This hour long conversation, “Revolutionize Your Parenting” is a brief overview for an online intensive course coming October 2022 to help parents manage stress and learn how to gain more connection with themselves and their children. Christianna Deichmann, a craniosacral therapist and trauma resolution provider for families, joins with Emily McCrea, a conscious parent-teacher coach and certified TEACH THROUGH LOVE practitioner, to discuss the latest science on how children’s brains develop and regulation skills that parents need in order to foster the healthiest relationships in the family home. The conversation is about how traditional parenting has damaged the nervous system’s of adults raising kids these days, and they explore how biological mechanisms keep this vicious cycle going from generation to generation. The focus is on a new paradigm that overhauls the systems society has put in place to foster patriarchal models that promote shame, blame, scarcity, and fear-based tactics to raise children. The conversation unfolds by introducing embodiment practices that can rewire the nervous system and navigate the hierarchy of how our brains function. The talk is meant to send you away with immediate tools to use today to help parent your child, and to raise your curiosity of what more you can do to empower your family. The talk is a preview of an online course being offered in October, “A Journey Backwards: How the past gets you stuck in the present.” The premise of the course is to teach parents how their childhood shaped their nervous system and is defining their present day behavior, and how we can make positive change to raise our children with more connection, more health, and more love.
Thom Bond’s Compassionate Communications course and Robin Grille’s Inner Child Process greatly influence my therapy practice. People come to me to seek refuge from suffering and to change their patterns. I help individuals create new behaviors and thought patterns in their bodies and minds using somatic experiencing, craniosacral therapy, and these two psychodynamic therapies. Parents come to me to seek support when they have children who challenge their psyche and disposition. Very few people who seek out my help realize that their struggles have origins from their childhood and even from generations before them. One of the key facets to understanding how to change the present is to understand how the past lays down the foundation for our behaviors, beliefs, and values. Parenting is steeped in “old ways” of thinking, traditional parenting paradigms rely on shaming, manipulation, intimidation, judgment, gaslighting, isolation, domination, and conditional love. Building awareness around (1) how we communicate with ourselves and others and (2) what need(s) are driving our behaviors is the first step to healing and creating change.
Thom Bond’s revolutionary research and teachings on how to communicate with compassion can be used to understand the premise of somatic-based therapies and the psychobiological principles of attachment. Thom Bond is the Founder and Director of the New York Center for Nonviolent Communication and the Creator and Leader of The Compassion Course.
“Needs are not ideas or cars or stuff to do, and they aren’t signs of weakness or selfishness, but rather they are the energy of life that flows through us.”
-Thom Bond, VOGUE
The other puzzle piece to my therapy techniques is Robin Grille’s Inner Child Process. Robin Grille is a counselor and psychotherapist who designed a universal table of developmental needs that outlines an identical trajectory in every human being. His process entails bringing awareness to what fundamental needs we have or have not had when we were growing up and how we can meet those needs in the present time, and go on to understand and meet the needs of our children.
I encourage clients and students taking the Journey Backwards course to practice NAMING needs for themselves by keeping a journal. I invite them to make 1 to 3 entries per day that describe an act or words spoken by someone in their family or workplace and imagine the need they are trying to meet. Thom Bond posted a needs list on his website that I encourage clients to use. It’s important to limit the words used in naming to the ones on this list.
Why is understanding needs so important in shifting our psyche and well-being, particular for those raising children now or in the future? Again it goes back to awareness, or the trend word today, consciousness. Bringing awareness, or naming the pattern is the first step to implementing change.
In an interview I recently did with one of my teaching partners, Emily McCrea from Rebel Shift, I ask her to define Conscious Parenting,
“It’s really about awareness. Most of us didn’t have our needs met as children. Parents, teachers, doctors, caregivers, schools, communities, etc have not understood the brain science of the developing brain in the early years of life and the impact of environment, emotional and physical, plays on the developing brain. We know more now-our environments work in tandem with our genes. We also know that the brain is rapidly developing yet inefficient until age 7. During those early years, 95% of the brain develops, laying neuro pathways and creating the foundation for later learning. The way we view the world and our understanding of the world being safe or not developed early. And our brains continue to develop until age 25, that means we are kids until around 25 years old. We know that trauma affects our ability to learn and grow. Trauma keeps us stuck in childhood. We may look like adults but really many of us are just wounded kids walking around in big bodies.
