Healing and Prevention of Prenatal and Birth Trauma for Babies, Children, Adults, and Couples

Welcome to my healing and educational practice in which I offer you, and your family, many wonderful opportunities for healing, consciousness, and improved quality of life and relationships. I am based in Sebastopol, Northern California and I offer support to:

Pre-Pregnant and Pregnant Couples: Conscious conception; Exploration of early imprints in relation to becoming a parent and birthing; and In-utero healing for baby.

Adults: One-on-One support, and small groups called Womb Process Workshops.

Babies and Children: Supporting them to tell us their stories: see Child Centered Family Work.

I also facilitate a three part class series, and I am available for talks.

Our most influential developmental experiences happen from conception, through our time in the womb, during birth, and in the post-birth bonding phase. These early experiences are the foundation of our being, and profoundly affect the rest of our lives on a daily basis.

In the womb, especially in the first trimester, we are at our most vulnerable, and therefore at our most susceptible to stress, trauma, and shock. See ‘Signs of Trauma’ for information about some of the many ways that trauma can be experienced by us as prenate's before birth, and as newborns.

Here are some of the benefits of this work for Pre-Pregnant/Pregnant Couples, Adults, Babies and Children:

For Pre-Pregnant and Pregnant Couples:

Your early experiences are imprinted in your cells and in your limbic brain. These imprints (see FAQ's for definition of imprint) are very often triggered, or more obvious, when you consider conception, pregnancy, parenting, and birthing. You may not realize that your decisions, feelings and belief's are being influenced by your own, largely unconscious, journey into life. Early memories are not cognitive, they are emotional and somatic. I love to support couples to explore their early imprints with an intention to have a conscious, fulfilling and empowering journey into parenthood and birthing, from pre-conception through to post-birth bonding. Prenate's are always lovingly included in this work whether it is your inner prenate, or a baby in your tummy.

Imprints from conception include your parent's characters/experiences including what their relationship was like at that time, how your first experience of coming into a body felt, and how it was for you to come in to your ancestral lines from each parent. Here are some of the major areas in which we can experience interruption, stress, difficulty, and trauma during our journey into life:

• Conception - was it planned - or not? Were you wanted?
• What was the nature of the womb environment - healthy or toxic?
• Major occurrences during gestation including traumatic or stressful events (e.g. considered abortion, divorce/separation, bereavement of a significant person, abuse, violence, neglect), or ongoing stressful situations.
• Birth can be very traumatic, especially a high intervention hospital birth.
• Immediately after your were born: how were you received and what was the quality of bonding primarily with your mother, and with your father or significant others.

See 'Signs of Trauma' and' FAQ's' for further information on these subjects.

Aspects of your parents, and their ongoing relationship with each other, teach you about parenting and the world you are coming in to. This can leave you with both good and challenging imprints, with ancestral layers woven in to the mix. Often we continue to repeat ancestral or parental pattern's and belief's without question.

Integration, illumination and healing will increase the choices available to you, and prevent a repeat of your own journey. We are conscious as prenates and we are having our own experience.

The benefits for Adults:

• Feel more present in your body.
• Find out why you over-react to certain situations, or react to something that is not actually happening in the present.
• Discover the origins of your belief's, fear's, phobia's, and other behavior's, and with new resources in place be empowered to make changes to them.
• Better understand yourself, your patterns of behavior, and how you relate to others, including your children.
• Experience a sense of wholeness, and coherency in 'your story'.
• Vastly reduce your fear/terror levels, and 'panic attacks'.
• Feel more confident and settled in yourself.
• Feel more connected to your self.
• Have a healthy pregnancy and a fulfilling and empowering birth.
• Make parenting choices from a clear and resourced place inside yourself.
• Achieve more intimacy in relationships.
• Feel more connected to Spirit/Divine/God.
• Reduce and understand stress levels and tension holding patterns.
• Explore health issues for their possible prenatal/birth origins.
• Change and improve your parenting style
• Achieve a feeling of enhanced wellness by integrating your earliest formative experiences.
• Take charge of your life!

Having a conscious awareness of the soil in which we grew, and of the personal spiritual adventure that we have taken to be here in our body, is a profound experience for each of us.

The benefits for Babies and Children:

• Your whole family, and especially your baby or child, will appreciate the empathic and deep listening given to the experiences they had during their Journey Into Life.
• Babies and children have their own experience, and need to be heard.
• I support little one's to integrate their experiences so that they don't develop their psyche around unresolved and unheard pain.
• This is an opportunity for the whole family to integrate what can sometimes be a very difficult and traumatic journey, allowing everyone to move on in a healthy and creative way.
• Healing your child's early imprints can help with real problems such as feeding, sleeping, continual crying (trauma crying), disembodiment and discomfort in their body, tactile sensitivity, and many other issues. These 'symptoms' are your child's way of communicating with you that something is wrong, and needs attention.
• This healing work also greatly enhances bonding and fosters closer relationships within the family.

Early imprints are held in our bodies, and our memories of these formative times are not cognitive, but show up in sequencing patterns, movements, postures, sensations, disease, flashbacks, dreams, relating patterns, seemingly irrational feelings, physical experiences, fears and phobias. Because these imprints are from a preverbal time they are generally unconscious and can seem to us to simply be ‘who we are’. In fact, they are an expression of something that happened to us a long time ago. These non-cognitive ways of storing experiences, feelings and sensations are called implicit somatic memories.

Somatic imprints require three skills in the practitioner in order to be healed and re-patterned:

• a somatic approach
• a working knowledge of shock physiology
• training in Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology which examines the beginning's of human life and experience from conception through to post-birth

My work is firmly based in all the above skills and knowledge. I have had extensive training and much personal healing in the field of prenatal and perinatal psychology, in addition to 15+ years offering counseling, psychotherapy and group work in England.

I’m not a licensed counselor/psychotherapist in California. I welcome clients who are either in therapy or are well resourced and supported. I appreciate the opportunity to collaborate and be part of a team approach with other therapists and practitioners. I look forward to working with you.

Take care, Karen

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To be notified of upcoming offerings contact Karen.

"We shall not cease
from exploration,
And the end of all
our exploring
Will be to arrive
where we started
And know the place
for the first time."
T.S. Eliot

Figure 15

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