Was Your Birth Traumatic?

Our birth story creates a blueprint for which our further psychological development takes place. 

So if we have an easy, no stress birth, we might have an easier life and be less anxious. 

But what if you had birth trauma when you were born? 

You may be wondering what is birth trauma? 

Serious physical birth trauma can cause medical issues.  If you’ve lost oxygen whilst being born, had the cord around your neck, or extreme forceps delivery, or a host of other complications, you can actually have physical health issues. 

But of course, I’m not a doctor. I don’t work with that side of birth trauma, but what I do work with is the psychological side; the subconscious beliefs and behaviours that we take on because of the blueprint that was set up at birth. Birth trauma can happen in utero before you’re actually born as well.

Maybe you did have the cord around your neck, not enough to cause physical issues, but that could have created a subconscious irrational fear of suffocation in your life. Or maybe even allergies! Asthma which is related to sadness of the mother.

Or forceps delivery, being dragged out may cause a streak of stubbornness for example. It also may not! But it is something to investigate if you are still exhibiting beliefs and behaviours that don’t make any sense as to why they are so deeply embedded in you.

if you were a C – section baby, you may not have that close relationship with your mother because vaginal birth is teamwork! A real dance between the mother and baby.  Or you may not have a very big drive in life because you missed out on having to literally push through! 

Also depending on what was going on when your mother was pregnant with you, if she was a drug addict, if you were abandoned, if you were put in an incubator right away and not touched for the first few days, if you were born into a war zone, culturally depending where you are and what was going on could be relevant. Or, if you were part of a twin set (or more) and the other one died, or was born and then died.

Whatever kind of stress was going on when you were born, that sets you up for life. Sigmund Freud thought that birth was the first experience of anxiety for the child, and also the prototype for separation anxiety. 

Naturally, the baby’s been safe inside the warm womb, growing. She can hear the mother’s heartbeat, can hear everything her parents are saying, and then she comes out into the cold world with gravity. And think about in the olden days, they used to actually smack that poor child to get her crying, so she’d breathe!

That’s a pretty rough entry into life. I’ve worked with birth trauma a lot, my own birth trauma, and with lots of clients. I’ve seen so many variations, and the fascinating patterns it creates. Even down to having fertility issues later in life, although birth trauma is just a portion of that whole area.

I had birth trauma in utero and when I was born. My mother nearly miscarried me at three months pregnant, was hemorrhaging blood on the street right after a gynaecological appointment. She returned immediately and the doctor tipped her upside down and advised her to miscarry me.

But she was intent on having me. So for the rest of her pregnancy she had to stand on her head every hour on the hour, to tip her uterus back into place. 

And so me, the baby, felt really trapped, because obviously I was feeling, ‘maybe this is perhaps a good time to not be born.’

Shamanically we believe we all have a soul contract with pretty much all of the major players in our lives. Certainly we believe that we choose our parents for whatever we need to learn or whatever past life karma we need to heal.

I felt trapped in the womb. I was a couple of weeks late, but I don’t think they had scans back in those days. Suddenly I was ready to be born, and although my mother was at the hospital in the waiting room, she felt me coming out, and they didn’t really believe her because a lot of women feel that sort of pressure. 

But me being her second baby, she knew what was happening and was insistent. She was put on a gurney, and while she was being wheeled to delivery, I started to come out. The nurse who was attending panicked and held me in! I know, crazy huh?

I swallowed a lot of gunk and was quite sick for the first six months of my life. I also couldn’t digest milk. Finally, they found goat’s milk for me. At 10 pounds, (my poor mother), I was put immediately into an incubator because I was jaundiced, and so I wasn’t held for the first two days of my life. 

Fast forward into childhood and my adult life. What my experience of birth trauma set up for me: after being trapped inside, when I wanted to come out, I wasn’t allowed to come out. It set the blueprint for not having a great amount of respect or trust for authority, hating to be enclosed in spaces, a little bit of claustrophobia, not to a huge extent, but still, and I’ve definitely got that “Me first, me first, get out of my way. Get out of my way” energy flowing through my veins!

