How Janae Healed Herself

  I often felt as though my own healing process served as an invisible map for understanding, identifying and healing developmental shock, trauma and stress. This felt sense became stronger as I began teaching a series of four graduate level courses in Developmental Process Work (DPW) at CU-Colorado Springs in the mid- and late 1990s. 

Teaching these classes helped me see my personal, relational, theoretical and clinical holes. One of the most interesting observations I made as I witnessed my own process of discovery and healing was that it was not a linear set of experiences that unfolded in a predictable sequence. While each new awareness was clearly connected to something I already knew about myself, it happened in a way that felt intuitive and guided from within.

Over time I was able to organize my internal, non-linear experiences into a coherent structure that revealed the divine perfection in all that had unfolded in my life. I’m going to briefly share this structure with you as a way of illustrating how DPW operates as an integrative clinical modality. In my example you will see how it helped me live more fully in my body and to experience my life from a heartful place.

I have always known that I was a wanted and planned child. My brother was three and one-half years older than me. My father shared after I became an adult about the effort he and my mother made to space their children in the absence of effective birth control methods other than, as my grandmother once said, “sending them (the men) to the barn.” 

It was after Barry and I attended our first pre- and perinatal psychology conference in San Francisco in 1995 that I recognized the strong imprint of this period on subsequent development. For the next two years, we both immersed ourselves in pre- and perinatal psychology, and then attended our second conference in 1997.

Actually, it was breathwork in 1996 that brought me my first memories of being born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. My body memories were so strong that I knew them to be true, in spite of what my skeptical and chattering mind said.  We had purchased several videotapes on pre- and perinatal psychology, some showing William Emerson doing birth re-facilitation therapy with infants and their parents. One of his videos was on umbilical cord trauma, which I studied intensely. While it was really difficult to watch the first few times because I got so triggered, this video helped me understand a lot about not only my birth, but also about my personal psychology.

According to Emerson, babies born with the cord around their neck go through labor feeling as though they are going to die. As they move down through the birth canal, the cord cuts off their oxygen. Then they pull back and feel like a failure. They often hear the words “failure to progress” from caregivers who surround the laboring mother and become forever imprinted in the baby's brain. These words seemed to have immense power over me until a wise therapist helped me differentiate between my failure to progress as a baby and the labor’s lack of progression.

Emerson calls the psychological dynamic caused by umbilical cord trauma "completion ambivalence,” as the experience creates a terrible dilemma for the child. On one hand, there are tremendous muscular and gravitational forces pushing to expel the child. On the other hand, the umbilical cord increasingly cuts off the oxygen to the baby’s body. The struggle metaphorically becomes, “if I don’t get out of here I’m going to die. But I can’t get out of here, because if I do, I’ll die. Okay, so I will just stay in here. But if I do, I’ll die.”

After digesting the video, I began a sort of life review of all the projects that I had started in my life and never managed to complete. I also saw how much effort it took to really complete things when I made up my mind to. I completed my undergraduate degree in three years and three summers, and can remember how ready I was to give up my goal during the second summer.

The perinatal period of my development was also very traumatic for me. After having a near death experience during birth from umbilical cord shock, I experienced a hangover from the anesthesia given my mother to knock her out while I had a forceps delivery. After birth, I was taken down the hall to a nursery and kept there most of the time during our ten-day hospitalization. My mother had decided not to breastfeed any of her children, mostly because of the pressure from her own mother to use the “modern” practice of bottle-feeding. So I had minimal contact with my mother during this period and virtually no comfort to help me recover from so much shock.

In spite of my very difficult birth, I had three really good months with my mother before she realized she was pregnant again. She must have loved me a lot and doted on me during those first months, because I grew up feeling stronger and more secure than my younger two sisters—neither of whom were planned.

            The loss of connection to my mother at birth and then again at eleven months when she went to the hospital to deliver my sister created a large vacuum of “mother need” that Barry has helped me recognize and heal. My mother separation pattern played out again when I was thirteen with her carbon monoxide suicide that also took my five-year old brother. My older brother and two younger sisters managed to upright ourselves after this tragedy and move forward in our development.

 I can now see my mother’s suicide when I was thirteen as an intergenerational pattern of shock and trauma that continues to be re-enacted through three generations. I see this event as a very large rock that was dropped into the center of our family “pond.” While it made a very big “splash” at the time, I am able to see this event still rippling through my own life and the lives of my children and grandchildren. Because I was present when this “rock” dropped, I know the origin of these now faint ripples and recognize the inter-generational patterns of mother-abandonment in the struggles my children have had in creating and sustaining intimate relationships.

My mother’s suicide also helped me understand in a very concrete way that I had the skills and strength to survive the collapse of my reality, and helped move me from victim consciousness into survivor consciousness. I believe this event particularly motivated me to become a therapist. I wanted to understand what drove my mother to such desperation, without realizing that my desire to know would draw similar experiences to me.

It was a brilliant woman in Colorado Springs with whom I did my “baby therapy” who helped me really understand developmental shock, trauma and stress at the most personal level. The hours I experienced with her holding and comforting me helped me to rewrite my “mother script” was life-altering.           

Only in the last few years did I recognize how my father helped me overcome my pattern of completion ambivalence. During my second summer in college when I felt I couldn’t cope with the stress of my intense schedule, he shared one of his “folksy” homilies about how every farmer had to do some job that he didn’t like in order to make a living.

For him, he hated digging postholes. Without postholes, he couldn’t put in posts; without posts he couldn’t build fences; without fences he couldn’t raise cattle and hogs; without cattle and hogs he couldn’t butcher meat for his family or have a source of easy cash when finances were tight. At some level he seemed to understand that I had undertaken a really big challenge. In his wisdom, he gave me the choice to continue working towards it or not, and I believe that his detachment about my choice helped free me from parts of my birth dilemma pattern.

