Trauma in the Womb
How Prenatal Experience Impacts Adult Clients
Recorded Friday 21 October 2022
With Dr Cherionna Menzam-Sills
CPD Credits: 3 hours
The field of pre- and perinatal psychology highlights memories of influential, often traumatic events before and around the time of birth. These early experiences can profoundly affect relational and behavioural tendencies. This seminar focuses on experiences of loss in the pre and perinatal period, the most common being early twin loss. We will also explore the “haunted womb” – one that has felt the impact of miscarriages, abortions, or stillbirths.
Maternal loss and stress can affect the flow of love and connection that the baby in utero requires to thrive.
READ MORE...It is suggested that babies developing within this traumatized space may live their lives in the shadow of a mysterious sense of longing and dissatisfaction. How might we shine the light on such shadows and access the original potential that they occlude?
This online seminar offers an overview of common early loss and its effect for the baby in utero, including how such experiences might be sensed and remembered. We will also be offered the opportunity for some experiential exploration of this material, both in ourselves as therapists and clinically with our clients.
CPD – Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 3 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.
Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.
FULL PROGRAMME
Introduction to pre- and perinatal memory and sentience within the maternal field
Cherionna will begin by guiding participants through a meditation to enhance a sense of mindful presence, resource, and social engagement to support self-regulation in meeting the material presented. This will be followed by a presentation introducing findings in the field of pre- and perinatal psychology on very early memory and sentience. We will consider the important influence of the mother’s psychological state, including effects of extreme or ongoing stress, ancestral/epigenetic influences, and available support. When challenges are too much, the baby’s needs, even in utero, for love and connection can be relatively unmet, leaving them longing for what they have missed.
Overview of the trauma of twin loss, haunted womb, and umbilical affect
Pre- and perinatal loss often relates to losing a twin in the womb or at birth. It will be suggested that unacknowledged loss generates unconscious shadow material, driving the surviving twin to mourn and seek their lost twin. Similarly, that losing a sibling prior to one’s conception can create confusing, lifelong tendencies toward depression, sadness, fear and anxiety, and a sense of never being good enough. A child conceived after miscarriage, stillbirth or abortion develops in a “haunted womb,” characterized by a sense of fear, terror, death, grief, and disappointment. Babies also take on maternal emotions communicated umbilically as “umbilical affect.” How can we recognize and help resolve these issues?
Q&A
Experiential
Following another guided meditation, including the element of holding our “inner little one”, Cherionna will guide participants in enquiry into their own early loss and its potential effects through journaling. Exploring this material may stimulate an infantile nervous system state. Unable to self-regulate, babies settle through co-regulation. They cannot differentiate between their own and others’ emotions or between past and present. The enquiry includes practicing essential clinical skills in addressing this material: self-regulation, differentiation, mindful receptive presence, and orienting to resource and to one’s current age in present time.
Q&A