The first imprint: understanding PTSD

CHRISTIANNA DEICHMANN is the Director of Education at the Association for Pre and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH), where she educates both professionals and parents on fostering the most nurturing environments for welcoming new life into the world.  She is based in Charlottesville, Virginia. With a multidisciplinary approach, Christianna blends Craniosacral Therapy, massage, and pre- and perinatal psychology into her holistic practice. Her work uniquely combines science and spirituality.

In this interview, Christianna shares her expertise with DR. SNEHAL DESHPANDE, a Developmental Therapist, PPNE, and the Director of Heartfulness Family Connect Programs, offering a rich dialogue on Birth Trauma and Obstetrical Intervention. 

Q: When I graduated as a pre- and perinatal educator, I realized that PTSD is big in mothers who have recently delivered, and in babies. It came as a big revelation to me, like a veil that was removed from my eyes. So what is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? And why is it important to understand it in relation to birth trauma?.

CD: I think we really have to understand who we are and where we come from. When we intersect with the spirit realm, our soul, and how it incarnates on this planet, it’s important to understand that we are deeply connected to nature. When we walk in nature, we often feel restored, refreshed, whole, and at peace, yes? We understand that we are intricately linked with nature. Then we observe where the world is today, how mechanical we are, devoid of this sacred respect for our innate connection to nature, then we can really start understanding what trauma is.

We look at trauma from a textbook standpoint, that it’s anything that overwhelms the nervous system, anything that’s too much, too fast, too long, or not getting our emotional needs met. But it’s really at the foundational level. Trauma is when we are disconnected from our blueprint, from our soul, from our heart. This is what is so beautiful about the Heartfulness Institute; you get us to go within and connect to the spiritual nature of ourselves, the invisible nature that we can’t see or touch, but we can experience firsthand.

I see that every human being has had trauma at the most foundational level, because it is traumatic leaving the spiritual realm. Even if we have the most nurturing, loving environment, let’s say a natural birth, and the mother is so supported and empowered, and the baby is born vaginally, that is still a hardship on the baby and the mother, because there’s a death and a birth all at once.

Anyone who’s witnessed a birth feels the power of this energetic portal that opens, and anyone who’s become a mother for the first time understands that something deeply profound happens to their being when they give life, and they let go of part of their own life. That is a trauma.

Q: Babuji Maharaj, one of our Heartfulness guides, describes birth as a separation. The soul feels separated, so our life is the journey back toward the source from where it has come. It is sacred; we have to treat birth and the environment around the baby in a very sacred way.

As a developmental therapist, I’ve been working with children who are born with problems. As a therapist, if you asked me a couple of years back, the definition of trauma would have been C-section, baby not crying immediately at birth, or the mother undergoing problems. Now, I have walked into pre- and perinatal education. In India we treat the womb as a place where the soul or the consciousness evolves. When this journey has been so sacred, how can we define birth trauma in the dimension of pre- and perinatal psychology?

CD: Birth psychology recognizes that babies are conscious. Science has had it a little bit backwards in the last few hundred years; scientists thought that babies didn’t have consciousness, that consciousness comes from brain development. They thought that since babies are so underdeveloped, and as they need a lot of developmental time, that consciousness emerges almost as a hierarchical development of the brain.

For eons, mystics and spiritual teachers have known, and other people learn through their life’s journey of remembering who they are, that consciousness is infinite. It doesn’t have a start or a stop. And the womb space that you’re talking about is where this divine spark can individuate from the unified field of consciousness, and then come to experience consciousness separate from this unified field. And that’s our soul’s path, our soul’s journey, our purpose here in life, and our own unique gifts.

So babies have consciousness before they’re even conceived. When you can heal any trauma, or let’s say a conditional force that happened, they go on to thrive because these experiences at the beginning of life, our earliest experiences, are what make the hierarchical brain.

And what makes our belief system and how we interact with the world? Birth psychologists believe that since babies are conscious, trauma really happens when we don’t recognize that babies are, of their own volition, initiating birth, and that we’re really the servants of babies.

Babies should be treated like royalty. Oftentimes, my job is to educate mothers, who haven’t been brought up in the traditional ways of ancient and indigenous cultures, that they are giving up a piece of themselves for the baby to come in. And it’s a dance. It’s a dynamic dance between the mother and the baby.

When a mother can listen at the level of the heart, the soul, to her baby, she will take a second seat. Then the baby knows what to do. Nature knows what to do if we can really trust and connect with that. So from the standpoint of birth psychology, trauma is when this bond between a mother and a baby is not recognized as a duo with deep consciousness.

Anyone who’s witnessed a birth feels 
the power of this energetic portal that opens, 
and anyone who’s become a mother for the first time 
understands that something deeply profound 
happens to their being when they give life, and 
they let go of part of their own life. That is a trauma.

In today’s world, oftentimes women are not given agency to birth. They are assisted by the staff or the doctor, and the doctor manages the birth. And that’s completely out of order. In and of itself, it causes trauma, it disempowers our children from their own independence and their sense of accomplishment and how they come into the world.

A lot of interventions take place today that rob children of this. And a lot of psychological illnesses and lack of health starts from birth, our relationship with how we come in, and how we are designed. I hope this answers your question about what we consider trauma.

Q: Absolutely. I see a lot of kids with autism, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders, and sensory processing disorders. That aroused my interest to do the PPNE. I wanted to look beyond and I knew that the roots of what I’m seeing now did not exist.

Now, as you said, it was somewhere when the mother and father even decided or did not decide to have a child, both ways. Sometimes it is an “accident”; parents come to me and say, “We didn’t plan the conception.” So, not planning the conception is again not planning the journey for your baby. And it’s a very sacred journey. It is all about your attitude at the time of conception and before conception.

If we want to change the world, we really need to change the bond parents and families have with the babies to come in. How do you look at this? And what are the key benefits of fostering a very strong baby and mother bond very early? 

CD: This is a big question and you brought up deep topics, so let’s see if we can approach it from Daaji’s perspective. I love that he says it’s all about the attitude at conception. And I study Hermetics. It guides my journey through life. From the Hermetic standpoint, when we think of worth, it actually means to be prepared. One of my teachers in craniosacral therapy, John Chitty, who’s now passed, said that babies are royalty.

Babies should be treated like royalty. 

If you have the king or queen coming to your home, what will you do? I live in the United States, and if the president comes by, there’s a whole entourage with secret service protocols. You can’t imagine how much preparation and strategy goes into every move the president makes. Now, do we do this for babies? I think not.

The morphogenetic field in which a baby develops is influenced by sound. And every vibration we put in and around a mother, whether it’s electromagnetic fields from a 5G cell phone, to ultrasounds at the hospital, which are constant, are part of the whole protocol, because we don’t trust the body’s ability to grow a baby.

We’re in a world of mess because I’ve heard doctors say that by 2035, 85% of children will be on some form of the autism spectrum. That’s wild. That’s scary. Could you imagine our workforce? What will be the gross domestic product if the population is largely debilitated? So, it brings up really important questions of how we connect at a soul level, at a heart level, from the very beginning. We have to prepare how we bring children into the world.

To be continued.