Prenatal and Perinatal Somatics: Eight Practice Principles and New Horizons for Integrating Earliest Trauma
Healing from earliest trauma as an adult is a journey of exploration, discovery, and deep process because it is a foray into implicit somatic memories, often with little cognitive story. Each step is a felt-sense experience; our memories lie in our bodies, and are formed before language comes online. Memories may also emerge from our early childhood, family dynamics, adolescence, and adulthood. We can traverse the earliest territory relatively easily if we have a map and a facilitator. Even still, it may be hard work for a traveler in those lands, as each layer may have a feeling of survival based on the conditions of the time. I hope this paper will help the enthusiastic traveler in healing begin finding their way thoughtfully and expediently. […]
This paper describes eight practice principles for entering prenatal and perinatal somatics, and explores new horizons for preventing and healing earliest trauma.
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It is more accepted now that babies can remember prenatal life and birth, and those memories can remain alive in our bodies until the story is told in such a way that it is seen, heard, and felt. This is the work of prenatal and perinatal somatics.
Prenatal and perinatal psychology pioneers have explained how we “remember” earliest layers of experience, and the importance of “consciousness” as a theme in human development, starting at preconception (Grof, 1976; McCarty, 2004; Blasco, 2006; Van der Wal & White, 2024; Verny, 1981/1988; Menzam-Sills, 2021). In The Embodied Mind, Verny (2023) explains how we can remember our earliest experiences by exploring anatomy. Memory storage and retrieval theories were en- lightened by the study of the sea snail, for which Eric Kandel won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology. His research proved that these simple organisms could have memories (2001). Verny expands on Kandel’s theory about how memories are stored in synapses by exploring glial cells, other anaomical features, and periods when brain cells are sparse, suggesting alternative sites where memories may be stored. He concludes that memories are stored in the nucleus of neurons, dendrites, and axons that connect with other neurons. These neural pathways carry sensory information; each time a memory is recalled, it creates a building block of memory.
Memory is encoded in various anatomical structures – synapses, neurons, glial cells, and surrounding neuronal areas. The most active period of neuronal development occurs at the beginning of the second trimester when 250,000 neurons are created every minute (Kolb & Gibb, 2011). A child is born with 100 billion neurons, as many as the stars in our galaxy, and a trillion synapses or interconnections (Verny, 2023). Verny clarifies that our bodies are one large vibrating network of communication, memories, and information, with many structures that work together – brain, spinal cord, cranial nerves, and neural pathways impact how we think, feel, and behave from moment to moment. He proposes a more holistic theory of memory:
It is time we put to rest the myth of the enskulled brain and mind and adopt the scientifically evidenced-based concept of the embodied brain and mind. This is a transformative, novel concept in psychobiology, at once paradigm-shift- ing and empowering. We think, feel, and act with our body. We relate to the world with our body. Our mind is body-bound. (2023, xiv)
We make our bodies in utero. Our memories start there.