So what do kids need to develop in healthy ways? We are mammals, we are biologically designed to be connected. And beyond food, clothing, and shelter, children need connectedness and attention, safety and security, support and autonomy, freedom of expression, boundaries, love, mastery, competence, to be seen and heard-
No one taught us to look inside ourselves for support so we search outside to ease our internal conflicts. Negative behavior is an external attempt to meet internal needs- Identifying our internal and unique needs and feelings is the path forward.
We respond automatically, when we are triggered and we struggle to access our thinking mind, like a trigger we are instantly pulled back into our “lizard” brains to assess the situation for safety or danger, scanning and seeking evidence to confirm if we are safe or in danger. As a survival mechanism we disconnect from ourselves. Because so many of us have unprocessed trauma in our bodies, our brains over react and automatically respond to the sensations in our body with maladaptive strategies, that’s a fancy term for impulsive, irrational behavior, like rage. These strategies grew in us over time in environments that were not nurturing, possibly even hostile, or harmful. Our bodies are overwhelmed and desperate for relief, and our brains flood with cortisol and adrenaline; therefore we are without access to our thinking mind so we overreact.
That’s the space I want to spend some time, the space where our wounded parts live. When we can connect to our wounded parts and objectively observe ourselves from a distance we can gather the information we need to grow the skills we need to function in moments of distress.
We can learn to pause when we are angry or overwhelmed, just because we are mad doesn’t mean we have to react to it. Beyond that logic is missing tools- how to regulate, how to process, how to organize our experiences and name our needs and feelings. This is a learning process and can be difficult and it takes loads of practice, and it’s available when we are ready.”
So, go for it. You don’t have to be a client of mine or anyone else’s. You can start understanding your needs today. Try journaling or developing a mindfulness practice in which you start tracking the meaning behind people’s behaviors and pinpointing that behavior to a word(s) on this Needs List. This practice will enhance your relationships with your friends, family, loved ones, co-workers, and partners, to name a few.
A new healing modality is emerging that incorporates three different therapeutic body-based modalities: CranioSacral Therapy, Somatic Experiencing, and Prenatal and Perinatal Somatic Psychology. This is a fancy way for explaining a therapy that ultimately tracks the autonomic nervous system while understanding how the body behaves, takes shape, and experiences stimuli from the environment in which it develops pre-conception, in-utero, and during the earliest period in life (infancy through adolescence). The therapy synthesizes this information to help a client settle in their nervous system, discharge energy from past situations that were overwhelming and are still present in their bodies in the current time, trace back to unmet developmental needs they had in specific time frames of their life, and consciously assess how those developmental needs can be met right now in the present moment. This process of “consciousness rising” allows for new neuronal pathways to be entrained in the nervous system. This new experienced awareness can be applied to life moving forward. Neuroscience today has proven that the brain and the body display plasticity—meaning that cells in our body can regenerate under new conditions. DNA that has been methylated (tagged) can be switched on and off by changing the cellular environment. Like Bruce Lipton and Joe Dispenza are saying, your thoughts create your environment. Most of our thoughts and habitual patterns are automatic by the time we reach our thirties. If we become aware of what is driving our thought pattern, then we can change it! The best way to understand this phenomenon is to consider a real-life scenario.
Client’s Predicament: Parents have a four-year-old child who has constant stomach aches. They take him to the doctor for numerous tests to see if the child has food allergies or a specific pathology. At the doctor the child had a violent anxiety attack to the point the medical staff became hypervigilant and critical of the parents. For the tests to be run, the parents had to hold their child down by force. The parents could sense their child’s terror while they were simultaneously feeling a sense of rage, helplessness, shame, and embarrassment in front of the hospital staff. Ever since this visit to the doctor, their child struggles to settle and has become violent with their dogs and is almost impossible to put to sleep at night. Bedtime routine takes anywhere from 2-3 hours leaving the parents exhausted, worried, and anxious that something is seriously wrong with their child. Sometimes bedtime routine goes awry and ends in screaming matches between the parents and child. Repetitive sagas unfold of anger and shaming, leaving the parents and child both bewildered, unsettled, and exhausted. This scenario describes a classic example of incoherence. The task set before the parents and therapist is to heal the betrayals, or moments in time when a human need was not met or acknowledged and to build coherence in the relationship, otherwise described as connection or consciousness.
