A grateful parent shares her
experience...
After a traumatic birth experience my son and I
spent weeks trying to recover, reconnect, and find
peace. It seemed nothing would sooth his cries at
times. I felt helpless and depressed as I
struggled to provide him with comfort. My husband
and I held our son all the time and provided him
with attachment parenting techniques. It was only
while breast-feeding that we were able to find a
small window of peaceful softness. After a few
months I began to reluctantly accept the all too
popular label of “colicky”.
And then I met Janel. Our
son was three months old and awakening every hour
on the hour and crying. Janel provided me as a
mother, the opportunity to “be with” my son as he
released the body memories of his awful birth
experience. He cried, raged, and then slept. Janel
knowingly taught me how to be present with my son
and his “experience” without trying to control it
or alter it. She taught me genuine respect of
another soul. Her touch was loving, yet strong and
competent. Janel later led us (including my
husband) in re-experiencing our birth in a gentle
way that led us to great healing and harmony.
Tracey L. Bovee, LCPC, Ed.S
Champaign, IL (now Pella, IA)
July, 2001
The baby above had
epidural anesthesia at 5cm dilation suggested by
the nurse midwife (not planned by mother), and he
turned posterior resulting in the use of forceps
and vacuum extraction.
Research
shows that epidural anesthesia is strongly
associated with abnormal fetal position (occiput
posterior) at delivery and may help explain the
high rates of operative delivery observed after
administration of an epidural. (Obstetrics &
Gynecology 2005; 105: 974-82).
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“You are your brain.”
Dick Swaab, Dir. of the Netherlands Institute for Brain
Research
I like to
say, "You are your PRENATAL
brain."
.... brain function and behavior are
critically influenced, even permanently modified in major
ways, by the environmental condition that exist during
development. How we think, reason
and see are not just inherited characteristics. Brain
function, behavior, mood, IQ, and
emotional stability are not solely a product of our
genes.”
—Peter Nathanielsz,
MD (OB), PhD (Vet) in “Life in the Womb:
It is scientific and logical that physiologically the
structures begun at conception and completed by the end of
the second month of gestation DO establish the biological,
hormonal, emotional, and mental foundation for who we are
to be our entire life. Every experience thereafter,
whether in the womb, laboring and birthing, or life long
is part of one long continuum of brain development. YOU
are YOUR prenatal brain.
From conception
forward, the baby (brain and body) has developed in
the maternal relationship and response to the environment.
The human baby's experience and feelings of safety,
love, support, worth, being wanted, etc are
established prenatally through infancy.
From
before conception, in the sperm and the egg, we are fully
living tissues of our parents and influenced
on a cellular level by their lives. During gestation
there is not one
second of time that is
not critical in building the baby's brain and body.
Every system and brain is literally built according to
mother's physiology, her life experiences, and her
perceptions of herself, the baby's father, and the world.
Birth is the human's first physical experience as the baby
leaves the warm, safe womb to become a physiologically
independent being. Continuing from and building upon the
prenatal experiences and brain development, the labor and birth experience creates the emotional,
physical, and psychological foundation for being in the
world. It is a lens through which our brain experiences the world and will wire up our neocortex
during childhood. This is preverbal memory, an ingredient
in the baby's language. From the last trimester
through the first year of life, the Limbic system of
the brain is "online" and developing our earliest
perceptions and memories of love and fear, the two basic
emotions.
The expressions of the early development don't "just
show up" when a child learns to talk.
By the day of labor and birth the newborn brain has a
billion neurons present already wiring up the neocortex. It is logical and scientific then that
Babies Remember Birth. The experience of labor and birth is vitally
important in the brain development of the human baby. Those billions of neurons,
BUILT during the prenatal experience, will be the
foundation of the neo-cortex, thinking brain for life,
unless we repattern it. We do this by acknowledging the early experiences and providing new experience for the brain to
rewire.
Coming soon -
Educational group
format for parents and workshop
training
for
professionals on how to incorporate prenatal and birth
psychology into
professional
practice and in parenting. Ask about sponsoring one for your
organization that
serves infants and children.
Click here
to read the last chapter from
Songs from the Womb
by Benig Mauger
Want to know more about
CranioSacral Therapy?
http://www.craniosacraltherapy.org/FAQ.htm
www.quantumlm.com/Craniosacral.htm
http://www.ccst.co.uk/clinic.htm
Want to know more about the emerging field of Pre and
Perinatal Psychology? Check out the website of:
Association for Pre and Perinatal Psychology and Health
www.birthpsychology.com
What does your birth have to do with your current
life, your health, and your struggles?
http://www.mercola.com/2005/jan/3/what_does_your_birth_have_
to_do_with_your_current_life_struggles.htm
(cut and past the address
to your brower)
Which of these babies had
EPIDURAL ANESTHESIA (narcotics) and which
had NO DRUGS during labor and birth?
