Part 2: HISTORY and THE WHY

Continuing Towards Love ~ Longing for Connection

In my 34 years of practice as a massage therapist, I have seen a disturbing increase of older women who are receiving multiple joint replacements. I have worked with women with double knee replacements, hip replacements, multiple vertebral fusions, ankle replacements, and thumb joint rebuilds. They are taking strong pain medication to get through their day. One woman doesn't know why her joints are doing this. The doctors say it's arthritis. One woman has a brain injury. 

Rheumatoid arthritis, which is an autoimmune disease, affects women two to three times more than men due to genetic and hormonal factors. Autoimmune disorders are when the body is basically fighting itself. It is similar to Peter Levine's explanation of having the gas and the brake on at the same time. The fight/flight response and the freeze response are on at the same time. 

From my polyvagal studies, the effects of prolonged stress responses either land in the organs or the joints. What does this mean? The stress response which is hormonal and related to emotions, heart rate, respiration, digestion and elimination, is in response to our ability to perceive threats accurately. 

To perceive threats accurately, we need to know what is self and not-self. Research is starting to show that the parts of our brain that perceive our sense of self are now called the default mode network. This network includes healthy interoception, the ability to perceive neural signals coming from the organs, lungs, heart, joints, arms and legs. Our joints have proprioceptors that let the brain know where and what the joints are doing at all times. These signals also help perceive our sense of ‘self’.

Recent trauma experts such as Kathy Kain and Nadine Burke Harris, Stephan Porges and Peter Levine all agree that when there are traumatic events, interoception and the ability to differentiate between threat and not threat become compromised. We can’t accurately perceive what is a real threat anymore. For some, the nervous system becomes hypervigilant. Everything is perceived as a threat, which can keep the gas and the brakes on at the same time. 

The nervous system is telling the body to get ready to fight, run away, immobilize and freeze at the same time. The organs and joints receive conflicting hormonal signals, which have long term effects. The brain’s sense of self centers are no longer able to accurately interpret organ, joint and other ‘bottom up’ neural signals. It begins to interpret life with an overactive fear center. 

I’d highly recommend reading Gabor Mate’s books or Nadine Burke Harris' book the deepest well for more in depth information about the effects of stress. 

What does this all have to do with birth and the pre- and perinatal time?

When medication and drugs meet an undeveloped nervous system, from conception to age 7, the default mode network — our sense of self — is affected. Research is just starting to name this. Doctors within pre- and perinatal psychology, who do regressive therapy see the effects regularly in adults and children they work with (Emmerson, Sills, Castillino and Martin).

The medical community assures all that the medication given to the woman in the birth process does not reach the baby. From the pre- and perinatal psychologists that I’ve studied with, and from my experience of working with clients for over 30 years, I would argue against this assurance from the medical community. 

Having come into the world with ‘something to make my mom feel better’, and having two surgeries under the age of five, I can sense the dissociative, sleep-inducing and foggy head sensations that come with the neural imprint of anesthesia and ‘twilight sleep’ medication at birth, in myself and in my clients.

These medication effects happen at a crucial time of bonding and attachment for the baby and woman who birthed the baby. What are the effects on our sense of self that is still decades away from being fully developed? 

Resources

Harris, Nadine Burke, (2018). the deepest well: Healing the Long-term effects of 

Childhood Adversity. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Boston - New York.

Kain, K & Terrell, S. (2018). Nurturing Resilience: Helping Clients Move Forward from 

Developmental Trauma. North Atlantic Books. Berkeley, CA.

Porges, Stephan W. & Dana, Deb. (2018). Clinical Applications of The Polyvagal T

Theory: The Emergence of Polyvagal-Informed Therapies. North Atlantic Books. Berkeley, CA.

Van Der Kolk, B (2014). The Body Keeps the Score, New York/NY: Penguin Books.