RESEARCH SHOWS THAT BABIES ARE TEACHING US ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF VIOLENCE
While the funerals are still going on in Tucson, David Chamberlain has said that I may share this paper on the web. Having known him and his dedicated research since 1982, I feel so very strongly that the insights he offers here can be of help in our current societal dilemma. It takes only some minutes to read this paper which has been so many years in the making.--bss
WHAT BABIES ARE TEACHING US ABOUT VIOLENCE*
by David B. Chamberlain, Ph.D.
[This paper was the Presidential Address at the 7th International Congress of the Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH), San Francisco, September 1995 on the theme “Birth & Violence: The Societal Impact.” Published in the Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health, 10(2), 57-74, Winter, 1995. For copies contact dbchamb@pacbell.net]
WHAT BABIES ARE TEACHING US ABOUT VIOLENCE*
by David B. Chamberlain, Ph.D.
ABSTRACT
Because of their keen awareness and proven learning ability before birth, babies are a major, though generally unacknowledged, source of knowledge about the early origins of violence. Clinical and experimental evidence reveals that babies are exposed to considerable violence in the womb and at birth. Many premature babies live in a veritable “theatre of violence”. Babies carry destructive imprints of early rejection and separation.
In a violent society which accepts anguished birth as “normal,” babies born in bliss set a higher standard for birth which we have not yet understood. These babies at least demonstrate that violent birth need not be the norm and they may also be warning us that birth without the baptism of violence may be a necessary ingredient for life without violence.
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[* This paper was the Presidential Address at the 7th International Congress of the Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH), San Francisco, September 1995 on the theme “Birth & Violence: The Societal Impact.” Published in the Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health, 10(2), 57-74, Winter, 1995. For copies contact dbchamb@pacbell.net]
Introduction
We probe the connections between birth and violence at a time when society seems more and more violent, and more and more people seem genuinely concerned about it. Parents, legislators, criminologists, policemen, theologians, and psychologists are among the millions who are asking why people willfully injure and destroy each other. The result of all this activity is a massive and multiplying literature measured in thousands of articles, books, conferences, and media productions. Nevertheless, the roots of violence in the prenatal/perinatal era are rarely explored.
Our approach is to respect all sources of knowledge and all types of evidence including experimental, clinical, and personal experience. We like to engage parents, professionals, therapists, clients, and babies in the task of understanding early development. Babies are a source of knowledge about ourselves, a revelation of human nature, and babies can be “bellwethers.” Bellwether is a term used by shepherds to designate the lead sheep, the one who wears a bell. I ask you to think about how babies can lead us and what they can teach us. This reverses the usual idea that they should follow and learn from us. But think about it: Would this violent world be better off if we tried to be more like them or if they tried to be more like us?
We do well to watch babies closely. They are like a mirror we can hold up to discover ourselves as fully sentient, fully conscious beings. Babies can also serve (if we let them) as an “Early Warning System” for humankind. This is hazardous duty for babies, teaching us, warning us of danger. In this respect, they are like the beautiful, singing canaries that coal miners once took into the bowels of the earth to warn them of deadly gasses. Babies have several important things to teach us.
1. Babies are teaching us the origins of violence.
Until recently, the prevailing scientific habit has been to treat the earliest period of human development--from conception to birth--as an insensitive, unconscious, period of physical growth. Babies are teaching us quite the opposite: they are highly sensitive, reactive, and impressionable participants throughout gestation and birth. However, this is still the minority view in both medicine and psychology.
The belief which has blocked understanding for a hundred years is the idea that no intelligence is possible and no learning or memory can occur until after birth, when the construction of the brain is more advanced. If this were true, it would follow that babies cannot care about anything, know anything, or learn anything--certainly nothing about love and violence. The false idea that prenates cannot learn is still given credence in academic circles, permeates the fundamental assumptions of developmental psychology, obstetrics and neonatology, still casts a shadow over nursing, midwifery, and childbirth education, and still confuses each new generation of pregnant parents. The mistaken belief that babies are not sentient is the main reason why scholars rarely look for the roots of violence in the earliest human experiences.
Potentially, babies have a lot to tell us and they are busy communicating with the psychologists, obstetricians, neonatologists, nurses, midwives, childbirth educators, and parents who will listen to them. Babies have been demonstrating awareness, vulnerability to influence, and intelligence (e.g., Verny & Kelly, 1986, Klaus & Klaus, 1985, Chamberlain, 1987, 1990, 1992, 1994). For two decades we have had proof that full-term newborns, prematurely born babies, and even babies in utero are capable of classical conditioning and habituation (e.g., Rovee-Collier & Lipsitt, 1982, Leader et al, 1982). More recently, with refinements in both learning theory and experimental methodology, newborns have demonstrated tactile, auditory, and olfactory learning, imitation learning, and verbal learning (e.g., Van de Carr, 1992, Busnel et al, 1992, Meltzoff & Moore, 1977, Ungerer et al, 1978, and Balogh & Porter, 1986). Recognition learning of musical passages, stories, voices, native language sounds and even children’s rhymes have been shown at birth and during intra-uterine life (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980, Moon, Cooper, & Fifer, 1993). You may not be familiar with the latest in the series of important experiments by Anthony DeCasper and colleagues, where French mothers repeated a child’s rhyme three times a day from week 33 to 37 gestational age. After four weeks of daily rhymes, babies recognized the rhyme they had heard but showed no recognition of a different rhyme (DeCasper et al, 1994).
Since the evidence for learning in utero and at birth is now overwhelming, we can assert that babies are capable of learning violence both before and during birth.
2. Babies are teaching us they are no strangers to violence in the womb.
Let us pause a moment to clarify definitions of violence and trauma. The dictionary says simply that trauma is a body injury produced by violence. In the psychiatric domain, trauma is a shocking experience which has a lasting effect on mental life.
Babies are exquisitely sensitive to their surroundings in the womb. Between 10 and 15 weeks, their mothers’ cough or laugh will get most fetuses moving within seconds (Tajani and Ianniruberto, 1990). Babies do not live in a fortress but in a mother. If she is assaulted, babies will learn about violence; if she is generously loved, babies will learn about love. A fetus whose mother received an electric shock while she was ironing sat bolt upright and immobile in the womb for two days--long after the mother had recovered. Inez Correia (1994) has measured the effect on the fetus of a mother viewing brief portions of a violent movie. Fetuses were upset along with the mother. They share the world of emotion.
You will perhaps recall that Sontag and Wallace back in 1934, using a primitive apparatus to measure heart and respiratory activity in the mother and fetus, discovered that when a pregnant patient was pursued by a psychotic husband, the baby was alarmed right along with the mother. Recently, a news story in California brought to public attention the background of Robert Harris who was executed in the gas chamber by the State of California. Harris was born three months early after his mother was kicked brutally in the abdomen by her angry husband and began hemorrhaging. This was only the first of many violent experiences this murderer-in-the-making suffered at the hands of his mother and father, a violence he later turned on innocent animals and people. At age 25, he shot two teenagers point blank, laughed at them after he pulled the trigger, and calmly ate the hamburgers they had just bought for lunch. We could not find a more dramatic example of a life that began and ended in violence.
Now that amniocentesis is common, babies in the womb frequently confront a needle entering their private territory. Studies show they react fearfully, defensively, and sometimes aggressively (Ianniruberto and Tajani, 1981). This was brought to my attention again when an acquaintance told us of her experience during amniocentesis. Her husband, the doctor, and the ultrasound technician all saw little Claire bat the side of the needle! The technician said, “Take it out!” When the doctor reinserted the needle, the fetus again attacked it , forcing the doctor to remove the needle. The husband and doctor were in a nervous sweat. The doctor said he had never before seen a baby bat a needle. The parents had an instant lesson in prenatal psychology: they had no idea that a baby this age could sense the intrusion of a needle (and with eyelids fused), have such strong feelings and take such effective action.
Ultrasound is revealing the hidden life of twins in utero. These pictures demolish the old theory that social relationships begin after birth. By 20 weeks, twins manifest a range of behaviors from affectionate to aggressive. Several observers have reported twins hitting each other. At 24 weeks g.a., monoamniotic twins were filmed having a boxing match with repeated rounds of a few minutes each. Rest periods separated rounds when one would strike with his hand and the other would strike back. (Ianniruberto & Tajani, 1981). They also filmed twins who were in different amniotic sacs. These brothers hit each other by pushing the dividing membrane. Obviously, we must enlarge our understanding of the roots of violence.
Much of the violence which takes place in utero is the silent, invisible type: the injuries cannot be discovered until much later. Babies are trying to alert us to this damage but we are slow in learning. Included in this category are (1) psychic damages conveyed through attitude, and (2) brain damage inflicted through neglect. Bustan and Coker (1994) have uncovered the lethal consequences of rejection. In a cohort of 8,000 pregnant women, divided into those who wanted and those who did not want the pregnancy, the unwanted were 2.4 times more likely to die within the first month of life. In a cross-cultural study of planned and unplanned babies in the U.S. and Greece, the planned (and welcomed) babies were already showing higher levels of cognitive processing and greater attachment to their mothers at three months of age than the unplanned babies (Row & Drivas, 1993). This is especially significant considering that roughly half of the pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned.
Recent studies of violent criminals have revealed they often have poorly functioning brains. These poorly-built brains were constructed under adverse conditions during pregnancy. Research psychologist Adrian Raine finds enough evidence to justify labeling criminal behavior a clinical disorder resulting from structural and metabolic problems in the prefrontal area, as well as from other brain injuries and dysfunctions (Raine, 1993; Raine et al, 1994). Psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis has studied juveniles on death row and found a pattern of neurological impairment, paranoid misperception, hypervigilence, and low IQ’s among these children (Lewis et al, 1988). Doctors Raine and Lewis fully appreciate that a combination of factors ultimately determines violent criminal behavior, but we must take note that brain-based origins of violence begin in the prenatal period. Having a sub-optimal brain means that life is more difficult, frustration is never ending, and self-control is marginal. This can lead to misery, crime, and even death--all from prenatal causes. Recent news from Children’s Hospital, Boston adds to our understanding of SIDS. Using positron emission tomography brain scanning, researchers discovered that SIDS babies have a deficit in the “CO2 detection system.” A fully functioning brain wakes a baby when the CO2 gets too high. We are looking at another violent consequence of impaired brain growth in utero.
A likely cause of abnormal brain growth is the ingestion of drugs and chemicals, legitimate or illegitimate. These substances can cause silent, invisible damage. Dangers of exposure to alcohol in utero are well known. The list of destructive effects now include evidence for slowed cognitive activity in infancy (S. Jacobson et al, 1993). Prenatal exposure to the invisible environmental toxin PCB also compromises cognition: tests show less efficient visual discrimination and poorer short-term memory (J. Jacobson et al, 1992). Epidemiologists now think that breast cancer may originate in utero from excessive exposure to estrogen (Trichopoulos, 1990; Ekbom et al, 1992).
Another impediment to normal growth may be the frequent use of ultrasound. In a randomized controlled trial involving 1400 women in Western Australia, women who had ultrasound five times during pregnancy gave birth to babies with lower birth weight than women who had ultrasound only once (Newnham et al, 1993). Low birth weight reflects suboptimal brain growth, which brings us back to our starting point: having a poorly constructed brain may lead to problems of cognition and self-control that increases the likelihood of violence and crime.
