Joy in Birthing

by Giuditta Tornetta

Of the many obstacles that stand in the way of a new beginning or a new life; fear is probably one of the most significant ones. Often fear comes from unprocessed grief. Grief is a multi-faceted response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone or something to which a bond was formed. Losses can range from loss of employment, status, a sense of safety, love, or possessions; to the loss of the ‘ideal birthing experience’ or the loss of a loved one. Losing a loved one includes losing a child via miscarriage, or losing the ability to procreate due to infertility. Grief can also be experienced by a newborn during the birthing process due to early separation from the mother and/or harsh conditions in the delivery room such as noise, blinding light and cold temperature.  But grief can come as early as in the womb, when we live a symbiotic life with our mothers and we feel and absorb all her fears, anxieties and grief. Many studies now confirm that how fetuses cope in the womb and how they make decisions will and can affect the rest of their lives.

It follows that how we are born influences how we give birth: to children, projects, businesses or new aspects of ourselves. But in order to give birth successfully to our ideas or our children we must relinquish fear and the grief that is embedded within it.

So how do we tackle this seemingly impossible task?  Indubitably time is the greatest healer when it comes to healing the loss of something or somebody that happened in our adult life. But what about the fears and grief that is ingrained in our personal history, which we might not even be aware of at a conscious level?   There is a famous dictum that says “THE PAIN I MIGHT FEEL BY REMEMBERING CAN’T BE ANY WORSE THAN THE PAIN I FEEL BY KNOWING AND NOT REMEMBERING.”  Psychologists tell us that the awareness of what happened or the acceptance of our feelings following the loss of something or someone can begin the healing process.  But unless we have some practical tools the healing cannot be permanent and we might find ourselves stuck in grief, dissatisfaction, and even depression.

Here are a few examples of some different types of grief and how it can impact our lives:

Grief in the Womb

In the book Remembering Your Life Before Birth: How Your Womb Memories Have Shaped Your Life and How to Heal Them by Michael Gabriel, we read that, “The recollections of birth and of life in the womb are not vague or confabulated recollections. They are detailed and are accompanied by much emotion.” For example, Gabriel states that a fetus can realize that a different sexed child was desired rather than its own sex. So the grown up person can spend a lifetime trying to be accepted by her parents and all authority figures. Such drives can result in a need for financial or educational success in life, often leading to the need to overachieve to prove ones worth.  He continues by explaining that for some the actual birth seems more like dying. This can result in lifelong feelings of claustrophobia and hypochrondria. Intolerable womb conditions can make the infant decide to be born earlier than normal, and once an adult this person might have feelings of not fitting in, impatience and low self-esteem.

Infertility

There are a myriad of emotional responses to infertility. For those women, who have always desperately wanted to experience pregnancy and childbirth, the grieving process may be intense and prolonged. Some men and women may have to resolve feelings of “failure,” that they could not achieve pregnancy, and in a sense, that their bodies “betrayed” them. For men, in particular issues of masculinity and “carrying on the bloodline” may come into play.   Women in infertile couples often protect their husbands from their own pain and feelings of failure, by taking much of the responsibility for the treatments upon themselves. When the attempts to procreate fail, often women enter a deep depression which is the sum accumulation of all the feelings unresolved and unexpressed during the fertility attempts. Males in infertile couples often feel overwhelmed by the intensity of their partner’s emotions as well as an inability to access their own. They tend to focus their energy back into their work, at times becoming aloof and workaholics.

