did as she was told. After the procedure, trying to appear normal, she left the office and began to drink. Plagued by guilt and shame she punished herself. One must wonder how different her life might have been if she had been able to freely choose, with loving support from her family and society. . Each woman in considering these difficult and personal issues deserves counseling and follow up. She deserves all of the information available about support groups, social agencies, and financial aid. Armed with all possible information, she is better equipped to make a decision wisely and to find the help she needs. With patience and knowledge, women and men can arrive at the best choice. . Women who have had miscarriages, stillborn babies, and natal losses of any kind need counseling before they become pregnant again or adopt a child. The psychic womb needs to be healed. If feelings are repressed, old fears will cloud future pregnancies. . A baby who has died remains part of a family, and this needs to be acknowledged, accepted, and experienced. At the 1989 Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Association of North America (PPPANA) conference in Amherst, Dr. Peter Barr gave a moving presentation of healing the loss over the death of an infant. Too frequently, the infant body is hastily disposed of. Barr’s work emphasized the healing power of parents holding the body and acknowledging the brief life of the baby with ceremony and a grave (Barr, 1998 Symposium: Reproductive Loss). . When working on her own birth memories, Susie found herself in a deep state of grief. She was picking up on her mother’s pain about the death of her previous infant, a boy. The memory of this little boy was so painful that he was never mentioned. The unresolved grief was passed to Susie. Part of her healing work involved locating the unmarked grave and symbolically putting her brother to rest by giving him a proper tombstone. She needed to do this to free herself from walking in his shadow. . The Blighted Twin . Another cause of grief and loss in prenatal and perinatal psychology is the "blighted twin syndrome" described so eloquently by Dr. Graham Farrant at several PPPANA congresses. . It is estimated that 70 percent of all twins conceived do not reach term. Sonograms show cases of one of the developing embryos dissolving. Dr. Farrant and others believe the surviving twin experiences that loss and retains it in cellular memory. I have had many clients re-experience memories of a blighted twin. . Shirley came for therapy, desperate and depressed. Her third marriage was collapsing. She had a long history of feeling alone and guilt-ridden. She felt she did not deserve anything good. Although she was intelligent and attractive, her life was littered with losses and broken relationships. One day while she was in treatment, she slipped into a uterine memory. . "Somebody's missing. It’s lonely. Something’s pushing against my back. It’s dead. There’s supposed to be two... now there’s one... I’m all by myself... you were supposed to be there with me. You left me... I need to make a choice, going forward or back... I left him... I let go of his hand... Oh my God, I didn’t mean to... Oh my God... I’m so sorry. I let go ? he’s all gone." Sobs racked her body as she grieved. . In later processing the session, Shirley felt that she had carried the guilty burden of the loss of her twin throughout her life. She unconsciously sought ways to punish herself, denying herself healthy relationships, a successful career, and virtually any feelings of satisfaction and joy. Shirley has begun the road back to forgiving and freeing herself from very old and premature cognitive commitments which dominated her sense of self. . Perhaps Shirley’s relentless commitment to self-punishment might have been lighter if she had been brought up in a loving, healthy family. Unfortunately, her abusive, violent father, and helpless, victim mother served to exacerbate her prenatal experience of loss and guilt. This is always the case. Loving, healthy parents have great power to ease and correct prenatal and perinatal losses and traumas of all kinds. On the other hand, healthy, loving parents, particularly the mother, also have great opportunity to avoid many of these traumas. . Lack of Bonding . An ongoing fear of intimacy can result from heavy anesthesia during childbirth. Several decades ago, it was common practice to heavily sedate women in labor. Women would wake hours later and drowsily ask, "Did I have a boy or a girl?" Rachel, a client in her forties, was told that her mother was so "drugged" during childbirth that when she came to, she requested a telephone. She wanted to call her own mother and tell her she had gone into labor. Rachel wondered, "Where was she? My mother didn’t even know that I had been born." . Child development researchers recognize the importance of the mother’s presence for the newborn to feel safe in its new environment beyond the womb. Ashley Montagu, in Touching, writes "Among the most important of the newborn infant’s needs are the signals it receives through the skin, its first medium of communication with the outside world" (Montagu, 1978). If the mother is awake during the birth process and the infant is not taken from her, no one is better equipped to supply that need for touch than the mother. When newborns are deprived of maternal contact, depression may result, causing loss of appetite and other signs of failure to thrive. In other cases, the baby may remain in a high state of anxiety. These reactions by the infant create patterns of how the neonate is perceived and how it is responded to by caregivers. Thus begins a history of maladaptive behavior and personality traits. Babies too get reputations ? "he’s so difficult," "she’s so nervous," "he’s not a cuddler" and on and on. Eventually these become fixed as the way one is, not as the way one learned to respond. . Babies become non-responsive or fretful, causing mothers to feel