The safety of obstetrical anesthetics has been a concern over several decades. Psychologist Yvonne Brackbill began reviewing the literature in 1979 showing the effects of maternal anesthetics on infants (Brackbill, 1979; Brackbill, McManus, & Woodward, 1985). A seven-year study of over 3,000 babies showed long-lasting effects on their behavior and muscular functions. Many children born to mothers given drugs were slow to start sitting, standing, and walking. By age seven, some of these children were lagging in language learning skills of perception, memory, and judgment. In Sweden, Bertil Jacobson and colleagues studied the birth experiences of adult addicts and found a connection between obstetric pain medication and eventual amphetamine addiction (Jacobson et al, 1988). Opiate addiction was linked with the use of opiates, barbiturates, and nitrous oxide at birth (Jacobson et al, 1990). More recently, a study of epidural anesthesia via continuous infusion of bupivacaine and fantanyl was found to upset newborn visual habituation as well as immediate novelty preference (Brumitt, 1994).
Mirmiran and Swaab (1992), of the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research point to damage to the developing brain from pharmaceuticals given to mothers in the third trimester. They report that 80% of pregnant and lactating women are given drugs and warn that the type of brain damage which comes of this is not “grossly evident,” but causes permanent microscopic and biochemical alterations in the formation of neurones, their migration, formation of neurites, synapses, transmitters, receptors, and behavioral states. They say what appears to be a structurally “normal” brain is functionally handicapped.
3. Babies tell us that even “normal” birth is violent.
Babies communicate this with their strong voices, their anguished facial expressions, and by vigorous movements of arms and legs. Are they not famous for crying fiercely at birth? Both parents and professionals expect this, smile nervously, and call it “healthy.” Birth cries are not yet taken seriously, although most of them are clearly a reaction to violence. Screaming babies tell us that something is wrong.
My own attention was drawn to birth trauma by clients remembering birth in hypnosis (Chamberlain, 1990). The great majority (but not all) were actively protesting inappropriate conditions or actions at the time of birth. With ringing clarity they identified what was wrong: the pressure of forceps on their heads, cold rooms, bright lights, needle injections, repeated heel jabs for blood, stinging or blurring eye medicine, being suspended by their feet, hasty cutting of the umbilical cord, separating them from their mother, and isolating them in nurseries. Their cries were cries of pain and protest.
Although many birth professionals have changed their attitude about infant cries, the prevailing practice is to tolerate crying and to continue painful routines regardless of crying. There is no goal of preventing crying. As might be expected, the crying continues. A psychological approach would ask why a baby is crying, and, would work to eliminate the possible causes. French obstetrician Frederick Leboyer in Birth Without Violence (1975) led us in that direction by comparing anguished baby faces with blissful faces.
When neonates cry intensely and are impossible to console, pediatricians often become resigned and counsel parents to accept colic as a difficult developmental phase. A psychological approach, such as that of William Emerson and Raymond Castellino, is to identify what past trauma the baby is expressing and work to resolve it. In this form of therapy, body language and cry language is respected as genuine and helpful communication. Psychologist Aletha Solter (1984, 1995) sees colicky crying as meaningful and potentially therapeutic and teaches parents how to facilitate this.
One of the most violent routines associated with hospital birth in the 20th Century is the practice of male circumcision, a surgical alteration of the penis, in the past always performed without anesthetic, and at the present frequently performed without anesthetics. In my view, this physical and psychic trauma cannot possibly be justified for any of the “medical” reasons which have been proposed over the last hundred years.
Proving that circumcision is, in fact, a trauma with serious consequences should not be that difficult. First of all, a boy is permanently deprived of a functional part of his sexual anatomy. Is this not a serious long-term consequence? In my experience with clients, circumcision has sometimes been the origin of deep distrust between mother and son, or has left the victim with an unconscious impression there is something wrong with his penis. Harder to prove, but a hypothesis we must consider in this violent age, is that this sexual trauma contributes to sexual violence. Note well: prior to the operation, the penis is swabbed--often by a female nurse--with cool disinfectant, creating an erection; then the penis is cut! Marilyn Milos states the problem concisely: “Circumcision is where sex and violence meet for the first time.”
New research by doctors at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto has documented that circumcised boys have a more extreme response to routine injections of vaccine at 4 or 6 months of age than do boys who are intact (Taddio et al, 1995). The babies who were circumcised showed more signs of pain and cried longer than intact boys, suggesting a long-term effect. These pediatricians recommend anesthesia for circumcision. However, a survey of primary physicians in that area, who performed circumcisions, revealed that only half used any form of anesthesia. Twelve percent still believed babies do not feel pain, and 35% believed babies do not remember it (Wellington & Rieder, 1993). In the U.S., 60% of male newborns are still being circed, usually with no concern about their pain. Is this not a seedbed for violence in our society?
Research based on over 4,200 consecutive births in Copenhagen found that birth complications like use of forceps, breech delivery, cord prolapse, pre-eclampsia and long labor, when combined with maternal rejection and extended separations in the first year, predispose the victims toward violent crime (Raine, Brennan & Mednick, 1994). Although only 4.5% of the sample had both risk factors, this small group accounted for 18% of all the violent crimes perpetrated by these 4200 people. Earlier studies also found links between obstetric complications and behavior disorders in children (Pasamanick, 1956), perinatal trauma and juvenile delinquency (Lewis et al, 1979), and perinatal complications and criminality (Litt, 1971). More recently, Kandel and Mednick (1991) found a significant correlation between delivery complications (e.g., eclampsia, forceps, ruptured uterus and cord prolapse) and adolescent and adult violent offending. The association was particularly strong for a small group of violent recidivists.
Taken together, this alarming evidence suggests that babies born in the era of hospital obstetrics from 1939 to present were born in violence, baptised by violence. Neither medicine nor psychology understood the formative influence of early pain.
4. Babies tell us the premature nursery is a theatre of violence.
Babies arriving too early find themselves in a surreal environment of needles, lights, incubators, and monitors designed for physical life support, but not for emotional life support. When these special nurseries were designed in 1967, babies were not expected to have thoughts, feelings, or perception of pain. Virtually everything done to children in NICU’s is painful: breathing tubes, suction tubes, feeding tubes going down the throat, monitor electrodes fastened to the skin, intravenous punctures, heel lancing, and endless interruptions and alarms. Over the last 25 years, the number of premature births has risen to over 10%. Obstetrician David Cheek calls it “the tragedy of premature birth” (Cheek, 1994).
In this theatre of violence, babies learn many lessons. Edward Harrison, who entered the NICU at 29 weeks g.a., learned to fear the sound and sight of adhesive tape and bandages. At age 15, he was still carrying in his unconscious mind the experience of having large patches of skin accidentally ripped from his abdomen and chest when monitor pads and tape were removed. He was also phobic about doctors, medical procedures, and hospitals. He would become sick at the sight of the hospital, and could not go for necessary medical care without sedation. Edward was shunted for hydrocephalus, while paralyzed with curare. Although he could not move, cry, or react in any way, he could see, hear, and feel as large incisions were cut in his scalp, neck, and abdomen, as a hole was drilled in his skull, as a tube was inserted into the center of his brain, then pushed down under the skin of his neck, chest, and abdomen and implanted deep in his abdominal cavity. At fifteen, he still will not allow anyone to touch his head, his neck, or his abdomen.
Edward’s experience was not unique. Numerous painful surgeries were routinely done on premature babies without benefit of pain-killing anesthetic, including the most common surgery, PDA, thorocotomy for ligation of patent arteriosus. Necessary for 50% of infants born under 33 weeks g.a. or weighing less than 1500 g., this major operation involves cutting holes in both sides of the neck, another in the right side of the chest, an incision from the breastbone around to the backbone, prying the ribs apart, and tying off an extra artery near the heart. In addition, the left lung must be retracted, and a hole must be cut for a chest tube. All this took an hour and a half, during which time the baby was left completely conscious of pain, and flooded with terror. As impossible as it seems, this was standard practice in neonatal medicine from the discovery of ether in 1846 until about 1986. For 140 years, ether anesthesia was reserved for certain classes of children and adults, but not for babies (Pernick, 1985).
What could the babies tell us about this experience? Being paralyzed, they could not use body language in the usual way. Doctors were convinced the mind was not working and the experience could mean nothing. In reaction to surgery without anesthesia, some babies went into a trance or fell unconscious during or after their ordeals. Doctors said they fell asleep and were fine. However, many babies died, not immediately, but from shock following surgery. Death was their message, like the message of the canaries brought into the mines.
Since 1986, many doctors have changed their minds about infant surgery without anesthesia, and medical societies have generally made new commitments to give babies the same consideration in regard to pain control as they do other patients. If this new path is followed, the total number of pain-traumatized babies could diminish each year. Meanwhile, no one really knows what the consequences to society will be for inflicting so much pain on so many premature babies. Massive pain makes us desperate and irrational, willing to fight and take extreme risks. Pain feeds rage.
NICU alumni are growing up: the very first graduates are now approaching age 30. Their ranks are constantly swelling as those from about 700 nurseries join them. If the percentage of premature babies holds around 10%, it means we are adding about 400,000 per year. We should carefully assess the long-term consequences of such a vast social experiment. Yet, I am not aware of any studies specifically focused on NICU trauma, violent behavior, and crime in this group.
With increasing acceptance of newborn pain perception, the debate now shifts to whether the fetus can perceive pain. That they do is shown by a team of London neonatologists who found that during intrauterine needling, the fetus mounts a full plasma cortisol and beta-endorphin stress response indicative of pain (Giannakoupoulos et al, 1994). Their study of 46 fetuses during intrauterine blood transfusions revealed an increase of 590% of b-endorphin and 183% increase of cortisol after ten minutes of the invasive fetal surgery. Even the youngest premies showed a strong response.
In special care nurseries, pain and suffering are being reduced by several promising trends: a new acceptance of the baby’s intelligence and capacity (e.g., Thoman and Ingersoll, 1989); introduction of pleasurable tactile interactions (Field, 1990; Adamson-Macedo & Attree, 1994); a new treatment approach called “individualized developmental care” which involves intensive listening and involvement with individual babies (Als, et al, 1994); and by new cribs and equipment designed to mimic the sound and movement of the uterine environment (Gatts, Winchester, & Fiske 1992). If neonatology continues to incorporate this kind of psychology, the current violence of the special care nursery may diminish--and with it some portion of societal violence which we have hardly begun to measure. Whatever happens in future nurseries, we must understand that the experience of prematurity is formative in its impact. For example, Stiefel and colleagues (1987) found that preterm babies studied at 12 and 18 months of age show greater sensitivity to even low levels of stress and show less ability to modulate distress once aroused. They do not relate to toys in the same way as full-term (fully-built) babies do. Their way of reacting to life carries a greater potential for emotional imbalance and loss of control--because they were prematurely born.
5. Babies know the destructive impact of rejection and separation.
Ever since the pace-setting work of pediatricians Klaus and Kennell on maternal-infant bonding in 1976, attention has been repeatedly drawn to the destructive effects of untimely separations. In animal studies, the profound effects of separation in the post-partum period have been documented by Harlow (1958) and by Prescott (1971; Prescott, 1995). Separation is both a physical and emotional experience for a baby and can begin anytime in the womb or after birth. Whenever it occurs, it is a stroke of violence.
