A Perspective

The most arduous journey any of us takes is about two or three inches long. Under the best of circumstances, being born can be overwhelming. The immature nervous system is bombarded by sensations, sounds, and temperature changes that are mind boggling because so much happens in so short a time frame while we’re being kicked out of the only environment we’ve yet known as physical beings. Does this scenario perhaps underlie the story of Adam and Eve being expelled from paradise?

Those of us with more harrowing entrances into the world than “best of circumstances,” may still be carrying around the unexplored burden of our birth story in every cell of our body. First imprints pack a wallop. 

Do you ever get stuck in your life? Do you know anyone whose default setting is anger, withdrawal into depression, or perhaps frozen like a deer in headlights? Chances are, he or she, you and I are suffering from a bit of birth trauma reenactment. All of us are, to some extent, as we try to heal the initial wounds. 

Simply put, it is difficult to arrive in the world without overwhelm to our tender being, and that’s the basic definition of trauma - being caught in circumstances that overwhelm us and from which we don’t get a chance to discharge the survival energies of Fight, Flight and Freeze that get triggered by a perceived threat to our life. 

Threats during the birth process can be as routine as the big squeeze as one skull bone slides over another so we may pass through the outlet. There may be sudden pressure or stillness, harsh noises in the delivery room, forceps or suction bonnet, or chilly dry air and breathing with our brand-new set of lungs once the umbilicus is cut. It’s all so new. It’s all so foreign. Perhaps that scenario is why so many science fiction stories feature being lost in a new world.

We’re all trying to find our way back to the garden.

We’re all trying to shed the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness born of that two inch trip.

During nearly thirty-five years of seeing clients as a body therapist, it has been my privilege to help some of them to resolve birth trauma, and to witness the ordinary miracle of healing from those earliest impacts. We are a resilient species. Each human has been given three graces to help us survive: Fight, Flight and Freeze. We’re hard-wired to survive. We’re also hard-wired to heal. 

With a trained practitioner, we can slow down the stimuli that overwhelmed us on the day of our birth and the days following it by gently revisiting what the body is doing now, in the moment, and naming the sensations that accompany the memory of each stimulus. Slowing things down and tracking sensations allows us to discharge the bound survival energies through sweating, gentle shaking, tearing-up or yawning. Thus we free ourselves from the reenactment cycle born of trying to heal from the too muchness of coming into the world.

When I was teaching nursery school in Topanga in the late 1970s, “P” was one of our most challenging and interesting students. At four, P was bright, creative and physically very active. His first order of business every morning upon arrival to the classroom was to dump all the small manipulative toys - Legos, Tinker Toys, and Bristle Blocks out of their respective baskets onto the floor and to ice-skate through them methodically to mix them up thoroughly. He seemed to be showing us how chaotic things were for him. The other peculiar habit P had was to find a place to get his head stuck. Sometimes, he would move a chair close to the wall and insert his head into the gap. Other times, he would force it into one of the plastic juice pitchers. Once we had to call the fire department when he discovered “just the right size” hole in the ledge above the back seat of a car that had been made “safe” for kids to use as a climbing/imaginative play structure. P climbed into the trunk which had no door, stripped off the fabric covering over that ledge under the windshield, and put his head up into one of the holes in the metal. There, he stuck. No amount of coaxing, coaching, supporting him to retrace his steps or attempts to physically remove him worked. He was calm; untroubled by all the adults who really wanted him to get free. He seemed content to stay with his head stuck in the hole. When the gentle firefighters arrived and worked their magic to get him out, they just smiled and assured us it happens a lot with kids. 

When P’s mum came to pick him up that day, we asked if anything unusual happened during P’s birth. “Ah, no,” said his mum, “apart from him getting stuck in the birth canal for eighteen hours. I just kept talking to him, until they put me under anesthesia and pulled him out by Caesarian Section. He does like to put his head into boxes and the like, doesn’t he?”

I think my eyes bugged out of my head in disbelief as I wondered why she had not thought to disclose this pertinent information to us.

Another little guy J was just under three years and a non-talker. We did know the story of his premature birth and how long he’d spent in an incubator. Can you remember a time when you didn’t want to get out of bed but were forced out - either by an insistent alarm clock or a parent worried about you being late to school? Can you imagine a little one inside mom enjoying full-on womb-service, and who isn’t ready to come out yet, but due to circumstances beyond his control is booted out before he’s fully “cooked?” Can you imagine living in a clear plastic box for two months where much of the touch you receive is painful or intrusive - like a poke for a blood test or a suction to your nose or a tube stuck down your throat for food?

One of J’s favorite games was peek-a-boo. I was watching him one day as he watched activities in the room while hidden behind the back of an upholstered wing-back chair. He had turned it around so that he could stand on the seat and all we could see of him was the top of his head peeping over the top of the chair back. Soon he stood on his tippy-toes and sought eye contact with me as I sat a few feet away. We played peek-a-boo for several minutes until he began to giggle, then guffaw and finally he came around the side of the chair and flung himself into my lap. He was beaming. It was as if a light had come on or a flower had bloomed. The difference in this self-initiated game of peek-a-boo was that he was the one peeping out, at his own pace, not an adult creating the timing. Within a few days, J began to speak. Like sunshine after a storm.

These are but two examples of kids re-negotiating their birth scenarios in an attempt to discharge bound survival energies. In the first story, P took much longer to heal the urge to get his head stuck so he could heal once and for all. It might have been faster had we known what he was trying to tell us and we'd been able to name and acknowledge his story. In the case of J, the discharge and moving through the feelings of discomfort was much quicker. 

Both these little ones were helped by our intuitive interventions even though it would be fifteen years before I began to study birth trauma resolution techniques with Dr. Ray Castellino of Santa Barbara.

There is hope for all, from newborns to nonagenarians, who wish to resolve early trauma and stop the cycle of feeling stuck with undischarged survival energies ruling our behavior. 

May all beings be happy. May all babies and their parents be surrounded by caring people.