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What Babies Know & All Mothers Need to Know

Babies know trauma

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'Throughout life, each of us will form thousands of relationships. These bonds take many forms. Some are enduring and intimate-our dearest friend-while others are transient and superficial-the chatty store clerk. Together, relationships in all forms create the glue of a family, community, and society. This capacity to form and maintain relationships is the most important trait of humankind, for without it none of us would survive, learn, work, or procreate.

The first and most important of all relationships are attachment bonds. Initially, these are created through interactions with our primary caregivers, usually parents. First relationships help define our capacity for attachment and set the tone for all of our future relationships'. Dr Bruce Perry

A child psychiatrist and leading authority on children in crisis Dr Perry explores attachment and how it contributes to preventing aggression and anti-social behaviors in children. His work shows that a brain that has suffered trauma through early neglect will have a poorly developed pre frontal cortex the area of the brain that enables us to empathise and recognise other peoples thoughts and feelings.

Alison Ball, Psychotherapist looks at what babies know they must do, in order to survive within the family. She claims;
'Our education' in feeling, in our society, is, in fact, more an education in how not to feel. We have deadened our bodies, clamped down on our tenderness, our joy and our despair, denied our grief or split off from our fear and our anger. We have done this because, as babies and children we have feared that if we felt these feelings and particularly if we expressed these feelings, then we ourselves or our parents would have been overwhelmed; or, in expressing our misery or our joy, we may have been ignored, ridiculed, humiliated or even physically chastised.......as we grow up, we ourselves become our own conscious and unconscious monitors, because, by now this limited self has become me'.

Our muscles are organs of both power and sensation and they contract and relax in movement and in response to physical and emotional stimulation.The muscles form our body’s first line of defence and will contract to inhibit feeling when the feelings become to intense and threaten to overwhelm us, as in emotional and physical pain and extreme excitement.
Babies know how to tighten their muscles to numb pain, and from a very early age on, when consistently subjected to the same intense stimulation, a traumatic pattern of muscular tension begins to develop. One that will cause stiffness and rigidity in the affected muscles. This is known as muscular armouring and muscular armouring is a result of physical and/or emotional trauma, and this most often begins in infancy and childhood. Once set it will become visible in a child's posture and emotional responses.

A sudden pain can cause you to with hold your breath and tighten your abdominal muscles. And if you live or work in an atmosphere of anxiety or emotional stress you are likely to have developed armouring around this part of your body. The ‘solar plexus’ is a major nerve and emotional center and either a sudden and intense, or, a prolonged period of emotional stress, can cause you to ‘hold on’ to your tummy even when the cause of stress has been removed.

Babies know how to tighten their tummies to inhibit pain. This can be the result of prolonged periods of stressful crying or a sudden physical and/or emotional shock.

This is our first step towards ‘muscular armouring’ one that will affect the physical and emotional health of the baby and something most likely to be perceived as ‘colic’. (There is no evidence to support the theory that babies suffer pain through bowel spasms, and all colic mixtures that have been tested scientifically have been proven useless. Similarly, studies have shown that babies who suffer from wind, have no more gas in their tummies than those who do not suffer from wind).

For by far the majority of people 'muscular armouring' starts very young, and well before adulthood most people have learnt to hold in their bellies. They breathe with only a portion of their lung capacity during a normal day, and will hold their breath when anxious or afraid.
Stiffness in the muscles and rigidity in the joints is mankinds most insidious and prevalent disease, one that is usually the most associated with ageing.

Although this starts in infancy babies also know how to remedy this.
'We are born soft and malleable and we die rigid and unyielding' ...Lao Tzu

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