Few things can compare with the oneness between mother and baby during gestation. The connections are total and holistic, embracing mind, emotion, and sensation. In this intimate world, babies know when they are not wanted, and if rejection persists, the harm worsens. This was thoroughly documented by the landmark study that followed several cohorts of unwanted babies in Finland, Sweden, and the former Czeckoslovakia over a period of thirty years (David et al, 1988). The mothers, repeatedly denied abortions, were forced to bear and raise children they did not want. As their children’s lives unfolded (in comparison with matched control subjects) they proved to be at greater risk for social and psychiatric problems, and were more often delinquent. In the Prague cohort, unwanted children had almost three times the risk of showing up in the Criminal Register. This finding underscores the data of Raine, Brennan, and Mednick (1994) that rejection and post-partum separation paves the road to criminal violence.
This evidence is also coherent with the thesis of Ken Magid (1987) that children with no conscience are those who never had a close relationship with anyone. He typically finds in the family histories of psychopathic killers that they never had an affectionate, supportive relationship with anyone at the beginning of their lives. They started life unattached and grew up unable to follow rules or form lasting relationships. Without guilt, empathy or trust, their actions are callous and cruel; they kill without caring. We say they are suffering from “antisocial personality disorder.”
Some clinical data indicate how early the vulnerability to rejection can be felt, though not necessarily on a conscious level. Psychologist Andrew Feldmar (1974) encountered four adolescents who were repeatedly attempting suicide at the same time each year. When he had put all the facts together, he learned from their mothers that their suicidal compulsion was occurring each year around the time their mothers had tried to abort them--something the adolescent children had never consciously known.
The same fetal sensitivity shown by these self-destructive youth is put to positive use in programs of prenatal stimulation. In every program which has been empirically tested, the efforts of parents to communicate love and welcome to their babies in the womb has been crowned with success. A prominent benefit has been the creation of strong mutual parent-child relationships (Van de Carr & Lehrer, 1988; Manrique, 1993, 1994; Panthuraamphorn, 1993). In the prenatal/perinatal era, anger and violence are natural products of rejection and separation; security and peace are the natural products of communication and love.
6. Babies born smiling teach us something we do not understand.
A client told me about his experience in the delivery room when his son was born. He and his wife had prepared well for this great event, and the birth was smooth. The baby made not one cry and seemed perfectly content. To this father’s surprise, however, the obstetrician proceeded to circumcise the baby, whereupon the baby let out screams of anguish! Not one cry from the birth, but a howling protest about circumcision.
Early psychological research on birth left us with the impression that birth was always violent and painful for babies. Certainly, birth can be painful, but what about those contented babies? What are they telling us?
Obstetrician Frederick Leboyer (1975) was one of the first to look seriously at newborn faces and recognize what they were saying. He got the message and started to rearrange obstetrical practices to suit the babies. This was a stroke of genius. Why hadn’t anyone thought of this before? You are familiar with how he dimmed the lights, moved the baby more slowly and gently, created a hushed atmosphere, left the cord intact, put baby on the mother, and waited while the baby settled down. Then he provided bath water near womb temperature, and voila! Faces changed from tortured and irritated to something more composed and--occasionally--smiles! This was a major achievement, although no one could claim that every baby treated in this manner was born in bliss. Birth without violence became a new thoughtform. Unfortunately, Leboyer’s good influence has declined, due in part to a randomized clinical trial in Canada that declared the “Leboyer approach had no advantage” over conventional delivery (Nelson, et al, 1980). I believe the obstetrical measures used in this study failed to appreciate the importance of psychological factors and their long-term implications for mothers and babies.
Reacting to the photos of baby faces in Leboyer’s book, noted Swedish obstetrician John Lind was surprised to see so much anguish. Lind had done thousands of deliveries in Stockholm and decided to take a series of photos of newborn faces there. After collecting 130, he announced that instead of anxiety or pain, baby faces expressed great curiosity and often, great expectations (Lind, 1978). These are rare and important data, speaking volumes about the positive atmosphere for birthing in Sweden.
The world record for happy newborns probably belongs to Thailand, where smiling is more a tradition than a surprise. In Thailand the obstetrician who holds the record for the greatest number of smiling babies is Chairat Panthuraamphorn. With inspiration from obstetrician and prenatal bonding pioneer Rene Van de Carr, Panthuraamphorn designed an experimental program of prenatal stimulation for parents in his hospital in Bangkok (Panthuraamphorn, 1993). From about 20 weeks gestational age, mothers were encouraged to take time each day for a bath, to sit in a rocking chair, relax, look at a beautiful picture and listen to classical Thai music. Panthuraamphorn recommended abdominal massage three times a week, along with breathing exercises, visualization of birth and bonding, and engaged experimental subjects in a multi-sensory program of speaking and singing to the child, playing a game with a bell, and other pleasant interactions. When the babies were measured after birth, the experimental group proved to be significantly more advanced in a variety of measures--including smiling and laughing.
Nearly all of the experimental babies in Thailand smiled responsively during the first five days following birth, something not expected for about six more weeks. Half also smiled spontaneously during the first five days following birth. The control infants were not as joyful: two out of 12 smiled responsively in the first five days, and three smiled spontaneously in the same period. What are these babies teaching us?
Water babies are coming in smiling, too. Statistics for them may be hard to assemble, but both stories and pictures document the fact that some water babies have emerged from the womb smiling, starting underwater! One photo shows a baby on her mother’s tummy, hand on the nipple, and smiling ear to ear seconds after birth. These babies seem to know their mothers have had an ecstatic experience; they express “total peace,” and wear a “Thank-you!” on their faces.
In an age of violence, we do well to watch baby faces carefully and to believe what they are telling us. In the past, we have neither watched nor believed. The scientific response to baby faces and sounds has usually been to deny real emotion at birth--and most certainly before birth--so these expressions have not been of value. Baby faces have not determined the direction of obstetrical practice, in spite of Leboyer’s efforts. We should see all pained, angry faces at birth in the context of the smiling faces. In the past, did we not mistakenly assume gruesome faces and screaming voices were normal? This myth befits a violent society.
Smiling newborns have been trying to teach us a higher standard for birth: birth without violence as a foundation for life without violence. Can we make this a national goal, a “standard of practice” in obstetrics rewarded with financial bonuses, and a basis for mother awards? It would make a difference, I believe, in our society. Almost three thousand years ago, the Hebrew prophet Isaiah poetically described his vision of a world of safety and peace, a world without harm and destruction, where “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” (Isaiah 11:6) Babies leading us? Can we let them? I sincerely hope we can.
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Friday, January 14, 2011
Thursday, January 13, 2011
ADDENDUM TO YESTERDAY'S POST REGARDING ANGER IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE
After watching, in the Netherlands, the Tucson Memorial, my friend Jon Turner has sent me this morning some words he wants to add to the paper which I posted yesterday. I am now sharing these below:
**Dedication: On USA Anger Rhetoric & The Victims Memorialized in Tucson, Arizona
"But what we can't do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another. As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together."
--President Barack Obama Tucson Killings Memorial Speech 12 January 2011
For our Postscript about belonging and individuation, we turn again to final thoughts from Dr. Wayne Guthrie:
"The emotional cloud of distrust and disturbance that surrounds the planet, brought forth and created by the emotions and the misuse of those emotions by man, is that which divides the world at this time. It takes then, men and women with great vision to move beyond that which holds them bound to the emotional world, to begin to bring about a release to this cloud that surely holds man in bondage. It is important that one be free, not of emotions, because that is an integral part of their growth process of the human being upon the earth, but to maintain a balance within the emotional structure. It is that which you have come to master and what you have come to teach."
Having begun with President Barak Obama’s words, we offer his closing words about the 9 year old little beam of light killed that day:
"That's what I believe, in part because that's what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed. Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation's future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.
"I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us - we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations.
"Christina was given to us on September 11th, 2001, one of 50 babies born that day to be pictured in a book called "Faces of Hope." On either side of her photo in that book were simple wishes for a child's life. "I hope you help those in need," read one. "I hope you know all of the words to the National Anthem and sing it with your hand over your heart. I hope you jump in rain puddles."
"If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today. And here on Earth, we place our hands over our hearts, and commit ourselves as Americans to forging a country that is forever worthy of her gentle, happy spirit."
--President Barack Obama, Tucson Memorial January 12, 2011.
Information on the Whole-Self model is available on www.Whole-Self.info and www.Whole-Self.co.uk , in Greece - www.cosmoanelixis.gr
**Dedication: On USA Anger Rhetoric & The Victims Memorialized in Tucson, Arizona
"But what we can't do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another. As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together."
--President Barack Obama Tucson Killings Memorial Speech 12 January 2011
For our Postscript about belonging and individuation, we turn again to final thoughts from Dr. Wayne Guthrie:
"The emotional cloud of distrust and disturbance that surrounds the planet, brought forth and created by the emotions and the misuse of those emotions by man, is that which divides the world at this time. It takes then, men and women with great vision to move beyond that which holds them bound to the emotional world, to begin to bring about a release to this cloud that surely holds man in bondage. It is important that one be free, not of emotions, because that is an integral part of their growth process of the human being upon the earth, but to maintain a balance within the emotional structure. It is that which you have come to master and what you have come to teach."
Having begun with President Barak Obama’s words, we offer his closing words about the 9 year old little beam of light killed that day:
"That's what I believe, in part because that's what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed. Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation's future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.
"I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us - we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations.
"Christina was given to us on September 11th, 2001, one of 50 babies born that day to be pictured in a book called "Faces of Hope." On either side of her photo in that book were simple wishes for a child's life. "I hope you help those in need," read one. "I hope you know all of the words to the National Anthem and sing it with your hand over your heart. I hope you jump in rain puddles."
"If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today. And here on Earth, we place our hands over our hearts, and commit ourselves as Americans to forging a country that is forever worthy of her gentle, happy spirit."
--President Barack Obama, Tucson Memorial January 12, 2011.
Information on the Whole-Self model is available on www.Whole-Self.info and www.Whole-Self.co.uk , in Greece - www.cosmoanelixis.gr
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
AFTER TUCSON SHOOTING - LOOKING FOR EPIPHANIES AND INTELLIGENT HOPE
AFTER TUCSON SHOOTING - LOOKING FOR EPHIPHANIES AND INTELLIGENT HOPE
On January 9, 2011, a headline in The Washington Post reads:
TUSCON SHOOTING REPORTED GLOBALLY AS EVIDENCE OF CHARGED U.S. POLITICAL CLIMATE
My friend, Whitney Vale was the first to alert me to the tragic happenings in Tucson:
"Someone has shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at Ina and Oracle at one of her town hall greet and meets. Yes, that's here in Tucson. Yep, you can carry a gun here in the ol Pueblo."
She went on to say "Epiphanies and intelligent hope are good." Now, through various media I am following the ensuing discussion about this...more closely than is likely 'good' for me..yet, I too look for epiphanies and intelligent hope which may arise from the sudden necessity to take a serious look at what is going on in this country....while holding, if I can, to prayer for an ultimate benevolent outcome..and prayers for all who are closely affected by this.
Even for me, it comes close to home...I once lived in Tucson, and for some reason, during the past two weeks, I have found myself revisiting in my imagination the loveliness of that environ...and then, synchronistically--actually on January 1st--I received a paper from two psychologists in Europe about the bubbling, often unrecognized, and insidious anger deep within the collective unconscious which is now being brought to the surface, in many countries...I have asked them if I can post the essay on my blog and am told it's okay...the paper has been published in an international journal in Europe. Listening just now to Rachel Maddow as she asks if there is something we can do to change things, I am thinking this research may offer a bit of hope...maybe getting at the roots...and offering hope for healing.
