Posts Tagged ‘premature’
The Story of a Premature Baby
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Did you know:
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Tony Crisp is one of those rare people who remembered his premature birth and its effects on his mature self. He underwent this amazing journey to find the source of his sexual inadequacy and his terror of being deserted.
His story is told in a series of articles about his experience of being born prematurely. It describes in amazing detail the memories and trauma felt and the way through it. It is an unusual and moving book, and should be read widely. Its main appeal being its description of the wonders of Life.
Art by Carlos Caban of Mexico (ccaban_98@yahoo.com)
Birth Dreams and ones Natal Experience
Few people who have not re-experienced it for themselves, can believe, or comprehend, the enormous influence ones birth has upon personal development and adult behaviour and feelings. Many images in dreams link directly to the influences/memories still alive within us relating to our birth. Being in a tight place and struggling to escape, being under water without breathing, being strangled, crawling through a tunnel, coming out of a pool of water, difficulty in breathing – may all relate to birth experiences. See: active imagination.
The experience of being in the womb and of being born lie at the very foundation of all we learn and accomplish in the further years of our growth. The way we react to that earliest of life dramas defines the way we react to later situations. I am not saying such reactions emerge from a self-aware centre in the baby – far from it, but like any other mammal or living creature, we as a baby can learn conditioned reflexes to given situations. We can and do make a sort of ‘life decision’ about things, a decision in the form of a massive feeling response.
So, if for instance the emergence into life outside the womb is difficult and without any compensation of loving contact and welcome, we might very well have a deep feeling of withdrawal, of not wanting to be ‘here’ in the external world. In later life this will be experienced as difficulty in wanting to be involved in everyday life or other people.
The psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor has written extensively about the subject of birth dreams, and gives the example of a woman who was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, and in adult life frequently dreamt of being strangled. Also an example is quoted of a person who received a head injury during birth, and in adult life frequently dreamt of being scalped.
Such stories are of course not definite evidence for the influence of birth experience in later life. But I believe it is something that is very important to consider in any attempt to understand ones adult behaviour or tendencies. I myself was born two months premature, at a time when there was no intensive care in hospitals for such babies. My recovered memories of that experience, gained from working with dreams, are intense and have convinced me that enormous personal difficulties regarding relationship with people and with meeting opportunity in life, have their roots in my premature birth. My memories revealed to me that being born so early left me feeling physically and psychologically inadequate to relate to and deal with independent life. My digestive system was immature, as were my breathing organs. My vulnerability caused my mother anxiety, leading to a lack of bonding between us. In my condition I needed months of being held close to her body and bathed in feelings of confidence and care. Instead of that I felt deeply anxious and alone. My lack of psychological readiness to be in the world also meant that I had an inner feeling of not being as capable as most of my peers. The constant desire to be back in the womb remained into adult life. I didn’t know that my interest in meditation and the unconscious was in fact a desire to find the ‘heaven’ of life in the womb again. This fixation of delving deeper into my inner life also caused a lack of understanding of motives that led other people to grasp opportunity in external life. In fact external life didn’t mean much at all to me. The disruption this caused in achievement and in feeling a part of everyday social interaction has been enormous. Now, seeing the extraordinarily premature babies who are kept alive, I cannot help but feel pity for what they will face as adults.
Whatever it is we may have lost during our birth, or whatever gained in the way of painful or disruptive decisions and conditioned reflexes, our dreams try to lead us back to the Garden of Eden that was our life in the womb. They try to recreate the scene of the expulsion from Eden, so we can understand and perhaps grow beyond the afflictions gained at that time. To lead us back to this recovery of our lost selfhood or wholeness, our dreams represent our story in symbols or in a sort of personal mythology. As I have explained in the feature active imagination, finding ones way through the imagery back to direct meeting with oneself as the baby, needs certain skills to be learnt and practised. Without these skills, or the help of someone who can introduce us to the skills, we may become lost in the shifting world or imagery and imagination, where resistances to meeting our pain play with us in a shadow world of truths disguised in dream landscapes and imagery.
Van de Castle quotes the description of Jane English, a physicist who writes about her dreams and how they helped her uncover the influence of her caesarean birth on her life – (her book is Different Doorway: Adventures of a Caesarean Birth.) Jane’s dreams were not direct expressions of a birth situation, but held within the symbols the feelings and sense of being overwhelmed that when met and allowed more fully into consciousness, led to the direct insights into her birth.
There appear to be several reason why dreams do not directly represent such early experiences and experience resistances. One is that they have never been thought about, or been a part of the refined imagery and concepts which arise as we learn language. Another is that they are usually intense body and feelings experiences, and to truly remember or represent them, needs us to actually feel emotions and physical sensation at that intensity again – something few adults are willing to do. Such memories are not neatly separated off from our personality and labelled ‘birth memories’. They usually arise as intense emotional reactions which we fully identify with and do not necessarily see as having to do with anything more than present experience. Many a relationship has foundered because the powerful emotional response in a marriage has not been seen as relevant to birth rather than to a problem in the marriage.
