Episode 142: The effects of our birth

The Aware Parenting Podcast

In this episode, I introduce the new series on the effect of the pre and perinatal period of us as babies, children and adults. This fits alongside the upcoming publication of my book, The Emotional Life of Babies. In future episodes in this series, I'll be having conversations about healing from stress in utero, birth and the postnatal period for babies, children and adults, and the effect of not healing can have. I share about my own journey of realising how much my birthing experience, being born at 30 weeks and in an incubator for 6 weeks, affected my childhood and teenage years, and how, over the decades after that, I reconnected with feelings of grief, loneliness, powerlessness, terror, and the deep pain of my experiences not being understood. I talk about the difference between healing from the effects of our birth in adulthood compared to healing whilst a baby or child, with the support of our parents. I include the work of people like Stan Grof, Thomas Verny and Michel Odent, and the powerful effects their work had on me and my understanding of what babies experience. I share about HypnoBirthing and Calmbirth, and the huge shift I made from being terrified of giving birth to being completely calm during birthing. I talk about posterior birth and The Lifting Technique by Janie McCoy King, who wrote Back Labor No More! I also explain how I supported my son to heal from his very fast posterior birth on the day he was born. I talk about the will work of The Marion Method and how the timing of our birth can also continue to affect us later in life and the patterns that can continue.