Miscarriage

Miscarriage is a complex grief that leaves us particularly vulnerable and involves a number of other potential significant losses and additional suffering, which is not necessarily present with other types of bereavement (except a stillbirth which is a similar loss occurring after 20 weeks.) Not only you have lost your baby, you are suffering from the effects of both a birth and a death. Miscarriage is unique in that you have very little remains to bury, sometimes because no baby has formed properly or it is unfortunately passed when using the toilet.  When this happens, or even with a later miscarriage and an identifiable little body, our loss can be minimized and invalidated by others, (like when people say, “You can always have another child,”) which lead us to question our feelings of grief. However, unrecognized or not, it is the strength of the bond with your baby not the length of the pregnancy that determines the depth of your grief. This mothering bond may have begun to form as early as you playing with your dolls as a little girl, so your grief is a normal reaction to a broken bond. For recurrent miscarries, the grief can be compounded by earlier losses. Parents who suffer miscarriage or infertility may experience resentment towards others who experience successful pregnancies. Aloofness and isolation can result from this type of grief.

Failed IVFs (In Vitro Fertilization) attempts

Research shows that women’s self-confidence and self-esteem can be very low after an unsuccessful IVF cycle. They often report a sense of panic, feeling tense, irritable and unable to relax.  The sense of isolation can be very strong – feeling ‘left behind’ by friends and family. Some women may become depressed; particularly if they feel unsupported or have suffered from depression in the past. Although some couples will become emotionally closer through fertility treatments, others report difficulties in maintaining close relationships. The challenges of dealing with the highs and lows of failed treatments can be immense and no two people will deal with the grief and loss associated with failed cycles or miscarriages in the same way. This compounded with the financial strain of IVF can lead couples to break up, or to react negatively to friends and family with children.

Birth Traumas

Even with all the support we get leading up to our babies’ births, things can still go wrong. And even when they go “right” according to our health care providers (which often say something like, “it does not matter that the baby was born via a cesarean, all it matters is that mommy and baby are healthy,) they can feel very “wrong” to us. Nothing can prepare couples adequately for the intensity, distress, confusion and out of control feelings of a traumatic birth experience, and even couples who have experienced a fairly “normal” birth can feel shocked and overwhelmed. Women can experience Post-traumatic Stress Disorder after childbirth. Most women go into their births with plans of a beautiful, wonderful birth where as soon as the baby is placed on their chest they will immediately bond. But it doesn’t always go that way. A lot of births end up less than ideal, but some births end up actually traumatic. A woman who did not feel the bond she expected to feel immediately following the birth may feel inadequate and is a good candidate for postpartum depression.

Job loss

In recent years we have learned that people experience these same stages of grief when they lose a job.  Since work is a major contributor to a person’s sense of self-esteem, the loss of a job can have serious psychological consequences, possibly creating the inability to finding a new job or the courage to start a new career.

The origins of grief and loss are varied and our wide variety of responses are influenced by personality, family, culture, and religious beliefs and practices. Loss may carry over into familial relations and cause trauma for children, future pregnancy, fetal development in the womb, spouses and any other family members. Issues of faith and beliefs may also face challenge as bereaved persons reassess personal definitions in the face of great pain. Why would a benevolent God do this to me?

Although we usually focus on the emotional response to loss, it also has physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, and philosophical dimensions. Many studies have looked at the bereaved in terms of increased risks for stress-related illnesses. Colin Murray Parkes in the 1960s and 1970s in England noted increased doctor visits, with symptoms such as abdominal pain, breathing difficulties, and insomnia to name a few, in the first six months following a major loss.

Healing the emotional loss seems to trigger a general overall healing so the first step towards serenity and the birth of a new self is to focus on our emotions. Many have spoken about the different stages of grief once we experience loss. In Elizabeth Kubler-Ross‘ book, “On Death and Dying,” she identified five stages of grief as follows:

1. Denial (this isn’t happening to me!)
2. Anger (why is this happening to me?)
3. Bargaining (I promise I’ll be a better person if…)
4. Depression (I don’t care anymore)
5. Acceptance (I’m ready for whatever comes)

The five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are a part of the framework that allows us to learn how to live without what or whom we have lost. These tools help us define and identify what we may be feeling. Yet, they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order.