A report of a man experiencing the trauma of premature birth
The man was born prematurely in the 1930’s, before great efforts were made to care for such babies.
so this premature baby was thrown aside after its umbilical cord was cut and the baby was not breathing. This led to the infant meeting death, but fortunately his grandmother took hold of his body and bathed it in hit and cold water and his breathing started.
“I am so alone. Even when someone loves me I can’t feel it. I want to change. I don’t want to keep hurting. My wife feels like she is feeling like she isn’t there at an emotional level. But that is the feeling world I have lived in – who is there for me? I was part of something and I lost it. I was part of something that was good, and I lost it. I was a part of a woman and I lost her. I was rejected. Now I face this struggle just to exist, just to breath, just to be. This feeling of life being a terrible struggle just to keep going has pervaded me all my life. I’ve got to struggle to exist just to keep alive. Got to struggle just to keep alive! GOT TO STRUGGLE TO EXIST – JUST TO KEEP ALIVE! GOT TO STRUGGLE BECAUSE THERE’S NOTHING THERE. I WANT SOMETHING TO HOLD ONTO. I’VE GOT TO STRUGGLE JUST TO KEEP ALIVE.
I cry like a baby. The question burns in me – Why is life like this? I cry again. Then I realise that at first when I was born I was too small and undeveloped even to be able to cry properly, so I couldn’t let out my misery. It is such a relief to cry now and be understood, to have known what I felt at that terrible time.
I am aware of my connection with my stream of life having been broken – the umbilical cord. What I realise as the adult watching this, is that because of its proximity to the genitals, there is an unconscious connection made between the genitals and the connection I seek to sustain my life. So even as a baby I am reaching for that connection with my genitals. I want to be fed. I attempt to reconnect through my genitals, but the pain of the separation is so acute even when I do try in adulthood through sex, the pain of the separation turns me back. This is the story of the Garden of Eden. I was in the garden and was cast out. Now when I attempt to return, an angel with a burning sword turns me back. Not only was it painful every time I attempted reconnection/sex, but I had the unconscious expectation to be fed, to be nourished. Instead of that every time I had sex I felt cheated, deceived and betrayed. I was not fed, but deeply sucked dry of what small nourishment I had managed to build up. I wasn’t fed, I was fed upon by a predator. Each sexual act was a betrayal, a predation, and a torturous pain. Yet I had to find my way to the garden again, because there lay the secret of my genesis and myself. So, I would return, to be wounded once more. It is even painful to look back on those years of misery now. Why is life so painful?”
When you experiences a dream which may relate to your birth, one of the most helpful tool’s to use in exploring the deeper levels of the dream associations is fantasy or active imagination. Skill in using fantasy can help you create an environment in which the spontaneous processes of the psyche are set free, enough at least to move beyond the boundaries of common experience and present the strange, awful, wonderful world of babyhood. See Processing Dreams – Opening to Life
In doing this certain basic psycho-physical facts are worth remembering.
Firstly the self regulatory process underlying the fact that your body and mind are still functioning without your conscious effort, holds in it the continuous move to heal whatever hurts you experienced. It does this by pushing those experiences toward your conscious awareness in any way it can. The depressed feelings, psychosomatic body pains, irrational reaction we have to some situations, and of course the strange and sometimes frightening dreams we experience, are all ways this process attempts to make conscious what was hidden.
Secondly, the difficulties we need to deal with are all lined up just beneath conscious awareness, like a queue behind a closed door waiting to come through.
Thirdly, the reason things do not surface, become known and resolved is because we resist them. These resistances are obvious and need to be meet for healing to take place. Dreamers wake with terror from a nightmare for instance and desire nothing more than to blot it out from their feelings. The nightmare is an attempt to make conscious the intense feelings from a trauma, but we resist this because we have not learned the ability to witness such feelings and personal emotions without fear. Another resistance is the automatic withdrawal from pain. Just as we automatically draw our hand away from a hot surface, so we draw our awareness away from a painful memory. The methods we use are many – using redirected attention, as when we rush to entertainment, alcohol, talking with friends, nicotine, breath holding, and so on.
Such resistances are the main reason we do not find healing through dreaming, even though dreams are constantly trying to heal us. Of course another one seen in massive number of dreams is fear. Fear acts just like pain to make us avoid/resist the action of dreams.
