Pregnant Mothers and Neurotic Children

More and more research is helping us understand who we are. Although the thrust of current psychologic thought maintains that genetics play a big part in our development, I claim that the state of mind of a carrying mother is very, very important.

If she is depressed or anxious the baby and the developing child will have high stress hormone/cortisol levels. Think of the implications. The mother’s emotional state may dictate how our lives unfold. (See Early Human Development. April 2008. 84(4) pages 249-256). This also helps explain why so many of our beginning patients have consistently high cortisol levels (secreted by the adrenal glands). In studies of anxious or depressed mothers (mood-based changes) compared to “normal” mothers the offspring had high stress hormone levels and more activity in the emotional right frontal brain. Anxious and depressed mothers are important predictors how we will do in school and later in life. Don’t forget the fetus has an environment; that environment is the mother and her status. That environment sculpts the fetal brain. The mother doesn’t have to say a word to her baby; her physiology does it for her. That sculpture plays heavily on our future behavior. It is a good predictor of the baby’s temperament. And of course, who we are later, as well. We must remember that the stress hormones of the mother can pass through the placenta into the fetus and affect all kinds of hormone balances. And this mixture becomes the crucible for later development and personality. It is here that we can start life already handicapped. And how we react to birth may be predetermined by womb-life.

We do know that womb-life maternal anxiety can affect the sex hormone level of the offspring. It all happens so early that when a homosexual says that it is genetic or a natural state he/she isn’t aware of the impact of the mother’s state on her fetus/baby’s development. It also explains why so many of us believe that who and what we are is normal. The deviation has begun so very early, before we had an operational thinking brain that the deviation seems normal; we have nothing else to compare it to. Moreover, when we look for causes of later Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s affliction we never would imagine that our life in the womb could be a major contributing factor. So we don’t look there, hence avoiding important information. We need to study brain dementia cases and check their womb-life, when possible. Several European countries already have that information. It dictates how we react later on. Do we have a predisposition to threat; that is, are we too ready for attack and therefore on a chronic high state of alert all of the time? All this based on an “attack” by mother’s high levels of stress hormones while she is carrying; that raised the cortisol level and made hyper-vigilance a steady state. And when we need constant tranquilizers as adults we cannot imagine that womb-life is the culprit. But if we see through research that stress hormones are chronically high in emotionally disturbed patients we see why they seek out pain-killing drugs.