Pregnancy & Birth

Pregnancy reveals deep needs like touch and connection; birth emphasizes a mother's role in emotional regulation. Integral body therapy aids mothers in emotional regulation, strengthens mother-baby bonds, and enhances trust in maternal instincts, offering insights into unconscious needs and early experiences.

Understanding Pregnancy and Birth

Pregnancy is the time when neurobiologically the emotional trauma stored in implicit body memory rises up on the surface. This is when a new mother is hormonally sensitive, and the deepest human needs will suffice. The desire and needs within the basic, and most important human spectrum: touch, connection, regulation, security, emotionally being seen and recognised. The system, the implicit memory, now heightens those unfulfilled needs from the mother’s early period. 

Birth is the time when the mother will regulate the baby with her own systematic capacity. Regulation is an achievement of early development and parenting experience. 

‘Attachment, interactive regulation of emotion, represents the mutual regulation of biological homeostatic states between and within organisms’. *

Connection offers to the child:

  • Survival 
  • Satisfaction of primary needs
  • Internal emotional state that is a prerequisite for development processes
  • Regulating unworkable conditions
  • Reference point for learning about the world
  • Openness to learning from parents

How integral body therapy can help?

  • I gently work on the emotional state of a mother by offering regulation, and the support within emotional conditions that arise in therapy sessions 
  • Working on the protective layers for the baby in the womb 
  • Connecting baby and mother 
  • Navigating mother how to listen to her own maternal instincts and trust 
  • I will provide you with your unique understanding for your unconscious emotional demands
  • You will get the awareness of experience of your early childhood period

*Bradshaw & Schore (Ethology, 2007)

My Story

I never felt that I had a maternal disposition. I (we) made a conscious decision to get pregnant. And now, after a few years, I can say with certainty that pregnancy changed me completely, and with the birth of my enchanted daughter, gave rise to my hidden feelings of great delight and pleasure. I was mesmerized by the changes in my body, I gained appx 40kg in pregnancy, and the heightened senses, I could ‘smell’ the ‘danger’ for my system from a long way. Something switched in me. But, it was a rollercoaster of different, unknown and not understandable emotional fluctuations, especially after giving birth.   

For me, while pregnant, it was a consciously chosen game of letting go. But cognitively choosing it and instinctively is a very different drive mode. Luckily I had loads of experience in that emotional game from practicing many years of yoga & meditation. However, I was still very much a beginner, because letting go while being pregnant is a different game altogether. The support of my husband helped greatly to have a space of acceptance whatever came up. But I wish I had the knowledge of Early Development that I started gaining at about 9 months after giving birth, because I would have more understanding and compassion towards my inner rollercoaster and certainly it would have been easier for my husband. I wish I had my therapist to experience and build conscious connection, and a knowledge that says that my inner sense of security was shaken due to unacceptance within contact experience from my early childhood period. Somehow I had managed, mostly, to listen to my inner (new) compass and take contact from my husband, which was luckily always available for me, but not always possible for me to really take it, benefit from it and integrate. The contact with my baby in my womb, it took a fine tuning into my (new) inner compass and really, but really trusting and letting go and going with the flow, and following the impulses. Sometimes it felt like work, because rewiring the system takes time, and a conscious witnessing. Falling into the implicitly known zone was easy. 

And sometimes, it would lead into real, deep dark feelings and expressions. A feeling of dissatisfaction, fear of survival, the ability of my emotional self-regulation was never great, and being pregnant sometimes looked like an unregulated three year old child. Did you know that all of that, and more, your baby can feel in the womb?!

I was preparing for the birth with a pregnancy retreat, books and guidance which in reality just made it more confusing. I was giving birth, for almost three days, with four pages of a birth plan which almost none was possible to respect. I also felt as if I was reborn. But for every process it takes time to settle in, to click in, to trust and to follow. To follow and respect my desires, to follow and respect my needs, and to follow my baby girl’s needs, which were on a high scale after three days of trying to come into this world. It was a rollercoaster of emotions. I wish I had my therapist with me. I wish I had my mum with me. I wish I understood what early development in childhood does to our system and implicit memory, because understanding removes stigma and opens the door to trust with compassion to our emotional states. 

*Please be aware that this is just a small fraction of my personal story. There are many layers and the possibilities for the individual dive into the subject.

My Voice

I hope that these recordings will serve you as a quick and easy simple exercise for obtaining a better state of your mind and your emotions. This is recorded with the aim to give you the feeling of myself, which can help you to maybe be inspired to take up a therapeutic journey with me.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask. 

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