So recognising these processes in oneself is the first step to self discovery. See: Integration – Meeting yourself – active imagination; self regulation fantasy and dreaming; Life’s Little Secrets; fundamental processes; self regulation; lifestream – A Psychotherapeutic Experience of Premature Birth
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The Mysterious Power of Children-To-Be
By Elisabeth Hallett – contact: e-mail at soultrek@montana.com or by letter: Elisabeth Hallett, Box 705, Hamilton MT 59840; http://www.light-hearts.com
It was midwinter and pitch-dark when the Volkswagen skidded off the road into an icy river. Unable to fight her way to shore, C. was exhausted, ready to give up and surrender to the freezing water when suddenly a voice protested…
C. is a down-to earth, level-headed woman, and an old friend. The adventure she related to me happened three years before the birth of her first child, when she and her husband were driving home to Montana after a Christmas trip. In her own words:
“We were anxious to get to our cabin in the Swan Valley so we drove night and day. We stopped in Great Falls for gas and were warned not to cross Rogers Pass because there was wind and extreme cold. Being young, we went along anyway. After crossing the pass we stopped for a cheeseburger and fries — it was about 9:00 P.M.
“As we started up the Swan Highway we encountered a snow packed highway. As we came around the corner, a large amount of snow blew off the bank above us causing a glare of snow and lights. I thought a car was coming toward us so I swerved, over-corrected, went into a spin and flipped over, and landed on our wheels in the Stillwater River.
“J. tried to paddle the car with the snow shovel but we were in a small whirlpool and just went around in circles. He climbed out the window into the river and got the spare tire out of the trunk for me to float on. He swam for shore and I tried to push off from the car on the tire. Unfortunately the tire was attached, so that I couldn’t use it for flotation as it was going down with the car. By this time I was ready to give up, death seemed a treat (I thought I would see my mother again). J. hollered at me from shore and then seemed to disappear under the ice. I resigned myself to an easy death.
“Then I heard, ‘But I haven’t even been born yet!’ This didn’t seem relevant at that time, but a hand or force or whatever seemed to grab me by the collar of my jacket and much as a cat carries a kitten, propelled me to shore. Later, when we had broken into a cabin and were running out of energy, I woke up and seemed to hear the same admonition — “I’m not born yet.” We were rescued in the morning.
“Three years later my son was born. The first night I was home with him he woke in the night to be fed. As I nursed him I had a vision back into the past of my mother, grandmother and so on nursing their children, and I felt connected to this pattern or plan. Then I knew it was my son who had spoken the night of the accident.”
This wonderful story illustrates one of the intriguing patterns in communications before conception: they often seem to have a definite purpose. In this experience, as in many others, the apparent purpose is to overcome an obstacle to conception. The untimely death of your intended mother would surely be a serious problem! But there are other roadblocks on the way to birth, and other stories that suggest the same amazing possibility–that children-to-be are somehow able to intervene and deal with obstacles to their own arrival.
In the story of Miriam and Steven, for example (see part I, this column), Miriam was not only emotionally opposed to motherhood, but had even undergone surgery to prevent it. It took a whole series of visionary and dream contacts with a very appealing little boy to overcome her resistance.
When people have lost a child, their grief and fear can become barriers to risking pregnancy again. Patricia and her husband were devastated when their first pregnancy ended with a stillborn baby girl. They were inclined to shut the door on parenthood forever — and then, as Patricia says, “I met another child in my dreams. His name was Luka, and he said he would wait for us to welcome him into our lives.”
But Patricia was not ready. She still had months of anger and sorrow to endure, and most of all, the fear of another loss. Yet the dream-child was persistent. He appeared again the following year, with the same message that he was waiting to be welcomed. “Why was this happening?” says Patricia. “How could I get this out of my mind?” She continues: “That autumn, I started to realize how depressed I really was. I was functioning in the outside world, but it was apparent in therapy that this sadness had a grip on me. I even thought about whether life was worth continuing. I had had so many losses in my life, and this was about all I could endure.
“Then, the vision to end all visions happened. I’ll never forget it. I was taking a shower, alone, on a sunny Saturday afternoon. I heard this voice (There was no visual). I can’t say the voice was loud, or startled me, or anything like that. But it spoke in no uncertain terms to me, and then vanished. He said that I was perfectly ripe to accept him into our lives, and that this was our last chance because he had to move on.
“I opened up like a lotus to the notion of having this child come into our lives. I felt a cloud lift. But I stood in the shower in slight disbelief. I didn’t know what to do, but I felt lightness, love, hope, and happiness. I told my husband (as I had always done when I got these visions), and asked him if he would be interested in reconsidering our baby decision. When Peter said he wanted this baby, too, I can’t tell you how elated I felt. Maybe I’ve never felt such joy. We made love once, and the rest, they say, is history. Luka was conceived that day.”