The Whole-Self Psychology approach is used to help Robert to resolve his disastrous situation. With his eyes closed, Sigrid invites Robert to
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the feelings you are feeling.' Robert: "Anger!"
'Feeling that anger, please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience your feelings beneath the anger.' Robert: "I feel I am being treated unfairly being at the mercy of the management. I feel powerless."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience your non-conscious belief in that moment.' Robert: "Business is small minded, without imagination. Everyone in business are prisoners. It is like a mental sanatorium."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the first time in your life when you have those feelings of anger and powerlessness.' Robert: "Shortly before I am born I feel good. I am relaxed. Everything is okay. And than I am born and it is cold, much too flamboyant, and there is nothing to eat." (At that time in Germany, babies were placed in a newborn nursery and only given to mother for feeding every four hours).
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the feelings in the nursery.' Robert: "Anger!"
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the feelings behind the anger.' Robert: "I am treated unfairly at the mercy of the management – I am powerless."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the feelings you have towards your mother.' Robert (answers from his mind): "My mother is a brilliant fairytale-telling mother, but she is not able to bring that fairytale into the world."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience how that makes you feel.' Robert: (again mental answers) "Your own source is wrong. The source of your life is wrong. Fantasy is wrong. Look what comes out of that?" (mother was not that successful).
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience how that makes you feel.' Robert: "I have so much to say but no one is listening to me. My heart contracts. I either betray my body or my ideals. My heart is now contracting, my legs are cold and paralyzed."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience how those make you feel.' Robert: "Anger."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the feelings behind the anger.' Robert: "Rage."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the feelings behind the rage.' Robert: "Hopelessness, I will die anyway!"
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience were the feelings are located in your body.' Robert: "In my heart - Like a death-shot." (His father died of a heart-attack when he was 40).
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience what your mind is doing now.' Robert: "My mind stops, halts!"
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the condition your emotional body is feeling because of that pain in your heart.' Robert: "Becoming smaller."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the connection with your spiritual source feeling that pain in your heart.' Robert: "The source is still there but I have difficulties to connect with it - to get the information that can help me."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the non-conscious belief you have at this moment.' Robert: "I will pay them back when I am grown up."
Robert has realized that his anger, rage and need for revenge were actually cloaks - cover-ups for what Whole-Self Psychology calls trigger feelings which are helplessness, hopelessness and powerlessness - feelings he did not want to feel. The actual trigger feeling he had all his life was not those diminishing feelings but the good, relaxed feeling he felt before his birth which when he entered his little body with his first breath changed to helpless, hopeless and powerless catalyzed later by a fear of dying of starvation.
On January 9, 2011, a headline in The Washington Post reads:
TUSCON SHOOTING REPORTED GLOBALLY AS EVIDENCE OF CHARGED U.S. POLITICAL CLIMATE
My friend, Whitney Vale was the first to alert me to the tragic happenings in Tucson:
She went on to say "Epiphanies and intelligent hope are good." Now, through various media I am following the ensuing discussion about this...more closely than is likely 'good' for me..yet, I too look for epiphanies and intelligent hope which may arise from the sudden necessity to take a serious look at what is going on in this country....while holding, if I can, to prayer for an ultimate benevolent outcome..and prayers for all who are closely affected by this.
Even for me, it comes close to home...I once lived in Tucson, and for some reason, during the past two weeks, I have found myself revisiting in my imagination the loveliness of that environ...and then, synchronistically--actually on January 1st--I received a paper from two psychologists in Europe about the bubbling, often unrecognized, and insidious anger deep within the collective unconscious which is now being brought to the surface, in many countries...I have asked them if I can post the essay on my blog and am told it's okay...the paper has been published in an international journal in Europe. Listening just now to Rachel Maddow as she asks if there is something we can do to change things, I am thinking this research may offer a bit of hope...maybe getting at the roots...and offering hope for healing.
WHOLE-SELF DISCOVERY & DEVELOPMENT
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INSTITUTE, Inc. INTERNATIONAL
Jon RG & Troya GN Turner, Co-Founders / Co-Directors
Waterrad 92, 1613 CR Grootebroek, NL
Tel: (31) 228 513 630 Email: Whole-Self@quicknet.nl
International Medical Director: Dr. Ellis Snitcher
UK Co-Director: Michael Reginald Whitley Germany Co-Director: Sigrid Westermann
Greece/Cyprus Co-Director: Olga Gouni Italy Co-Director: Smilja Janjatovic Pugliese
Mexico Co-Director: Maria de Leon Crowhurst
Venezuela Co-Director: Patricia Castillo
Anger: A Sense of Belonging and Individualization©2010
By Jon RG & Troya GN Turner
International Society for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Medicine (ISPPM) Congress “Times of Transition: Sense for Belonging and Individuality”
On 29th & 30th of October, 2010 at Alanus Highschool, Alter, DE near Bonn
Abstract: Anger is a behavior sweeping through human consciousness like a smokescreen – a firewall to cover emotions humans do not want to feel. When anger in provoked in therapy, it triggers adrenaline – the most addictive substance to the human body. Analysis illustrative of the behavior of anger is the Tea Party Movement during the 2010 midterm election in the USA. The feelings of the behavior of anger morphing into rage, hatred, bullying, and violence can begin even before birth. Several cases with pre and perinatal sources are presented.
Keywords: Anger, Belonging, individualization, evolution, ideology, religion, religious belief, fear, conditioned reflex, smokescreen, firewall, adrenaline addiction, Whole-Self Psychology, Tea Party Movement, President Barak Obama, hatred, bullying, violence, racism, mass movements, President Sarkosy, Anger Racket, Whole-Self Prebirth Analysis Matrix, the brain & anger, prebirth anger, rage, sexual rejection, helpless, hopeless, powerless, inherited cultural hatred, slavery, colonialism, misogyny, misogyny to females, conception, preconception.
Keynote: Dr. Wayne A. Guthrie:
The world, of which you are a part today, is torn asunder because of ideological and religious belief. Few upon the planet today, though they espouse great wisdom and a belief, and profess to have a deep anchor in spiritual understanding, are truly in touch with the depth of their emotions. Thus, you have one part of the world polarized against the other because many fear or fail to understand what it is that is occurring within the human being.
Dr. Guthrie identifies a core challenge facing humanity. In an age of change, an age when humanity is making a tremendous leap in evolution and development of consciousness as well as technology, humanity is being deluged with a thunderous emotional pattern – Anger. Common usage defines anger as a human emotion. In our research, Whole-Self Psychology has discovered other dimensions as well and offers some optional ideas. For example, anger is a conditioned reflex I trigger when something about myself is being reflected to me, in the situation, which I do not want to admit.
Belonging
Before discussing how anger seems to be diminishingly addicting humanity let us define the key motivators in our title, first – Belonging. Belonging can deal with a sense of connectedness with any other people. What usually comes to mind is family roots. My roots help me to identify myself through the branches of the tree of life from which I am the fruit. These roots have for several thousands of years been grouped through race, nation state, country. Another scale of belonging manifests in community. In Conscious Evolution: The Dance of Intuition and Intellect Sheldon and Barbara Smith Stoff trace community back to:
Many animals function best in herds or packs. We notice dogs, elephants, bees, wolves, primates and so many other species form communities. Communities are a result of cohesion, strength and growth. At this time of planetary crisis, it becomes ever more imperative that we create a positive vision for the future. Communities can and should become our basic social unit. Dialogue is a basis for community and is a sustainer for us all.
Individuation
Individuation has been described extensively by Carl Gustav Jung as the gradual integration and unification of the self through the resolution of successive layers of psychological conflict. Defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, individuation is the act or process of individuating, especially the process by which social individuals become differentiated one from the other. And so, we are back to belonging and community.
The Smokescreen of Anger
Whole-Self discovered that anger is not just an innate emotion. Whole-Self Psychology defines anger as a smoke screen, a firewall I hide behind when something is being reflected in me about myself that I do not want to admit. Troya discovered that a smoker can use the smokescreen to hide a secret and introduced that model very effectively in Whole-Self Psychology sessions to help people stop smoking by asking the Whole-Self of the person what secret was there. Actually, we found that in a fiery emotional outburst, anger may not actually be the problem. Anger could be seen as a behavior – even a learned behavior. Since it is a smokescreen and firewall, anger simply may be a cover-up of several layers of emotions culminating in three main patterns I do not want to admit feeling helpless, hopeless and powerless because those patterns exclude me from belonging. The singular promise of Presidential Candidate Barack Obama was the promise of hope that America could change if Americans could change.
In a vision of hope, anticipating the birth of a new movement of community in the USA, the Stoffs wrote:
The vision of hope that is possible today is not based on a unitary leader, but rather a call from a large group of seekers in convergence, not content to see humanness trashed in a sea of violence, greed and domination. This vision will not accept a society where many are manipulated by a few and where inequity is the order of the day. If we have the courage to look closely at events in our time, there will be the realization that humans can indeed do better – that harmony and justice can emerge as the tenor of the day.
Community Synergizes to Action
When individuals unite their beliefs in a common cause their action can synergize. R. Buckminster Fuller discovered that “Synergy means behavior of the whole system unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately”. Another way to define synergy is that the total energy is greater than just the sum of its parts. According to the website Answers.com the phrase “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child” is attributed to an old African proverb. In January 1996 publisher Simon & Schuster released Hillary Rodham-Clinton's book It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us in which then USA First Lady Hillary espoused more the expansion of government than any true wisdom or insight into the nurturing of children”. And the expansion of government and a ballooning debt in the trillions of dollars passed on to their children and grandchildren has sparked and synergized individual citizens into a political community which created a sum of anger greater than the anger of individual citizens. In the USA, it is acknowledged that the Tea Party Movement was hypothetically conceived and born as a community suffused with anger. While some in the world may not know about America’s angry - political ‘non-party’ as it likes to call itself, it is possible to use the Tea Party Movement as an example of manipulating the masses through anger.
The Tea Party Movement USA Born of Anger
The Tea Party Movement was founded to replicate the angry action of Colonist in Boston, Massachusetts, USA revolting against a tea tax imposed by the British Crown over 250 years ago. The Colonists dressed in the guise of Native Americans boarded a British merchant ship and threw the cargo of ‘royal taxed tea’ into Boston Harbor. In the 21st Century, emotionally synergized anger brought about the conception and development of the Tea Party. Begun over a year before the November 2010 mid-term election in the USA, its founding and development is a potent example of the smokescreen of anger. What is the truth of its conception?
Roots of the Tea Party Movement
In alignment with the Stoffs visions of hope, The Tea Party Movement is purported to have begun as a grassroots, leaderless movement to represent honest, decent, concerned citizen’s protesting against what was believed to be ‘too big government’ and ‘too high government debt.’
To some in the Tea Party, the vision of reasoned hope President Barak Obama promised was a distraction from action. In alignment with our theme title, these were Americans who simply wanted to belong – to have their voices heard. Basic themes of the Teapartyers touch on the mythic. They decry that big government was overtaxing them and that citizens needed to ‘take back America’. In fact, taxes were significantly lower than in the past and who were they going to take America back from? The true fact is that as in so many European countries debt is the blade hanging over heads their children and grandchildren. This is a basic fear.
