Please understand that what you will learn is NOT about blaming others, particularly parents. It is a process of understanding how you’ve been impacted by your early experiences. It is an acknowledgment of the truth of your experiences, rather than covering them. Once you acknowledge truth, you can move forward to improved and deeper relationships. Like it or not, we are a composite of all of the experiences we have ever had from the moment of our conception. As a matter of fact, from your relatives from three or four generations before you were born, traits have been incorporated into who you are. You were born with these traits, and you saw them modeled in the lives of your parents and grandparents as well. This is a solid fact!
Can you believe it? It’s not even necessary for you to recall the experiences for them to still affect your decision-making today. The tendency toward them is included in your DNA. Dr. Bruce Lipton, formerly of the University of Wisconsin and one of the founders of DNA, makes it very clear in his lectures that we carry the physical and emotional traits and the results of life experiences of those who came before us. Parents’, grandparents’, great-grandparents’ and even great-great-grandparents’ experiences and feelings can impact our feelings today, and thus our actions.
Of course, you can’t remember details about the atmosphere around or between your parents while you were inside your mother’s womb. You no doubt can’t even remember what happened in the delivery room when you were born or in the nursery or in your mother’s arms when you were fresh out of the womb. And, it is doubtful that you can picture what you were wearing on your trip home from the hospital when you were just a few days old, or your first view of grandparents or older brothers and sisters. You might have even been a sick newborn or a preemie and had to remain in the hospital longer than the usual stay for new mothers and babies, but nevertheless those experiences of life all have an impact on how your thoughts and feelings have developed.
Do you think that this is foolish psychobabble? Not so! In this book, you will be provided with scientific verification and words of wisdom from leaders in both the scientific and psychological world. If you are a Christian, you will see that what you will learn also corroborates with Biblical teachings. Sadly, many blame God for the negative things that befall them, when it is His enemy who is responsible. Satan uses those who allow him to do so, to wound others, especially their children and grandchildren. All of this is written for you here in an attempt to create understanding of your current situation, and how you got to it. When you have received knowledge and hopefully have applied what you have read to yourself, you will be offered tools to undo the negative emotional charge in your memories. It is this negative atmosphere in your thought life that can dog your steps and steal your joy, leaving you bitter, lonely and alone, even pushing others away by caustic words and hurtful behaviors toward them. So are you ready to move out of the shadows?
Chapter One
In the beginning . . .
Do you think that your beginning occurred in the delivery room and began the moment you gasped your first breath? You might have been born, like Ron was, in an attic, or even in the back seat of a car on the way to a hospital, but your first breath, wherever you gasped it, was not really when you began.
In his wonderfully informative books, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child and Pre-Parenting - Nurturing Your Child from Conception, Dr. Thomas Verny writes about the experience of a child in the womb. Dr. Verny is a psychiatrist, who earned his doctorate at the University of Toronto, and has taught at several Ivy-League Universities. He is the founder of the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health and has lectured extensively throughout Europe and North America and has appeared frequently on national television shows. During his years of research, he has discovered many valuable things about the life and development of the child growing in the womb.
Did you know that at 18 to 22 days after your conception, your heart was beating, bringing life to you – and you were just the size of a grain of rice? In those first few hours and days after conception, the fertilized ovum (egg) begins the rapid division into multiple cells, until a form of the human body begins to develop. Easily seen shortly after conception are the spinal column and chord, the brain (much larger in proportion to the body than it will be later on) and the base of the brain (known as the medulla oblongata). It is the center for developing and operating all the emerging body systems that provide functions necessary to sustain life.
The October 4, 2010 issue of TIME Magazine reports other new findings about life in the womb and its effect on the fetus, newborn and developing child and later adult.
“The kind and quantity of nutrition you received in the womb; the pollutants, drugs and infections you were exposed to during gestation; your mother’s health, stress level and state of mind while she was pregnant with you – all these factors shaped you as a baby and a child and continue to affect you to this day.”
“This is the provocative contention of a field known as fetal origins, whose pioneers assert that the nine months of gestation constitute the most consequential period of our lives, permanently influencing the wiring of the brain and the functioning of organs such as the heart, liver and pancreas. The conditions we encounter in utero, they claim, shape our susceptibility to disease, our appetite and metabolism, our intelligence and temperament. In the literature which has exploded over the past 10 years, you can find references to the fetal origins of cancer, asthma, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, mental illness – even of conditions associated with old age like arthritis, osteoporosis and cognitive decline.”
Catherine Monk, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, has advanced an even more startling proposal: that a pregnant woman’s mental state can shape her offspring’s psyche. “Research indicates that even before birth, mother’s moods may affect child development,” Monk says.
Women’s heart rate and blood pressure, or their levels of stress hormones, could affect the inter-uterine milieu over the nine months of gestation, Monk explains, influencing an individual’s first environment and thereby shaping its development.
“We know that some people have genetic predispositions to conditions like depression and anxiety,” Monk says. “And we know that being raised by a parent with mental illness can increase the risk of mental illness in the offspring. It may be that the intrauterine environment is a third pathway by which mental illness is passed down in families. This kind of research,” says Monk, “is pushing back the starting line for when we become who we are.”
In his book Pre-Parenting, Dr. Verny reports that former Harvard professor, Chicago Radiologist, Jason Birnholz, has prepared over fifty thousand fetal sonograms over the past two decades. One of the most dramatic findings for Birnholz has been that unborn babies, especially beyond the fourth month of pregnancy, are not all that different from newborns.
“You can see the emotional reactions on the fetus’s face”, says Birnholz. “If they look unhappy, there is probably a reason. I’ve seen starving fetuses cry just like newborns. They used to be considered blobs, but they are not.”
In the forward of his best-selling book, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, Dr. Verny states,
“We now know that the unborn child is an aware, reacting human being who from the sixth month on (and perhaps even earlier) leads an active emotional life.”
Reading further on pages 12 and 13, he sites the following discoveries:
•“The fetus can see, hear, experience, taste and, on a primitive level, even learn in utero (that is in the uterus before birth). Most importantly, he can feel – not with an adult’s sophistication, but feel nonetheless.”
•“A corollary to this discovery is that what a child feels and perceives, begins