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

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.