Where does the parent-and-child bond begin? The editorial of the APPPAH Newsletter of Spring 1997 made an important point. “Considering what we know about the realities of life before birth,” it proposes, “shouldn’t we be setting the clock of parenting back from ‘early’ (birth to three) to ‘very early’ (conception to birth)?” Now, these stories of a presence even before conception have me wondering: Is it time to look even further back for the beginning of our connections with our children?
INVITATION: Please join in exploring the mysteries of communication before conception. If you have had such an experience, please consider sharing it here! You can contact me by e-mail at soultrek@montana.com or by letter: Elisabeth Hallett, Box 705, Hamilton MT 59840.
A Book for Further Exploration
Conscious Conception, by Jeannine Parvati Baker and Frederick Baker, 1988 (Freestone Publishing Co & North Atlantic Books) was one of the first books to talk about parenthood as a relationship that begins in a spiritual dimension. Subtitled “Elemental Journey through the Labyrinth of Sexuality,” this classic book really is like a labyrinth to explore! It’s an unusual blend of earthiness and spirituality, with a wealth of interesting material from several contributors.
Through all the stories and articles runs the daring assumption that an unborn child is a conscious presence before conception. There are many examples of pre-conception communication, as felt by men as well as by women. For example, a father describes a reverie he experienced, some months before the conception of his child. While half-asleep, he found himself in a rose garden. “Just about the time I started thinking about leaving, I felt something move. It was more like a shift in energy than anything else. I looked over towards the fountain. Seated on a marble bench was a robed figure. It was smiling at me.
“I’m not one to go around seeing things, visions or otherwise. However, I was now very curious. So I asked the figure who it was. I started to repeat my question when I suddenly knew the answer. This being was waiting to come through us. The ‘us’ was my lover and I. This being would be our baby, our child. It was now making contact with us. It had decided to start with me.”
Lumpkin – The Baby Who Became Tony
I existed long before my conception and birth. What was new was this particular body conceived by a young country girl, fathered by the son of an Italian immigrant to England, and born in Amersham just before the Second World War. It was a completely new configuration.
There are memories of being in the womb, feeling like the yolk of an egg. My genitals were the pulsing centre of that yolk, and they pulsed with gentle pleasure in time with my tiny heart. There was no sense yet of being a person, but there was an integrity that gave a feeling of being something different to other things in my awareness. And there was sense of love. It came to me in waves as the beating of my small heart roused pleasure in the centre of me, pleasure raised high as my mother’s heart and mine beat together while the two rhythms crossed.
Birth is seldom ever completely commonplace to its witnesses, and certainly not to the baby being born. Sometimes we have the strangely naïve attitude that this is a new being who has entered the world. But what is there new in nature? Can we say, if we plant an acorn, that the oak tree growing is new? Well, yes. The body and leaves of the tree will be unique. But millions of years in the lives of other trees are involved in the growth of this particular oak. It cannot, it hasn’t, simply emerged from itself, for each of us have a history of our beginnings started from the single cells from which all started. What an incredible journey we have all been on!!!
Whatever way we explain birth, the baby carries with it the influences of an immense number of men and women who lived, struggled, loved, in the past.
I have memories of my birth. Not as pictures in my mind, like old photographs. I remember through the pain in my guts, and through my feeling response to some situations. I remember because the experience of that birth sometimes wells up like a great tide overwhelming my normal, everyday, self.
My tiny body was born two months early, apparently dead. I was told the doctor threw my body to one side, saying, “Forget the baby. We need to look after the mother.” The doctor’s words were not flung out casually. I was born in the thirties, prior to intensive care units for premature babies – prior to antibiotics. Each of us is a witness to our times. We all exist within a huge web of influences and understandings, and if I try to grasp the view from which the doctor’s words arose, there is sense in what he implied. If we have children and say to one of them as he or she goes out the door, “Be careful”, we don’t need to mention all the things in today’s world that one needs to be careful of. If the child is old enough to manage the streets alone, they can already fill in most of the details about dangers they should avoid, such as drug pushers, muggers, child molesters, and other violent children. So the doctor was saying to my mother, “Within this present social and medical situation your baby has little chance of survival. If it does survive it will be weak. Let this one die and have another one.”
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It wasn’t an auspicious beginning, but my grandmother carried off the limp body and managed to provoke breathing.I have a sense — I cannot call it a clear memory — that in reviving me, my grandmother baptised me in case I died. She blessed me with her love, and marked a cross on my forehead in oil and water. That mark has remained in my being indelibly, having been given with true love. It has opened connections to me with mysteries I might otherwise not have known. |
It wasn’t just my body that was impressed with the experience of birth. There are levels of awareness in us right from conception, along with the learning of responses to what is confronted. Not only does the unborn body mature in readiness for birth, so does the awareness, the receptive sentience.
