The "Rebirthing" Myth….

A third myth is that Primal therapy is "rebirthing" therapy. Once again, this could not be further from the truth. While the primal process does have the capacity to access and connect to birth trauma, this is not the same as what has been referred to as "rebirthing". Unlike "rebirthing therapy", the focus of primal therapy is not exclusively on the birth experience.  In fact, birth trauma is only accessed if, and when, the client has a need to go there and only if his or her body is leading the way. Traumatic births leave traumatic neurobiological imprints (just as with any adult or childhood trauma). These birth trauma imprints are encoded as "implicit memory" and respond on a sensorimotor level as a "signature" or "fingerprint" that is expressed through the body and the brain. Therefore, obviously, not every one has the need to deal with the birth experience. A client must be exhibiting signs and symptoms of a traumatic birth in order for there to be any need for a therapeutic intervention.

When birth trauma does come up for resolution, unlike in "rebirthing", Primal techniques are non-invasive and not artificial or contrived. Rather the client will safely explore and experience from their "insides" what happened and not have a belief system imposed from the outside. There are never any physical constraints used so the client can connect to the trauma in a totally organismic way that is natural and self-paced.

Birth trauma, when it is real,  can and does have a devastating impact on later adult life and lifelong effects on the adult nervous system. By re-experiencing birth trauma phenomenal changes take place.  Many times, clients are able to stop taking medications for anxiety or depression that they have been on for years or they are able to avoid having to go on meds in the first place. Obviously such decisions are left to the client and their doctor. However, the capacity to enjoy life and not have to be on medications and their inherent side effects is usually optimal and one of the potential benefits of connecting to and feeling one's early traumatic imprints.

For certain individuals, the birth trauma is the original PTSD experience and is the closest that many people will come to dying and the struggle for survival before their actual deaths. Prior to the advent of modern medical intervention (only about 100 years ago), the birth mortality rate for infants was around 40%. This underscores just how life-threatening birth can be. The life and death struggle that ensues in a traumatic birth sets a person's nervous system up to be more vulnerable and reactive to any later stressor's, violence, or abuse .In fact, trauma research is very clear that the impact of any early trauma is typically far greater than horrific events that occur later on as adults. The young nervous system is extraordinarily fragile, underdeveloped, and more sensitive to pain and sensory/ stimulus overload.

When working with any trauma, but especially preverbal trauma, safety is the paramount concern as well as the honoring of the client's own unique history and process. As each person's childhood may have general themes that are universal to a degree, it is also true that the birth experience has similar generalities. That said, however, each person's childhood is unique and so is the specificity of an individual's birth. If and when birth trauma is accessed, the integration of its "signature" will be amazingly individualized and its history revealed in phenomenal detail as to what went wrong. This specificity is, of course, true when healing any PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) experience and so why should it be any different for a person's birth?

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