Womblife and the Rest of Your Life

In my book "Life Before Birth", I discuss how life inside the womb can affect us for a lifetime. There is new research on this every day. *


What is pretty clear now is that the carrying mother’s anxiety can often produce anxiety in her baby, not for the moment but for decades and decades. And what does this do? It produces ADD in school children who cannot concentrate nor focus enough to study properly. It produces hyperactive adults who have to keep going and going; making plans and projects without end. And what does that do? It makes it likely that they will die of a stroke or heart attack because the defensive gates are leaky and keep on driving the person unceasingly. This is different from those whose gates are solid and repression is massive; their death of choice will most likely be cancer. And what causes this differentiation? The kind of womblife and above all, the kind of birth; whether it is parasympaththetically dominant, where exit was most difficult, or sympathetically dominant where it took a herculean struggle to get out. The parasympath learns to hold back and not struggle to survive; while the sympath learns to struggle for survival. It is stamped in, embedded and engrave in nearly all systems; all are affected eventually, and in the reliving all are involved again, so that we see changes in most of those systems again.

What makes the difference early on is whether traumas early on are within the first 3 months of life or afterwards. There are times in the very early months when there can be free-floating anxiety with little ability to repress or gate the pain, as the gating chemicals are not yet organized and effective. Later on this may change so that repression does set in, and this may be the difference between anxiety and later depression. Anxiety a much earlier event, and depression a later one, depending heavily on gating. Anxiety, therefore, is much more a primitive response. And it is most difficult to eradicate; it never will happen without deep remote access to our low-lying brain processes. I am discussing embryonic and more likely post-embryonic life (assuming embryonic means up to 12 weeks post-conception). I mean roughly in the first trimester where the reaction is terror because adversity at that time is usually life threatening; a mother who takes drugs or smokes heavily or who is constant very anxious. And this is the time when serotonin and other repressive chemicals are not up to snuff. So we have pure terror that is embedded and imprinted. Later in life anything that evokes fear can immediately become terror as resonance reawakens the connected/related terror. These people are often known as hysterics who overreact all of the time to the slightest input; it is all “too much,” and even a slight request is overwhelming. Their anxiety level is near the top constantly. And all this because of first trimester trauma. It doesn’t have to be excessively overt. Not even perceptible. But it is there ready and waiting. And pure anxiety tells us how early the event occurred. If it is mixed with depression we know even more; perhaps there is a mixture of traumas occurring at different fetal periods. And the result of this may result in colitis fairly early life, and/or other midlife afflictions not excluding bed-wetting, a forerunner for runaway sexuality. To imagine trying to treat excessive sexual impulses without understanding prenatal events.

You see that this excessive reactivity can be a strong survival mechanism to handle early, primitive danger. The problem is that it was appropriate early on but not in adult life where it is excessive. We will never convince anyone about how wrong their reaction is because their physiology and its imprint is saying it is appropriate. The problem is that the body does not differentiate past from present. In the brain it is all the same. And in the reliving of those events the brain state in the reliving comes to exactly mimic the brain state at the time of the trauma. So no wonder the brain can be fooled. Being hyper-reactive was important early on but not normal now. And that is the problem. The only way to solve it is to go back over time and re-experience it fully and then the system and brain will know the difference and no longer over-react. We have seen this time and again as patients relive their past.

*(See the work of Vivette Glover. And also the work of the following between 2002 and 2010……O’connor, Heron and Glover. Also de Bruijn. And Williams and Taylor.)