Could Your Overwhelm Be Birth Related?

Could your overwhelm be birth related? 

How could overwhelm have anything to do with my birth?

You might wonder, but our birth experiences are stored in our subconscious memories, not just from the time that we’re in utero, but ancestrally before that. But that’s another story. 

When we, as babies are born, it impacts our lives at a critical time in our development, and it affects our entire neurological system. 

Our whole central nervous system can be affected, and can impact our learning capacity, mental orientation or emotional stability, as well as our stress management. 

It also impacts upon our fight or flight response. This is something that I balance with all of my clients when they come to me, and it’s very fascinating to see those people who are almost frozen in that response that is not being activated because of what’s been imprinted onto us as babies.

The whole birth process is a dance between the mother and the baby. And did you know that a staggering 80% of children with sensory processing disorder, ADHD, developmental delays and autism all have a history of birth trauma? 

That’s not to say that that’s exactly what happened to you, but there’s a lot of other physical issues that if babies were born with problems in their bodies, like shoulder dislocation or alignment issues with the hips and feet, these all impact the newborns birth imprint.

I have an amazing therapist friend who works specifically with babies with these physical misalignment issues when they’re born to get them back into alignment with their body. 

That little baby has to push through a relatively small space, and if the mother is in a lot of stress during her pregnancy, the adrenaline that she produces can also affect the baby’s central nervous system, so that baby can develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Whatever interventions had to happen when the baby was born or directly afterwards all impact the baby. 

Often that baby is taken away from the mother immediately – that baby comes out from the nice, warm, protective womb, and then suddenly is thrust into gravity and having to breathe on its own, not breathing through the umbilical cord, and that’s a lot of stress and overwhelm for that baby, right from the first moment.

So to to add more overwhelm, stress and complications on top of an already stressful situation, is asking for a big imprint of overwhelm in that baby’s life. 

When we’re emotionally flooded with too much information or stimulation, our central nervous system is dysregulated, so we struggle to hear, see, think, even speak straight. Sometimes it can take up to 45 minutes for us to do this. This is as adults! 

So you can imagine the number of times that young children need support to learn this skill set to be able to regulate their own central nervous system when they’re in a situation of overwhelm or stress, or whatever it is that’s conquering them from the outside. 

So if you’re suffering from this in your adult life, and this is a repeating pattern that you’ve always had, maybe it’s time to look at your birth experience. 

Maybe it wasn’t yours, maybe it was your mother’s stress? Were you separated from your mother right after you were born? Were you put in an incubator? Were you taken away? Did your mother die? I mean, there could be a million different things that happened. 

Now, I hear people who said, “Yeah, my birth was fine, no problem.” But what was your mother’s birth like? Perhaps there were some emotional issues, psychological issues in your mother that subconsciously went into you, her fear of being a mother, her fear of giving birth, her fear of carrying to term or delivering a healthy baby.

All of this piles into the pot of of possible overwhelm and repeating patterns of trauma in your adult life, later on. 

If this is making some sense or you’re starting to think, “Hmm, that’s weird. Yes, actually I had these problems, and now I have this… Oh, could this be connected?”

A lot of people don’t notice the connecting patterns from how we act as adults to what happened in our childhood and what has been repeating all along. 

It doesn’t seem like it’s a repeating pattern because of different circumstances and different situations. But actually, if you look more closely, you’ll see that it is all related. 

So if you want to start to unwind this big ball of string that you’ve been wondering what core experience you’ve been wrapping it around and you want to change your way forward so that you can have a smoother flow through your life, maybe it’s time to book a call.

Let’s unravel that ball of string and get to the root of the matter.