INTRODUCTION
Emerging from the Shadow
What we have called " karma" or "shadow" may, today,
be called "trauma," since the effects of trauma propagate
as dissociated and denied energies, frozen in shadow,
bound to repeat. Trauma creates incoherence, fracturing us
from ourselves and separating us from others. Its broken
memories resurface repeatedly through exterior eruptions
that are not directed by free will but by that part of the self
that is held in darkness.
Thomas Hübl,
Healing Collective Trauma (2020)
SELF-KINDNESS ON YOUR JOURNEY
Before proceeding to discuss the profound effects of trauma at a very young age, I want to pause for a moment. This book introduces potentially challenging material. It could be activating because it may touch memories that have been held in shadow and not previously named or processed. I encourage you to take your time, pause as you need to be with your feelings and bodily reactions, and seek support to process what arises. I suggest reviewing the end of the introduction to this book, entitled, "Tips for the Journey," to support you in your reading.
Here, I want to appreciate that you may be a parent reading this.
You may find yourself feeling judged or criticized, which is not at all the purpose of the discussion. Or you may experience feelings of guilt or regret for what you now realize your child was exposed to and experienced in their earliest days. It has never occurred to me that prenatal or birth trauma is the fault of parents. If I blamed anyone, it would be doctors (particularly obstetricians), but I have always been more interested in acknowledging the cultural denial that underlies insensitive relations with babies. That is no individual’s fault. There is, however, culturally generated ignorance about how exquisitely sentient and intelligent little ones are, and how we can meet them with the respect and empathy they need and deserve. Please, please, don’t blame yourself for whatever may have happened in the past, and please consider that while repair is most effective early on, healing is possible at any stage of life.
I also apologize to any readers who may find my references to mother, her, and she as offensive. I acknowledge that this may not resonate for those who prefer terms such as "birthing person," "they," or "them," but I have not been able to find a way to use alternative language that communicates the content as clearly. I’m still learning! Please know that hereafter when I use such language, I am referring to the person in the mothering role. This caregiving position can and is intended to be inclusive of a variety of experiences.
MEETING THE SHADOW
Many years ago, I had a dream where I was being chased by monsters. I was running down a hallway and came to a locked door at the end. I could not escape. Suddenly, I remembered the common advice to face your monsters. Heartened, I turned around, where I beheld the three ferocious cartoon character-type monsters who had been chasing me. Holding out my hands, I dared to ask, "Do you want to dance?" Then monsters were delighted! We all joined hands and danced together.
The shadow, a term coined by Carl Jung, refers to unacceptable aspects of ourselves that we have pushed down into the unconscious mind. Although buried and out of our own sight, our shadow aspects never disappear. Like any rejected child, they long to be loved and welcomed. Inviting them to dance, as I did in my dream, enables them to come home. We return to wholeness.
Fortunately, at the time of this dream, I had already done a fair bit of therapeutic work on myself. I had some ability to face and welcome my monsters into the dance. As shadow expert Robert A. Johnson writes, "We are advised to love our enemies, but this is not possible when the inner enemy, our own shadow, is waiting to pounce and make the most of an incendiary situation. If we can learn to love the inner enemy, then there is a chance of loving—and redeeming— the outer one."1 The monsters in my dream represented my inner enemy, but they were often reflected in my outer life. I felt chased by the demands of a family and culture apparently requiring perfection. I often feared the criticism or judgments of others, and these three monsters represented angry, aggressive, and even violent aspects of myself that would have been dangerous for me to own or express as a child. My critical and mentally ill father was too unstable to tolerate anyone’s anger besides his own. I could easily point to this time as when my monsters went into hiding in the shadow.
Shadow work commonly addresses the roots of painful experiences within our childhood. As I immersed myself in learning about pre- and perinatal psychology in the 1990s, I began to understand that the origins of this trauma were even earlier than I realized. Prenatal refers to the time before birth, generally considered from conception to birth. Perinatal refers to around the time of birth (the prefix, peri means "around."), including the actual birth as well as the period just before it, usually involving labor, and the postpartum time that can be defined as hours, weeks, or even a year after birth. This field of study has been amassing evidence of our memory, learning, and intelligence from this very early time in our lives. As we sense and respond to the context in which we form the physical body, we are also forming the psyche.
As a little one in the womb, I marinated in the psychic field of my mother, who was stressed and often frozen in the presence of my father’s irrational outbursts. Prenates are intelligently preparing for the world their mother perceives. I was clearly entering a dangerous world where it was best to be a good, quiet, possibly frozen, child. Along with forming arms, legs, organs, brain, and muscles, I was also forming an unconscious home for my monsters. Later childhood experiences served to bolster, rather than to create, my shadowy patterns.
Personal shadow, which I have referred to here, differs for each individual and nests within a larger collective shadow. Though some aspects of collective shadow are universal, each culture strongly influences and expresses it differently, relating to their unique social mores. Pre- and perinatal experience, which profoundly affects our personality, relational tendencies, and other behaviors throughout life, is almost by definition shadow material, at least in the modern Western world. Cultural denial of early consciousness has only recently begun to shift in response to advances in research, development of more age-appropriate Research methods, and ample clinical evidence of the effectiveness of addressing this early time in therapy. As a result, attempts to express prenatal or birth memories are just beginning to be reinforced and integrated into consciousness. Within a field of denial, aspects of us associated with these memories tend to be judged, rejected, and relegated to the realm of shadow. Now, we can begin to meet and integrate them, returning to our original wholeness.
DENIAL, RESISTANCE, AND COLLECTIVE SHADOW
The purpose of shadow is to protect us. There can be fierce resistance to efforts to reveal these parts of us in hiding. New information tends to be met with emotional reactions, generated by defensive hormones as we sense our beliefs and as the identity founded on them is being threatened. Fueled by the stress hormone cortisol, we are likely to react emotionally, often with anger.
Within the field of psychology, Sigmund Freud and his student Otto Rank discussed the effects of birth experience, but these ideas were not popular and continue to be widely unknown a century later. Otto Rank’s The Trauma of Birth (1929) is a classic in the field of birth psychology, yet I recently spoke with a psychoanalytic therapist who was shocked to learn that Freud and Rank had met and acknowledged this material in their patients.
Collective shadow is responsible for this ignorance.
Several of Freud’s students, including Frank Lake, Otto Rank, J. Sadger, and Donald Winnicott, saw Freud as unknowingly being on the verge of perinatal work, and built upon his theories.2 Freud acknowledged birth as "the prototype" of anxiety in later life. He initially focused on the physiological trauma of loss of oxygen at birth, but later included the trauma of separation from the mother.3 He recognized birth symbolism in dreams and saw sleep as like being in the womb.
Freud, however, lived and worked in Victorian Vienna. So, when his patients revealed sexual abuse, he eventually renamed these memories as fantasies due to their unacceptable nature in Victorian society.4 If these memories were imagined, surely memories of even earlier, prenatal and birth experiences must also be fantasy.5 Otto Rank’s The Trauma of Birth (1929) was first published in German in 1924, and "initially celebrated by Freud as the greatest advance since the discovery of psychoanalysis,"6 but within the context of Victorian society, Freud then rejected this work by one of his favorite students, delaying its publication in English until five years later. The birth theory in the book was officially laid to rest.