The Path To Healing Intake with Parents First Step: Hear the Birth Story and Childhood history of the child through the parent’s eyes
During an intake with a parent(s), I establish baseline to create a space between myself and them that feels safe, honors confidentiality, is neutral, fosters frequent eye contact, promotes mutual support and cooperation, and allows for choice, self-care, and pauses. I name that I will be utilizing my craniosacral therapy skills during the session to slow the pace, feel into their states of being within their autonomic nervous system, and sense into discomfort that is presenting in their bodies through behavior, body positions, or visceral sensations.
After establishing the principles and explaining how I would be working and communicating with them, I discovered the mother had a miscarriage prior to conceiving their present child. Her pregnancy was wrought with anxiety and fear that something would happen to the child and result in another miscarriage or unforeseen tragedy. The mother went into early labor, which developed into more serious circumstances that ultimately led to C-section. They were discharged from the hospital at the normal length of stay. When they returned home, their infant stopped breathing and turned blue. They rushed to the hospital where the son was admitted to the NICU and stayed for almost a month in an incubator.
During the telling of this story, I could sense discomfort in my stomach and speediness in the space between us. I called frequent pauses to slow the pacing of the storytelling and ask the parents to feel into their bodies to name what they were experiencing. They could sense their stomach discomfort. After hearing the birth story, I explored childhood history of each parent. One parent grew up in a very dysregulated home, he often cried himself to sleep or would have great difficulty settling at night, but he was too afraid to tell his parents for fear of being shamed or punished. He witnessed a lot of arguing between his parents, who ultimately divorced, and he was now estranged from his mother who cut him out of her life in favor of his brother. The other parent had overly critical parents, particularly the father. After some inquiry, she even remembered that often when she was in grade school, she would go to the bathroom and be extremely sick to her stomach before certain school activities or tests.
What to do with all this information and how to map it back to their child?
I dig a little deeper into what are the biggest challenges the parents are facing right now in the present moment. I discover the Dad is having problems with his family and he runs a business with them. His mother is estranged and favors his brother over him to the point that she is mean and critical of him. He works a great deal and exercises by lifting weights and doing heavy cardio. Settling in his body has always been difficult and even more difficult at bedtime routine with his son.
I call a pause at this point and do a few breathing and grounding exercises with both parents to help them become more embodied in a slow-paced rhythm. I could feel the tension rising in the space as the father told his story. He was clearly troubled by his mother and hurting from her lace of acceptance, support, closeness, trust, understanding, warmth—all needs that every human hopes for from their mother (or primary caretaker). I asked him to tell me what he noticed in his body and he realized again how tight and unsettled his stomach was. After naming this in the open space between the three of us, the field started to ease and his stomach pain dissipated.
The mother explained her biggest challenge was the amount of work it took to be present with her son. He stayed at home with her all day and often had to mediate between the frustrated father and the child’s needs. She explained how the birth of their son was overwhelming for her. The months leading up to it were wrought with fear and anxiety. She explained that her parents were extremely disappointed when their grandson was born, and he was spending so much time in the hospital. Her mother did not understand why her daughter had to live at the hospital. She expressed her concerns in such a way that she judged and shamed her daughter for not paying more attention to her needs. I could see a number of needs not being met her similar to Dad’s, but more importantly, the need for security was at play here. No one was supporting and reassuring the Mom that her ability to mother is innate and good and right. Throughout her childhood she was criticized by her parents for her appearance, and she just needed to be seen, to be known, to belong, and feel appreciated for her own gifts and beingness. Going on to name these needs helped her to settle, also to commend her for the heroic role she has been playing all along with her own child. Reinforcing her intuition in all that she has done to be at his side, meet her son’s needs like hers were never met started to help her feel peace and hope that she was on the right path and that by applying her own knowingness to the situation, trusting her gut, her son was going to improve.
We finished by doing craniosacral therapy, I had them both just lie on their couch together and feel their heart beats, and I held the space. After a few minutes tension in their kidneys accumulated and then released, leaving a space of clarity and harmony.
