A Primal Pandemic: Prenatal and Birth Experience Influence How You Meet This Pandemic

As we continue to move through very strange and changing times, I am repeatedly reminded of how babies experience their birth and time in the womb. You may be surprised by how your early experience resonates with your current feelings and reactions to the pandemic threat in the world just now.

Locked Down

Consider first the experience of lock down. People have different ways of reacting to and coping with isolation, constriction, being told what to do, and the menacing threat of a virile virus in our midst. Some are happy to have some extra peace and quiet, time to reflect, to rest, to be. Others are challenged by having to be relatively still, missing their friends and family. At the same time, people display varying degrees of worry, fear, anxiety, grief, anger or denial.

What do these reactions have to do with your prenatal and birth experience?

Consider what it might be like for a little one in the womb. The space is constricted, particularly as the little one gets bigger in the third trimester. How tight or spacious has your home felt to you during lock down?

Babies are exquisitely sensitive. In the womb, they are learning via their mother’s emotions and biochemical surges about the world they are preparing to move out into. How supported or threatened mum feels affects the little one’s level of stress or relaxation, literally establishing life-long tendencies for levels of stress hormones, like cortisol.

If your mother experienced severe or ongoing stress while pregnant with you, your nervous system was preparing for a stressful world, developing increased sensitivity to stress. The stress of a pandemic might resonate with the stress you and your mother experienced when you were in the womb. If you marinated prenatally in a field of fear, perceived threat, perhaps unavoidable environmental dangers, the current situation might feel to your nervous system like you are back in the womb, once again a helpless little one completely dependent on the support of others. You may feel more stress than some others in the current situation. You might feel easily overwhelmed or particularly insecure without your friends or family nearby to take care of you.

Or you might protect yourself from these vulnerable feelings by presenting a strong front, or staying extra active, signing up for the endless stream of online course offerings available just now, or cleaning your home yet one more time, or cooking all kinds of wonderful new recipes. There is nothing wrong with any of these activities. It can be enlightening however to consider what is actually motivating us to engage in what we engage in.

How welcoming, safe, and supportive does your world feel to you just now? How dangerous, toxic, scary or uncertain does it feel? What is your sense of how it was for you and your mother back then when you were in the womb?

A New Birth

Coming out of lock down, as is happening now in many places, may bring its own set of hopes and fears. If we continue to look at the potential echoes of our prenatal and birth experience, coming out may be more like birth. We are emerging from a constrained space, opening into a much vaster space. It may feel like it is happening much too fast to be able to process. Or it may feel like we have waited forever to finally be free. The curiosity and eagerness of a little one may accompany us, along with trepidations of how it actually is to be out in the world, physically close to those who theoretically might infect us.

How safe or dangerous is our world as we emerge? Our experience of this might relate to how it was for us coming out at birth. Was it a gentle, welcoming emergence? Or did it feel violent? Were we pulled out by forceps? Was our timing taken away from us by inducing drugs or Caesarian section? Did we feel supported and met as we were born, or did things happen too fast and impersonally?

Do you have any sense of how your birth was for you? How might it compare to how it is for you to be coming out or considering coming out of lock down?

Umbilical Affect and Toxicity

As little ones in the womb, our survival is completely dependent on our umbilical connection with our mother. We require the nourishment coming to us via the umbilical cord and also that the cord take away our waste materials – de-oxygenated blood. What arrives umbilically includes not just the oxygen we depend on for survival, but also other biochemicals, like the stress hormones related to maternal stress and others accompanying her various emotions. What comes to us umbilically is called in the field of pre- and perinatal psychology “umbilical affect.” Affect is a psychological term for emotion or emotional states.

Ideally mum is feeling loved, safe and supported and the umbilical affect coming through to her baby is nourishing and feels good. Umbilical affect can be less than ideal, however, if for example mum is overwhelmed, extremely or chronically stressed, is ill, is taking drugs, alcohol or other damaging substances, is breathing very polluted air or drinking polluted water, or is ambivalent about the pregnancy, having relationship difficulties, pregnant during a war, famine, pandemic or other threatening cultural or environmental event. In extreme cases, it can be toxic for the baby.

In this case of “umbilical toxicity,” the baby needs to defend against what is experienced as toxic. A double bind arises. The baby requires the nourishment arriving umbilically to survive, but opening to receive it means also taking in toxicity. The natural protective reaction to toxicity is to withdraw or contract. In the case of umbilical toxicity, trying to block the umbilical flow to protect also blocks the source of food.

Many of us have learned to survive taking in nourishment that is tainted with what we experience as toxic. Our relationship to food, love and income may all be affected by this early experience.

For many of us, our income has been affected by lock down. What we receive instead may be empty or confusing promises from our government. Or we may need to cut back – effectively reducing our umbilical flow. The uncertainty and confusion about income, as well as the challenges of how to get groceries without going out of your house, may resonate with prenatal anxiety about an uncertain or unreliable umbilical flow of nourishment.

I find it interesting in view of possible prenatal influences that it has been so common to hoard toilet paper during lock down. Remember that the umbilical cord also takes away our used blood, our waste products. If the umbilical cord has failed to be a trustworthy source of nourishment, can we depend on it to also take away our wastes? From this perspective, the possibility of running out of toilet paper could become catastrophic!

The good news in all of this is that, where our history is presenting in our present, there is also a potential for healing. I have been moved by so many stories of people helping people during this pandemic, including my own neighbours and friends who have offered to deliver groceries, including toilet paper, when we were sheltering due to my husband’s lung condition.

Imagine if I had had someone to rescue me when I was immersed in my mother’s womb, which felt intensely toxic to me in too many ways. I perceive that my inner little one was able to rest a bit with each delivery of needed groceries in these recent months.

Accessing the Potential

The field of Pre- and Perinatal Psychology has helped to enhance awareness of the challenges and traumas that may accompany prenatal and birth experience and how these may influence us throughout our lives. I find it important to emphasise, however, that we also came into form with great potential, developing from one unicellular organism at conception into the complex beings we are today.

When you consider your early experiences and how they may resonate with your current experience, I invite you to include a sense of the potential you might carry with you from that early time. As a little one, you had the ability to learn and adapt quickly to whatever situation you found yourself in. Little ones are extremely fluid and resilient, although that fluidity can be impeded due to trauma and other conditions. With enough support, resilience can be resurrected.

It may be enough to consider the little one that you were, as if they were still present within you. Consider what that little one might need to feel safe and secure. Then, as the grown up that you are, whatever your current age may be, can you offer that to the little one? Can you hold them in your heart? Can you help them be aware of the ways you are safe in this moment? Can you sense the safety that is available in this moment, how it feels in your body? Can you find something, anything, to feel grateful for or appreciate? Can you share that with the little one? What happens when you play with offering something helpful to the little one within you?

Identifying and taking care of the little one within is not likely to change the pandemic, but it may have an effect on how you feel about it. Can you be with this with curiosity? What is possible here? Where is the potential?

Supporting Little One Health

It is important as we consider primal influences during the pandemic to remember that there are also little ones gestating during this time. Whatever support we can offer to pregnant and birthing women and families at this time can have profound protective effects.

While the stresses inherent in living during a pandemic may be influence pregnancy and birth in challenging ways, pandemic life may also make it possible for the mother, and therefore her baby, to have more time to rest and be, allowing the bio-intelligence within them to express even more brilliantly.

I wish for all little ones, those currently coming into form and those within us, to know the safety, love and profound health that is their potential.