Echoes of our Trauma Part 3: How Birth Trauma May Arise in Practitioners

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Have you ever been with a client and felt like you didn’t know what to do but you really needed to do something? It may have even felt urgent, like you needed to do that something immediately! You may not have had a logical idea about what to do or even why you felt this way, but the urge to act may have been so strong that you felt your breath accelerating and becoming shallow, your heart beating quickly, fear rising up as if it could take you over. Perhaps it even did take over and you acted because you could not tolerate what you were feeling.

Obviously this is not an ideal way to make decisions about next steps in a treatment plan! For one thing, it completely leaves out the needs of the client! Most of us when in this state of near overwhelm are not consciously trying to assuage our own discomfort but our drive to do so overcomes whatever training we may have had to do otherwise.

This is usually an expression of early trauma.

Other reactions common to little ones can show up in practitioners, as well as their clients. You may, for example, feel like you begin to float away. Or you find yourself emerging from an apparently deep state wondering where you have been, what has happened, where the time has gone. You may even think you were perceiving dynamic stillness. The vibrant stillness we call dynamic stillness is, however, very different from the dissociative states I have been describing.

In dynamic stillness, we can experience being divinely present in a heartful relationship with our client – even all beings and all that is. In dissociation, we are not present. The client may also be dissociated, but they certainly are not going to sense a supportive relational field as we are not in relationship with them.

In case this is challenging for you to read about, I want to reassure you that discomfort is not unusual when very early trauma its effects are named. Because these experiences of babies are often not acknowledged, they tend to retreat into the shadows of the unconscious mind, acting out when they can as part of the natural tendency to seek resolution and health. We may feel uncomfortable looking at them, but our awareness is key to being able to act from a place of conscious choice rather than unconscious need. I encourage you to read on and notice how your body responds as you read, taking time to orient to resource, breath and ground as needed. I believe we all care for and want the best for our clients. I hope this post supports you in offering that even more effectively.

Little One State Emerging

You may recall from previous posts that when babies are not met as they need to be, they tend to freeze and dissociate. They are unable to run or fight, although that sympathetic surge is present. If their social nervous system is not responded to, they have no other option but to withdraw into a quieter dissociative state of non-presence, where they need not suffer so acutely the pain of their situation.

We have all been little once. Whatever our experience was back then, if it was difficult and we have not integrated it, we are likely to slip back into a little one state at times. We may then feel easily overwhelmed and dissociate or freeze. Without our pre-frontal cortex and social engagement system online, we may find our thinking is clouded or confused. We may feel inexplicably afraid, anxious, angry or even nothing – as in dissociation.

As mentioned in earlier posts, little ones are not able to differentiate between what is theirs and what belongs to someone else. For little ones that someone else is usually mother. When as practitioners, or other grown ups, our early, unresolved history is touched, we can easily become like an infant. Unconsciously, we take on the feelings or stress of others around us, sensing it as our own. Babies do not have the ability to tell themselves, “This is mom’s not mine.” They simply feel in their bodies whatever the feeling is. They become the experience.

A practitioner feeling extreme urgency or nervousness or anxiety may be becoming confused with an experience from when they were little. Or they may be resonating with something the client is carrying. This practitioner reaction can be very confusing and rarely benefits the client.

Emotions experienced may vary. There may be anger or frustration triggered by something the client says or by their system not responding as expected. There may be shame associated with not having the desired results. The practitioner experiences this as evidence of their lack of competency or worth. While this reaction is not unusual for new practitioners or those with a tendency to believe they are not worthy or good enough due to early conditioning, extreme emotions or defensive numbing may also arise.

These intense reactions suggest a very early experience in the practitioner’s life may be being touched. When this occurs in resonance with the client’s history, we call this counter-transference. When it is understood and can be witnessed, it can be a useful source of information about the client. When the practitioner slips into a little one state, however, the witness disappears. The necessary differentiation is not available.

 

Back to Birth

Often there was a sense of urgency and emergency for the practitioner when they were born. Back then this may have been a matter of life or death. The emotions in the room at the time of birth are experienced by the baby directly, somatically as their own. That sense of urgency may be triggered by an event in session work. The practitioner, for example, may feel helpless, disempowered, lost in the unknown, which resonates with their experience at birth.

Slipping into a little one state, becoming like a newborn baby, the practitioner loses their ability to differentiate effectively between what belongs to them and what belongs to the client. They also become like a baby in being unable to differentiate between past and present. They begin to perceive the current situation as if it were the past, as if they are in birth or have just been born.

We all know that newborn babies are not capable of sitting at a treatment table giving Craniosacral therapy sessions. What happens, however, when an established practitioner slips into being like a newborn? Compounding the situation, the client’s birth trauma may also be arising as part of the inherent treatment plan unfolding. They may also have slipped into a little one state, perhaps perceiving or reacting to the practitioner as if they were the doctor or other birth attendant from back then, at the time of their birth. This is also true in work with babies, who always need help from others to differentiate between then and now.

Clients may need support to differentiate between the dangers and urgency at the time of their birth and the relative safety of the treatment room and relationship with the practitioner. They need the practitioner to be even more present than usual, not less!

If the practitioner is lost in their own little one state, the client is unlikely to feel met, reinforcing what probably happened when they were born.

In the next post, we’ll explore how to work with arising birth trauma when it arises in session work. Until then, I encourage you to consider how your own early experience may be echoing in your life, your relationships and in particular in your session work.

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Posted in Biodynamics, Prenatal and Birth Psychology/Therapy, Trauma and Healing.

