In my BodyTalk work, I primarily do 2 things: 1- heal the impact of our earliest experiences and how our past will create triggers and pain over and over again until the root issue is addressed or 2- work to prevent trauma by supporting pregnant women and the babies they carry to feel safe and at ease in the world, in birth and into parenthood.
With adoption, there is massive stress and trauma for both the pregnant woman and the child. I work with a number of adopted adults and children to heal the core wound of rejection and loss and how it shows up time and time again in their daily lives. Meet who we will call Leah. She has given permission to share her more recent BodyTalk session experiences. Leah is an older adult with grown children. As we settled in for her most recent session she recounted how she had been travelling and how hard it was on her body and mind. She had felt so disconnected from her body, so ungrounded, bloated and how bad her digestion was. Her physical and emotional symptoms are communication of a deeper issue asking to be addressed. We began with energetically grounding her and releasing all the old trauma of being uprooted, fear, uncertainty, confusion, grief, loss and resentment from her root chakra (our energy centre that relates to our right to be here, our right to exist and gets damaged by rejection and loss of security). She was uprooted by the only home she knew, the body of her biological mother. She was separated and alone, confused, afraid and in deep pain. When I do sessions I can feel the pain coming to the surface and releasing. This pain was so immense. We rebalanced her root chakra and how it related to the 8th chakra, our ancestral/karmic experiences. We explored how things get replayed over and over again until they are healed. Leah recounted how she always hated her face. How wrong and mismatched she was to her white adoptive family. That she was never able to conform or fit it. She was always an outsider. We explored how travelling and being an outsider in a new place related to her ongoing relationship with not fitting in. We cleared her fear of belonging, and her resistance to letting go of her unworthiness.
We worked specifically to heal her first 6 hours of life. In Ayurvedic philosophy, it isn’t just the golden hour after birth that is crucial to bonding. It is the first 6 hours. In these hours the newborn is alert and is encoding in the imprint of who they are. Am I safe? Am I loved? Am I enough? What is my place in this world?
For Leah she was not loved. She was not emotionally safe. She was rejected and abandoned and no one told her why.
I recently attended the Birth Psychology Congress and I heard over and over again that if you talk to a baby in the womb and once out and explain to them like a toddler what is going on, they calm down and their nervous system relaxes. They are conscious.
I believe adoption can be done consciously with minimal long-term impact when we work with them in the womb, through birth and beyond to feel safe, and supported and can understand what is going on. But Leah never got that. All of this related to her self-image, and her view of herself. This belief that she can never be enough.
She had to give herself permission to be desirable. This core belief that because her biological mother didn’t desire to keep her she isn’t desirable to anyone. Leah like other adoptive women I’ve worked with had a need to be perfect and had an eating disorder in an attempt to attain physical perfection and be desirable to people. Yet another place the trauma of adoption had reared its ugly head.
Back to the session. Next I was drawn to use Dr. Tony Madrid’s protocol of healing the “Non-Bonding Experience” between mother and child (see my blog post on healing asthma for more on his amazing work) except instead of working the mother herself, I was led to take Leah through a visualization of being carried in her adoptive mother’s womb. The woman who wanted her, loved her, raised her. We imagined being in that safe loving womb space. Being desired. We imagined a beautiful birth in which she went straight to her mother’s body and had proper bonding. Where she was welcomed, loved and safe. We gave her a new beginning.
Decades of research tell us that our subconscious does not know the difference between these imagined realities and the physical realities. We can construct new memories and make them to be real in every way that matters. We finished off the session by repairing her learned programming of belonging. She can belong in this world. Even in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people.
Leah says there have been a lot of emotions to process since this session. We opened the door for that old pain to come to the surface and to be released. Her digestion dramatically improved. A lot of emotional weight has been lifted.
Healing is a journey, not a destination, Leah, like all of us has more work to do to unravel the 5 decades of playing these abandonment patterns out.
How about we prevent them instead? We can do that with a conscious conception, a connected pregnancy, a gentle birth and a loving welcome. We can encode in their psyche that they are wanted, loved, safe and welcome in this world. We can unravel the stress and traumas as they inevitably happen. I have children I continue to work with monthly that I worked with while in the womb, through their births who are now preschoolers. Supporting their development and processing all that life throws at them. It is magnificent!