Birth Imprints

‘What’s next?’ For months now, she had been struggling with stress over a neighbour that had turned from kind into too eager to help out, into monitoring her routine coming and going. She withdrew as it felt increasingly uncomfortable and when her car was damaged, her property damaged and a torch light shone intentionally at her bedroom window, for her an increase of a sense of total unsafety emerged. It began with her feeling frustrated, then angry and subsequently sliding into feeling terrified, nervous to leave the house, and hyper-vigilant for fear of being followed.  At home she was worried; during her Christmas-stay with relatives miles and miles away, she was worried what might happen while she was absent and what would happen when she returned. Her mind was overactive and despite support from authorities she felt helpless and alone.

She had asked me to do a Compassionate Inquiry session with her so that she might get a bit more clarity about what made her so fearful about the situation. She continuously felt on edge, constantly trying to anticipate what might be next. Nevertheless, she felt powerless; where did that come from?
As she tells me the story, I ask her what she notices in her body. She feels frozen, a tightening in the chest like a rigid block and the fear makes her feel somewhat sick. As she speaks, she hunches the shoulders and I ask her to exaggerate that movement a bit: shoulders a bit more forward, tightening the muscles a bit more… She has her eyes closed and says she feels helpless and has a sickly feeling in the throat that she has not noticed before. She has a hard time staying with the physical sensations and the emotions that come with the sense of helplessness. We are silent together while she is feeling into her body and I hold her in my presence. I look carefully at my screen to see how she moves, to listen to the volume of her voice, to let the words that she speaks sink in.

I suddenly get a very intuitive urge; I ask her if I can share an observation and a question with her and she agrees. ‘As I was watching you, making yourself small and bending your head forward, I was wondering… do you know what your birth was like?’ She only pauses a second and tells me that her birth was induced. She came four weeks early, because the umbilical cord was wrapped around the placenta and she was in danger. When she was born, she was asphyxiated, gasping for air in her lungs, and after a short moment with her mother, she was put in an incubator. For the three days she was only rarely touched and was alone much of the time. I ask her what it must be like for a baby to be born early, to feel short of breath, almost suffocated and in utter distress, and then be pretty much left alone. ‘Very scary’, she says. I look at her: ‘Very scary…? What is it you might have feared, lying there alone?’ She waits and thinks and says: ‘Am I okay?’, ‘Will somebody come for me?’, ‘What do I do if they don’t?’ Her choice of analytical words does not seem to match the fearful look on her face nor the faded volume of her voice and I say: ‘Might you have been terrified, fearing you might die…?’ The tears come again: ‘Maybe I thought it was the end… and I often feel terrified, indeed, and I find it unbearable to be alone, completely disconnected from myself…’ We take time to let this sense of life-threatening loneliness be present for a moment. This allows her to experience that this time she actually can survive this emotion – actually has already survived the intense loneliness.

Then she continues: ‘There must have been this feeling of ‘What’s next? What might happen to me next?’ As she utters the sentence, she is aware that this is what she has been wondering about for months now with regard to her neighbour and she shakes her head: ‘You have heard me say this before, literally…’ I nod in silence and after she has shed more tears, I point out that this is a connection she made on her own: ‘Yes… this is a massive realisation’, she says and we are both aware of the incredible mirroring of the past in the present.

We dive a bit more deeply into aspects of what she has just discovered and she says that the vulnerability of helplessness causes her terror. We conclude, however, that she is not as helpless, powerless, and lonely now as she was way back then. Pondering all she has said in this one hour long inquiry, we also wonder about her energetic presence when this terror takes over. What does she radiate with this sense of powerlessness that might in a bizarre way ‘entice’ her neighbour? To prevent any misunderstanding… this is not about ‘blaming the victim’, but about acknowledging that her earliest experiences outside of the safe womb were of terror and fear of dying. This has left a huge imprint in her that she carries and exudes, despite all the amazing achievements she has manifested in her life.

‘True connection feels like a big soothing hug to me’, she tells, ‘but I have had so many experiences in my life where soothing and holding were lacking that it has become quite difficult for me to trust others. Also, I don’t like to be controlled and at the same time being on my own and feeling alone has been a huge theme throughout my life…’ She is teared up again, still processing the fact that all of this, as much as it seemed connected to experiences in childhood, had a much earlier root cause, still.