Words are tools of communication and can be used to empower or diminish the speaker. Early in its incarnation extremist fractured any vision of hope, for example, by demanding to be heard yet not allowing any reasonable or rational public discussion of health insurance issues. Sincerely, honest citizens often fell prey to angry, often questionable, untrue, even hateful rhetoric on right wing extremist radio and tv against their government and particularly President Barak Obama. They blamed President Obama for everything they angrily disputed against even those circumstances which he had inherited from G.W. Bush of which Obama had no responsibility for creating.
The Tea Party Billionaires
As mentioned above, in a political myth, using populist anger as its banner, the Tea Party Movement is alleged to have its conception as a leaderless self-creating community structure of right-minded citizens. In actuality, the truth is that the Tea Party Movement was lavishly funded by the extreme political right wing rich of the Republican Party. Here is an extended quote from Columnist Frank Rich in a New York Times op-ed article revealing the source of the Tea Party Movement financial resources:
There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. (Note: Sarah Palin and others stoked fear in the elderly populous that President Obama’s health care system would set up ‘death panels’ to determine which elderly would receive health care or which would be allowed to die. (While being an outright lie it was repeated over and over again.) Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch (pronounced Coke), are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet among Americans. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are on the payroll.
Like I said, the Tea Party has less to do with a grassroots political movement and more to do with power and money. The fat cats financing this “movement” are only too happy to take advantage of those misinformed, misdirected and sometimes intolerant individuals that attend rallies and protests.
The Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker Magazine. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception."
The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks…under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations.
Conceived in Anger
The Tea Party became co-opted by angry lies and untruths about President Barack Obama. Brainwashing repetition of slogans and insulting signs reminiscent of totalitarian mass demonstrations of the 20th Century which had led Europe into two World Wars seduced many people. As an example, a fringe group called ‘Birthers’ continue to deny that President Obama was born in the USA and is therefore ineligible to be President. Misdirection and outright untruths by charismatic, manipulative individuals on right leaning radio and TV especially Fox television moved the masses to anger against President Obama and his programs - programs which in fact, had begun to reverse disastrous policies of the previous George W. Bush administration. Obama policies actually pulled the USA back from the brink of an economic depression. They saved the American car manufacturing industry now in profit for the first time in years. He stood up to the banks for unscrupulous greed and actually created a significant profit for America.
When President Obama defied the health insurance industry and brought healthcare to 30 million uninsured Americans his program was irrationally and angrily denounced as ‘Obamacare’ – a ‘Socialist Virus’ in America. Even well after the 2010 midterm elections, extremist politicians declare that the American people, as though they are the vast majority of Americans, are against ‘Obamacare’. The truth is that there is only one point difference in an equally divided electorate (47%) against (46%) for Universal Healthcare. And even more interesting is that in surveys, even those who say they are opposed to Obamacare are in agreement with the specific health supporting provisions of the law. Erstwhile possible 2012 Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin in speeches before fundamentalist anti-abortion groups across the American Midwest continually declares that Obamacare will pay for abortions – an outright lie she keeps repeating to stir religious anti-abortionists to anger against Obamacare.
A Conundrum of Prejudice
It may be difficult for many Americans to admit, but all the smokescreen of anger and rage against President Obama’s vision could be exposing a core of racist virus still infecting American culture after some 200 years of outlawing African slavery. The conundrum that is almost impossible to reconcile is that while his policies which have saved the USA from a staggering depression are decried, Obama’s personal approval ratings are in the high 70%. Perhaps this can be understood from our theme about belonging. The seeming contradiction could revolve around belonging and not belonging, with white skin and other shades of skin color. The disastrous decline in the middle class has accented a growing divide between the 1% rich and the poor. Even the white population is now joining the ranks of the up till now needy tan and brown and black Americans. Again, an interesting truth about America is that within decades the population of white skinned Americans will be overshadowed by other shades of skin color – Latinos, African Americans and Asians.
In expanding their vision of hope for the future of community without prejudice not just for the USA but for the whole world, the Stoffs foresee:
We now have an evolutionary concept of community that far surpasses the bonds of exclusive self-interest. At heart, our concept of ‘who we are’ has grown and expanded to engulf the stars and the nebula as well as the atoms and the dust particles at our feet. The very concept of our community citizenship is evolving accordingly and our actions must keep up with this process of maturation. The evolution of local community will lead to national and international community and then will inevitably lead to a living understanding of our universal connectedness.
Finally, perhaps the most concerning impetus of the Tea Party Movement in the USA 2010 midterm election was putting forward for public office some faintly luminous fanatical personalities who were simply ignorant, as though public office was the reward for winning a personality reality tv show. During the 2010 mid-term election campaign former USA President Bill Clinton cited a survey which summed up the result of mass displays of people trapped in anger, “When people act out anger, 86 percent of the time they make mistakes in their actions.” The overwhelming shift of over 60 House seats from Democrats to Republicans who were originally responsible for the economic crisis during the G.W Bush administration seems to bear out the truth of his statement.
Is Anger Fashionable?
Volatile Tea Party demonstrations of anger trigger adrenaline in participants, the most addictive substance to the human body. So, the more people set up their smokescreen of anger in non-productive ways, without rational resolution, the more addicted they become to their adrenaline. In France, in that 2010 November of discontent, demonstrations of anger raged against President Sarkosy much beyond his law raising the pension age to 62. Noisy public protest demonstrations were instigated by Labor Unions in France and Greece where population’s angry behaviors – street marches - acting out cries against feeling helpless, hopeless and powerless to save economic gains. In that same month of November, university students in London stormed the Conservative Party’s headquarters in angry revolt against its raising tuitions from $5,000 to $15,000 a year. Students also rose up in anger in Italy. In all cases, citizens were vocalizing and behaving with anger because beneath a plethora of fearful inner emotional patterns they were feeling helpless, hopeless and powerless. Anger has become mass media mode of expression instead of expressing true, authentic positions and the emotions they generate. Anger has become fashionable.
The Racket of Anger
For decades when there was a death, some emotive therapies provoked the survivor to feel angry and lash out verbally or even physically with pillows and bats against the dead person. Kelduyn R. Garland, PhD, explains that in Transactional Analysis:
This is called a RACKET. With a RACKET, the anger is not authentic or real, but a ruse, a red herring ‘smoke screen’ to avoid feeling the true, authentic emotions a person is experiencing. It is a substitute to avoid feeling other more vulnerable emotions such as fear or sorrow. The characteristics and dynamics of a RACKET that Whole-Self Psychology is describing, keeps a person unresolved and stuck. It does not set them free to go on living, as occurs when someone deals with true authentic feelings and emotions (i.e.: you know the truth and the truth sets you free.)
Often when people are grieving the death of a loved one, they will ‘get stuck’ in the anger phase of the grieving process and do not progress into experiencing the fears, sorrows helplessness, hopelessness and powerlessness they also feel about their loss, which needs to happen for them to complete their grieving process. So firstly, the survivor is not just feeling anger but many other emotions which she or he is not wanting to feel, and therefore cover up with a pseudo feeling of anger - cover up with the behavior of anger. In the first person, I understand what I am actually feeling underneath the anger - the firewall. I explode to cover up my sadness, disappointment, frustration, fear, helplessness, hopelessness and powerlessness. Secondly, the dead person, not being able to defend her or himself, the behavior of anger is unresolved anger. Even years later, after Racket acting out, when asked to remember the death, all the emotions of the loss, sadness, pain, etc beneath the anger are still there. The key to healing these disparate emotions is to recognize and to understand what, in the first person, I was actually feeling. There does not have to be RACKET anger in the world if I fully understand the situation.
A Sidebar of Anger is Sexual Discrimination
As we have seen mass protests can cross easily from “big green monster” anger into intolerance then hatred, racism, bullying and violence. So, many mass demonstrations morph into behaviors of anger, even rioting and killings suspended on the religious limbs of the great oak of life called god. Hatred, bullying and violence against sexual orientation could be a solidified adjunct of anger. Forty years ago, Whole-Self Psychology in the Whole-Self Prebirth Analysis Matrix© Question #8, (see Appendix) showed that sexual orientation is already locked in before birth. Humanity is not just male and female. In Conscious Evolution, The Stoff’s remind us of “the discourses of Plato’s Symposium where the bisexual principle has been presented as primal”.
Again, in the first person, if I have felt uncomfortable about my relationship or sexual feelings or preferences, that is, intimate, sexual feelings towards others of my own gender, I can recognize that these feelings or patterns are not bad or wrong, sinful, evil or sick as held in various religions. As in so many of aspects of nature, gender identity is just another variant in natural sexual orientations which actually exist in considerable numbers throughout humanity.
Hate Is A Growth Industry
In November 2010, Dr. Phil, TV Psychiatrist, on CNN discussing five children committing suicide after being bullied by conservative religiously or politically oriented students or adults because they were gay, concludes that “Religious beliefs about being gay or lesbian are obsolete”. Genderwise, the simple truth is that humanity is not just polarized male or female but there are varying shades of sexual coloring including bi-sexual to non-sexual. There is so much anger, fear and hatred by righteously religious and political leaders circulating in the spiritual and psychological veins of humanity many media people are hypothesizing that ‘Hate is a growth industry’. In an interview on the BBC World Radio Service with a man named David in Bolivia, David remarked, “When I die, god will not ask me if I was gay. He will ask me if my life was a pleasure!”
The Brain And Anger
Kelduyn R. Garland, from her forthcoming copyrighted book Grief: a Transitional Journey discusses some physical dimensions and dynamics of anger:
There are three primary areas of the human brain, reptilian, mammalian and frontal lobe/neocortex. Reptilian is the part of the brain which deals with survival and elicits a fight, flight or freeze response to the world. The Mammalian part of the brain elicits emotional and nurturing responses for care giving and protection. The Neocortex is the reasoning and problem solving part of the brain that puts the ’brake’ on the reactionary responses of the reptilian brain. When you have a person who is not in touch with themselves, as Guthrie described in the Keynote cited above, these three areas of the brain do not function in harmony and people react from a reptilian survival mode. This is illustrated in the old TV show the Incredible Hulk which, as explained by my nine year son after having watched the show in which the main character is morphed into a green monster when he experiences anger told me that, “When you get angry you turn into a big green monster!”
Whole-Self Psychology knows that under certain conditions and certain situations anger may be an effective, legitimate behavior. Sometimes it can be uniquely productive to appropriately stimulate right action. Garland continues:
When people are aware and in touch with themselves, as mentioned by Guthrie, these three parts of brain function in harmony with each other so that the anger energy becomes a feedback mechanism to mobilize the person to bring back into balance and harmony something (situation/ circumstance/agreement) that has gone awry. When the three parts of the brain function the survival responses of fight, flight or freeze are tempered by the reasoning and problem solving abilities of the neocortex can be of good benefit personally, societally and on a planetary level.
Understanding our biological dimension is important but the key to our reasoning and problem solving abilities lies in the consciousness infusing that biology. The Stoff’s expanding a possible future belonging to our community, project that that consciousness is discovered in the vibration of love infusing the human community:
We hope in our present human condition, for the future, and at a very deep level we understand that the individual who does not share love shrinks as a person and becomes as if dead. Such a person perishes though he still walks the earth. To find the way of spirit requires living in the “divine matrix” by giving and receiving the force of love. This love comes from the spark within and the cosmic force without. Consciousness, our most precious gift also comes from the spark within connected to the spiritual. This love is ours to pass along. It is constantly replenished. This is the great lesson of life. It is our great hope to fulfill our responsibility in the chain of hope and of love. To live in hope is to wish to experience the reality of love, and then to share that love.