In my 40s, when I traced back troublesome reactions to everyday life events, I discovered memories of the period just after birth. I found the experience of being a tiny vulnerable creature, and as that creature I was very definitely reacting to a feeling of awful exposure, even though I didn’t know myself as Tony.
Remember that in the womb my small being did not need to breathe. Food did not have to be taken in and digested. There was a stable temperature, so no exposure to temperature shifts. My nervous system was geared to survive, and in some way respond to stimuli. There was no assault of powerful and unknown sounds in the womb – sounds such as birdsong, dogs barking, house sounds. Also, in the womb one is buffered against bacterial and viral attack.
A baby is aware of all these in its own way. It has a functioning brain and nervous system that is already learning — not in words, but certainly feeling responses.
What I recall from that early period after birth — recall and put into words by my adult self — is of being afraid I could not survive in this new environment. At the time of my birth there were no intensive care units to plug my tiny body into a drip feed or oxygen tent, or an incubator to keep me warm. Neither were there antibiotics to help fight the deadly diseases so many infants and children of the time were laid low by. At that time premature babies were very likely to die.
So I couldn’t breathe easily. I couldn’t digest easily, and I was deeply anxious about the strange sounds around me. A tremendous feeling response took place in my tiny self. As an adult we would call this a decision. But in my infant self it had nothing to do with thinking or analysing. It was a total feeling and fear response. It was a rejection of life. A turning away from scrambling, struggling, for survival. I didn’t want to be in the world. I wanted to remain in the egg!
The effect this had on my adult behaviour was that I never developed the ambition to “get somewhere in life.” Just existing felt like an enormous struggle, an exhausting struggle. I turned away from opportunities because they needed involvement and participation. I didn’t want to be involved, and often had to crash out of social activities, as I did not have the coping mechanisms to engage in ordinary social events.
There was also, in my budding awareness, a sense of death. Even though my body was ill prepared for life outside the womb, it still functioned strongly enough to stand between me and death. But death felt very close. I needed to be back in the womb, kept warm, protected and given a chance to grow undisturbed. Second-best would have been to be held skin to skin against my mother’s body and breast, a sort of constant drip-feed in a warm environment. Unfortunately that did not happen. She was a working mother dashing back from work to breast feed me.
I gather from these memories, and the feelings accompanying them, that my mother, being young and inexperienced — I was her first and only child — was frightened by my fragility. All her sisters had produced heavy full-term babies. So she may even have felt lacking in some way. And I felt something of this anxiety. My own struggle, and feelings that death was sniffing around me like a waiting hyena, were not held at bay by my mother’s anxiety. As the little budding me existed beyond any sense of time there was no knowledge that things could change, only a feeling of impending doom.
Then a truly life changing event occurred. I have no awareness at all of its place in the sequence of things. But picture if you can this vulnerable and helpless creature, this spark of life and awareness not ready to deal with independent life, retreating from it, yet not wanting to die. And my spark of awareness, my forming sense of myself, is afraid, and feels alone in this fear, alone in the dark, with death as a predator sniffing around. Then suddenly I am picked up and held in arms that are strong; held by a being of love who is not afraid of death, and communicates love and courage to me. Communicates so profoundly that I feel I am in the arms of a higher being, a being who has lifted me out of darkness and fear, and has driven away skulking death itself. So I cry out to this being with the only passionate sound I can make, the panting, weeping of an infant. But if there had been the gift of words I would have been looking into the eyes of this being, crying out, “I love you! I love you! I am bonding with you! I am connecting with you forever!”
When I remembered this, when I re-experienced the moment as an adult, I too bawled like a baby, and felt the exquisite love and strength, the relief from darkness, of those moments. In fact I still weep as I write these words, for that experience was so profound.
That was my second, and most deeply felt experience of love. It was also the first, and perhaps most fundamental, experience of religious awe. It stands as some sort of nucleus in the development of myself as an adult personality. It is a touchstone against which is tested any meeting I have with love. Also, when I first re-experienced this event it was accompanied by a revelation, a certainty, that this was the resurrection.
The wonderfully loving higher being who had the power to lift me beyond the reach of death, was of course my grandmother. She was the mother of 13, some of whom had not survived. My mother was the youngest, born on the eve of the Great War. My grandmother did not have long to live herself, but I think had developed that serenity, not of the mind, for I doubt she was a thinking person, but of the heart, that comes with deep acceptance. I also have a feeling out of these experiences, that she was the heir to the wisdom gathered by a long line of women who were her ancestors. I don’t see this wisdom passed on verbally, because I doubt it was ever put into words. It was passed from eyes to eyes, from heart to heart. It was passed in the passionate responses to hard times and loss and love. And I feel my grandmother baptised me in the essence of it, and I am blessed for all time.