The next day she texts me: ‘As a baby I was terrified, alone, wondering what was next, afraid I might die… When I have been gripped by these feelings [of helplessness], I have thought as well:  what’s the next option, because this feels like death. It makes sense why this whole situation is so raw for me. Thank you for your time today. That was a life changing session for me.’ She adds that she had a beautiful conversation with her mother that day, about how her mom had told the nurses who wanted to send her home: ‘I am not leaving my baby!’ What an amazing and touching flow of healing events…

Breadcrumbs…

Vera had had intense days with a training that had asked a lot of her. The trainers had been present dedicatedly and had paid attention to everyone’s needs. In an impressive way, they had brought in both a lot of energy and a lot of calmness. She looks back at it with a lot of satisfaction, but there is also a lot to reflect on and I have time to listen to her. I have been in conversation with her before and the confidence between us gives a safe vibe to our conversation. She fires away immediately.

On the last morning of the training, Vera had looked around and felt touched as she saw how all the participants were chatting with each other. She herself had also been pleasantly in conversation, but then she had sat alone for a while and unexpectedly all the experiences of the training had merged into one big inner spectacle. The insights screamed for attention: ‘Do you realise this? Are you aware of that? Don’t you think this is special? Have you let that get through to you? Do you see how this is related to what you had discovered earlier?’ She sits opposite me, looking somewhat defeated, and says: “I feel that there is a link between my life history and my feelings about what is currently happening. I felt it that morning too, but I could not put it into words. I could only feel tears welling up from my toes. I felt short of breath; I sat with my eyes closed and felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was afraid that I would fall apart into a thousand pieces. I needed all my attention to keep my breathing in order and make room for those tears.

The sounds around me seemed to disappear. I sat there with my eyes closed and was aware of everything that came to mind, until suddenly I felt a hand on my back. I just knew it belonged to one of the trainers; I recognised the energy that emanated from it. I took a quick look and saw that I was right. I was encouraged to breathe more deeply because my breathing was so high in my chess. I tried that, but it was difficult. I felt completely overwhelmed by my emotions…” The hand had remained on her back for a while; then she received a kiss on the top of her head and was left to herself again; the trainer walked away.

Vera thinks and is silent for a moment before continuing her story: “On the one hand, I felt uncomfortable being in the middle of everyone, but I knew that the training was intended to gain insights, so I didn’t want to run away from it, but I also do not want to pretend any longer that I am strong and can handle anything. What happens and how people respond to me… that often affects me so deeply. They regularly seem to think that I can handle it all, because I don’t immediately fall over, but I am much more sensitive than people generally realise and there are certain dynamics I am no longer willing to accept anymore.” She sounds fiercer. She tells about a number of people with whom communication has been difficult for some time. She has recently looked into various forms of passive aggressiveness. Someone pointed this out to her some time ago and she wanted to know more about it so that she could investigate what it meant and whether she was guilty of it, as that person claimed. Now that she has learned new things, she can recognise elements of it more quickly and pays more attention to how she communicates. “I have noticed how often passive aggression and gaslighting occur. I find that difficult and I am shocked and sad about my own role in it and about what I did not notice. I can see better now how as a child I used to be treated that way so often that I came to think it was normal. I did not always communicate well, but I also often tolerated how I was treated. That really has to stop; I don’t want to do that anymore and I don’t want to be the target of it anymore either…”

The tears well up and Vera brings up her expectations of relationships and friendships: “Some say you shouldn’t have expectations because that only leads to disappointment, but I think that’s impossible. Things like reliability, responsibility, reciprocity, vulnerability, openness and attention… these are essential to me. I experience these as human values, but certainly also as social needs! I want to be able to count on that.”
We are silent together and suddenly she realises something: “I can actually remember so little of moments in my childhood when my parents were really happy with me and for me. It did happen occasionally, but it was so sporadic, not nearly as often as what I try to give to my own children… I just settled for what little there was in terms of attention and emotional availability… I got that from both of them to a very limited extent and I am becoming increasingly aware that this is why I long for it so much in friendships and love relationships. For far too long I have satisfied myself with a bare minimum there and that has led to many feelings of loneliness…”