In the second session, we did a deep dive into the child’s birth story, which was quite traumatic, fast-paced, and terrifying for the mother. I explained how they could use belly messages to craft messages of repair. By taking some time to envision the birth they wanted and recognizing that their son was sentient and conscious throughout his whole journey. The technocratic procedures could leave imprints on his nervous system, like implicit memories stored in his body, including the incubator. Often babies in incubators are isolated and can have a sense of being cut-off from their parents. This scary place is often overwhelming with constant noises from medical equipment, cries from babies around them, lights and commotion that make it difficult to settle. Often times, babies will dissociate in their nervous system to handle such extreme environments. Taking him to the doctor or any hospital could potentially solicit these memories to stir in his subconscious mind, meaning in his body.
The situation that recently happened when he had to be held down created a repeat scenario for a time in his life that had yet to be integrated into his conscious psyche. Since he is a child and his brain is not fully developed, his parents needed to start by creating coherency and awareness on his behalf. I shared with them techniques to use at bedtime to down regulate his nervous system. These exercises can be found on YouTube and are easily accessible, gentle joint compression and distension techniques, compressing his body slowly and rhythmically with a pillow, gentle massage, gentle squeezes of his arms and legs, belly rubs in clockwise motion to help release his diaphragm and relax his abdominal muscles, fascia release of his psoas muscles. We practiced these in the space together, and I also helped Dad feel more present in his body while reading stories. I explained the more present he can be in his body and mind while telling the story, he will create a more coherent space that the son will detect and ease into more coherence in his own body. Lastly, I had Dad stop exercising for two weeks and practice Qi-gong each morning. The point of this was to help him slow down his own revved nervous system and give his body more energy by cultivating energy stores in his own body. Intense aerobic exercise can exacerbate a person who already is living from a state of hyper-vigilance or “fight-or-flight” in their nervous system.
The story unfolded more in subsequent sessions, but after only two sessions they were able to implement some basic tools and practices and noticed immediate improvement in their son. Slowing down transition times was key to their success, and in the long run required less time to put their son to bed. We set up some play dates to which I could come and work with their son and his birth story through play. Children tell their birth stories all the time through their play, and with a trained eye, a practitioner can help the child recreate their story and bring in harmony around moments of discord and wounding.
Both parents received the benefits of craniosacral therapy by just sitting in the Field and allowing presence and breath to ease their body functions. They were so thrilled with the immediate reliefs they experienced in their family field. The road to recovery was not complete and much work had to be done, but they were well on their way to healing. The sense of empowerment was strong and fueled their dream to manifest harmony and connection in the family they were creating through their own will.
The whole experience was so rewarding to behold. Their son will be forever changed in ways we can only imagine at this point, but as the saying goes, “as the twig is bent, so grows the tree.”
Healing from Loss of a Baby by Kate White, PPNE, BCST, LMT Loss of a baby, either to miscarriage, abortion, stillbirth, or twin loss (embryologists estimate that 30 to 80 percent of us were conceived with a twin) is hard on the mother, no matter what. Children conceived after these occurrences are sensitive to these losses. Parents, especially mothers, are encouraged to grieve these losses and pray for the babies who never were born. If you wonder whether you have lost a child or a sibling, you can ask the following questions. Because there could be many other explanations for “Yes” answers, they are only clues to the possible loss of a baby and not definite proof.
Questions you can ask to discover if you have lost a child or a sibling:
For Parents: · Mother: Did you experience any unexplained bleeding at a time when you were pregnant or could have conceived? · Have you had cysts, tumors, fibroids and/or other growths in your reproductive organs? (When miscarriages occur early in pregnancy, there is often an unconscious attempt to hold on to a lost child, even though the mother may be unaware of the loss. In several cases, tumors or cysts have been removed that contained hair follicles, bone cells, and other biological material from a miscarried child.) · Mother or Father: Did you have repetitive dreams about loss during a time when the mother may have been pregnant? For Siblings: · Did you have any imaginary playmates whom you insisted were real? · Do you have repetitive dreams of someone you long for? · Are your intimate relationships unsatisfactory, as if you are always searching for someone who does not exist? (This is sometimes acted out in the form of compulsive sexual behavior.) · Do you have unexplained survivor’s guilt (guilt about being alive while others die)? · Do you have an unexplained fear of death (perhaps because a sibling died)?