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When that love inspired by the Stoffs vision is lost, hope is lost. And when hope is lost it morphs into hopelessness, along with helpless and powerless. And, when I feel those feelings I do not want to feel, I cover them up with anger. Whole-Self agrees that addressing the anger is necessary but through understanding it must go beneath and not just acting out the behavior of anger feeding into adrenaline addiction.
Anger and Fear
The pattern of the learned behavior of anger being an aspect of fear is found in a personal communication from Barbara Findeisen, former President of the Association of Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health. It was in connection with an historic prebirth case which was featured on the Oprah Television program:
The subject on Oprah was actually about a mother and her 20 year old daughter and abortion. Oprah’s people contacted me after receiving a letter from the mother. After an accident, the daughter’s doctor told her that some damage was actually from the womb or birth. The mother had tried in many ways to abort the baby but had never mentioned it to her daughter. Oprah's people flew them to see me at Pocket Ranch in California where on camera the mother told the full story to her daughter for the first time. I did birth work therapy with the daughter. It was very amazing to see the healing that took place. It was much more about fear than anger.
Anger: A Culture of Fear
Professor Frank Furedi writing about the worldwide Culture of Fear describes how:
Fear has acquired a powerful cultural vibration and is constantly encouraged by the unprecedented level of suspicion towards the human species that prevails at the beginning of the 21st Century.
Ultimately, fear is a vibrational emotional pattern of also being helpless, hopeless and powerless which humanity covers over with a behavior of anger. It was amazing that Findeisen’s prebirth pattern event could be televised worldwide. While Barbara writes that 'it was much more about fear than anger', we have experienced, in other cases, that there is often some lifelong antagonistic behavior of anger or hatred between a child and mother simply from the child non-consciously ‘knowing’ that mother had even a fleeting thought to abort during pregnancy. At the 9th ISPPM Congress Jerusalem, Israel, a paper was presented showing that even when mother changes the fleeting thought of termination to deep wanting and love, the child is born and lives his or her life in the pattern of mother’s emotional fleeting despair moment. For the unfolding consciousness of the preborn, this flash may be sensed as a threat to its very existence. But, what actually is encoded is a possible vibrational pattern of mother’s fear of being pregnant, or a future burdened with a baby, or subjectively, a fear of being a bad mother. The consciousness of baby is in mother’s consciousness, in her mind and in her emotions, experiencing and being educated by mother’s consciousness. The fleeting thought of termination could be a shared life threatening instant for both. It is a clear illustration of Brekhman’s model of mother/child communication.
Because mother’s feelings which are generated are unbearable, her child has lifelong non-conscious fear, even terror, covered over by anger towards mother. These patterns are not released by acting out a behavior of anger as some therapies would attempt to do, but by, as Findeisen shows, specifically through professionally trained prebirth and birth psychology.
Prebirth Symbiosis
Are these mother’s feelings or my feelings? Whole-Self Psychology, Philosophy and Education hypothesizes that just as each of us is the synthesis of our parent’s genetic coding which gives us our physical characteristics, there is also a synthesis of the charged emotional-mental patterns of our parents from the nine months of their pregnancy. Every human being begins life in symbiosis with her or his mother by being psycho-spiritually, energetically attracted and attached to mother’s mind by her charged ideas and thoughts; and, to her emotional body by sharing her charged feelings and emotions - even before conception.
Symbiotic Communication
Symbiotically, as Grigori Brekhman has shown, there exists a communication system between mother and her unborn child on all levels during pregnancy and at birth. Cracks in the mother/baby symbiosis are widening where mother cannot accept her pregnancy. It begins in pregnancy when she directs thoughts of abortion or termination in her non-conscious communication with her not yet born. An increasing number of women are presenting that they have no feelings of love or acceptance towards their babies; when even at the birth of their babies they were still unable to open those channels of mutual emotional communication or connection with their babies. When that happens their babies are born with those non-feeling patterns. This results in an increase of young people growing up without love, compassion or empathy for themselves and any other person. When mother has repulsion and rejection even death wish towards her baby those are the charged patterns baby is born with. In the anthology Phenomenon of Violence edited by Prof Brekhman and Prof Fedor-Freybergh there is clear evidence of the roots of violence in gestation, birth, infancy and childhood.
Can Baby Be Born Angry?
What about reports of babies being born angry? Prebirth and Whole-Self Psychology have shown, and as Brekhman proved in his mother/baby communication study, the consciousness of preonates being in mother’s consciousness are being educated by mother’s charged mental/emotional experiences. When during pregnancy, mother is feeling helpless, hopeless and powerless and she covers over those feelings with a smokescreen or firewall of anger, and at birth, baby feels helpless, hopeless and powerless, baby has already been educated to react with anger.
Disastrous Consequences of Prebirth Anger
Olga Gouni shared a case in which she visited a mother pregnant with twins in hospital because her sack had broken. The mother told of her anger because her husband’s work had him living in another the country. In the Whole-Self session, the male twin, through the mother, told that because he was feeling so much anger he kicked hard and broke the sack. Having been educated by mother’s anger he lashed out replicating mother’s anger and causing a potential disaster. Prognosis is that because of the loss of amniotic fluid there could be critical problems for the boy’s life and if he should live for possible diminished mental and emotional capacity. There are pregnant populations exposed to disastrous cataclysms all over the world being educated to and igniting the firewall of anger. Baby can be born angry.
A Prebirth Anger Case In Action
Sigrid Westermann, Whole-Self Co-Director in Hamburg, Germany reports in some detail the case of a young man locked in patterns of anger and rage:
The client, Robert, a young man, fresh in his job, presents with aggression against corporate management. A famous company tries to come into a consortium of companies. The managers assign Robert the job of facilitating the corporate merger. From the beginning, Robert feels bad about taking on such a venture. Physically, he senses this feeling in his stomach and in his back. But he ignores these feelings. Robert also presents that he has problems with personal relationships with women as well. And, especially, he has difficulties with his mother. She had inherited between 1 and 2 million Euros which she lost to a con artist. Robert’s girlfriend also disappoints him.
Robert works hard to bring the company into the consortium. Then Robert realizes that the management’s intention to merge is false. It only wants to benefit from publicity. Robert is unable to control the situation. In fact, the management not only does not support him, but blames him for the failure and for all the lost money and effort.
The Whole-Self Psychology approach is used to help Robert to resolve his disastrous situation. With his eyes closed, Sigrid invites Robert to
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the feelings you are feeling.' Robert: "Anger!"
'Feeling that anger, please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience your feelings beneath the anger.' Robert: "I feel I am being treated unfairly being at the mercy of the management. I feel powerless."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience your non-conscious belief in that moment.' Robert: "Business is small minded, without imagination. Everyone in business are prisoners. It is like a mental sanatorium."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the first time in your life when you have those feelings of anger and powerlessness.' Robert: "Shortly before I am born I feel good. I am relaxed. Everything is okay. And than I am born and it is cold, much too flamboyant, and there is nothing to eat." (At that time in Germany, babies were placed in a newborn nursery and only given to mother for feeding every four hours).
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the feelings in the nursery.' Robert: "Anger!"
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the feelings behind the anger.' Robert: "I am treated unfairly at the mercy of the management – I am powerless."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the feelings you have towards your mother.' Robert (answers from his mind): "My mother is a brilliant fairytale-telling mother, but she is not able to bring that fairytale into the world."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience how that makes you feel.' Robert: (again mental answers) "Your own source is wrong. The source of your life is wrong. Fantasy is wrong. Look what comes out of that?" (mother was not that successful).
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience how that makes you feel.' Robert: "I have so much to say but no one is listening to me. My heart contracts. I either betray my body or my ideals. My heart is now contracting, my legs are cold and paralyzed."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience how those make you feel.' Robert: "Anger."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the feelings behind the anger.' Robert: "Rage."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the feelings behind the rage.' Robert: "Hopelessness, I will die anyway!"
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience were the feelings are located in your body.' Robert: "In my heart - Like a death-shot." (His father died of a heart-attack when he was 40).
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience what your mind is doing now.' Robert: "My mind stops, halts!"
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the condition your emotional body is feeling because of that pain in your heart.' Robert: "Becoming smaller."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the connection with your spiritual source feeling that pain in your heart.' Robert: "The source is still there but I have difficulties to connect with it - to get the information that can help me."
'Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the non-conscious belief you have at this moment.' Robert: "I will pay them back when I am grown up."
Robert has realized that his anger, rage and need for revenge were actually cloaks - cover-ups for what Whole-Self Psychology calls trigger feelings which are helplessness, hopelessness and powerlessness - feelings he did not want to feel. The actual trigger feeling he had all his life was not those diminishing feelings but the good, relaxed feeling he felt before his birth which when he entered his little body with his first breath changed to helpless, hopeless and powerless catalyzed later by a fear of dying of starvation.
Robert was able to acknowledge and heal the patterns from the beginning of this life. He understood that all his life he had created situations of anger which where covering up feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and powerlessness. He could now face and no longer be at the affect of fear triggered by relaxed feelings. Afterwards, having released the pattern of good, relaxed feelings changing to powerlessness covered up by anger and rage towards his mother – the lifelong, infantile feelings which had controlled his behavior towards her and other women as well, were dissipated. Now that he was safe and relaxed, Robert was able to find a woman, to marry, and, to have a baby. (Before he only had relationships where he was disappointed by the woman). Now he was able to feel good and relaxed without becoming punished afterwards.
Whole-Self PAM Discovers Gender Rejection Trauma
An even more devastating trauma pattern can be the sense of rejection for being the ‘wrong’ sex. Anita, an American mother, single, in her early 60s, presents being melancholic. She feels weary, tired of life, not interested in life and filled with fears and anxieties. Through her Whole-Self Prebirth Analysis Matrix, Anita discovers the core familiar emotional patterns which had became the pillars of her life. She discovers the source of the stark contrasting contradiction between her male and female polarities. Anita discovers that in the act of intercourse mother feels that while her partner is feeling love and desire towards her as she is gripped in sadness. She feels sad, lonely with a sense of revulsion and anger within herself. Her feelings toward her partner include revulsion and disgusting rejection.
In her Whole-Self PAM, using her creative imagination, Anita senses her father's sperm is optimistic, adventuresome, excited, happy, creative, full of life, fun. While in stark contradiction her mother's egg does not want anything as she is overwhelmed with repulsion for life, fear, anxiety and resistance. Continuing her prebirth creative visualization, Anita senses that when mother's egg sees father's sperm coming towards her, she is trapped, paralyzed in fear, locked and wants to be left alone. Again, in contrast, her father's sperm is happy. He says, 'The goal is there, so let's go for it'. The feeling is fun.
As mother's egg is surrounded and engulfed by the hundreds of father's surviving sperm trying to penetrate into her, she reaffirms that she does not want this to be happening. She rejects everything. The sense is an overwhelming repulsion for life building up and compounding fear, anxiety and resistance. Anita discovers the sensation as if something is going to happen that the egg really does not want to happen. She now experiences that the formation of her female ego is violation! Then comes another discovery. In her Whole-Self PAM, Anita senses her fetal consciousness floating in pleasant peacefulness. This peace is shattered when it is sucked into the wall of the womb. Anita realizes that this anchoring is the source of her lifelong feelings of being trapped, stuck and locked.