Cherionna

View posts by Cherionna

Cherionna Menzam-Sills is a therapist, author, teacher of Craniosacral Biodynamics, mindful movement called Continuum, and Prenatal and Birth Psychology. As well as having a private practice, she is a senior tutor at Karuna Institute, teaches around the world with her husband and Biodynamics pioneer, Franklyn Sills, and enjoys supporting practitioners through mentoring and supervision in person and online.

12 Comments

  1. Amazing to see the layers thank you. I have felt an urgency in some sessions.. that really resonates with my speedy entry into the world!

  4. Hi Cherionna, the opening paragraph does not describe me as I’ve done a lot of work on my early stuff both in peer counseling, polarity therapy and receiving BCST, but I love the article and am so glad to see this held up as a standard… However, some of the things I described in my fb comment to this article you shared there at Birthing Your Life are possibly of interest to me in the discussion of how a practitioner’s past unresolved shock and trauma might show up whilst giving a client a session. Oh my goodness do I ever know I have so much more to learn as a practitioner and much to resolve and release as a client!
    I think we do this work to the best of one’s ability, and of course no judgment for the practitioner who suffers with confusion or hurt and anxiety–although it’s best to take steps to get help… and in my case, follow directions when/if in doubt about my own judgment! Luckily, Anna mentioned a thing called “benign neglect” where you sort of look away fm client yet with staying close with the hands awareness. And the textbooks give so much help in how to set practitioner fulcrums which can be remembered constantly if need be with such great help to the client. So many clients respond well to more space. (A whole topic in itself) I try different things in a session if I’m not sure like imagining I’m across the property holding them with long spaghetti arms (I think that’s in Franklyn Sills, your husband’s book) or imagining my hand is actually under the table beneath their sacrum not just there directly. Then I can see if their system seems to settle more from that or if I need to only notice the edges of my skin and not try to widen my perceptual field out to the walls of the room or beyond. I like that you say that it’s possible a therapist will think they are sitting in the tides but are really just in their own baby self / trauma. So good to be aware of this and it needs to be said. Fascinating topic really. I hope to spend more time with the whole BCST community at the annual conference very soon. My daughter is a senior in high school so I’ve been very focused and busy. Nice to e-meet you! Thank you! PS-I’ve been doing Lange-Muller Natural Facial Rejuvenation lately which is really a trip and yes, kind of flies in the face of the pure biodynamic touch since it intersperses “laser” touch, if you will but wow have I really loved that because it is a tool for some situations. It easily flows into a full on BCST session. I’m vlogging more about BCST but you’re inspiring me to write more.

  5. Hi again Cherionna,
    As far as arising birth trauma during the session, I was taught to do a sort of “apology” in the sense to just go back to yourself and your sensation, low, slow loop… noticing your weight and seat, contact but I cannot WAIT to read your advice! I do hours each day of BCST with clients! It’s really amazing and a trip!
    With your article today I decided to open up Peter Levine’s “Waking theTiger” and read a little bit and I realized he was talking about a lot of “coincidences” like family type incidents and the repetition of similar accidents or traumatic events and even geographic locations. The whole heart=pounding I experience when the longtide comes in and is building potency and about to possibly do a heart-activation within the client is landmarked for me by a sudden heart-pounding which is very uncharacteristic for me. But suddenly I thought of my older brother who died at three days old of a heart condition and I was conceived immediately after his death. I don’t want to share more here but the “heart” is key… also I’m having difficulty opening my heart completely to view the client through there because of energetic “scar tissue” from grief and trauma in my life so I’m meditating to clear it which admittedly is slow and admittedly my goal is to get back to Boulder and so forth (I completed the BCST there in 2007 and Anna was a polarity director in 1986 in CA which I took too). So these are some of the things I deal with as a practitioner and do the best I can with as much awareness and consciousness as I can each day. If you have suggestions in your article for setting aside your own stuff or managing it etc I can hardly wait to see. Thanks again.

  8. Hello Sea, Thank you so much for your informative comment. There is much we can do to be in more of a witness state and gently allow healing. My next post will be out soon. I hope it helps!

  9. Sea, thanks again for your comments. I appreciate the depth of inquiry you seem to be on with your practice. Yes, widening attention is helpful often and especially helpful usually if we can also stay with midline and ground and not just float away! Yes, I believe we all try and do our best and most of us can keep learning and healing throughout our lives. I hope my writings can help with that! It is so helpful to be aware of when we might be dissociating or reacting from our own history. It’s not about judging ourselves or anyone else. Awareness is a first step in healing and change. More to come soon!

  11. Interesting article – thanks. Do you think the same kind of trauma occurs when a long term significant other ruptures an adult attachment? Do you think people ever really get over such a rupture? I have the metaphor of a seed that only has one chance to ever put down a root. If that root is killed in some way, that seed can never put out another root again. Is it possible that some trauma is permanent and that its not only babies that can be traumatised but securely bonded adults too?

  12. Thanks for your comment and interesting question. I do agree that any rupture in attachment at any time in life can be traumatising. If adults have had the background of secure attachment in childhood, I believe and have experienced that they are more likely to be able to be resilient in such challenging situations later in life. Those who have most difficulty recovering from a relational or other rupture later in life are more likely to be experiencing the effects of recapitulation of an earlier trauma, often unconsciously. I don’t tend to believe in absolutes, so I wouldn’t say this is necessarily always the case but, so far, I haven’t encountered anything different. How does that sit with you?

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