inadequate, angry, or rejected. These behaviors can range from mild psychological damage, to extreme forms of deprivation and abuse of the child. This scenario is particularly apt to occur if the mother herself did not enjoy a positive relationship with her own mother as a child. . One 39 year old client was the family caretaker ? independent, self-sufficient. In my office she sobbed for her mother, who was not available to her as an infant. "I hate this feeling. It hurts too much. I don’t want to need my mother. She is not there." She learned very early to deny her own infant needs. Her compulsive controlled perfectionism and care-taking, however, did not prevent her acting-out those unmet infant needs, especially when she was drunk or on drugs. . Stephen came in for therapy in a marital crisis. Though now in recovery, he had a history of drug abuse which began during medical school and later threatened his career. He had always lived on the edge, testing limits legally and sexually, looking for one high after another ? "It is the only way I feel alive." His mother had been unconscious during his birth, due to anesthesia. He grew up disliking and distrusting her. During a birth regression, he became numb and immobilized. In due time he roused himself, but he had no ability to even imagine being born. He felt compelled to prove he was alive. Living on the edge gave him that sensation. In therapy he was able to imagine re-experiencing being born, consciously and alive, i.e., without the numbing effects of drugs. . Newborns need to be touched and welcomed in order to feel safety and belonging. For that to occur, their mothers must be present and awake ? emotionally and physically responsive. Rachel and Steven were robbed of that experience, and it took a toll in their lives. Their mothers were also robbed, as have been countless other mothers and children. In the face of modern technology and pharmaceutical advances, we must not lose sight of human relationships and well-being. Certainly, the epidemic of co-dependency and the failure of families reflect the inability of people to trust and be intimate. . One of the greatest losses as a result of prenatal and perinatal trauma is the damage to the innocent child-self within us. "I was born 35 years old," said a 50 year old client. Another lamented, "I knew right then I had to take care of my mothers needs." We feel we were "born old" and missing our original sense of joy and radiance, born with the "weight of the world" on our psychic shoulders, learning to deny our own needs. Very early poets and mystics have long recognized what was sacrificed. There is an old Jewish saying, "In the womb, man knows the universe; he forgets it at birth." Wordsworth in Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood wrote, "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting..." Myths and fairy tales tell of the golden child ? the lost prince or princess. Wordsworth also spoke of the infant arriving "trailing clouds of glory." Even though some children retain numinous memories of this, painful early trauma cast many others adrift in a chronic sea of separation and anxiety. . Conclusion . We have briefly touched on some of the prenatal and perinatal losses which may cause later difficulty both to the child and the mother. Abortion, adoption, replacement, drugs, rejections, and physical or emotional abuse all have this potential. The degree of pathology depends on the level of pain, length of the trauma, later re-stimulation, and the absence of parental nurturing. Obviously, the kind of parenting ? be it nurturing, neglectful, or abusive ? will have a major impact. These examples illustrate the importance of educating professionals to recognize prenatal and perinatal influences in their clients. To practice psychotherapeutic or psychiatric interventions without including the individual's prenatal and perinatal history is tantamount to buttressing a cathedral without noticing the foundation is built of crumbling stones. . Recently, a client re-experienced her long, difficult birth when the nurses held her mother’s legs together until the doctor arrived. That was the genesis of a life-long mistrust of her mother. During the regression she was able to feel, for the first time, her mother’s love as she held her as a newborn. The client sobbed deeply as she grieved the years of resistance and pain between them. Unfortunately, her mother had recently died. This early trauma and its tragic consequences had never been healed, even after 20 years of psychotherapy. . The cost of prenatal and perinatal losses, in terms of healthy loving relationships and feelings of self-worth, is staggering. The real tragedy is that we do not comprehend or accept how open and aware the human fetus and newborn is for imprinting, both negatively and positively. R.D. Laing noted that "we are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy." Therapy which includes this early history offers the opportunity to mend these ancient, cut-off, denied wounds which remain in the system and interfere with healthy development, both physically and psychologically. . When the importance of prenatal and perinatal psychology is recognized and its messages are heeded, we will be free to create a brighter future for our children and ourselves. We have the research. We have the technology. We have the heart. We can and must use all our resources to escape the long shadow of these early injuries and their damage in our lives and the lives of future generations. . References . Arms, Suzanne (1990). Adoption: A Handful of Hope. Page 12. Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts. . Lifton, Betty Jean (1988). Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience. Page 35. New York, NY: Harper & Row. . Montagu, Ashely (1978, 2nd ed.). Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin. Page 47. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
NOTE: Use of this website
or email correspondence
|
