Ch 10 - The role of Birth tightness & emotion in Psychosomatic Patterns

CHAPTER 10:

PRESSURES AT BIRTH & HOW THEY AFFECT US LATER IN LIFE

How specific fears are implanted in our sub conscious minds
during the birth experience, and how these affect us during
pressure situations later in life.Louis A. Gross BSEE
www.backfixbodywork.com


Birth is one of the major foundational episodes in which we get 'implanted' with specific fears and phobias. In fact, our entire life patterns are set up according to what happens at birth. I know some Netherton therapists who focus directly on birth and the pre-natal right at the beginning, for this very reason. Processing out these experiences not only clears that part of our un conscious minds, but it also gives the therapist a clear picture of the patterns that should also be eliminated from earlier and later time periods. Whatever happened to you at birth is a microcosm of the kinds of patterns you'll have throughout life. As I have said, the programming gets set up into our un conscious minds from conception through the first couple years after birth. Then it is solidified through further stages of childhood development.

I'll now lead you through some common examples to show how our experiences in birth set up our life long behaviors.

Typically, during the birth process, many mothers fear that they or their baby will die, but this is rarely verbalized. It may be a flashing thought. But it's usually part of the emotional or painful experience. But however it occurs, the words go right into the baby's un conscious mind. From then on, whenever this person experiences the specific kind of difficulty Mother had when she thought, "I'm going to die," or, "The baby's going to die," that person will also have an overwhelming fear or upset.

There will probably be 'pressure' as well. This was usually the time of most physical pressure on the child while it was being born, usually when it got stuck in the birth canal. It's also a time of physical pain for the mother and of psychological pressure for all the adults in the delivery room including the doctor and nurses.

This entire pattern, from all the people, goes right into the newborn's un conscious mind, especially the predominant emotions and the words said out loud. And there doesn't even have to be a death fear to do it; just the physical birth experience is enough.

Another example shows how some of us handle difficulties, with capability on the one hand, and gut emotional upset underneath. While not every mother has thoughts of her, or her child's death, when something goes 'wrong' during the delivery, the spoken, and the unspoken, words of the doctor and nurse go right into the kid's un conscious. In many of these instances, Mother's fear and pain is the predominant feeling that gets implanted. The doctor and nurse are usually acting swiftly and accurately to handle the problem, and their actions and feelings get recorded, along with what mother is feeling physically and emotionally, and what the baby is also feeling.

This is a lot of material. And it comes from different sources. It all pops out of this one adult person 20, 30 or 50 years later. And he or she thinks it's all 'my' stuff. Whenever we're inundated with many conflicting thoughts and feel upset, it's because this kind of episode has been activated and the words and feelings of all the people are coming to consciousness. Rather than identifying the trauma with your adult situation, it's much more effect to get a picture of the event on top of your stack, whenever it happened, and process out the words, even by yourself. The first way continues the upset. The second way eliminates it.

One of the major things that happens as we process the material out of our bodies is that we differentiate who said and did what. And we recognize that it's not 'our' stuff at all. The baby is predominantly feeling something physical. Mother usually has pain and some amount of emotional concern. From the doctor and nurses, outwardly, no fears are expressed. But inherent in their quick action is a statement such as, "We have to act fast and push this through or the baby will die."

A major reason the original tapes are erased with this method is that when an adult processes out the birth material, he or she sees exactly who is saying and feeling and doing what. We no longer identify with them. Seeing who said it in our mind's eye, and then saying it out loud as their words, does the release. In fact, we can actually feel those individual emotions that were being felt by all the different people at the time. Some of them are what we feel when we are in the upsets of our adult life. And they have been coming from the same source. This kind of processing removes it from where it really came from and thereby erases that original recording.
When we think it's our own words, we stay stuck with it no matter how many times we emote and no matter how minutely we describe it.

This 'something goes wrong during birth' is the most common scenario I have seen that creates 'pressure' patterns. The way the doctor and nurse act, so swiftly and accurately, is just a matter of trained professionals doing their job. But their job includes preventing unnecessary deaths.

Yet this is the most common way we, as adults, also act in situations when 'something goes wrong.' We act fast, and maybe even capably, but driven by more emotion than the event calls for. Most of our jobs don't involve life and death situations. More often they involve work overloads, demanding bosses and so forth. We have the impression that our job security is a life and death matter, even when we discuss it with friends. But it isn't, really. And part of us knows that. The other part, the old, unreleased birth experience, does not. It is just a recording that gets played at these times.

This is one type of 'pressure,' and the problem is often solved more appropriately in our adult lives after this surge of emotion has run its course.

The kinds of things you get pressured about, even in childhood, will be mentioned, or thought about, by the adults around you while you are physically experiencing your birth and other early life conditions. .