My Grandmother
I have wondered a great deal about what was meant by the resurrection. I know it has to do with love. I feel people apply the term to Christ because the Christ being represents, or is a symbol of, a form of love we sense in ourselves occasionally, and sometimes see in other people. It is the type of love that in its weakest form is seen in the love of parents for their children. It shows itself as the giving that enables a mother to almost totally devote herself to the needs of the helpless and completely demanding life of her baby. It is the ability some fathers have to toil year after year to feed and provide for their children.
But that is its weakest form. That love is often partly instinctive, built into us if we are healthy. Its most profound form is seen in those who reach beyond their love for their children and family, and extend it in depth, not just in duty or to be seen to do good, to people who are not their kin, and from whom no financial, sexual or social advantage is expected.
I sense the resurrection as a form of love that transcends the boundaries of kin, and is not afraid of death or risking of one’s own life for the need of another. In essence, this is the story Christianity tells. Although I am personally uncertain about the existence of an historical Jesus, I can see that as humans, we collectively sense there is a profound wonder in such self-sacrificing love. In sensing this we have created a deeply perceptive mythology around it. The mythology tells us that even if we can allow a little of such love into our life, it will give us entrance into becoming aware of an essence — the spirit — that pervades all existence, and to the survival of bodily death.
To some extent I have to acknowledge that by getting my newborn body to start breathing, my grandmother did raise me from the dead. So my unconscious mind has powerful material around which to create its own personal mythology. But the love I experienced I sense as a force beyond that, and has to be acknowledged too.
In our collective myth of Christ we have created, or witnessed, a being who extends love to all living things, and offers a life beyond death in its existence – the mystical body of Christ. Just as my grandmother lifted me from darkness and death, so Christ is said to lift humankind.
My grandmother took over my care soon after I was born. My mother told me that I slept in the same bed as she did, but one morning she woke and couldn’t find me. She panicked, and then discovered I had slipped out the side of the bed, and was as cold as stone. From that point on my grandmother took charge, which probably did nothing for my mother’s confidence.
I have not recovered memories of this period, but from looking at photographs, I grew from a tiny shrunken little creature into a happy and sometimes radiant looking child with blond hair. Things soon changed though. My grandmother died of a stroke before I was two. So suddenly the great love in my life was gone.
This was such a major event in my life that it left massive residues in strata of my psyche. The petrified remains of that event were only uncovered slowly, plunging again and again into the depths to find the heartbreaking remains of that lost love.
From my teens, through to the time of uncovering these buried feelings connected with my grandmother, I had an almost compulsive religious drive. This was never something leading me to attend church or listen to sermons, or study the Bible. It was a direct need to find God as a personal experience. I wanted to communicate, to meet, and to have a direct confrontation.
Understanding of this drive dawned slowly as I developed the skills of mental archaeology, and learned to carefully brush away the debris of years. My first discovery in this old burial mound was anger. I was angry with God – violently angry. Only slowly were the roots of that anger uncovered.
My grandmother died after a second stroke. As a young child I had no foreknowledge of this, so it was a terrible shock suddenly to no longer be able to find her. Literally she was no longer there. I didn’t even see her dead body, and I feel that was a great mistake on the part of my family. Seeing her corpse would have given me a tangible experience of her death. Lacking that experience she had simply disappeared mysteriously. I was left to seek an answer to this, and when I asked where she had gone was told that my grandmother had gone back to God.
When that one sentence was lifted out of the darkness of years, along with the emotions buried with it, the anger and the compulsive religious search were understood. I was angry with God for taking away the person I loved. I was searching for God because, according to what I had been told, in finding God I would find my grandmother.
It’s crazy how the mind and emotions work, but logical too. As a child I didn’t have the equipment to question the information I had been given. So it was buried intact, still channelling the energy of my drives and emotions until I managed to uncover it and re-evaluate it against a much wider database of experience and information.
Isn’t love a strange and terrible thing to keep a child held to its determined search through the long years into adulthood? Some ghost, some spirit of that small boy that I was, remained waiting in a corner of myself. Waiting and hoping for the return of his beloved grandmother. Waiting and bearing the weight of that waiting each day, gradually becoming walled up in a dungeon of debris dropped by the passing years.
The vulnerable and beautiful spirit of that child, buried in the shadows of myself, was the hidden artist behind much of the beauty and tragedy in the love story of my life. It became known to me in a dream as Lumpkin.
That’s how I waited out the years with my mother. Because I had been so close to my grandmother, in some ways my mother was a stranger. Living with her left the love child in me constantly waiting to go home. There was a feeling in me that if I could wait through this day, maybe today, or the next day, I could go home. If not today, maybe tomorrow I could be with my grandmother!
