Pre- and Perinatal Psychology sees that our life has been conscious and sentient ever since the moment of conception. Therefore, it includes our experiences in utero and at birth as significant influences towards our integral body, mind, heart, and spirit. This new paradigm perspective brings holistic understanding and healing opportunities to the roots of unique relational patterns, belief systems, and reactive dispositions which each one of us carry in life.
The unconscious yet familiar responses we have to certain situations in life—which may lead to the emotional and nervous system activation, self-sabotaging inner dialogue, sense of numbness, or beliefs towards oneself as well as relationships to others and the environment—are often derived from our early preverbal history, even from the time in utero or at birth. The characteristics of those imprints are that they feel so visceral, yet cannot be traced to their roots through our cognitive memories. As one of the pioneers in this field of practice, William Emerson introduced the concept of recapitulation in his writing “The Vulnerable Prenate,” the traumatic experiences during the prenatal period would call for their remembrance through unconscious attraction to the similar contexts in life. Namely, the imprints drive us to attract, choose, or perceive the life situations unconsciously that would resemble the original trauma, until we make the original traumatic experiences explicit (conscious) with bodily understanding and bring reparative healing to them.
Pre- and Perinatal Trauma Resolution accesses this tender territory with great care, attunement, empathic listening, and somatic orientation, so that the understanding and healing can take place through the mind-body experiences. The practice embraces that we all have the very sensitive and young self still living inside of us, carrying all the experiences from our early history and responding to the life experiences from that perspective. Therefore, healing is not to get rid of the painful experiences or imprinted perceptions, but to orient ourselves to the present moment and resourceful connections that are available now, so that we can differentiate the experience of now and then to hold this younger part of ourselves with love and understanding. This attitude towards healing always orients the understanding of who we truly are towards our blueprint—the innate wholeness within us—which enables us to appreciate all our imprints as the opportunities for growth and deeper understanding of who we truly are.