Meditation for Healing Loss
This meditation is for the loss of one’s own child through miscarriage, abortion or stillbirth. It can also be completed for children who died shortly after birth. The healing that results can affect all the child’s surviving brothers and sisters. This meditation can also be done by the one who has lost a sibling such as a twin or from a pregnancy that occurred before or after one’s own birth. 1. Light a candle, close your eyes and breathe deeply. 2. Recall a moment in your life when you knew how much you were loved. Breathe this love into yourself once again. 3. Get in touch with your feelings regarding the baby you lost (love, sadness, longing, grief, guilt, anger, curiosity, etc.) 4. See someone you love standing before you, holding you child or your sibling and offering him or her to you. Open your arms and receive the child. Say to and do with the child all that your heart has always longed to say or do, and let the child do the same for you. 5. Ask what name he, she or them wishes to be called. Is there a ceremony you might perform to welcome and bless this child? If so, what is it? 6. Talk over with the child how you can continue to give and receive love with each other. How do you want the child to be remembered by you and your family? How does the child want you to remember him, her or them? 7. When you are ready, place the child in the arms of the loving person who gave him or her to you. See that, instead of walking away from you, they walk toward you, right into your heart. Feel their warm presence as they make their home in your heart. Breathe deeply, allowing that warmth to fill your whole body. Healing Actions for Oneself: 1. Go to one of your favorite places, where you feel the most able to give and receive love. In your spirit, invite the lost child to accompany you. Share with him or her why this place means so much to you. 2. Ask yourself whom you would want as godparents for the lost child. Tell the child why you have chosen these people as godparents. Visit these people, and in your spirit bring the child with you. Invite the godparents to pray with you for the lost child and to bless him or her.
Science now shares a profound truth that babies are sentient, conscious beings who have the potential to shake down the very foundations of societal ills engrained in our economic, political, and spiritual structures. This truth remains largely unknown to humanity, and yet it carries the greatest potential for all mankind. In order to cultivate this truth and allow our children to mature into adults who can create stability, growth and connection within our communities, we must first eradicate birth trauma by dispelling the current technocratic birthing practices. Bringing awareness to the population at large of the true nature of children and how they function is key to making this goal a reality. The premise of birth trauma lies in betrayal, and to truly comprehend it, we must first come into relationship with our own experience of betrayal. So, with this essay, and for future audiences, I intend to explain my own embodied experiences when I have encountered treachery from those I trusted most. I will connect these similar embodied experiences to my son’s sense of betrayal he experienced during his gestation period, birth, and breastfeeding experience; all experiences tainted for him by my ignorance of his conscious, sentient nature. Knowledge of what is causing betrayal in our most vulnerable population is the first step to shifting the world.
Ray Castellino documents the essential steps for setting up a birth passage free of trauma and betrayal in his article, “Being with Newborns.” If any rupture in this sequence occurs, then an infant experiences betrayal. This type of overwhelm has definitive and resolute outcomes in the hardwiring of a child’s nervous system that impacts their behavior, neurodevelopment, emotional states, and belief systems. In sum, every child needs two parents who are loving and nurturing of each other, are well prepared physically, emotionally and spiritually for the welcoming of new life, and are capable of developing a felt sense and awareness of the new soul’s presence (Castellino 1996). With this magical elixir of mutual support, consciousness, connection, and joyous welcome, a child will flourish and grow in health and love. The horrifying reality, though, is that 98% of children born into this world experience some form of trauma (Castellino 1996). This tragedy is evident in the national and global crisis facing our children’s health and overall state of being. As Wendy Anne McCarty states in her 2008 article “Investing in Human Potential in the Beginning of Life: Key to Maximizing Human Potential”:
[A] much more silent crisis is brewing all across America relating to our infants and children. We see an alarming rise in prematurity, low-birth weights, surgical births, autism, ADHD, childhood aggression and depression, asthma, overweight and obese children, attachment disorders, learning disabilities, and use of psychiatric drugs to manage children’s conditions, as well as a rise in the number children in foster care, adolescent homicide, child abuse and teen pregnancy (Glenn, M. & McCarty, WA., 118).
