In Part 1 of this post, we looked at how our trauma may echo throughout our lives, affecting how we meet stressful or threatening conditions arising later in life. A common effect of unresolved trauma is to harden ourselves against feeling pain again. This can lessen our compassion for suffering others, perpetuating a cycle of trauma through traumatizing actions.
This tendency to dismiss obvious pain and suffering has been rampant in the field of obstetrics. Babies have been routinely treated with speed that is overwhelming for their sensitive, immature nervous systems. Just last month, the World Health Organization released a document with 56 recommendations, including allowing birth to be a slow as it needs to be, without interventions. (http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/260178/1/9789241550215-eng.pdf?ua=1)
The sense of urgent need to get the baby out may or may not relate to accurate perception of the current situation. Often, not intervening could be much less traumatizing and result in a more successful, satisfying birth experience for mother, baby and family. Interestingly, in the USA, which has a very high rate of medical interventions at birth, the infant mortality rate is higher than many other countries. When mothers and babies are given the support they need to listen to and trust their process, most often they can find their way.
It is important to acknowledge that some interventions save lives. We can be grateful for those. The way they are administered, however, is often as traumatizing as the intervention itself. Birth practitioners coming from a fear-based motivation – fear of death, fear of loss of control, fear of being sued, fear of missing their golf game (sorry, I needed to include that one) – all of these can propel the birth team into frantic, often unnecessary, action. In the commotion, the sensitive state of birthing mother and her baby may be missed.
Often, the fear comes not from the current situation but from the birth practitioner’s own history. As Frederick Leboyer wrote in his book, Birth Without Violence, “The easiest, the most sensible, the most obvious thing for the onlooker to do – would be simply to breathe.” He describes in beautiful poetic language how birth practitioners tend to be acting out their own history. This is how trauma can be passed on from one generation to another if we do not meet it in a healing way. Parents also tend to act out (or in opposition to) their own history.
Where is the relationship and the safety when we are just doing what is etched in our defensive nervous systems to do? Stephen Porges, whose polyvagal theory has been changing the face of therapy, points out that we need to have our social engagement nervous system online to feel safe and to accurately detect safety. Otherwise, we can only act from sympathetic fight-flight or parasympathetic freeze states when faced with potentially threatening or overly stressful situations. From these defensive states, we tend to perceive danger, unable to accurately assess the current situation in current time. In this way, those at a birth may be perceiving and acting as if the stress or dangers of their own birth were happening again.
Meeting the Baby
How often do birth practitioners take time to explain to the baby what they are about to do and why? This may sound bizarre, but babies clearly respond when they are spoken to as intelligent, sentient beings. Their social nervous system is online, eager to engage with safe others. For example, when a baby is in a breech position and nothing is working to turn them around, it has been known to be highly effective to talk to the baby, explaining the options. The baby then can make a choice and often turns around, preventing a caesarian section.
Little ones need us to slow our pacing around them to reduce their tendency to be easily overwhelmed. They need us to help them feel safe through our voices, touch (when possible) and presence. They also need when possible to have some warning of what is about to happen, so they can accommodate more readily to it. When what they needed was not possible or was overlooked, little ones (like all of us) need repair. “I’m so sorry that happened” or “I’m sorry that I missed how you were feeling” or “I’m sorry that was so scary/painful.”
How do you feel in your body reading these sample repair statements? People of any age can revert into a “little one state,” where they also benefit from the slower pace and respect little ones require.
When these communications and considerations are not included, babies tend to be traumatized, often emerging in a state of freeze or shock. They can then remain in that state or tend to return to it easily when encountering more speedy or shocking experiences later in life. Like a mass shooting.
Our trauma can affect us in different ways. For those traumatized very early in life, in the womb, at birth, or in the following years, especially before they are mobile and verbal, the tendency will be to go back into a freeze state. They may feel paralyzed in the face of terror.
Others may have learned to overcome their tendency to freeze by being hyper-active with anxiety, depression, or tension, and often expressing anger, rage or violence. As is noted in reference to post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatized individuals may alternate between parasympathetic freeze/dissociation states and sympathetic hyper-arousal, fight-flight states. In the cycle, there is usually not much room for feeling, for being with the pain of the past or the present.
We live in the modern western world in a culture characterized by fear, hyper-vigilance and separation evoked by trauma, often relating to overwhelming experience at birth or even in the womb.
What Allows Us To Be Free?
If we want to set the prisoners within us free, if we want to support peace, love and connectedness in our world, it is time to acknowledge the wounding we have endured, even from our earliest moments. It is also time to give birthing women and families as much support as possible, to make this a priority, to support them in being able to engage in birth and parenting in a satisfying, rewarding way.
Craniosacral practitioners are in an ideal position to support prevention and resolution of birth trauma. Working with pregnant mothers can help reduce their level of stress, supporting the little one growing in the womb, and facilitating the birth flowing more easily.
Having an awareness that mothers tend to (usually unconsciously) re-visit their own prenatal and birth history while moving towards and through the birth of their child can also aid a mother in differentiating between what happened back then when she was little and what is possible now. Identifying with being a helpless, dependent fetus can render a mother (or father) relatively powerless in the face of the inherent stresses of pregnancy and birth.
The first step in healing is awareness, which then enables differentiation. If I am aware that I am feeling like a little prenate, I can acknowledge this and re-orient to all the strengths and resources I have now as an adult. Practitioners can support this process (as well as learning to do it for themselves!).
Working with babies and their families after birth can assist in resolving any traumatic or overwhelming experience associated with the birth. Feelings of panic, terror, shame, self-doubt or anger are common when birth plans have changed or not been respected. For example, parents who planned a home birth and needed to transport to hospital for some reason may feel grateful that they and baby are alive and relatively well, but may have complex emotions to deal with afterwards.