Another stage of grief, which absolutely comes before acceptance, was introduced by Melody Beattie in a recent talk I had the pleasure of attending.  She calls this stage obsession. People who have experienced loss can experience obsessive recurring flashbacks or nightmares or obsessive negative self-talk.  It seems they cannot stop thinking about what happened, and relive the loss over and over again, and the self blame that accompanies it. Some join support groups, which are a good way to cope, but that at times feed on the obsession of needing, wanting to talk and relive the experience over and over again.  A lesser known definition of the stages of grief is described by Dr. Roberta Temes in the book, “Living With An Empty Chair – a guide through grief.” Temes describes three particular types of behavior exhibited by those suffering from grief and loss:

1. Numbness (mechanical functioning and social insulation)
2. Disorganization (intensely painful feelings of loss)
3. Reorganization (re-entry into a more ‘normal’ social life.)

The concept that both Kublerr-Rosss and Temes put forth is that once we recognize that we are or have experienced these stages of grief we can finally arrive at tackling the reorganization and acceptance stages. Once there we can go on with our lives, have a baby, VBAC, new career, adoption and in essence a new life and a new self.  Awareness of these stages is certainly one of the remedies, yet that often does not seem to be enough especially for those who have experienced grief in the womb or at birth, and whose memory is deeply embedded in their subconscious mind.

Dr. Arthur Janov, author of  Primal Man: The New Consciousness, has been telling us since early 1975 that: “Painful things happen to nearly all of us early in life that get imprinted in all of our systems which carry the memory forward making our lives miserable.”  Finding a way to access these memories, re-living them and integrating them in the present can create a new way of living that does not spring from them, and comes from a new, healed self. But is it possible to change our memories?

Michael M. Merzenich, professor emeritus neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco,  tells us that the brain is not an inanimate vessel that we fill; rather it is more like a living creature with an appetite, one that can grow and change itself with proper nourishment and exercise.  Thus with the right tools we can heal the past by working diligently at redesigning not only the painful memories but our thoughts, and feelings towards them.

The past is a collection of memories you hold in your head that might also not be always accurate. McGill University neuroscientist Karim Nader is pursuing the notion that every time you remember an event, you might be changing your memory of that event. “Reducing or eliminating the fear accompanying the memory … that would be the ideal scenario,” says Roger Pitman, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School who has done extensive work in this area. The latest research is based on a radical rethinking of how memories are stored in the brain. Scientists used to believe memories are like snapshots on which the details are fixed once they’re recorded. Now, many experts accept the view that memories are stored like individual files on a shelf; each time they are pulled down for viewing, they can be altered before being put back into storage. Scientists believe that altering a memory during the time it is off the shelf can create an updated memory that can be saved in place of the old one.

Indulge me in a little experiment of my own and do this exercise:

• Think back to when you last had an argument with someone.
• Go back into the memory and start to change various aspects of it. Change
  the colors in the scene, change the way people are interacting with you.
• Look at the person you are angry with and study them and see them as a little kid who is filled with feeling that might not have anything to do with you.
• Freeze frame the scene.
• Study the person again and mentally ask them questions, how are they feeling?
  Did something happen to them to make them feel this way?
• Now ask yourself what is your part in this?  There are never just one-way situations, so own your part of the anger. Was there something that made you feel this way, even before you got into a fight? Did what was said push an ancient button that had nothing to do with the situation at hand? Something that engaged a core belief like, “I am not good enough, not worthy?
• Now replay the scene again and notice the changes in yourself and the way you feel about the fight. Are you still as angry? Are you still right?

Some clients, especially those who are expecting and are afraid of negative emotion during pregnancy, are plagued by the “No, I won’t look at it! I can’t bear to remember right now!” syndrome. Some have lived with the pain so long; it seems to be a part of them. But just because you are used to it, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t affected you. As a matter of fact, pregnancy, as I often say in my book, is a perfect time for healing.  Why not take advantage of the nine months of pregnancy to heal all that stands in the way of the birthing experience you deserve and desire.