From reading Castellino’s article, I recounted the stages of both my pregnancies, only to realize that most of the crucial steps he outlines were missed. My children were deeply betrayed, and I see the same outcomes in my children as I see in myself, patterns of behavior afflicted with anxiety, anger, depression and physical suffering that ultimately stem from betrayal I incurred during my entry and upbringing in the world. When I turned inward and began to come into relationship with this knowledge, a sense of horror swelled from the center of my stomach and tightened like a frozen ball of ice. In moments of true despair, grief, abandonment, and betrayal, when emotions overwhelm me, existential questions always arise. Why must we have pain and suffering? Why has God forsaken me? Why must the world be this way? Why is coming into existence so excruciatingly painful? Who made the world this way? Why do we turn a blind eye to the atrocities facing mankind and our Planet? How can we stop apathy and despair?
I decided to jog my memory for times when I was most overwhelmed, and I looked to what caused these episodes initially. In my twenties, I will never forget the grief and betrayal I experienced when the father of my firstborn left me. I remember the last encounter we had when he broke the news that he was leaving. I didn’t feel much in that moment, it was the moments after ground zero that were devastating. Metaphorically, I can compare it to a meteor striking the Atlantic Ocean—an immediate contraction of the liquid body absorbing the impact occurs, releasing forces of equal and opposite direction to encapsulate and counter-oppose the impact. Once a point of neutrality arises, the energy disperses outward sending shock waves of equal momentum throughout the field of time and space around the site of impact. The first few moments after my partner declared his new life, confusion whirled in my head, thoughts bounced round and round, leaving my body cold and numb, as if all the energy in my body went into absorbing the news. I turned to go in my house. My legs were moving, but they felt far away, like my head was disconnected and miles apart. It felt like nobody was home, my body was vacant. I crawled onto my bed and curled up into a ball. My stomach churned and I squelched the urge to vomit. I laid there listless, complete apathy settled in my bones.
The impact of the separation lasted for weeks. Moments would come over me and I would sob so hard, my body would violently shake. A wave of heat would swell from my pelvis, up my spine, and spread from my neck to my face and ears. The tears of sadness made me feel so forlorn, so alone, and forgotten. I doubted my self-worth, my existence. Who could I possibly be? After the initial shock wore off, I remember the obsessive thoughts that took over my life. Thoughts of him consumed me and I would imagine over and over how I could contact him, what I would say. I would beg and plead inside my head with make believe conversations I would have with him. These little fantasies were reruns on auto pilot, endlessly churning. My appetite disappeared and in its place my stomach twisted in knots. I suffered from reflux and “fire” tongue. I felt anxious like I couldn’t sit in my own skin. I had to move and keep busy. I could go all day and night without food, just water, and even that was not appealing. After a couple of weeks of this hypervigilant anxiety, I then started to slow down. I had very little energy. I would lie on my couch on the weekends watching movies all day. I no longer wanted to move. I didn’t even want to think. I just felt like a blob that would fade into the shadows. I had no purpose, no drive, no passion. My body felt heavy and dull. I was forsaken. I had been betrayed.
Science is now revealing to us that these embodied emotions originate from intricate chemical and electric reactions taking place in the neuroendocrine pathways. In other words, trauma has specific repercussions that manifest in our behaviors. Ray Castellino documents shock affect characteristics in the physiology, behavior and energetic fluid fields of neonates (Castellino, pg 7-8). I like to explain development as a continuum, everything from the starting foundation affects the hierarchal levels. The embryo begins in a fluid field with the building blocks of blood, neurons, and energy. When overwhelm or trauma enters this fluid field, it creates roadblocks, or little pockets of energy that get absorbed into the tissue field. These energy pockets get cut off from the system and begin to act like black holes sucking in solids and energy, building their own inertial systems. This form of disconnection causes neuronal pathways to be less connected. The whole point of development is to grow a brain that is connected from the bottom up and from the top down.
The human brain is the only organ that is not fully developed at birth. It begins developing at day 40 after conception. The neocortex is the seed for the genesis of neurons, which will explode throughout gestation and for the next ten years of life. The primary factor governing this growth in the fetal brain is feedback from the mother by means of nutrition and stimulation at the physical, emotional, energetic and spiritual levels. Only the brain’s basic structures are present at birth (Melillo 2015). Paul MacLean coined the term, the Triune Brain, to explain the three functional hemispheres of the human brain: the primitive (reptilian), limbic (mammalian), and new cortex (neomammalian). The base of the brain encases the brainstem, or reptilian brain, which controls all of our most basic functions and is the seat of our subconscious mind. The middle brain, or limbic system governs our emotions and is the reactive part of us that initiates “fight or flight”. The cerebral cortex controls all of our higher-order conscious activity, and is what makes us regulated, conscious, and compassionate humans (MacLean 2009).