Even still, I’ve got to consciously calm down in traffic, because it’s like, why are people blocking my path?! This is something that’s a fundamental drive inside of me.

I had abandonment issues, even though I know and understood intellectually and emotionally as a child, that my parents wanted me and that they loved me, but because that little baby had to fight so hard to get out, and then wasn’t held, the little baby, me, felt like she wasn’t wanted, right? 

So that builds a great sense of aloneness in the world. I also believe that I was part of a twin set. My mother believes this as well, because she lost so much blood when she was miscarrying me. Anyway, that’s another whole long story, but I’ve always had this intense feeling of loss in my life, even though I’ve been very blessed and haven’t had much loss in my lifetime to warrant the level of sadness and loss I have always felt. 

Could it be past life stuff? Yes, it could be related. But we always deal with what’s in this lifetime first. We also hold seven generations of cellular memory in our bodies, filtering down into us from our ancestral lines. 

Birth trauma marries very well with the healing work that I do, because with every single client, I clear foetal memories in the first session, because it’s all of those things that our parents were feeling and experiencing when they were pregnant with us. 

If your mother was being physically abused while she was pregnant with you, or if you had an addictive parent, or whatever was happening around them, that baby is picking up all of that stress.

This also ties back into the shamanic work of healing the ancestral line and looking at what kind of belief systems, patterns, and memories were handed down through all of the generations. 

This is all out of conscious awareness, which is why this work is so exciting because you really get to the root of stuff that you don’t realise that you’re still holding. 

The more I talk to people, I keep hearing connecting patterns of what happened to them when they were born. Their birth story and their life story, their birth story and their relationship with their mother, their birth story and their relationship with their partner, their birth story and past lives they know about. 

If I’ve had the privilege to go and look at somebody’s ancestral line that can really open up amazing insight into the birth story. It’s all connected. 

So if you know your birth story, and know or think you’ve had birth trauma of some kind, or you’re feeling like you’re constantly triggered all of the time as an adult or have an anxious or stressful relationship, specifically with your mother? Then maybe you want to think about that birth trauma and how it could have set you up for life. 

In the healing and energy work that I’ve always done, we always start at the beginning, at birth. But more and more, what I’ve been hearing from people, from my clients, is all of their birth stuff coming up. The roots of our becoming. 

I always talk about getting down to the roots of things. What I’m really good at doing is connecting the patterns with different circumstances and with different casts of characters in your own life, to see the connective pieces. I’ll point out what I see as an obvious pattern to someone, and they’ll be like, “Oh my God, that’s just made so much sense to me!” 

So if you know that you’ve had birth trauma, please get in touch with me, because you could have a whole floodgate opening of ‘aha’ moments that could explain everything in your life. 

At 11 years old, I heard the first part about my mother’s pregnancy with me, but it wasn’t until I was 37 when I was first starting Transactional Analysis studies, that I heard the rest of it, about being born on the gurney, being held in and put in the incubator.

When my mother told me all of this, she happened to be visiting me in England the weekend I was starting Transactional Analysis and I cried and cried in her arms till I had salt stains on my face. 

It explained so much about my relationship with her, why I always felt I was walking on eggshells around her, and it explained so many of those unasked questions about my personality, about my fundamental kind of drive in life and the need to be how I was.

Knowing the whole story gave me so much awareness about myself that I was then able to start to work on these patterns and belief systems and start to clear things so that I could calm down.

What is it that’s holding you in your repeating patterns that are not serving you from your past? Maybe you don’t know your birth story?!  I encourage you to find out if you can.

I’m going to be talking about birth trauma a lot, because this is something that I feel is at the base of everything. It’s at the root of all of my work, and it bridges the gap to the ancestral stuff too.

Because if you can heal your foetal memories, heal your ancestral line, and discover what your repeating patterns and subconscious beliefs are in your adult lifetime, and heal those three things, you will be able to flow through life much more easily. 

Really exciting, huh? I so look forward to hearing from all of you. Book a free mind shift call, and let’s talk about your birth. 

Lots of love.

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