It’s quite easy to see the difference…
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My daughters, Mariah and Erin. They are both three
weeks old
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Did you know??
It takes seventeen years for the peer-reviewed, evidence-based
research to be fully accepted into medical practice. Think about
it -- all of the drugs and procedures we've been told are safe,
only to learn that they are dangerous. Think about what's being
done to women and babies in history and right now. Is it
evidence-based and safe? Historically, the drugs used on
laboring and birthing
women and babies have NEVER
been shown to be safe. Drugs and interventions are stopped
ONLY AFTER years of harm and death to women and babies.
Check out my story and article on the increasing use of epidural
anesthesia promoted as safe when the literature by 1992 clearly
showed it is not.
Check out
www.sciencebasedbirth.com.
Read about Inducing and
the Use of Epidural Anesthesia (narcotics)
for pain relief during
labor and birth.
Visitors:
Looking for
something specific? Check out the
site map.
Content last updated:
January 3, 2006; previously July 15, 2005
Originally published,
October, 2003
Original Web Design
© 2003-4
Bamboo-Web Designs. All
Rights Reserved.
 You
can access the old home page and links at:
www.infantparenthealing.com/homepage-current.htm
If you find this you will wonder what is up with
this huge page and this information.
I am now managing my website and I don't know how
to change the borders!!!
After the end of a movie, I always wait to the
end of the credits because some movies have great out-takes and
other tidbits.
this is sort of like that ....
We now know that the
prenatal period is the foundation for health and wellness -- or
pathology and pain. Personality, behavior, and health (i.e.,
blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, etc.) are all expressions of
early uterine life. Evidence-based, peer-reviewed research in
the last decade confirms this -- what we have intuitively known
(and yet denied.) Conception and prenatal experiences
determine the architecture of the brain and all body systems for the lifetime. Simple logical tells us
that the human being is built during the
prenatal period. Everything the mother experiences is
experienced by
the gestating,
laboring, and birthing baby and is imprinted in the on the newborn baby's
brain.
Labor and birth
is the first physical, independent experience of the human
being.As one transitions
from the womb to the world this just might be the single, most
significant and defining experience in the human's life. It is
established a set of survival skills in the brain and body of
the laboring and birthing baby. What happens here is critical
for the human being for the lifetime -- are the mother and baby
drugged, is it bright and noisy, with strangers and their time
frames, rough treatment or is the woman in power of her
own body, following and allowing hers and her baby's physiology
to happen, quiet, dark, surrounded only by people who love her?
This all matters in
the experience of
transitioning from uterine life in symbiotic connection with the
mother to being an independently functioning being
-- it is critical for the human brain. Within hours and moments every system must
work efficiently at birth, and we visually see and physically hold a
completely separate, functioning human being -- one whose body
AND brain
has completed a critical, monumental, development task. Trauma
to the head, neck, shoulders, and hips during the birth
experience is the first physical experience. Unresolved and
unacknowledged, this is the cause of infant, child, and adult
issues, including chronic pain and physical and emotional
dysfunctions.
What keeps society
from embracing and applying basic biology and physiology to
birth? What keeps one from observing simple physiological
fact that babies remember birth?
Most of us have been birthed "under the influence" of drugs and
experienced a very violating transition from the womb to the
world. Our own births feed the
politics (of
medicine, drug companies, and insurance companies), denial
(of a society who does not know how to forgive and change
directions), and fear (of malpractice for doctors and
guilt and shame for mothers and fathers). Recognizing that
prenatal development and labor and birth are keys to physical,
psychological, emotional, and spiritual well being creates
a monumental need for society to change how we treat women and
babies in birth. It calls for an overhaul of every service we
fund and provide for in our society. For example, not even in
addiction studies, autism or depression and violence or even
basic parenting does our society look at the earliest brain
development and birth experience (of baby and mother and father)
for answers. The detrimental impact of drugs and interventions at
birth is ignored, and the contribution of conscious conception
(wanted children are happier), prenatal development (healthy
body and brain) and
natural, empowered birth (non-violent survival imprints) is
overlooked.
Again, our own births and the collective denial supports denial
of the importance of the prenatal and birth experiences as the
foundation
(cause, if you must) of the multitude of medical, emotional,
psychological, educational issues in our society. To
acknowledge this is to open a huge Pandora's box that require
change -- PERSONAL, individual change. Changing how we conceive
our babies, how we treat and support pregnant women, and how we
treat women and babies in labor and birth. It would require
looking at the science that supports the healing of trauma and
the brain.
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Elijah 
