Why Am I Banging On About Womb Life?

I am sometimes accused of too much emphasis on the trauma of birth and/or life experience in the womb. So let me explain why this is so.  My conclusions are based on almost fifty years of clinical observation now added to by hundreds of scientific articles in major journals.  It is not that these article “prove” my point, but that when joined with science helps add weight to it all.  We should pay close attention if we want to understand ourselves and our families.

One of the key articles supporting my position is by at least twenty authors including the well-known scientist in Canada, Michael Meaney.  (“Antenatal Maternal Anxiety Predicts Variations in Neural Structures Implicated in anxiety Disorders in Newborns.”  Anne Rifkin-Graboi et al.  J. of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Soon to be published).

Among other things the authors wanted to find out the effects of maternal anxiety in carrying mothers on the fetus/baby.  

One thing they wanted to know was how this anxiety affected the white matter of the brain, consisting heavily on nerve fibers, their myelin sheaths and their connections.  So what were some of the effects?  “Children were classified with fearfulness and social withdrawal.  This predicted risk factors for anxiety disorders.”  And Anxious, carrying mothers resulted in stress reactivity in offspring and affected the changes in neurotransmitter functioning such as norepinephrine.  That also dysregulated cortisol production (stress hormones).  And this high cortisol level can cross the placenta and affect all kinds of processes including many of the neurotransmitters.

It altered uterine blood flow that directly affected brain development of the fetus.    We begin to see how massive the effects are of maternal anxiety.  There are many changes in the limbic system and the relationship of the neo-cortex and various feeling sites.  And there is diminished control on feeling states.  There is less corticol control, in general which predicts behavioral problems later on.  And the crucible of all this begins early on in womb-life.  There is really no free way out of all this.  Giving a mother calming drugs produces all sorts of corollary problems.  We need to extirpate some of the latent pain stored deep in the brain, before pregnancy.  Otherwise, we get later distress when the child is temporarily removed from his mother; separation anxiety.  This becomes a child who cannot sit still, cannot concentrate and fidgets, is restless and has to keep on the move as the imprint is compounded by later traumas.  This is how it all starts and builds from there.

Without going more deeply into limbic structures, there are adverse effects on them (especially the insula and amgydala), which impairs integration of feeling with higher levels.  Some of the current anti-anxiety medication works on these limbic areas to produce a calming effect.

What the study found, which is not my experience, is that is that produced inhibition of behaviors.  I have found the opposite; early anxiety drives external behavior, not inhibits it.  But it does adversely affect information processing;  complex thinking is diminished.  This may be due to  decreased/slowed overall brain development.

What all this is about is something I wrote about 30 years ago: the prototype; the crucible that structures later abilities and malfunctions.  These are the formative experiences that channel our thinking, emoting and behavior for the years to come.  They determine how well be learn or don’t learn.  We must pay attention here and that is why I go on about it.  They are absolutely formative of who we later become.

There is a related study on white matter (Brain white-matter changes seen in children who experience (early) neglect.”  Jan 26, 20015.  The MAMA Network Journals).
It isn’t just anxiety that is the culprit here.  Neglect and indifference also play a major role.  Again, white matter is part of the crime.  Children who grew up in a Romanian institution show “compromised brain development.”  It is not just that this seemingly ephemera happening affected how the brain develops, but it has far-reaching effects throughout development.  Just ignoring a baby for a protracted period can adversely affect his brain.

The point of most of these kind of studies is that brain development depends heavily on experience.  Sometimes it can be seen as physical brain impairment; other times it shows up as brain dysfunction; a not-so obvious event.  Things do get better if the child is placed in a loving home, but in my view there can be a residue of impairment,”Dyslexia, cross dominance, confused thinking, “etc.  It is not obvious but what I see in some adopted children is often some subtle kind of brain affliction.  This is not even to mention limbic dysfunction and difficulty in controlling and sorting out feelings.  And what amazes me is that something like neglect, this vaporish behavior, without physical substance can do such physical damage.  And why? Because love is like that. It is an energy field; feelings travel and have an effect. They change brains and alter our physical development.  And interestingly, even the physical connection between the two hemispheres of the brain is affect by neglect.

I seriously doubt that all these impairing effects can be fully reversed when I child is placed in a loving home. There seems to be a lingering residue.  Better to grow up in a loving home than to play catch-up.  Then our brains can find equilibrium, balance and normality.

There is a related study from the University of Cologne, Germany (Novel form of experience-dependent plasticity in the adult brain revealed. Feb. 6, 20015).  Essentially, what they are finding is that experience can reorganize connectivity in the brain, in particular, the limbic structures such as the hippocampus.  Thus, I assume that life in the womb can give us a leg up on how well our emotional brain functions, how well we remember and how good is our thinking processes.  Neural stem cells in this area can regenerate over a lifetime so that the hippocampus goes on and on intact.  And I believe this depends on not too much trauma.
And when we have a good gestation, birth and infancy there is a stronger liaison between the top level thinking and lower level feeling.  We are connected.  In short what takes place in the brain early on depends on our experience.  Deprivation of our basic need is not good for our connectivity later on, and that means our fluid interaction to our feelings many be impaired.  The brain is quite fluid, it seems, and when we treat it well it comes back to guide and help us.