I look at Vera and my thoughts go to the theatre play the day before, in which the interviewer had asked the guest at the beginning about his definition of freedom. The guest replied: “If you don’t long for it, then you are really free.” There was mock laughter in the large, packed hall; the suggestion came up that we could all go home, now that the greatest lesson had already been delivered. The interviewer fell somewhat silent and the guest had continued with a grin: “A child who romps outside and plays in the meadow near the ditches and can go wherever they want… such a child does not speak about freedom, because they simply ARE free. Only when we lack things do we start to crave them and they become needs, concepts that we want to define, but as soon as that happens, you already know what is going on. Someone who is or wants to be the ‘connector’ in a family or a group has had a place and a role earlier in life or in a previous life in which there was little connection. Now, in this life, in this environment, an attempt is being made to make up for that, to do things differently. We are, as it were, living the dynamics that we previously missed; that is why we are here.”

The performance had lasted almost three hours, but these opening lines had been the most important of the evening for me. I had taken them home and now recognised them in Vera’s words. We explored it further and I dropped the term ‘breadcrumbs’. That is a word used for relational dynamics in which someone so incredibly longs for connection, security, and genuine, loving attention that every little bit of those values ​​is received as if a banquet is being served, when there are merely breadcrumbs. They do not satisfy the hunger, but give just about enough to fuel the hope that sooner or later there will be a richly filled dinner table. And the more vulnerable and hungry we are, the more likely we are to conveniently ignore the red flags of such an interaction pattern. It is sometimes called ‘intermittent reinforcement’, a severe form of emotional neglect or actually emotional abuse. I know that dynamic all too well, so I now recognise it in Vera’s words. We mutually mirror one another and that connects us.

We discuss some more and she indicates that she has gained clarity about the coherence between her wishes, the way she deals with them and what she tries to tolerate in dealing with others. Of course, it also comes up that once again she is in the middle of the tension between ‘attachment’ and ‘authenticity’ and, as a result of the pain of the past, attachment is often still being given priority. Guarding your boundaries, respecting your values… a young child cannot do that, but as adults we have an (emotional and health) role in this and she is now on the brave path of self-care for this.

Within five minutes of taking her seat on the couch with me the tears are already streaming down her cheeks. It is a relief for her to have taken the step to come to me, but it is also complicated. She has not talked to anyone yet about visiting me. And not only that: she has not talked to anyone about many of the things she wants to present to me. Difficult thoughts arise about what to say if she gets caught here, even though she knows there is nothing to caught on. She considers not discussing it at home for the time being, even though she knows that sooner or later this will be inevitable. She is already preparing herself for an argument about the choice to seek therapeutic support, even though she knows that this is the only way she will be able to find more peace within herself in the near future, because she can bear the burden on her own anymore. She feels how more and more things are starting to go wrong inside her, although on the outside it all looks nice. At the beginning of our conversation she tells me, somewhat cool and collected still, that most people cannot see from her appearance how she is really doing, how she is always able to be there for others, but that as soon as she is alone, she really just wants to cry, wants to crawl away from the claims of the world, becoming invisible, so that no one demands or desires anything from her anymore. The loneliness, the feeling of not belonging anywhere, the experience that everything in life is chaos… they slowly but surely become unbearable and she no longer wants to numb everything at the moments when she feels like she can no longer deal with it in any other way.

“I don’t really know who I am and what I want… I really have no idea… Other people have goals, but I wouldn’t know what to do with life… And if you ask me what makes me feel good, what I like to do to feel better when I feel really bad… then I can hardly answer that… In fact, I have never looked at it or thought about it that way. There was always so much chaos… I was merely surviving, but I don’t want that anymore. I realise that I can no longer avoid the pain. If I want to do something with my life, I have to face that pain and somehow learn to look at it and deal with it differently. I have been very helpful to others and I have the impression that they really see me as the go-to-person, for them to talk about all their difficult things, but lately that has also started to bother me. Why does it always have to be about them…? And why don’t they address their problems and do I have to hear them again and again? I’m tired. I do not want it anymore. It’s time for me to take better care of myself. Well…and that’s why I’m here. I hope you can help me with that…”

We end up working four hours together. I already turned up the heating earlier in the day, because experience shows that when people get emotional, they get shivery. In the winter months it usually feels nurturing when a room is comfortably warm. The physiological effect is a greater chance of oxytocin flowing: skin pores and blood vessels will open up. This often also promotes emotional and psychological openness, partly because the entire organism is calmed by oxytocin. There is tea, there is something sweet, there are candles burning, and to be on the safe side there are even two crocheted woollen blankets available and two or three times I am tempted to wrap one around her when she is sobbing and shaking her head, hands over her eyes, crawling into the corner of the couch and silently reflecting on what is going on and what she perceives in her body during the story she tells.