The brain builds from stimulation. Positive stimulation in a safe, supported, and loving environment allows for growth; whereas, unsafe, disconnected, non-supportive environments result in a body that is in survival mode, or “fight or flight,” battering away at overwhelm and trauma. Ray Castellino’s checklist for being with newborns in a co-creative field was largely missed with both of my pregnancies, and the evidence remains in both of my children. I would not have been able to comprehend Castellino’s shock affect characteristics if I had not witnessed for myself Dr. Melillo’s Brain Balance program. I conducted the evaluation with my daughter shortly after having my second child in a traumatic hospital setting. I saw from him patterns that I saw in my first child. I intuitively knew something was going on that was beyond my awareness. I had to find out what was causing his stress and erratic behaviors. He couldn’t breastfeed and he slept for hours and hours. So I decided to test my daughter. The assessment tests from the Brain Balance program revealed that she had deficiencies in all seven areas of brain growth:
Motor: muscle tone, coordination, and strength
Sensory: correlating to the five senses of touch, smell, taste, vision, and hearing
Emotional: ability to control and display emotions at appropriate times
Behavior: acting appropriately and social interactions
Academic: abilities required for learning and retention
Immune: tendencies toward allergies and chronic illnesses
Autonomic: self-regulation of body functions
After taking these tests, Castellino’s remarks on trauma ring true for me, “Stressful and traumatic events during prenatal life and birth imprint both the baby’s body and the baby’s psyche. Traumatic imprints overlay the true self and profoundly impact the emerging person and how they will be later on in life. Body structure, movement patterns, sense of self and lifelong strategies manifest from these early traumatic imprints” (Castellino 1996).
When I think of my son when he was conceived, I felt his presence and I welcomed him with an open, loving heart. I wanted him more than anything, and I had held a place for him for almost two years prior to his conception. When I told my husband that I was expecting, he panicked and lashed out in fear. He did not want the burden of a child on his shoulders again, the lifelong commitment, the financial consequences, the physical and emotional toil that children always bring. He quickly became furious, and I withdrew into myself—building a wall to ward off the world of betrayal that existed for me, and always had from the earliest days in my own childhood experience. I lashed out in anger directed at my husband. We fought for the first five weeks of my son’s development in utero. Our marriage almost ended. In the deepest moments of despair, my stomach would be coiled in knots, my appetite gone, confusion at the helm—sobs would rock my body as I lay wide awake at night with my husband in a different room. When I recall those moments and take into consideration another sentient being was experiencing every moment right there along with me, my heart breaks. I did not know to even talk to my son and assure him that this was not his fault. I wish I would have been aware of him and all his capabilities.
With these regrets, I will refrain in this paper from sharing his entire birth story and the countless ways he was repeatedly betrayed by the doctor, by the hospital system, by our culture, by his caretakers. The layers of betrayal run deep in a very condensed period of time. He was ripped from me during a cesarean operation. The doctor was losing him, because he was stuck in a transverse position and the contractions of my uterus were clamping down on his head that was wedged in my bicornuate shaped womb. He was resuscitated immediately after removal and raced off to the NICU. When he and I were united a day later, he could not breastfeed, and he screamed out in pain all through the night. He and I were both so frustrated. Now, when I consider just one moment of deep betrayal I experienced in my life and I compare it to my son, I wonder what in the world he was experiencing in his first few months after arriving into this world. It took weeks and months for me to recover from a broken heart, how my son survived makes me marvel at the resiliency of human nature. He fought through a tongue-tie surgery where I left him alone with a doctor and nurse to burn his skin attachment off with a laser. He underwent surgery at 9 months to reconstruct his penis from the hypospadias defect with which he was born. In hindsight, remembering his behaviors and his crying patterns, I am certain that babies experience betrayal in the same way all other humans experience it. Babies are not a different species.
