Talk of the Town - Recollections of birth October 28 2000

Ten years ago, at a facility in a wooded mountain cove in northern California, I came face-to-face with my mother. Not my mother of present time but, weirdly, my mother before I was born.
I was a client in the STAR program, a 17-day intensive conducted by Barbara Findeisen, a psychotherapist who was already well known for what was then regarded as a very peculiar interest in the dawning field of pre- and perinatal psychology. As she had with hundreds of clients before me, Barbara led me through a hypnotic regression with the idea of recovering memory of my birth and life in the womb.
At the time the idea seemed utterly absurd to me — and this was before regression therapy came under the broad attack it has suffered since then. There is not space here to recount the phenomenal experience of that regression and several that followed. Although to this day it’s hard for me to imagine that I literally recalled my birth, several facts are indisputable.
First, during my initial regression, a second one and a related experiential process, I basically blanked out. I lost all power to move and awareness of my present circumstances. Second, during the time I was awake during the re-experience of birth, I was in terror that something was going to hurt me.
I knew nothing about my birth and out of curiosity called my mother when I returned to Atlanta to ask about it. When I asked her if she knew any reason I might have repeatedly blanked out in these processes, she informed me that I had actually been born unconscious and remained that way for hours after birth. Like many women of her generation, she was administered heavy drugs during my birth and they rendered me unconscious.
I also asked her if anything else had occurred during the birth that might have caused concern. She told me that she had been given an episiotomy. After the birth, doctors discovered while repairing her that a needle had actually been in the birth canal. She had wondered for years, she said, how it got there, if it had posed a risk, etc.
When I heard my mother’s description, I naturally wondered if she’d told me these stories before. Perhaps my imagination had narratized them during my regression as often happens during hypnosis. But my mother was sure, on account of her decades of guilt, that she’d never told me I was born unconscious.
It gets more interesting. When I reviewed some of the then-sparse studies on birth and its effects, I found one that demonstrated a very high correlation between use of drugs at birth and drug-related problems later in life. I had actually gone to California about eight years after beginning recovery from addiction.
For all the fascination this caused me at the time, my greater interest has been in what occurred during my initial regression while I was “blanked out.” I did not lose complete consciousness. In fact, my imagination awakened in the deepest way I’ve ever experienced. Basically, I watched a movie inside my head, a profound metaphor (some would call it a past life) of life with my mother and my relationship to my own destiny.
Although this was a fiction, it had a quality of reality about it that — I can’t put this another way — was more real than real. This experience was the beginning of a slow grief-filled process of reconciliation with my mother and, more important, of coming into an understanding of my life’s work. (I went back to school shortly after and got my first advanced degree in psychology.) Thus, I experienced what Freud called a “healing fiction.”
In the years since my experience, more and more research has emerged to empirically validate what Barbara was experiencing with clients like me. Not only does it seem possible to “remember” birth. Not only is it true that birth affects us throughout life in many ways. It is also possible, through the imagination (for memory is imagination) to “re-work” birth and its effects on us — to “re-imagine” our lives. The implications of this are of course phenomenal for psychology. It is a demonstration of the capacity of the imagination to heal many other aspects of our lives — as Carl Jung and his heirs in archetypal psychology have taught. It also is a profound argument against the popular current belief that biology is destiny.
But don’t take my word for it. Barbara will be here Saturday, Oct. 28, to conduct a daylong seminar on the subject of birth and relationships with Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., a cellular biologist whose work as a research fellow at Standford University School of Medicine corroborates Barbara’s longtime work with clients.
Lipton brilliantly exposes the fallacy that nature predestines us with little influence by nurture. “In fact,” he says, “we now have proof — and nobody in science disputes it — that the genes are not self-emergent. They do not turn themselves on. What’s turned on and the way it’s structured is dependent on the environment — including the environment in the womb of the mother’s blood. ... We also know that this can be re-structured — the genes can actually be changed — through the subjectivity of perception — the imagination.”
I urge you — especially if you are engaged in parenting and health care or a psychological profession — to attend the seminar, which will also include Sandra Van Pelt Hogue, a social worker engaged with Barbara in conduct of the STAR program. Cost is $100. Call Anne Love at 404-255-7929 or 831-662-2765 for information. This is a benefit for the Association of Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health.
Cliff Bostock, M.A., is a doctoral candidate in depth psychology. Contact him at 404-525-4774, or care of his web site, www.soulworks.net.