I am reading Nadine Burke Harris’s Book: The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity. I will often come across a passage that resonates so deeply with my own life that I have to put the book down and just breathe. The reason for my pause is not about my own Adverse Childhood Experiences, although I have a few; it is because I recognize the path she is on. I first heard about Adverse Childhood Experiences from another professional in my field of practice, prenatal and perinatal somatic psychology, named Terry Monell. In her paper, Living Out The Past: Infant Surgery Prior to 1987 (published 2011), Ms. Monell describes how our society and culture, especially our medical culture, used to see babies as unfeeling, without thought or even the capacity to feel pain. She mentions ACEs because of the documented impact adverse experiences have on our health lifelong. She states that babies were dying from the shock of pain due to medical procedures without anesthesia. Those who survived were extremely traumatized to the point that later in life, people who had infant surgeries had a phobia of hospitals and documented cases of post-traumatic stress disorder. All because it was thought that babies don’t feel pain. The enthusiastic ingestion of Ms. Monell’s paper and the ACEs study led to a presentation about the baby’s experience called The Baby is in the Shadow that explores early overwhelming conditions.
We now know that babies DO feel pain, and in fact, they are even more sensitive to it than adults. The study of baby’s experiences in utero and the first two years of life have led to the rise of early developmental trauma as a reality today, especially with the acceptance of implicit memory and that the body remembers. At the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH), we have developed what we call the Adverse Early Experiences questionnaire with its own Resilience score. These experiences are classified by what we find truly overwhelming for babies starting with conception.
What I can sense in Dr. Harris’s story is some of my own, which is why I often have to pause when reading it. In Claudia Gold’s blog two days ago, A Conversation with Nadine Burke Harris, Ms. Gold reiterates the experience Ms. Harris has as she pioneers the integration of ACEs into pediatrics where her colleagues talk about her as “that doctor from San Francisco telling us that our kids are brain damaged.” I have had similar experiences working to have our culture, especially our medical practices, embrace the baby’s experience. I still remember the chill I felt when talking with a well-known midwife in my area when she said, “You can’t tell people their babies are traumatized.” In fact, “trauma” is a word I had to avoid for years for fear of triggering people. Trauma and babies don’t go together, apparently. We see these beautiful beings as somehow apart from the horror and terror of overwhelming, life threatening experiences. It is thrilling to see Trauma Informed Care and Resilience health practices take root that normalize traumatic life and offer prevention and cure.
We know at APPPAH that babies have overwhelming experiences, and yet, there is still some resistance to fully embracing how we can make their earliest experiences less traumatizing. This morning, I read in The Deepest Well another one of those statements that gives me pause. I just had to close the book and breathe. It was in the first part of the book where she talks about why it is so hard to imagine overwhelming events in childhood. She says, “It’s possible that we marginalize the impact of trauma on health because it does apply to us” (p. 42). Yes. We were all children and babies once. Many of us have trauma in our earliest roots, and even before, in our ancestral line.
Recognition. That is what I am feeling. Someone is saying what really needs to be said, about childhood, our culture, our medical practices, and also about babies. I want to recommend The Deepest Well to anyone interested in their own health and well-being, and that of the future generations. The roots of our health lie in the experiences of our earliest times. For those of us working out to change culture and support humanity to thrive, reading this book is like drinking a cool drink of water when you are very thirsty. For APPPAH and practitioners like me, we know that the prenatal and perinatal period is the deepest part of the well.
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