Birth: The Effects of a Complicated Start in Life #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone and welcome to my letter B post in the #AtoZChallenge. I’m doing this challenge on healing past hurts. Today, I want to go far into my past: I want to talk about the effects of a complicated birth.

As regular readers know, I was born prematurely and spent the first three months of my life in hospital. Of course, I have no conscious memories of this time, but that doesn’t mean my complicated start in life didn’t have an impact. There is evidence that many people who were born prematurely or otherwise had a difficult start to life, experience attachment problems into adulthood. Now of course I didn’t have the most positive childhood either and there is no way of knowing whether I would still have attachment issues had my parents been well-attuned to me. Of course, this is also a difficult question, since my parents experienced their own trauma having me prematurely.

The thing remains though, a child who was born prematurely, spends time in a clinical setting that they should’ve spent literally inside their mother’s body. There are attempts to lessen the burden this has on children (and parents). For example, kangarooing, in which a baby experiences skin-to-skin contact with their parents, is encouraged as soon as it is possible. However, for preemies and other NICU graduates who are now adults, this may not have been the case. Many older NICU graduates hardly saw or heard their parents for the first few weeks to months of their life. My parents, thankfully, lived in the same city I was in the neonatal unit in, so they were able to visit often.

One thing that haunts me though, and I’ve mentioned this several times, is the effect my being medically complex from birth on left on my parents’ attachment to me. Like I said, whether I would’ve experienced attachment issues had my parents not mistreated me as a child, is a difficult question because one of the reasons they treated me so poorly is their difficulty coping with my being disabled. My father quite literally asked the doctor whether it’d make sense to keep me alive after I’d had a brain bleed a few weeks after birth.

It’s telling, in my opinion, that when you look up “birth trauma” online, what comes up most frequently is not the effects a child’s own start in life could’ve had on them, but the effects of complicated childbirth on parents. And like I said, one goes hand-in-hand with the other.

Heal

Posted on by Astrid

Today’s prompt for Five Minute Friday is “Heal”. I read several of the responses before writing mine. Some left me feeling all sorts of things, which I will try to articulate in the below freewrite.

Is it possible to heal from a hurt you can’t explain in words? Can something that you can’t describe in words, a memory that is just visceral, even be traumatic? I am referring to preverbal trauma, of course and, in theory, I know the answer: yes, it exists and yes, healing is possible.

However, in reality, how can I prevent my cognitive processes from constantly interfering with my experiences? Or should this be prevented at all? I mean, if I can rationalize that I’m now in 2022, living in the care facility and not in whatever danger my body thinks (feels?) it’s in anymore, does it even matter that I endured preverbal trauma?

After all, it’s a fact that I did: I was born prematurely, spent the first three months of my life in hospital and had several complicated surgeries before the age of five. The question is whether said possibly-traumatic events affected me and, if so, how to heal from them.

Preverbal Trauma

Posted on by Astrid

Today, I wrote in a Facebook group about preverbal trauma. I know for a fact that I endured a lot that could have caused PTSD from birth on. I was born prematurely, spent the first three months of my life in hospital and was hospitalized several more times before the age of five.

About seven or eight years ago, I started experiencing body memories that I immediately associated with a medical emergency that I endured at age four. At the time, my trachea closed up and I as a result had difficulty breathing. I never completely repressed that memory, always knew that it’s something that actually did happen.

So I wonder if I made said association because it makes more sense than connecting the body memory to preverbal trauma. I mean, preverbal trauma is very controversial, because people do not form that clear memories until the age of three. That doesn’t mean people cannot be affected by preverbal trauma. It just means the memory is hard to recover.

I have alters. About six years ago, an alter emerged that is constantly curled up in a fetal position. We don’t know more about her. A seven-year-old alter who also emerged around that same time talks about that alter as a baby in the incubator. Now of course babies in incubators are not in the fetal position, so yeah.

Still, it all makes me wonder whether I’m making all this trauma stuff up. I mean, yes, I was born prematurely. Yes, I spent three months in hospital and had repeated re-admissions before the age of five. But my parents say that until age seven, I was completely fine and carefree. I mean, it’s not like everyone who endured trauma develops PTSD. So could it be I’m just making this whole preverbal trauma thing up?

In a preemie parent support group, I asked whether anyone has experience with their child getting EMDR for medical trauma. I have always wondered whether EMDR could help me. It was recommended when I had just been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder in 2010. Then I heard it’s not recommended unless you’re very stable otherwise. Well, the consultant I talked with on Monday said that’s no longer the case. So maybe I could benefit from it. Several parents responded about reading their child a “life story” about their birth and hospital stay while the psychologist did the EMDR. Since my parents aren’t very supportive, I cannot ask them to help me with this, but I could create my own life story based on what my alers tell me.