The specifics of our behaviors are not always obvious, and conscious analysis can help clarify them. When we process material it's important to define the problem as clearly as we can, so we can zero in on the most appropriate un conscious scripts. Money pressures might be related to getting our needs met and also to survival. Both of these can be related to abandonment and/or control. Work achievement pressures can be related to all of them plus the need to achieve. They can even be a way to protect us from attack, by always being prepared, or always being in charge. All these issues got put into your un conscious mind by the words of the adults around you.

However, at our usual level of awareness, the adult who has the upset will almost never recognize that part of the source of his or her problem is a piece of his or her birth experience that's doing this subtle emoting. This whole understanding never comes to the surface, even if the person goes to therapy for it. That's because the words were not their own and they don't know the information you've just been reading. Only hypnosis or this Netherton method, or something else that does the same thing, can clarify what's really going on. And my understanding is that hypnosis does not remove the material.

The upset is often inaccessible in regular psycho-therapy because the person is not in the same emotional state that caused the issue to act out. The words in the sub- conscious mind are intertwined with the remaining energies of those past physical and emotional experiences. By the time someone gets to the therapy session, the excited energies may have been dissipated and their conscious minds are now wondering how and why they acted that way. These energies need to be re-stimulated and brought to the surface in order to clear them out from where they're really coming from. In most verbal therapy sessions, people just talk, or do some other kind of process to try to change their current behavior. Even if a person does get charged up, the focus is on their behaviors in the current situation and not on the same behavior of the original tapes.

Another reason a person doesn't see what's going on underneath is that they were Mother's words and feelings, and they are stored in our sub- conscious minds underneath, or mixed in with her pain, her efforts, and the need to 'push.'

A third reason is the similarity of our sociological 'norms' to what happened in our past. The norms tell us how we should act with our conscious volition. We're supposed to overcome 'our' weaknesses. So we're taught to 'push' in this society, and that is caused, in part, by the guidance of so many people who lead us in business and education, who also have the same kind of birth scenarios I've been talking about.

Here's another kind of pattern set-up. Some mothers did not have such fears, but felt so much pain that they swore never to have another baby in the midst of that experience. One client's mother was supposed to have resisted sexual relations with her husband because of it. Another's was supposed to have said, "I'd rather die than go through this again." So all this, too, gets recorded in the child's un conscious. But the words aren't relevant to anything most people can remember, and they aren't available to our usual methods of therapy.

Some mothers have no pain at birth, usually, but not always because she's been given drugs [1]. Administering these drugs sets up other patterns. Mother may have had pain before she was given the drug, at some times before she went to the delivery room, even at home in days past. Some mothers may have been frightened and some may have toughed it out until they couldn't do it any longer. Some modern mothers have given birth in water, and the children seem quite contented. Whatever happens, for whatever reasons, has a pattern that becomes a part of us, and can fool us into thinking it's all part of conscious volition.

Whatever happened at the times of greatest pressure in birth are the same kinds of things that happened in the prenatal, in past lives and in infancy. That pattern will also appear as the same kind of problems we have in pressure situations from childhood on. The circumstantial reasons for the troubles we remember having at age 5, 10 or 21, will make perfect sense to us. On one level, they were difficult circumstances (and are sometimes needed to be processed out). But we still over reacted or reacted in a rigidified pattern.

Even as adults we usually handle the situation the same way, even though our friends and loved ones can see that we're blocked from handling them in different, less difficult ways. We are then stuck in the way the pattern was formed. It is what reacts this same way. Certain avenues of creativity are opened to it, and some had gotten closed. Since our friends had different births and different lives, they are not stuck in the same mindset and can see the limitations in ours.
This part of us that reacts is indeed under pressure. The difference between the adult conscious awareness, which is us, and this specific recording, is that the recording includes the statement, "I'm going to die," or "I'm going to die unless I get help," or "I'm going to die unless I act fast and push through this." 'We' don't.

And this statement is included in an experience of being compressed physically, such as mother’s birth canal, the opening at the end, or the whole womb being compressed with Mother’s abdominal contraction from emotions or cramps. In adult times, we will more likely feel the compression as our own emotional muscle tightness, but not usually from compression from outside.

If there is compression such as in an accident, then that whole current adult (or teen or childhood) episode will have a lot of emotion in it that can be processed out in the same Netherton process manner, especially doing Reichian techniques to bring more out to the surface easier, and with hands on fascial spreading or structural fascial stretching, whioch will open the physical muscles and organ areas so the stored energy comes out easier, more readily, and the person him or her self can be more of him or her self, without the old tightnesses and emotions from past and adult times polluting and distorting the person.