I invite her to really feel what her body has to say to her, but for anyone who has not really listened to their own body in a long time, this is not an easy task at all. We take our time; with me, someone does not have to leave after 45 minutes because the time is ‘up’. With me, clients are allowed to sit for hours, so that we have time to explore things deeply and to allow intense emotions to finally come to the surface without having to immediately be muted or shielded, brushed away or pushed aside. She says it several times: “It feels like something wants to come out, like something is about to burst…”

That is already a very beautiful insight, the sensation that something is reporting from the body that it wants to be seen. I am with her and I see it; I hear what she says and she is surprised to hear me give her own words back to her. “When you say it like that, it sounds so logical… Yes, I’m really such a stupid loser for not having done anything with it all this time…” That is a statement that regularly appears in other forms as well and I strongly bring it to her attention both at the beginning and at the end.

I ask her how she would feel if I told her that she is a loser because she has still not addressed and resolved certain issues. I ask her if she would stay and if in that case we would have a nice and safe conversation. She laughs: “Uh… no. Definitely not!” We conclude that if she did not run right away, she certainly would not come back. We also conclude that this is however the way she addresses herself. The relationship with her true Self therefore also becomes unpleasant and unsafe. That is why I say at the beginning, halfway and at the end that the greatest gift she can give herself with this and any possible follow-up session is that she becomes kinder and more compassionate to herself.

She lacked a lot of love and safety as a child and that fact cannot be undone. That influenced how her personality and beliefs developed. What she can do, in difficult situations or when things are not going well, is to look at that little girl within herself with soft eyes and wonder what she might need now. That is what she can give herself and what she can also allow herself to receive from loved ones. She can understand that intellectually, but emotionally it is not yet self-evident. After all, it also requires her to express what is going on. It is logical that this can feel scary: you usually cannot change decades-long patterns overnight, especially not if they were associated with unsafety for so long or if they were the only way to survive. Today, however, she has made a start and taken an important, courageous step. I promise her that I will prepare the report of our meeting as soon as possible. With her permission I give her a hug before she leaves. She looks less troubled, but the sadness and vulnerability are visible. That is beautiful; she was able to soften during our conversation and broke down her wall a bit. I hope that she can maintain that softness, especially towards herself, and that she will let me know if I can do anything for her.

This week we’re picking up the thread of blogging again after a long time! We have been able to do many other wonderful things in the past period, but we would really like to share beautiful stories with you again. The blog below is a guest blog by ‘Elize’, who approached ACE Aware NL and shared her story with us.

Knowledge surrounding ACEs – the missing piece of the puzzle?

When I drive to work in the car, I often listen to a podcast. Trained as a lifestyle coach, I am interested in everything that has to do with health and vitality. This time I listened to the OERsterk podcast by Richard de Leth, where Marianne Vanderveen was a guest. From start to finish I was fascinated by the topic: ACEs, adverse childhood experiences.

Being seen
I remember my childhood as a wonderful time, and yet I recognise a lot in the podcast. This is my story.
I am over 50 years old, born as the middle child of triplets. My eldest sister had mental problems from an early age, my youngest had physical problems. I skipped through life, but had to settle for much less attention from my parents. My sisters got their havodiploma. I did my very best to be seen and obtained my vwo-diploma a year later. However, the feeling of not mattering remained present.

