What Babies Teach Us:

Supporting the Integrated Self from the Beginning

Wendy Anne McCarty, Ph.D., R.N.

Prenatal and perinatal psychology (PPN) has grown into a multidisciplinary field “dedicated to the in-depth exploration of the psychological dimension of human reproduction and pregnancy and the mental and emotional development of the unborn and newborn child,” The Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health.

The heart of the PPN field’s unique contribution is the exploration and understanding of prenatal life, birth and bonding, and infancy from the baby’s point of view. PPN coalesced in the 1980’s with clinicians who found their adult clients describing prenatal and perinatal experiences. The clients associated these experiences with the origin of a life pattern or belief, which were often debilitating or life-diminishing. With little in psychological literature to go on, the clinicians began to share their findings with one another and a field was born.

During the past thirty years, a wealth of clinical experience with adults, children, and babies has been reported, and a much deeper understanding of our earliest experiences is now available. PPN research demonstrates early how experience involves consciousness beyond (before) the biological human self. (McCarty, 2005)

My first contact with the emerging field of PPN was in 1988. I attended a conference by the Association of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH). During a workshop, I watched Dr. William Emerson work with a three month-old infant concerning the baby’s cord trauma during birth. Their level of mutual conscious communication was beyond what I had ever experienced. In that moment, I perceived another level of consciousness in the baby that I had never had seen during 20 years of working with babies. It changed me. I began my career as an obstetrical nurse, childbirth educator, and received my masters in early childhood development in the 1970’s and a doctorate in psychology. I had worked with young families for over twenty years. I was very typical in the sense that I understood the world and babies through “Western medicine and the Western Newtonian paradigm.” My education and training had supported those views.

In 1990, I began training in PPN oriented work and began incorporating these new principles into my psychotherapy practice with children, babies, and their parents. Session by session, babies and children de-constructed my narrowed view of what I had held to be possible and true. I felt a schism between the Western view of babies and early development models and what the babies and children were showing me.

In 1999, Dr. Marti Glenn and I co-founded the Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology Program at Santa Barbara Graduate Institute to help further the field and train professionals (www.sbgi.edu ). I continued to grapple with the disparity between our current western biologically based models of early development and the findings from prenatal and perinatal psychology and PPN clinical work with babies and children. With the help of a grant from The New Earth Foundation, I wrote Welcoming Consciousness (2004), a developmental psychology book that introduces an integrated model of development encompassing the newly evolving PPN research and perspective. The following are selected key principles of this model:

1. We are sentient beings–conscious and aware from the beginning of life. We have a sense of self as we enter physical form that is present prior to, during, and after our human life.

2. From conception on, we have dual perspectives of awareness: a transcendent perspective and a human perspective. Our earliest experiences involve an intricately woven relationship between these two distinct perspectives. Together they form the Integrated Self.

3. From the moment of conception we perceive, function, communicate, and learn on non-local consciousness, energetic, and physical levels. Our ability to transmit and receive communication during the prenatal and perinatal period is much greater than traditionally thought.

4. During our gestation, birth, and early infant stages, we learn intensely and are exquisitely sensitive to our environment and relationships. Through our transcendent perspective, we have omni-awareness of our parents and others’ thoughts, feelings, and intentions that arise from their conscious and subconscious mind. Through our human self, our experience is intricately related to our mother’s experience, the health of our womb, and physical/emotional journey at birth. During this period we form a foundational holographic blueprint for life based on these early experiences.

5. This blueprint becomes the infrastructure from which we grow and experience life at every level of our being–physical, emotional, mental, relational, and spiritual. Our early experiences become part of our implicit memory reflected in our subconscious and in our autonomic functioning. These affect us below the level of our conscious awareness and directly shape our very perceptions and conceptions of “reality.”

6. We already are making choices and forming adaptive strategies in the womb and at birth that appear to establish potentially lifelong patterns.

7. Young babies show us their established life patterns developed in utero and during their birth. It has been noted that the majority of the babies born in the United States often show signs of stress or traumatic imprinting. (McCarty, 2002)

8. Many of the needs we have considered essential for healthy development during infancy and childhood are needs we have from the beginning of life: To be wanted, welcomed, safe, nourished, seen, heard, included, and communicated with as the sentient beings we are. From the beginning of life, stress and trauma inhibit or interfere with the natural relationship between a baby’s transcendent self and its human self.

9. As indigenous cultures have done for centuries, communicating with babies during the pre-conception, prenatal, birth and infancy period on is one of the most powerful ways to support babies and can mitigate the impact of potentially traumatizing events.

(McCarty, 2004)

10. PPN-oriented therapies and ways of being demonstrate new possibilities of wholeness and connection with the Integrated Self, starting at the beginning of life.

Prenatal and perinatal psychology’s clinical findings bring a tremendous renewal to the exploration of our understanding of human experience from an integrated lens that honors our multidimensional nature echoing the ancient wisdoms held in many indigenous cultures. The new “Western frontier” is clearing old beliefs that stand in the way of the fuller vision of who we are. When we nurture the possible, supporting the Integrated Self from the beginning of life, it opens the door to help each new being to create a foundational life a holographic blueprint that supports their fullest creative life force and wholeness.

References

1. McCarty, W. A. (2002a). The power of beliefs: What babies are teaching us. Journal of Prenatal & Perinatal Psychology & Health, 16(4). 341-360.

2. McCarty, W. A. (2004). The CALL to reawaken and deepen our communication with babies: what babies are teaching us. International Doula 12 (2), Summer 2004.

A shorter version of this paper was published as: Nurturing the Possible: Supporting the Integrated self from the beginning of life. Shift: At the Frontiers of Consciousness

6, 18-20, www.noetic.org .

Wendy Anne McCarty, Ph.D., R.N. is a Prenatal and Perinatal Consultant, Educator, Mentor, Researcher, and Author. Her newly released book, Welcoming Consciousness: Supporting Babies’ Wholeness from the Beginning of Life-An Integrated Model of Early Development and continuing education home study courses based on her book and other publications are available through www.wondrousbeginnings.com She is the Founding Chair and Faculty of the Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology Program at Santa Barbara Graduate Institute. In 1999, she co-created and co-authored with Dr. Marti Glenn, the first masters and doctoral degree programs in Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and was part of the core team that created and opened Santa Barbara Graduate Institute. She presently teaches several graduate courses and continuing education courses in Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology. Dr. McCarty is a frequent presenter at conferences.

Dr. McCarty has worked with families for 25 years. Her roles have been as an obstetrical nurse, childbirth educator, psychotherapist, prenatal and birth therapist, educator, and consultant. She was the Co-Founder, first President and a Primary Therapist of BEBA, a Non-Profit Research Clinic to provide therapy to babies and families to resolve early trauma and support optimal growth and bonding. She has been involved in consciousness studies for over two decades. Her work with families and professionals comes from a rich synergy of traditional and innovative foundations that integrate mind-body-spirit. She provides consultation services for young families, professionals, and organizations in Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Being with Babies in Healing Ways.