That feeling of desperate waiting, of feeling I was never “at home”, of constantly wondering where home was, lasted most of my life. A dream I experienced in Italy in 2000 shows the depth and dilemma of this. In the dream I was driving home along a country road. Ahead of me the road forked and I took the right-hand fork. I drove a little further and arrived home. It was a lovely house in its own grounds. My wife and children were happy to see me and came to greet me warmly. But something was wrong. I had no sense that these people were my family. This was not my home, and I hurried away, back to the fork in the road. There I took the left fork. Again I arrived home – another lovely house, another wife and children who warmly greeted me as husband and father. But there was still no feeling in me that I was home. Again I must go to look for where I belonged.
That dream sums up the feelings that haunted me most of my life, and the split shown by the forked road. As with the religious drive, the feeling arose because of my desire to be once more with my grandmother. After all, it was a desire etched into me over many years. Strangely enough, at the time this memory really surfaced, I was living with a friend, being homeless at the time. On the very day it came to light my friend told me I would have to find somewhere else to live. It was so strange it was almost comical.
Therefore, before ever I had any real sense of time or identity, those early experiences set patterns in me that have influenced the rest of my life. My prematurity, with its consequences of unreadiness for an outgoing life that would grasp the world and its opportunities, left a yearning, and I think an open door, to enter into the mysterious in the worlds of the mind and spirit. I wasn’t looking outward to the world. All my energy was flowing backwards into the life of the womb and its dark mystery. And there were negative aspects to that, such as lack of worldly ambition and a failure to understand the needs and functions of placing oneself well in the world to gain financial and social benefits.
What I have gained though, is an extraordinarily rich inner life. I suppose it was also a major factor in my becoming well-known in connection with dreams. Also, for never having any sense that I ought to absorb the subjects offered through schooling, as given by the establishment. But I believe there are other factors not mentioned, that played a big part in that.
The other main pattern put in place by my infant years, was the foundations upon which would be built a terror of losing the one I loved and the compulsion to be loved as desperately and urgently as I myself loved. In this way the scene was set for the drama of my destiny to unfold.
Last Thoughts About Lumpkin
I end by thinking about Lumpkin and realise what a wonderful part of me he is. I have an image of him as the Lion headed dwarf. The tiny malformed being who is yet enormous, with strength, wisdom, and power. He has that in his weakness. And in his love and compassion, he has more strength than soldiers. I have a sense that my female has taken Lumpkin deeply into herself. I have a feeling she is going to carry Lumpkin deep in her being, perhaps into another lifetime. And if that is so, I want her to recognise that Lumpkin has the seeds of enormous strength, great wisdom and love. I know that is why my lover has taken Lumpkin into herself.
Lumpkin is now also flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood.
Here is the Lumpkin dream.
“I believe it was a man, rather shadowy, who gave me a leather pull string purse or pouch. In the pouch was powder that I poured onto my rather stained trousers. Strangely, they looked like the one’s I wear now. Immediately the powder started working like yeast, or at least, I thought of it as yeast. It was cleansing and purifying my trousers in a spreading action. I knew that this yeast, or pollen, had also penetrated my body, and was gradually working through my being, purifying and healing.
I looked at the opening of the pouch, and it was in the shape of a mouth and a vagina. The powder that came out was like millions of living motes, or particles, life giving and alive. I thought at first that using the powder would empty the pouch, but I saw that in fact the living counts replenished itself. They were like sperm or pollen, they regenerated.
Then suddenly the scene shifted and it was later in the day. I was the only person at an eating-place. I heard sounds of people coming, and wasn’t sure if they were friendly or not. So, I acted as if I were working at the place by clearing one of the tables. There didn’t seem to be any proprietors or staff. Then, into the room, or space, because I believe it was outdoors, walked my friend Sheila, with a man who was shadowy, ill-defined, like the man who gave me the pouch. Sheila was now like a warrior figure, a man/woman, the genders blended. I understood, or could see, that Sheila had gone through an incredible journey or adventure. This was like one of the mythological odysseys that had transformed her in meeting its dangers and trials. She was now a very powerful figure. In her hands Sheila carried a tiny being. She held it out to me and said, “Lumpkin has been asking for you.” (Some days before the dream of the pouch and Lumpkin I experience a powerful uprising of feeling and joy. In listening to the feeling I received the distinct message that in four days I would receive a gift. I wondered what this gift might be, and understood that it was something that had always existed, but I had now grown, or opened, to the point where the gift could be received.)
Strangely, since that time, my dreams have given me four gifts – the two books, the pouch, and Lumpkin. None of them are easy gifts, and I am still riding the waves that lift me and thrown me down in my relationship with love and loneliness.