Then, Anita discovers the source of her most familiar feelings in life. While most people discover diminishing feelings come from a specific traumatic event during the pregnancy, Anita, as some also have found, learns that there can be a pervasive, continuous state of diminishing reality – what the consciousness believes is real. For Anita's mother the ongoing situation of being trapped at home is a constant struggle being disappointed and unhappy in her life. She judges herself to be guilty, unaccepted, unable, incapable, powerless, indifferent, apathetic, unrecognized, stupid and inept. While Anita discovers her mother's trauma, she also discovers the actual source of her own pandemic comes from her own birth – GENDER REJECTION. Devastation sweeps through her when she is revealed to be a girl when 'it' was supposed to be a boy. When asked about her life purpose, Anita replies, "I wish I knew! It seems not to be of any purpose, and this pisses me off!"
Angry words indeed. After her Whole-Self Prebirth Analysis session, Anita’s perspective on life is significantly enhanced.
In The Case Of A Thought Of Abortion
The important point is that prebirth psychology is able to help a person to realize and understand the physical and emotional circumstances of helplessness, hopelessness and powerless which mother may have been experiencing which motivated mother to consider an abortion. As mentioned above, in cases where there is extreme life-long conflict between a child (even an adult child) and mother, prebirth psychology can help the client to realize that because during gestation a child is symbiotically experiencing and being emotionally educated by mother's thoughts and emotions, a child non-consciously 'knows ' what mother was even fleetingly considering. In Whole-Self Psychology, we help the child recognize a distinction that the mother did not ‘not want the child’ but because of circumstances did not want a baby, the pattern of anger toward mother can be gently released. Because of gestational symbiosis the child believes that conflicts are its own. Profound healing in the relationship can happen when a child realizes that the conflict patterns where actually mother’s during her pregnancy. It is also noteworthy that should an abortion be mother’s chosen option, the consciousness of the baby does not die or cease to exist but simply moves on to another potential mother who will give her or him the life learning possibilities she or he needs for its consciousness development or evolution.
The Prebirth Source of Intimacy
Trust is a key element in relationships. Where do primary shared beliefs of individuals such as trust or mistrust which permeate a culture come from? In the Whole-Self Prebirth Analysis Matrix a key moment is during sexual communication. Brazilian Psychotherapist Suely Moliterno in her paper Moments Before Conception has shown in Prebirth regression cases that:
The thoughts, feelings and physical sensations experienced by the parents during their sexual relation, will be assimilated by the new born human being as his own. During his life the individual has a tendency to carry on with him all those feelings which will manifest in his present effective sexual relationships.
Prebirth Source of Hatred
So, a most essential element in human relationships is trust. Olga Gouni, in her paper Prebirth Psychology in Action analyzed the consciousness of anger in a number of clients in Cyprus. She especially noted the cultural, universal mistrust in relationships within the Cypriote community. When I was teaching in Limassol, Cyprus in the Summer of 2006, I met a woman who had a son 32 years of age. Meeting me, he mentioned that he could not understand his very strong burning hatred for Turks. Later, I asked his mother what had been happening during her pregnancy. She told me that in 1974, the year of his birth, Turkey had invaded Cyprus. The Cypriote community was deeply traumatized. I asked her if she had felt any hatred toward the Turks while she was pregnant. She said ‘No!’ I knew that answer was coming from her personality. So, I asked her if we could work with her Whole-Self. She agreed. When I invited her Whole-Self to take her back to 1974 to remember what was happening specifically for her, she realized that the husband of her first cousin who was to be her son’s godfather - had disappeared. She said that she had searched frantically for him and to her surprise recognized that she was feeling great hatred toward the Turks. She was able to tell her son what had happened to her during his gestation and the hatred she had not realized she was feeling. And she could share that her anger was actually a cover-up for her patterns of being helpless, hopeless and powerless during her pregnancy - and blaming the Turks. The son understood his hated was her hatred not his hatred and was able to start to release it. So, what we discovered is that prejudice and racial and ethnic hatred can be rooted in prenatal patterns. We are all seeking belonging. And, our identity comes from the individuation – the actual separation of self from the symbiosis with mother at birth beginning life.
Prebirth Memories of Slavery and Echoes of Colonialism
In 2010, there emerged major concern about human trafficking and human slavery especially of child labor and women, and men too, in the sex trade in the modern world. Consummate helplessness, hopelessness and powerlessness of these slavery victims had not been recognized nor thought possible. We have pointed out before the impact of slavery on mass consciousness through the research of Sauci Bosner, a Whole-Self Psychology Therapist in Amsterdam. Bosner developed a project entitled Prebirth Memories of Slavery and Echoes of Colonialism. While focused on Central and South America in which generations of victims are suffused and suppressed in anger and rage because of being helpless, hopeless and powerless the same principles apply worldwide to modern human trafficking and slavery. Bosner writes:
Such horror patterns have impregnated in stagnated identities of survivors, witnesses, victims, collaborators and perpetrators of atrocities. Irregardless of age, class, gender and race, all too often socio-economic and political interests of minorities have cast giant shadows of atrocities, devastation, destruction and death on countless victims in the southern hemisphere: victims who were never offered options in their personal or professional evolution; victims who did not know that ‘NO!’ was also an answer; victims entangled in the human treadmill of helplessness, hopelessness and Power-lessness; victims who have transferred these patterns onto their children and their children's children (Epigenetics). Without Consciousness, Without Choice, Without Hope, change and personal professional growth remain unrecognized birthrights and become destiny.
Shirley Ward, in her definitive study: Anger Related to Preconception, Conception and the Pre- and Perinatal Period in the International Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Medicine (Fall 2006) based on the work of Lloyd de Mause states:
Violence is displayed in the form of war, riots, murder, torture, terrorism, and crime all of which seem to be escalating. Many of these forms of violence can only come from individuals collectively. War would be the greatest struggle between nations. National Leaders may take us into war as they act out their own prenatal dynamics in gruesome ways - and others follow their own dynamics. From the field of experiential psychotherapy the answer to the cycles of violence, war, and death-rebirth is to stop the acting out, and relive these cycles of violence at their preconception and pre and perinatal origins – in order to find peace.
Whole-Self Four Points of Victimness
Olga Gouni, makes four Whole-Self Psychology points about victimness. In the first person again, I have raised my survival mechanism of anger or retaliation, or having lost power. I am trapped in self-judgments and diminishing life decisions that place me in the position of the victim:
1. I oppose seeing the causative traumatic event and lock myself in my trauma
trance pattern.
2. I attract and get involved in life experiences that will keep proving to myself
any diminishing self-judgments that I have made.
3. I create a future for myself based on the non-conscious diminishing decisions I
have made, and, finally,
4. I contribute to the perpetuation of diminishing patterns in the world.
Attachment and Bonding
Attachment and Bonding are critical for healthy and holistic human development. When a newborn enters the world and healthily attaches to mother/father right after birth and continue during infancy and toddlerhood, the effects generate essential normal neurological development, as well as appropriate social skills and behaviors and emotional balance. Early attachment relationship creates health and trust - yielding lifelong, safe and appropriate and supporting relationships and success. Kelduyn R. Garland, also a pioneer in Reactive Attachment Disorder treatment describes:
Parent and child attachment is a biological and psychological need – rooted in thousands of years of evolution since the development of the mammalian brain. This bonding is critical for healthy emotional, social and physical development. The fraying of this attachment and bonding process spawns violent temperament, personality and behavior, and is a causal dynamic underlying Reactive Attachment Disorder. This fraying is a dynamic phenomena that knows no cultural, status or socio-economic boundary, and underlies the violence that is increasingly pervading societies throughout the world to global impact proportions.
John Bowlby in the UK, pioneered Attachment and Bonding theory. Kate Moss offers a comprehensive definition and description in What is Attachment? on the Association for Treatment and Training in the Attachment of Children (ATTACh) Website: www.attach.org:
Attachment is a reciprocal process by which an emotional connection develops between an infant and his/her primary caregiver. It influences the child’s physical, neurological, cognitive, and psychological development. It becomes the basis for development of basic trust or mistrust, and shapes how the child will relate to the world, learn, and form relationships throughout life. Healthy attachment occurs when the infant experiences a primary caregiver as consistently providing emotional essentials such as touch, movement, eye contact and smiles, in addition to the basic necessities such as food, shelter, and clothing.
Because it is so important as an increasing reproductive crisis, Whole-Self Psychology has discovered that when mother has no feelings or diminished loving communication in pregnancy, baby is born with no feelings. Subsequently, with no feelings of love and acceptance and a diminished ability to communicate, RAD children have no conscience. These are the children who in their anger and rage kill other children, their families or strangers. Research in Reactive Attachment Disorder shows that sibling murder can be a symptomatic behavior. RAD children can act out aberrant, even murderous behavior because they have no feelings or conscience.
Reactive Attachment Disorder
As mentioned above, every human being begins life in symbiosis with her or his mother by being psycho-spiritually, energetically attracted and attached to mother’s mind by her charged ideas and thoughts; and, to her emotional body by sharing her charged feelings and emotions - even before conception. When the enhancing symbiotic process is interrupted, Reactive Attachment Disorder can lock into the child (See Appendix 2) and as the news reports, because of unmitigating, unrelenting, explosive anger and rage develops into today’s dysfunctional, anti-social, disruptive, moralistic, psychopathic, even sociopathic children or adult sexual and/or murderous predators and terrorists. The simple beginning is, again as mentioned above when the symbiosis is ‘non-feeling’ resulting in a lack of any human love, compassion or empathy for the self or any other living creature – animal or human.
Two faces of Reactive Attachment
Whole-Self Psychology hypothesizes that Reactive Attachment has two faces: Reactive Attachment Disorder – RAD and Reactive Attachment Order – RAO. Both RAD and RAO babies lack healthful Attachment and Bonding patterns. Both have diminished emotional capacities of not having feelings. Both strongly develop their mental capacities (even when there can be apparent initial mental deficiency) to compensate for their diminished emotional capacities.
RADs, without conscience, go into dyslogic and aberrant behaviors.
RAOs, with conscience, go into logic and beneficent behaviors.
In RAD and RAO pregnancies the communication system described by Brekhman may not be functioning: first, in the mother, then, consequently, in baby. In RAD parents this non-communication can be because they are against having a baby and they may even try to abort what they judge to be ‘a thing’. In RAO parents this can be because even though not wanting a baby - say for medical reason - they are resigned and acceptive to the birth. As Thomas Verny has pointed out, some mothers and fathers are ‘managers’ and some are ‘parents’. The RAO mother who feels no love towards her baby mentioned above is ‘a manager’. She can take care of the physical needs of ‘this baby’ but she has no emotional capacity to love ‘her baby’.
Terrible Tyrants and Diabolical Dictators
Jon C. Sonne, MD, did monumental, research on the prebirth horrors of the 20th Centuries most raging and destructive dictators. Sonne discovered how they all experienced horrendous gestations:
Tyrants such as Hitler, Franco, Stalin, Mussolini, Hussein, Milosevic, and bin Laden, have all demonstrated murderous hostility toward any one person or group who does not agree with them completely, or toward any group or person who has or aspires to have positions in society in which self and desire processes in social interactions are respected and affirmed, including those of different ethnic, racial or religious identifications and beliefs (symbolic “undeserving” siblings).
