Prenatal

The term recapitulation, in the context of pre and perinatal psychology, refers to ways of coping with stressful situations that stimulate unresolved prenatal and birth trauma. Recapitulation styles are the unconscious behavioural patterns that come from our attempts to manage this stress (ie. the inappropriate behaviours associated with our Super Conductive Survival Systems). Our recapitulation styles will be shaped by many factors, including how we dealt with the original stress or trauma. For example, if our experience of birth was that we nearly died but managed to survive by keeping going, we may recapitulate that, later in life, by feeling that we have to keep going, when we feel pressured. That might serve us well in many ways, but it may mean that we don’t allow ourselves time to rest and build our resources. We do not even know that this is possible. It is as if we have a blind spot: a gap in our neurology. Underlying this behaviour there is an unconscious motivator which is the fear that ‘if I stop, I will die’.

Since the further back in history one goes the lower the level of childrearing, it follows that children in the past grew up in houses of horrors that were like those of dissociated personalities of today. Psychiatric studies have shown that there is a direct correlation between elevated levels of dissociative symptoms—separate alters, depersonalization, derealization — and the amount of early physical, sexual and emotional abuse. That the average person before the modern period walked streets full of spirits, demons, gods and other alters is evidence of the dissociation that resulted from their routine abuse and neglect as children. Historical evolution of the psyche, therefore, is the slow, uneven process of integrating fragmented selves into the unified self that is the goal of modern upbringing.