wet set gazette | vol. 1 2011 www.dy-dee.com
p a
r
e n t
i
n g
3
(800) 80-dydee-dydee
Trust Begins in the Womb by Giuditta Tornetta
T
he connection the mother and child share during pregnancy is so intimate and close that the emotions and thoughts experienced by the mother are directly felt by the child through hormonal and chemical shifts in the body. Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., in an article entitled The Wisdom of Your Cells points out, “Blood contains all of the information molecules, such as hormones and emotional chemicals. The mother is always adjusting her physiology and her emotions to deal with the contingencies of life. Since her blood via the placenta is directed to the fetus, the fetus is experiencing and feeling what the mother senses. When stress hormones cross the placenta, they have exactly the same target sites in the fetus as they have in the mother.” When you learn how to cope and learn from everyday challenges, as well as harness every day’s beauty, your body’s chemistry will adjust accordingly and your baby will learn from you. That is the ultimate, unconscious teaching from example. Psychologist Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development suggest that trust and mistrust are the first building blocks of personality. According to Erikson, choosing one versus the other, trust or mistrust, is the result of our first learned experiences in the womb. The development of trust and mistrust continues into the toddler and childhood years. The level of reliance your child will feel in her life, is correlated with your ability to keep your word and allow her to freely express herself with you. As a mother, you represent the safe haven the child can rely on and return to when going out and exploring the world. You are the one person she was born to trust unconditionally and the one whose job it is to teach her the art of speaking and hearing the truth.
photo: shutterstock
[Don't be frightened or feel guilty for every negative emotion you have experienced in your pregnancy, none of us can have a perfect and carefree pregnancy and that is not the ultimate goal. As we mostly teach by example, the best for the unborn child is to learn how conscious mom is of her states. What are her coping mechanisms? How self-reflective she is in her life, versus prone to find blame only in others? How committed to her self-love is she? In this chapter we specifically focus on the power of words. The fifth chakra, which is the throat chakra, relates to the Right To Speak and to Hear the Truth. Do you say what you mean? Can your baby trust your words? Trust begins in the womb if you strive to be trustworthy to the world around you.] Regardless of what we have been Giuditta Tornetta taught as children, today we have a greater 310.435.6054 responsibility as adults and parents, to www.JoyInBirthing.com learn to be conscious of our words. When Giuditta Tornetta is a birth and post-partum doula, a we pass our own words through the sieve lactation educator, and hypnotherapist. She is the of, “Is it true, necessary, and loving?” we author of the book Painless Childbirth: An teach our children how to use words conEmpowering Journey Through Pregnancy sciously. For instance, we teach our chiland Birth (available at amazon.com). She dren that to tell Uncle Charlie, “I don’t like you,” is true, but it is neither neceshas a private practice in Marina del Rey, California.
sary, nor loving. To tell Uncle Charlie, “I’d rather not go to the park and play right now,” is a loving way to enforce a boundary. Often clients that enter the hospital during labor want to make sure the nurse will follow their Birth Plan, and they will either try to explain to her why they chose not to have an epidural, which often leads to a sparring of opinions, or they get irritated and get into a screaming match with the nurse who does not want to cooperate. Sometimes nurses, in an effort to help you, will insistently offer what they believe is the best remedy to a laboring woman: drugs. They mean well and once you are hooked up to all the gadgets they have to offer, they can perform their jobs better. They can monitor you from another room or from the nurses’ station and don’t have to work so hard to keep checking on you. Of course, it is your right not to have pain medication offered constantly, and it is the right of a woman to ask not to be given unsolicited advice such as, “You don’t have to be a hero, sweetheart. Every woman does fine with an epidural. Trust me.” Some of us want to scream at the nurse to shut up and leave us alone, but we are teaching our baby how to manage stressful situations, so we still need to learn how to pass our words through the filter of, “Is it true, necessary, and loving?” Certainly it is true you don’t want an epidural, but it is not necessary to tell the nurse why, nor is it necessary for her to understand your reasoning. Now all you have to do is focus on loving. When asked, a simple “No thank you, please don’t ask again,” will do.
To read more get the book! Painless Childbirth: An Empowering Journey Through Pregnancy and Birth was created to inspire women to remember their innate ability to give birth naturally. Painless Childbirth, by Giuditta Tornetta, promotes self-confidence urging women to take charge of their well being as they make informed decision and take a hard look at what may stand in the way of their own sacred drug-free childbirth.