In his landmark paper On Tyrants As Abortion Survivors in the International Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Medicine, Sonne advanced the thesis that these were all ‘unwanted’ men and all faced horrendous conditions during gestation and early childhood. He suggests the conscious or non-conscious themes of tyrants are:
“No one can have what I didn't get, what is rightfully mine that has been taken away from me.” “I will psychologically or physically destroy these persons, and also anyone who gives or gave to them or supports them.” “Revenge is what I want more than anything else, and this is more important to me than being loved or cared for.” “I hate others, but I also loathe myself so much that if I die in seeking this, I will only have gratified my own wish for suicide.”
Sheila Crouch, Whole-Self Therapist in the UK, offers this perception of such men:
It is the weak male aspect that is causing the problems in society. Insecurity and no empowered male lead models lead men to invent their version which is influenced by the media as much as anything alongside hereditary patterns from cultures and religions. Apparently the real fear men have is that women can create another being and the closer we get to making men redundant the more their fears are realized. Belief systems create reality! So the more women use sons as their insurance policies and shields believing they have no personal power the more we get these despotic types. The more we revere each being and see their gender as no more than having blond or brown hair the better!
Misogyny Towards Girls and Women
Horrendous abuse of girls and women in Afghanistan was at the top of the news at the beginning of 2011. Victimness of girls and women attacked for being female is tragic source of devastating helplessness, hopelessness and powerlessness in the world. The main difference is that even though they are feeling helpless, hopeless and powerless girls and women must suffer in silence and are not allowed to express their anger because they are totally incapable of changing their situations for themselves or their families. So is this veiled anger being played out through their husbands and sons? We can only imagine the devastating prebirth patterns of religious zealots, who through distortion of religious texts, practice suppression, hatred and violence towards girls and women. The hypothesis may be explored that during pregnancies misogynist’s mothers might have been consumed with intolerance and hateful anger and rage. Anger and hate can be a prebirth inheritance? The anger and rage and rioting and pillage and murder in the name of the male god by religious extremists is overshadowing and blinding humanity.
What is often ignored is that nature has given us the key. Humanity is composed of two genders, with a few sub categories of genders, of approximately half female and half male. Is humanity disproportioned because of religious distortions? The cosmic irony is that while females are murdered at birth, it is possible that the mythical Armageddon could begin because there will not be enough women for men to mate with. In their landmark book Conscious Evolution the Stoffs trace misogyny to the suppression of the feminine goddess and the ascension of the male god and the dire consequences thus generated:
These actions or events have deprived millions of people, especially women, of the respect, opportunity and equality of life that all humans have as their birthright. They have deprived nations and the world of the brain power and nourishment these women could have provided each of us, given their opportunity. We have all suffered because countless generations of women have suffered. Males, raised in the spirit of misogyny have also suffered with their distorted vision of humankind and their distorted view of human relations and science. It is long overdue that our collective minds and hearts are opened to the plight of half of humanity – our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters. The suffering will continue until the problem, the world’s problem, yes, the problem of you and me, is made right. Justice is a strange phenomenon. It must be universal or it is not an accomplished fact.
Is the entrenched male god reveling in his crushing power or is there of vestige of the goddess in him appalled by man’s misogyny? The Stoffs conclude:
We now have a bold, reawakened understanding of divinity to embrace. As difficult as it is within the religious family comprised of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to accept, the balancing of the masculine and feminine energies is the key to human maturity. We don’t believe we will ever achieve the return of partnership community, that of complete equality of the sexes in harmony which will provide the foundation to facilitate its blossoming, unless religion, as social and spiritual scaffolding, leads the way by formally recognizing such equality in public and private practice and by having the courage to firmly denounce past and present distortions. Only then can love flourish within humankind and a period of harmony flower. This is our future if we join together in making it come true.
Non-Violence: A key to Healing Anger
While we have been focusing on violence and victimness, it can be helpful to acknowledge a place for its opposite – ‘non-violence’ which can be a state of ‘resistive responsiveness’ without angry reactiveness. Non-violence can be a recognition and an acceptance of a pattern about myself that I know is true about myself without blaming and attacking someone else and their entrenched power. It can be a recognition or acknowledgement of myself and another when we disagree often in the face of the other person’s overwhelming power and force. Mahatma Gandhi in India is a leading worldwide advocate of non-violence in the face of overwhelming British power and authority during the RAJ. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the USA, described his vision of the promised land of freedom for descendants of African slaves.
While violence is an expression of masses of people, even in streaming together, non-violence can more often revolve around the individual self. It can be a state of recognition of who the other is, appreciation for his gifts to life, respect for his beingness and appreciation and even gratitude for who he is as a background for deep love to grow. Is this a possible source of the Stockholm Syndrome where the victim supports her or his captor? Safety of the individual self is a prerequisite for anything healthy to come and the authentic interest and attention turned to the self or other so that, in the first person, I can recognize who I am and who the other is. When this self lacks conviction, the energy of fear seeps into me resulting in unsatisfied primary need to stand up, or lie down, in non-resistance to my commitment to a high human idea(l) that is at stake. When I am resisting my helplessness hopelessness and powerlessness my high ideal crumbles into an often futile behavior of anger and most likely perpetuates those patterns imprinted with violent reaction from the oppressor towards me. When non-violence has been mastered and brought into patient practice, violence can be healed on both sides of the anger divide.
For our Postscript about belonging and individuation, we turn again to final thoughts from Dr. Wayne Guthrie:
The emotional cloud of distrust and disturbance that surrounds the planet, brought forth and created by the emotions and the misuse of those emotions by man, is that which divides the world at this time. It takes then, men and women with great vision to move beyond that which holds them bound to the emotional world, to begin to bring about a release to this cloud that surely holds man in bondage. It is important that one be free, not of emotions, because that is an integral part of their growth process of the human being upon the earth, but to maintain a balance within the emotional structure. It is that which you have come to master and what you have come to teach.
On an optimistic note, The Final Thought comes from Shirley Ward:
Happy Conceptions Make Happy Babies, Make Happy People, Make a Happy World. ... Conclusively, we live our lives according to the trauma or glory of our conceptions and our births.
Information on the Whole-Self model is available on www.Whole-Self.info and www.Whole-Self.co.uk , in Greece - www.cosmoanelixis.gr
Appendix 1:
Copyrighted Whole-Self Prebirth Analysis Matrix@2008 Question and Meaning of
Specific Question #8:
Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the egg's instant emotional reactions as she is surrounded and engulfed by the surviving sperm (plural) trying to enter her.
Please allow your Whole-Self to let you experience the sperm's instant emotional reactions as he is trying to enter her.
Some 40 years ago, through Question #8), we discovered and taught that sexual preference and attraction is locked in before birth - even before conception!
In Gay Men, could it be that I am locked in my egg/female/receiver? - that my spermatozoid was not attracted to the egg? - that my spermatozoid felt overwhelmed or rejected by the egg? - that my spermatozoid felt an obligation and/or a lack of choice? In Lesbian Women, could it be that I am locked in my sperm/male/initiator? - that my egg might be terrorized by the sperm? - that the egg was disappointed by the sperm? - that the egg felt an obligation and/or a lack of choice? Just recognizing this information about my innate (born with) gender and sexual patterns often releases feelings of fear, guilt or diminishing self-judgments or decisions against myself. If I have felt uncomfortable about my relationship or sexual feelings or preferences, that is, intimate feelings towards others of my own gender, I can now recognize that these feelings or patterns are not bad or wrong, sinful, evil or sick but actually existed even before I was conceived. In human gender I am simply another aspect of a normal sexual being.
Appendix 2:
Some Reactive Attachment Disorder Parameters
The following lists are some diminishing patterns experienced by mother, and through her charged emotional and mental reactions, by baby during pregnancy and by baby after birth.
1) Mother’s sudden and/or traumatic separation from loved ones and for
baby primary caretaker through illness, hospitalization or death.
2) Physical, mental, emotional, or sexual abuse pre or perinatally.
3) Neglect of her needs and/or abandonment of mother during pregnancy
and by baby after birth.
4) Illness with unrelenting pain in both mother and baby.
5) Frequent moves and/or temporary foster family placements.
After birth RAD children can exhibit ‘child from hell’ patterns:
1) Hyper alertness to counter terrors of destruction and survival
reactiveness.
2) Refusal to make or hold eye contact
3) False ‘charming’ acting out.
4) Inappropriate ‘feel goods’ with strangers.
5) Inappropriately demanding and clinging with strangers.
6) Revenge by refusal to receive or give affection or respect with parents
or caregivers.
7) Continuous talking and repeated annoying stupid questions.
8) Poor peer contacts. No friends.
9) Extreme overt and/or sneaky control patterns.
Because of neurological deficiencies RAD Children
1) Do not have conscience nor fear consequences for bad actions.
2) Do not perceive consequences for wrong actions.
3) Can have learning disabilities and developmental delays.
4) Can have critical inability to control reactive impulses.
5) Can have hyperactive behavior.
Because of disturbed emotional development RAD Children can display:
1) Infantile fear and outrageous rage.
2) Incoherent and/or confusing speech patterns.
The speech center seems to be miswired.
3) Aberrant patterns around food and feces.
4) Sneaky stealing of objects and hoarding of food.
5) Stupid crazy lying.
6) Harming self and others, or property.
7) Abusing, torturing and killing helpless animals.
8) A strong attraction to fire, blood, and gore including Video Games.
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Conference on Prenatal Psychology & Medicine June, Saint-Petersburg, Russia.
Turner JRG & TGN (2006) Why Prebirth Education: A definitive presentation on the urgent need for
Worldwide Prebirth and Birth Education 1st Pan European Congress H.U.P.P.P.M. Athens, GR 15-
17 Sept.
Turner, JRG & TGN (2006) My Brain Just Did Not Give Me Anything To Say Proceeding 1st European
Congress on Prevention, Detection & Diagnostics of Verbal Communication Disorders Greece,
Patra 15-17 December
Turner, JRG & TGN (2008) Now Our Brains Give Us Something To Say 2nd European Congress on
Prevention, Detection & Diagnostics of Verbal Communication Disorders Sofia, Bulgaria
Verny, T. & Kelly, J. (1981) The Secret Life of the Unborn Child. Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Inc. NY
Verny, T. (1997) Birth & Violence IJPPPM Vol. 9 (1997) No. 1. Reprinted (2005) Phenomenon of
Violence Editors: P.G. Fedor-Freybergh & Grigori I. Brekhman, News Agalil, Haifa, Israel.
Verny, T. & Weintraub, P. (2002) Tomorrow’s Baby Simon & Schuster, NYC.
Ward, Shirley (2006) Anger Related to Preconception, Conception and the Pre- and Perinatal Period
IJPPPM Fall 2006
Westermann S (1996) Die Antwort Bist Du Selbst: Whole-Self Ein Innerer Weg Ryvellus
Medienverlag, Seehaupt-Munchen, DE
Westermann, S. (2000). Der elternschlussel (The parent-key) entwickelt (based on) von Whole-Self-
Methode nach Turner. Beispliele von Pranatalen Pragungen von Verhalten in Beziehun-gen.
lJPPPM 12(1):221-228
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