I think the first time I heard about birth trauma was at a contact improv dance event. I was skeptical and even judgemental, believing it an easy excuse for dysfunctionality. Only after completing a masters in cognitive neuroscience and going through several deep psychedelic trips did I realized how wrong I was. Understanding our birth trauma can be a path to improved functionality.
I will focus on my anecdotal story because most humans learn better from stories in hopes that you can find some practical learning for your own growth. I will augment my story with relevant research for those who want to delve deeper.
Can We Remember Our Birth? The science
There are two types of memory:
Episodic memory - this is what most of us think of when we think of memory. A narrative around where we were and what we were doing. The ability to recall specific events or experiences. This type of memory typically develops from around 2 years old and improves throughout adolescence and adulthood utilizing the brain region called the hippocampus.
Procedural memory (sometimes called implicit memory) is the ability to acquire and retain motor skills and habits. Examples of procedural memory include riding a bike, playing a musical instrument and also simpler things like walking or crawling. Procedural memory doesn’t involve the hippocampus and is believed to begin earlier in life. How early? There is evidence that this memory starts from around 34 weeks of gestation after the fetus’s brain is developed enough that it can start multisensory integration and form feedback loops between motor output and sensory input.
We learn what we are while utilizing these feedback loops and calculating statistical correlations between input and output.
In the tight loud environment of the womb we push and turn and kick against the womb boundaries and start building our agency. The output of our motor neurons controlling our hand correlated with the activity of the neurons in the sensory cortex receiving the proprioceptive signals sent from our hand through the nervous system.
Slowly the complex system of our 86 billion neurons starts organizing itself, until it is able to form predictions. “If I do A, I will probably feel B”. “If I feel B I am probably doing A.”
And then, all of a sudden, everything changes, our whole sensory world that was filtered by being in our mother’s womb vanishes and we are tossed into a world filled with so many unpredictable sensations. This might just be the most memorable moment of our lives when it comes to procedural memory.
There is one more thing to understand about our memory banks: whenever we “read” from them we also “write” to them, connecting our current sensory input with the previous learnt memory. Think about all the instances you heard your favorite song, how they connect and blare with each other. This is the basics of many trauma healing therapeutic modalities. From EMDR to Exposure therapy, we can bring up traumatic memories in safe spaces and override the procedural memory, the tightness in the body, the
shaking, sweating or vomiting that can accompany PTSD. We can slowly learn to regulate but it’s not easy.
My Story
My uncle used to tell me that as a baby I would bang my head on the floor and scream. Turns out, head banging can be pretty common in kids especially those diagnosed with autistic spectrum traits. For most it stops in childhood, for me this impulse returned in adolescence and my early 20’s especially in times of stress. Mostly I could inhibit it except when sometimes I couldn’t. The narrative I carried with me was that I was broken, a self destructive creature. It was only after I started somatic therapy in my mid 30’s while crawling and going through developmental movements that I remembered my birth story. I was stuck, banging my head on my mother’s pelvic for 12 hours until a MD managed to get me out. I messaged my mom and she confirmed it, I was born with a big dent on my forehead. I wasn’t broken, I was just holding on to an early procedural memory, an adaptive strategy stemming from my birth. I like to fantasize that if traditional birth practices were more common maybe I wouldn’t have gotten stuck to begin with but also enjoy attributing my stubbornness and relentless pushing towards challenges to those early moments.
There is interesting evidence that children born via cesarean operation have higher rates of obesity and asthma as these first moments impact our immune system and gut bacteria and perhaps even early learnt motor skills.
Psychedelic Short Cut
Our brain remains plastic until the day we die even Alzihimer patients can form new procedural memories creating new neural connections. However, the majority of our plasticity happens early in our first few years of life. Various parts of the brain hyper connect at very specific times and then a pruning mechanism happens, whatever connections aren’t triggered by incoming input get pruned. Most of the research has been done with language identification. If we are not exposed to a language early in life our brain will forever react differently than if we were, even if later in life we become fluent speakers.
Psychedelics have the ability to bring back some of that lost plasticity, they can over connect different areas for a short period of time allowing us to create new feedback loops. Different psychedelics work in different ways and have very different risk profiles. My research is mostly focused on classical psychedelics such as Psilocybin and LSD, but other research shows Ketamine and MDMA have potential therapeutic effects (with a somewhat higher risk profile). In some psychedelic trips I would get glimpses of very early patterns but finding and replacing the exact procedural memory responsible for my head banging was harder than the movie eternal sunshine of the spotless mind would lead us to believe.
Yes And
My path to rewrite this specific birth trauma learnt pattern started with building an artistic shrine to these patterns in an attempt to connect them to visual-spatial processing. Then I began to use idea’s from Improv theater which are also reflected in the therapeutic modality called Internal Family Systems and Acceptance commitment therapy. Instead of trying to block or reject the impulse or sensation, I would try to accept it. However it was a dangerous impulse I add a an “AND” to it. YES I’m going to bang my head AND I’m going to put this pillow on the wall before I do it. Yes I’m going to bang my head AND I will do it on my bed mattress. Yes I’m going to bang my head AND I’m going to do it very very slowly and feel the full sensation of pressure in safe slow motion. I began exploring the impulse, expanding it and slowly stopped being afraid of it.
As I practiced this, the impulse led to one of many actions I could act out. But it still felt maladaptive. When I feel stress in my adult life it’s not because I'm physically trapped and there are so many more useful patterns that I could be doing.
Float Tanks and Hot Tubes
I’ve always loved hot tubs and ever since I tried a float tank for the first time it’s become an integrative part of my wellness and self care practices. I even explored a dry float tank in NYC in hopes that it could be a more effective replacement for short mental health breaks (it wasn’t but it did still help with my lower back pain). The warm water and reduction of sensory changes quiets my over noisy bottom up sensory input. I feel safe and content. I’ve been thanking my mom for giving me what was likely a great womb experience which is far from trivial as many issues can start from lack of prenatal care.
The singer/song writer Rachal Lark sings about hot springs and psychedelics. For me it was submerging myself in a jacuzzi in the Netherlands while on Psychedelics. In this altered state the noise of the bubbles and water sensation brought me back to the womb. Then, I opened my eyes underwater and the bright underwater light of the jacuzzi shocked and pained me. My procedural memory kicked in, I was in the womb and I needed to get out. It was terrifying. While my episodic awareness and memory was intact and I knew I was in a jacuzzi a stronger than ever impulse to bang my head on the jacuzzi wall emerged. Luckily all the somatic and therapeutic training kicked. “ok you want to get out but remember we now have a whole body and we can figure out where the way out is.” A new pattern came out of my body contracting and then pushing sideways and finally using my legs to break out of the water. It was an incredibly powerful experience.
A few days after that I felt a little twitch, the beginning of the known head banging impulse had arised. However, this time my body reacted with the new learnt pattern, contract, push sideways, expand. When I completed that pattern the impulse was gone and I felt something had changed.
It’s been months and the impulse has not returned even while under a lot of stress. Whether the narrative of my birth story is objectively true or an inaccurate story that fits the few data points I have is immaterial. What matters is that it helped me stop exerting immense mental effort to deal with this patterns, and instead make friends with it and teach my brain some new tricks!
*This is a personal story and by no means a recommendation for a specific therapeutic modality.
Super interesting thanks