What I look to now is the knowledge that these ruptures can be repaired, and most importantly that brains can be rewired. Resiliency can prevail through the phenomenon of neuroplasticity. Nerves form synapses/connections through repeated stimulation. The phrase “use it or lose it” rings true in this incidence. If you know how to stimulate the areas of the brain that are underdeveloped, then they can grow again in a secure and supported environment (Melillo 2015). To use my metaphor mentioned earlier of black holes, these underdeveloped areas in the brain are places where inertial fulcrums are present, organizing and isolating pockets of trauma in an energetic sense. Axons and dendrites of neurons are missing in these areas of “black matter”. Somatotropic therapy coupled with proper sensory stimulation is just one path for how neuroplasticity and integration can occur. Direct manipulation through fascia work, massage therapy, and osteopathic practices can help eliminate this stagnation of energy. The field of pre and perinatal psychology integrates a diverse set of therapies from polarity, EMDR, breathwork, birth regression, psychoanalysis, somatic trauma resolution, interpersonal biology, bodywork, and attachment therapy (White & Rhodes, 2013). Science also now shows us that epigenetics can be changed through diet, movement and stimulation.
In conclusion, I must share a fascinating story about Albert Einstein’s autopsy on his brain after his death. He donated his body for study in the name of science. Dr. Melillo outlined this story in his book Disconnected Kids. Einstein is considered one of the greatest minds of all time, but as a child he was far from brilliant. In fact, scientists now agree that Einstein had a significant learning disorder that today would be diagnosed as ADHD and/or dyslexia. He did not speak until he was around age seven and did poorly academically all the way through college. When he failed to get into graduate school at the age of twenty, he became a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office. He never gave up his cerebral pursuits, though. Just six years later he published the first draft of his scientific Theory of Relativity, which won him the Nobel Prize ten years later.
So, what turned the mind of a child who couldn’t pass the grade into a veritable Einstein? The answer is neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to change and grow through stimulation, a term that was created by Dr. Marion Diamond. When Einstein’s brain was examined in 1955 by Dr. Marion Diamond, it was roughly the same size as most brains and had the average number of brain cells. However, they discovered that his brain possessed an enormous number of connections, or synapses, between brain cells, and more astrocytes, which are cells that nourish the synaptic junctions (Melillo 2015). At one point, we would have credited this to Einstein having good genes, yet we can now see it was the result of the unique way he used his brain (Diamond 1964).
Einstein passionately played the violin and piano. He once explained, when he was stuck on a mathematical problem, he would sit down and play music and envision his problem until the mathematical equation came to him. Put another way, listening to music (the sense of hearing) stimulated playing an instrument (physical activity), which is a right brain activity, and concentration on the equation (mental activity), which is a left-brain activity. Doing so on a repetitive basis not only strengthened the electrical connections between the left and right hemispheres, but new connections grew. Combined, they increased his brain power. As early as 1966, Diamond and her team demonstrated that putting young rats in a stimulating environment rich with challenge and new experiences increased glial cells. They discovered the same results when they placed elderly mice in an enriched environment: increased astrocyte numbers and complexity of synaptic connection had a direct correlation with better cognitive performance (Diamond 1964).
This story demonstrates how healing takes place in the present time, not in the past. History always repeats itself until transmutation occurs and something new is created. This new creation then becomes the next point in history. Now is the time to create a new story for our children, a story that dispels betrayal and replaces it with connection and love.
References
Castellino, Ray. Being with newborns. Santa Barbara: Castellino Training. 1996.
Diamond, Marian C.; Krech, David; Rosenzweig, Mark R. (1964). “The effects of an enriched environment on the histology of the rat cerebral cortex”. The Journal of Comparative Neurology. 123: 111–119.
Glenn, M. & McCarty, WA. “Investing in human potential from the beginning of life: key to maximizing human capital.” Journal of the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health23(2): 117-136, 2008.
MacLean, Paul D. The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions. New York: Plenum Press, 1990. Print.
Melillo, Robert. Disconnected Kids: The Groundbreaking Brain Balance Program for Children With Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Other Neurological Disorders. New York: Penguin, 2009.
White, K. & Rhodes, J. (2013) Summary of trends and influences in pre- and perinatal psychology. Position paper, Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health.
