In her book, “Prenatal Development and Parents’ Lived Experiences, Ann Diamond Weinstein points to a quote by McCarty and Glenn, leaders in the field of prenatal and perinatal psychology. McCarty and Glenn, devoted their research to proving that the prenatal and perinatal states of life are, in their words, “a time in which vital foundations are established at every level of being, physical, emotional, mental, spiritual and relational”. It seems preposterous not to acknowledge that this phase of life has a profound effect on us both, emotionally and physically.” We inherit not only eye and hair color, we inherit all of the unresolved emotional issues of our ancestry. Think of it this way. Cells have sensory receptivity from the very beginning. According to perinatologists, Verny & Weintraub state, “We do not need fully developed central nervous systems or brains, to receive, store, and process information. Our earliest memories are not conscious, nor even unconscious in the standard sense…we record the experience and the history of our lives, in our cells”. Since as babies, females are born with all of their eggs, the egg that made us, was in our mother’s prenatal body, therefore, we had, not only a firsthand experience, in the womb of our mother; we also had a psychophysiological experience of our grandmother’s womb. This is a crucial fact that can not be ignored, when we consider the healing of our maternal side. The cell that became us, directly experienced the dynamics of the emotional relationship that transpired between our maternal grandmothers and our mothers. A fact that connects us emotionally to our entire maternal lineage.
Emotions play a crucial role in our development. There is a universal acceptance of the fact that babies who receive love through care and touch grow robustly, and babies who don’t, are at risk of severe neurological disturbances or even death. We all accept that the emotion of love is vital to our physical health. Love is also vital to our psychological health. Love is an emotion, and it plays an enormous role in our emotional health from the very beginning of our existence. We need to become much more sensitive to and accepting of the fact that our mother’s emotional state has a profound influence on the quality of our life. We need to consider more than just the extremes; total capacity to want and love a baby, versus negative feelings about pregnancy, harsh treatment or neglect. There are many shades of and levels to a mother’s capability to love. We must acknowledge a mother’s monumental power to affect her children from their very beginnings. It is important to acknowledge the unique range of emotional experiences one has with their mother and their benefits and consequences. Somatic experiencing has the capacity to awaken us fully to our experience of our mothers and in doing so, it allows us to understand our intimate relationships. Once we feel the truth of our early experiences with our mother and our maternal ancestry, we can gain an understanding that allows us to participate more effectively in all of our intimate relationships. Healthy relationships and our ability to find them and maintain them, has everything to do with the emotional relationship we had with our mothers and the maternal line from which we have descended. Our first experience of being wanted, of making our presence known, of belonging, of worthiness, are all based on our relationship to and with our mothers.
When the original, loving, symbiotic attachment of ‘baby to mother’ is carefully and gradually transformed into the loving, autonomous relationship of ‘adult to mother’, the result is a person capable of balancing good boundaries with the need for connection. The initiation of our love relationships and our ability to function well within them, will be a repeat of the emotional dynamics we experienced with our mothers during the initial and early developmental stages of our lives. The skills that we continue to develop and employ within our intimate relationships, will be born out of a combination of what we experienced with our mothers and our continuing efforts to know ourselves and therefore others on a deeper and deeper level.
This Emotional Life 