I understood that Lumpkin, this little being, had missed me and wanted to be with me. I held out my arms and took this creature, who was about 10 inches high, with spindly legs and arms. From his appearance he was incapable of individual locomotion. Lumpkin wasn’t a baby, nor an animal, but he was intelligent and could speak. He came to me and I held him, with the feeling we have known each other in the past.
Art by Carlos Caban
In fact what he brings me it is the possibility of the compassion for the helpless and injured. He has, because of his own weakness, a sense of humility that allows a link with other people’s vulnerable and perhaps a hidden, nature.”
A Psychotherapeutic Experience of Premature Birth
Without hesitation I begin to feel my connection with another human being. I experience that being connected with another human being is a fundamental part of life and procreation. If something threatens that connection, then it is life threatening – the reason being, I am in the womb! To lose my connection threatens my life. But my life is threatened. I am expelled from the womb before my body and soul are mature enough to be ready to be separated, ready enough to undertake life disconnected from the placenta. I feel incredibly vulnerable. Each sound, whether a bird singing or a car going by, is a possible threat to my existence. I had been physically and psychically attached to my mother. Now the bond is broken.
I realise as I experience this that the broken bond, the feeling of life threatening isolation, enormously increased my sensitivity to threats. It set me up for what happened at three when I was placed in a convalescent home and was deeply traumatised. In itself the short absence of my mother was not as potentially traumatising as it turned out to be. But because of the birth experience, I was already traumatised to abandonment. To be hit by it again increased the volume of it enormously.
I wasnt properly formed, so it was very traumatic to be separated as a baby. I am trying to heal this at the moment. I feel the struggle of resisting what has happened to me. I cry out that I dont want to be born. I am not ready. I feel deeply alone. There is in me a sense that tells me I shouldnt be alone. It is like something that pushes me to seek not to be alone. I feel lost. Im not ready for this world. Im feeling awful.
In fact I do feel awful, like I am ill and can barely move, or move only with effort and concentration. I go on to say that I have felt awful most of my fucking life. I can see from the feelings I am meeting how they have contributed to my lifelong feelings of being lost and cut off – alone. I have always called it independence, and perhaps seen the positive side of it more than the negative. But it has been a source of restlessness and a spur to seeking a bonding with someone. Of course I want to find the security of the womb. I want to know someone is deeply committed and bonded to me.
I am so alone. Even when someone loves me I cant feel it. I want to change. I dont want to keep hurting Hy by living like she isnt there at an emotional level. But that is the feeling world I have lived in – who is there for me? I was part of something and I lost it. I was part of something that was good, and I lost it. I was a part of a woman and I lost her. I was rejected. I was rejected. Now I face this struggle just to exist, just to breath, just to be. This feeling of life being a terrible struggle just to keep going has pervaded me all my life. I’ve got to struggle to exist just to keep alive. Got to struggle just to keep alive! GOT TO STRUGGLE TO EXIST – JUST TO KEEP ALIVE! GOT TO STRUGGLE BECAUSE THERE’S NOTHING THERE. I WANT SOMETHING TO HOLD ONTO. I’VE GOT TO STRUGGLE JUST TO KEEP ALIVE.
I cry like a baby. The question burns in me – Why is life like this? I cry again. Then I realise that at first when I was born I was too small and undeveloped even to be able to cry properly, so I couldnt let out my misery. It is such a relief to cry now and be understood, to have known what I felt at that terrible time.
I am aware of my connection with my stream of life having been broken – the umbilical cord. What I realise as the adult watching this, is that because of its proximity to the genitals, there is an unconscious connection made between the genitals and the connection I seek to sustain my life. So even as a baby I am reaching for that connection with my genitals. I want to be fed. I attempt to reconnect through my genitals, but the pain of the separation is so acute even when I do try in adulthood, the pain of the separation turns me back. This is the story of the Garden Of Eden. I was in the garden and was cast out. Now when I attempt to return, an angel with a burning sword turns me back. Not only was it painful every time I attempted reconnection, but I had the unconscious expectation to be fed, to be nourished. Instead of that every time I had sex I felt cheated, deceived and betrayed. I was not fed, but deeply sucked dry of what small nourishment I had managed to build up. I wasnt fed, I was fed upon by a predator. Each sexual act was a betrayal, a predation, and a torturous pain. Yet I had to find my way to the garden again, because there lay the secret of my genesis and myself. So I would return, to be wounded once more. It is even painful to look back on those years of misery now. Why is life so painful?
Seen from this level of experience, that of the uterine baby, God is a projection. You were in connection with a great creator, the mother. You were at one with them, but now you have been cast out of the Garden of Eden, so you have lost your contact with God, the creator in whose bosom you had existed. Perhaps that is why I searched so long for God.