No matter what kind of grief you are experiencing, my favorite method for accelerating healing involves working with timelines. It is very simple and extremely effective for changing patterns in the subconscious. All that you need to do is go back in time, in your imagination. In fact, you can go back even before birth. Then you move through your life in your imagination engaging your emotions in the recall of the past. You then stop when you reach a negative memory and slowly recall it in detail.  Recall it as if you were watching a movie or a TV show. Don’t dwell on the feelings as they can take you to a familiar powerless place, but see it as you’d watch a show. Now freeze frame the particularly difficult scene and then change the memory.  You can either add a compassionate person to it, someone who can protect you from the wrong done to you, which could be your adult self in case the memory is from your childhood.  Or heal the moment by making peace with the events, people and places. For instance, if the grief comes from the womb, where you did not feel wanted by your mother, imagine that you can see that she did the best she could under the circumstances, and add the feeling of your adult-self   loving your-unborn-self unconditionally, reassuring you of being welcomed into this world.

It may help you to keep in mind that your body is changing all the time and that new cells are constantly replacing old ones according to the blueprint you hold in your subconscious mind. As you work with the above process to replace the blueprint held in your subconscious mind, you are causing the cells and tissues in your body and brain to form according to new, healthy, pattern.

You will get the fastest results if you keep on repeating this process a number of times. What you are really doing is impressing new memories, new experiences in your subconscious, so it doesn’t matter how accurate or detailed your imagery is, but rather how much you are able to create the feeling of let’s  say perfect health, or acceptance  and then just superimpose it over the memories about your past. If you are new to using self-hypnosis, then it may take you a little bit longer to get the results, but if you persist you will get there. This work is not only aimed towards mental and emotional serenity, but also to physical well being, as one lives in total symbiosis with the other.

You can also choose to work with a professional hypnotherapist or a therapist who is familiar with hypnosis to acquire the right tools, and eventually you can heal thyself.  There are several workshops designed to help you on this path that vary from week-long to one-day intensive.

So we ask why is it so important to address grief? The answer is quite simple. Grief, especially severe grief, can negatively impact virtually every aspect of your life.

• It can interfere with your ability to function properly at work.
• It can sour your family and personal relationships.
• It can virtually eliminate your enjoyment of leisure.
• It can cause you to have a traumatic birthing experience.
• It can negatively affect your health.

So why don’t we make the profound changes that we know we need? One of the biggest fears we are faced with is fear of the unknown. Who will we become once healed?  How will our relationships withstand our deep emotional, behavioral and spiritual changes?  Will we face yet another loss?  Yes. In order to bring on the new we must let go of the old, in essence the old self must die and a new-self be born.  Healing is a continuum that meets you wherever you are along your physical, emotional and spiritual life path. It takes a lot of courage to want to explore your fears and relive your grief in order to heal them. Fear, the other side of courage, is an emotion that very often limits our potential to heal, to change, and to be who we really are. Healing is a very complex, multi-dimensional process that involves our mind, body and spirit. Receiving a treatment or even partaking in one workshop alone is not enough to harness the healing for the rest of our lives.  Healing is a journey that takes time and requires not only courage but commitment, patience and compassion for ourselves. Often we fear change, opting to maintaining a known unhappiness rather than seeking a possible greater happiness. Many of us do not enjoy the “now” due to a preoccupation with the future. However the future is a function of our imagination. It does not yet exist, and cannot be predicted. All of us have positive and negative events in our lives that we could have never predicted and some of these events are life-altering. Sometimes we put our lives on hold, planning to do important things tomorrow. Focusing on the now, making sure that every day is meaningful; helps reduce the anxiety of the future, and the obsessive compulsions of our past.  The only absolute truth in life is that it will change, so why not be a conscious participant of our life changes and not simply a passenger.

Giuditta is holding a “Healing the Womb” workshop in August in Santa Monica.  For more details please follow this link -> Healing the Womb Workshop