Too different
My partner and I had three beautiful children. When they were a little older, our children had some major challenges in their lives: our eldest daughter was diagnosed with Asperger’s, an autism spectrum disorder, at the age of eleven. Our second daughter developed an eating disorder. Our son developed depression, in addition to his ADD. At the time, I suspected that our son’s ADD and his depression were related to his sisters’ autism and anorexia. After listening to the podcast, reading the ACE Aware NL website and a conversation with Marianne, I have a different picture. The children showed behavioural patterns labelled as ‘autism’, ‘anorexia’ and ‘ADD’, but in fact these were largely ‘coping strategies’. This behaviour was a way for them to survive in an unfavourable environment.
With what I know now, I can see that it was almost inevitable that our marriage would end – the gap was too wide. At that time in our lives we could not support each other with everything that was going on. The events exposed our own traumas. And on an even deeper level, I now think that the underlying trauma for both of us influenced the development of the children’s problems. After the divorce, I started working on my personal development in several ways. The children are now 25, 23 and 20 years old, beautiful young adults who are doing well. I think the foundation for this was laid in their early lives.

Rat race
For the first ten years I was at home full time with the children. When the youngest went to school, I worked three mornings and after school, I looked after them at home. After the divorce, when the youngest was seven years old, I retrained for a different profession. After that, unfortunately, I had no choice but to work 32 hours, which meant I was less at home with the children. I had a lot of balls to keep in the air and I joined the rat race of life.
That changed with one phone call: “You have to come get your daughter now, because she wants to go to the railway tracks.” She was already seriously ill at the time. In that moment my world stood still. It was as if I woke up with a shock, as if I realised for the first time that I could actually lose her because of her illness. I completely panicked: what was I doing? The four of us live under one roof, but we each lead our own lives. How truly connected are we? I wanted to change that!

Being available
I made appointments at work and assisted my daughter where I could. We ate all meals together. We also largely visited doctors and therapists together. I could be there for her and that felt nice. However, I felt all the more how I had missed my mother in my own youth. Being able to do it differently than my own mother was healing for me and hopefully for my daughter as well. Just as I missed my mother at the time, she also had had to miss me. As parents, we had failed her in our search for an explanation for her eldest sister’s behaviour (autism). I was aware of it and yet at that moment I did not know how to do it differently. The anorexia forced us to interact in new ways. The result is an even better bond with each other.

Personal development
After a number of major life events, I took the path of personal development in 2004. At the beginning of 2018, the eating disorder appeared to be in remission. That same year I followed an annual program at ‘365 days successful’. For me this was life changing! I recently watched a webinar from them about unacknowledged grief, for example after trauma. When I thought of trauma, I always thought of big things like sexual or physical abuse. That turned out to be an incomplete picture; smaller events can also have an impact on someone’s life and can lead to trauma. An impressive list emerged in my head, including the emotional experiences that preceded and followed two car accidents, a miscarriage, divorce, and illness. After listening to the OERsterk podcast, I listened to Marianne’s own podcast: ‘Raising Resilience’. I now understand much better where the feeling of ‘I don’t matter’ comes from. I also now look at the consequences of the car accident differently. This took place at a time when the second child’s anorexia required a different treatment process. I simply didn’t feel the space to process the emotional and physical side of the accident. I prioritised what I saw as her best interests, forgetting that my own well-being (or lack thereof) is actually the foundation for the children’s happiness (or lack thereof).

Trauma therapy
After my car accident in 2016, I received targeted trauma therapy in the form of EMDR. It didn’t do anything for me. In 2019 I booked an EMI session, a variation on EMDR, which removed the charge from the event. I recently had a similar experience. I was triggered by my piece ‘I don’t feel seen’, which I now understand falls under the consequences of ACEs. My partner booked a treatment for me with a trauma therapist friend. After an extensive intake, he not only tackled the car accident, but all the trauma that I had unconsciously accumulated in my life, the trauma that limited my functioning and that made me tired. He looked at the bigger picture. Together we spent an afternoon working intensively on reprogramming the various events. The result is astonishing: the load has been removed!

Mirror
How are things now? I am a volunteer at the Leontienhuis, a drop-in center for people with eating disorders. I see many parents struggling with the issues that I have had myself. They tell me they feel powerless regarding their child’s eating disorder. Could it be that parents and/or their children are also dealing with the consequences of ACEs, without being aware of it? Could it be that children then lovingly mirror to us how we treat ourselves? Is it an invitation to us as parents to turn inward ourselves, to work on our own issues and thus heal together? In any case, I am much more aware of the impact of trauma on my life and therefore also on that of my children. My wish is to be able to assist parents who are in a similar situation. Is the knowledge surrounding ACEs the missing piece of the puzzle? That is what I want to delve into further in the near future!