Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Birth Trauma Memories


Someone recently told me that she had heard that all children remember being born until they are about two and a half. So she had asked her grandchild if he remembered. And he said he did.

She asked him if he remembered being born and he nodded with assurance.
She asked him what it was like being inside his mommy's tummy and he made the noises of her breathing, and he made the sounds of her heartbeat, with big actions and puffed out cheeks like a bellows, which was exactly what it would have sounded like inside I imagine, not like our breathing on the outside.
She asked him what it was like being born and he touched the top of his head and made a squished up face and said "ow" in a long sound.
She asked him how he got out and this was the only time he said anything in words, "there was a door!" For a two year old I take that to mean that there was a something that he went through. A door is a place that you recognize will take you somewhere else.

He primarily acted it all out in sensory kinesthetics, in feeling language, which is just too perfect to even  be anything but in awe of! How perfect! That is exactly what it was like. It was before words, it was all sensory. Can you doubt it?

Now imagine asking every little one what their experience was like, and really listening to it, with your whole body. Feeling it the way they felt it. I work with lots of kids that were preemies and had issues at birth. And often they have issues with separation anxiety, high startle reactions, and issues with change and transitioning.

It struck me that if the sound of her heartbeat is what that little boy remembered, why don't we play the sound of their mother's heartbeat, recorded off of all those ultrasounds, to them when in the ICU? I've heard of vets putting  ticking clocks under the blankets to comfort puppies and kittens that lose their mothers.

I remember going through a rebirthing regression experience myself years ago, and after my birth I was searching for the sound that I was missing. I remember a profound aloneness that grew with intensity inside, causing me waves of increasing panic. Where where where was the sound I knew? I couldn't see, I couldn't tell where I was. (I had gone through a door into a new world).

Yes, it was the sound of my mother's heartbeat and it wasn't until I found it again that I relaxed with my whole body. My only grounding and centering channel was on search-auditory, and it was an auditory/kinesthetic search, meaning that sound fed every skin cell of my body because it surrounded me in the womb. My skin was on search for the sound, and when I found it, my skin relaxed, my central nervous system relaxed.

Without finding it, I wonder? We go through stages of stress, which cycle from shock, to countershock to exhaustion. I wonder if we asked a two year old preemie what they remembered of their birth, if they would be able to recall, or if, like someone having survived a trauma, they would start the