How Womb Life Shapes Us

 There is a recent experiment that throws light on this subject. Babies can learn a musical melody while still in the womb.  They recognize it after they are born.  They took two groups of babies, testing them at birth and again at four months.  The tests were of brain responses. They were greater in those who recognized the tune.  And it was equally true at four months of age.  One key conclusion by the authors was that, “ a baby can be relaxed and soothed by melodies it hears before birth.” Obvious.  But the neurotic mother’s metabolism also plays a tune, a fast or erratic one.  And that baby is not longer soothed; rather, she is galvanized.  Or confused, or dazed. And this state is imprinted in the same way that she is soothed with nursery rhymes.  (twinkle twinkle little star).  (see Eino Partanen, University of Helsinki,  Finland).

Here is what makes early life so important; experiences can be engraved for life.  They stick and they guide behavior thereafter. They make us open as individuals or closed as personality traits.

 The point is that we start learning long before we think we start learning.  Yes, it is a nursery rhyme, but any key experience affects us for a very long time.  Long before we can say, “Oh yes, I remember when my daddy came home drunk and beat us!”  These are things of instincts, primordial memories that have no words, yet shape us ineluctably as any later trauma; more-so, because very early experience is stamped in with a force that is often powerful because it is stamped in to a vulnerable, naïve soul that has little previous experience to fall back on.  There is no reservoir of perceptions that help establish a frame of reference to make sense of things.

The experience joins in the a-perceptive mass which helps form an orientation to life that ultimately shapes one’s attitudes, interests and perceptions.  Later when we are asked what made you think that,? there are childhood experiences we can evoke but also many pre-birth experiences of which we are unaware.  These join into the ensemble of experience that form us. And these are the experiences that psychotherapy ignores systematically.  How can we know what drives us when we ignore life in the womb there the mother is severely depressed or takes heavy duty painkillers?  How can we know about terror and anxiety in a patient when we ignore a father who left home when the fetus was seven months? Or neglect to take into account a severe auto accident where the mother was pinned against the seat and the baby petrified?  We ignore this because we do not know about the imprint of experience and how it endures perhaps for lifetime.  We do not “grow out” of experience; we grow into them.

If we do not understand our malleability early on or how the brain changes all along the nine months of pregnancy we can’t hope to figure out endogenous depression at age thirty.  Those early experiences are still part of us and guide behavior.  So when a therapist says “I focus on behavior and try to make the patient take a healthier more wholesome attitude,” we know she is missing out.  She is missing out on causative factors that are alive and well inside of us.  And when we address the imprint we make real profound changes in the patient as he relives those central imprints.  It is supporting evidence that the traumatic event lives on. Otherwise, obviously there would be no change.

Now we see why some of us suffer endogenous depression.  Children whose mothers were depressed while carrying are more likely to have depressed offspring. (major work done at Bristol University, England who studied 8000 depressed mothers. Also see the work and comments of prof. Carmine Pariante of King’s College, London Institute of Psychiatry, Published in JAMA Psychiatry 2013,).
These studies are part of current science that should affect our practices.  We need to investigate birth weight in our patients because recent studies point to birth weight as affecting how long we live and the rapidity of aging.  (International J. of Epidemiology. 2013).

I don’t want to drown the fish but I do want to underline what we as therapists must do to be effective and help patients:  read the scientific literature.  That is our key responsibility.    We don’t want to rely on the writings of Freud or Jung from one hundred years ago. There is a new science out that we must adhere to.

What is uplifting about this research is that those nursery rhymes can still play in our minds as we mature.  We carry around that relaxation as an imprinted memory, maybe for all of our lives.