Of my two brothers and two sisters, I was the most outspoken and defiant. No matter what my parents, particularly my mother, would say, I opposed her. I was so defiant that she began washing my mouth out with soap in an effort to establish her authority. No problem . . . I just learned to like both of the kinds of soap she used! In retrospect, I could see that my birth trauma had set me on a lifetime of conflict with my mother, and it played itself out in numerous ways before her death.

I could see a lot of evidence of not only the psychological impact from my umbilical cord trauma, but also the physiological impact. As a child I had a lot of sore throats, infected tonsils and respiratory infections. I also had a misalignment in my cervical vertebrae where the cord had been so tightly wrapped. This didn’t appear until I was my 50s and helped explain my aversion to wearing things that were tight around my neck. 

It was deeply transformative bodywork  with a number of gifted people that helped me shift these patterns that were literally programmed into my physical body. This included lots of massage, craniosacral, structural integration and other unusual bodywork approaches. In my 60s I discovered a genius Hungarian  bodyworker who helped me connect the dots between a lifelong pattern of scoliosis and a prenatal pattern known as “large baby – small mother.” Symbolically, it represented coming into a world that was not large enough to support and appreciate me. I was amazed to discover how my strong will to repattern my physical structure, combined with the able hands of a skilled body-worker, could actually create a new way of Being. I did not anticipate, however, that the emotional components of this re-patterning work would emerge with such intensity. It was a bout of “walking pneumonia” in 2008 in which I came close to dying that I cleared what I hope are the final pieces of my birth shock and trauma memories.

            My self-healing journey taught me many skills in navigating the “in-between worlds” of altered states. During my divorce, my former husband threatened to kill himself several times, as he knew this was a big trigger for me. Between my experiences in separating psychologically from my mother and from him, I learned how to create and facilitate conscious death rituals for profound transformation. I really learned not to be afraid of death, either for myself or for others by accepting that people are always in charge of both their own lives and their deaths.

            It always amazed me when clients with suicide in their histories or death processes came to me for help. Because I had walked through the Dark Night of the Soul and knew the path through these deep places in the psyche, I was able to draw from my own experiences and support them. Over the years, I’ve been able to make my mother’s suicide into a meaningful experience. This has not only helped me heal the shock and trauma associated with it, but transformed it into a wellspring of inspiration and hope for others.           

            Unfortunately, I passed on almost all of my own patterns of developmental shock, trauma and stress to my two sons and also have witnessed them being passed on to my three grandchildren. It has been painful to witness the intergenerational transmission of these family patterns and has challenged me to accept that at a soul level they also are in divine order. As I’ve been able to heal my own developmental shock, trauma and stress, it has slowly changed my relationships with my sons.

            I grant Barry the honor of being my greatest soul teacher. His steadfastness during the many rounds of clearing our personal developmental shock, trauma and stress has been amazing to experience. When I look back now, I wonder how we ever made our way through so much. Without the support of key people at critical times, I’m not sure we would have.

I had read about Carl Jung’s individuation process, but it has been profound to experience it, map it and then write about it with a devoted partner. This very personal perspective on individuation from “inside the fish bowl” helped me understand just how many times it is necessary to repeat the four stages of development in order to become fully individuated. While we did our work together in increments, in retrospect, it feels like we have “eaten an elephant---one bite at a time.”

            I believe we have been able to sustain the intimacy in our relationship because of our deep soul connection and common vision about helping the world evolve. Sometimes we’ve felt that we’ve been clearing not just our own traumas but also those belonging to the collective as well.

At some point in our relationship, we discovered that we shared a common mind. Now this may sound odd and a little co-dependent, but something wonderful happens when we get in synch with each other on a specific issue or topic. Things that neither of us can generate separately appear—new perspectives, leaps in awareness, paradigm shifts. We do it so effortlessly that sometimes we look at each other in amazement after one of our creative bursts and wonder out loud, “Now where did that come from?” Sometimes we talk with our friends about “mental-course,” and then laugh, knowing that when we each get in balance and attune with each other, how much synergy we can generate.

I am aware that as I have cleared each piece of shock, trauma or stress with Barry, that my sense of identity has become clearer and my sense of personal power increased. It was between 1997 and 2000 that I generated a burst of creative work regarding developmental shock, trauma, stress and DPW, and that is when I began the first draft of this book. You can see that it has had a long gestation time and guess that it has cycled through several rounds of my completion ambivalence.

 It was late 2009 when I finally “got it” at a mindbody level about my long-term internal conflicts related to the loss of the mother-child relationship were responsible for several ongoing relational and health issues. I could see how the loss of relationship with my own mother and my role as a mother to my children were emotionally and mentally entangled. This came after several months of studying Dr. Hamer’s German New Medicine and integrating key concepts of his work with our paradigm. While I understood this integration mentally without any difficulty, it took me a while to grasp it inside my body.

 Once I recognized that I was caught in a deep codependency with my children because of my early experiences of developmental shock, trauma and stress, I realized how it was impacting my physical health. Once I resolved my internal conflict about surrendering to my own destiny . . . my own path . . . I had a huge shift. My energy returned, the fog in my brain cleared and the number of supplements I needed dropped dramatically.

 It was also interesting to observe through my “witness part” that this shift happened around the time of the New Year, the Blue Moon full moon and a partial eclipse. It affirmed again the strong interaction between my personal growth and the influence of my larger environment.

 Sharing my story with you really affirms that all bad things can become good things, that there are no mistakes in life, and that the world is flowing according to divine but invisible order.