I just finished reading ‘The Paradise Paradigm’ by GD Allport, which I picked up very randomly when I was hanging out at the democratic school where I run a homeschool drop-in. It was a fairly quick read, and I felt that it needed either a shorter (more concise) or a longer (more in-depth) format, but it fell in so synchronistically with where my head’s been at, I wanted to write something about it.
Here’s my quick summary of the main ideas:
“Extreme sensitivity to early conditions” is a hallmark of complex iterative systems like the human brain. This means that the character of each adult was shaped primarily by their experiences in the earliest months and years of their life. Early experiences colour later experiences, to the degree that enough “bad” early experience will cause almost every later experience to be perceived as negative.
Mistreatment & traumatization of babies, children and their mothers is considered normal in our society. There is little awareness or compassion for their suffering. This gives rise to many of societal ills, including violence, addiction, crime, illness, war etc. The way to a world full of compassion, health, freedom and prosperity is through giving high levels of support and love (which includes freedom from coercion) to pregnant women, infants and children. So we need to change the paradigms we have around raising & educating children to make this support systematic & automatic. We will do this by making the connections between early care and healthy adulthood, & between healthy adulthood and a healthy society, explicit and well-understood.
I agree with this thesis — all the work I’ve ever done backs this up, and it’s a big reason that I’m now focusing on issues around conception, pregnancy, birth and parenting. It’s also part of my obsession with the Reggio Emilia approach to education. I find modern medicine, especially in it’s attitude towards pregnancy and birth, to cause unnecessary pain and stress for women and young children. I’m also not a fan of a lot of mainstream parenting ideas, although I realize finding alternate ways of parenting are difficult and North American lifestyles don’t make them easy.
Many times working with clients, where emotional issues are resistant to traditional and alternative therapies, I’ve found the answer in healing traumas (usually multiple) occurring during their first few years of life, or in the womb. Working with healing trauma from my own life from before age 6 has been huge, significant amounts of it triggered by parenting my own child.
Most of us have been exposed to statistics documenting how those who experienced child abuse, have a likelihood of becoming abusers themselves. If you’ve ever read books like Alice Miller’s ‘For Your Own Good’ or researched the sociological roots of cultures of violence, it’s very clear that we end up reliving and revisiting upon others, in some form, traumas experienced pre-verbally. In ‘For Your Own Good’ Miller makes the connections between Hitler’s “Fatherland” and his own tortured relationship with his abusive and cruel father; she also shows how his vision resonated with Germans in general because of the harshness of the typical German upbringing. She critiques our oppressive Western history of child-rearing, calling it ‘poisonous pedagogy’. I think it’s also in that book, that she talks about how surgery in early childhood is often associated with violence in later life.
When looking into anthropological studies of peaceful cultures, the things that seem to make the biggest difference are loving child-rearing practices and how much the emerging sexuality of adolescents is accepted by the community. Lots of affection for children, extended breastfeeding and carrying, are all things that set people up for valuing connection and positive relationships with others.
Attachment parenting research shows that the fundamentals of self-esteem are based on whether and how an infants needs are met. If a mother isn’t able to meet the baby’s needs for food, care, or attention, the baby internalizes this as a non-verbal belief: “I don’t deserved to get my needs met – there must be something wrong with me.” The fields of pre & perinatal psychology and infant mental health are beginning to provide scientific background to the idea that babies feel and are aware, are active participants in their birth and care, and can be depressed or show signs of trauma. Dr. Fredrich Leboyer’s ‘Birth Without Violence’ (also mentioned in ‘The Paradise Paradigm’) was a pioneering work in the 1970’s that helped sensitize many people to the importance of gentle birth practices, and the positive impact it can have on people’s quality of life.
Rebirthing was also pioneering in making the connections clear — Rebirther Sondra Ray has talked about how people relive their births all the time without realizing it — people born via c-sections will have knife collections, or re-experience their birth traumas in other ways in daily life, such as recurrent accidents or relationship patterns. Leonard Orr, the originator of Rebirthing, called the first conclusions you made about life and yourself, as a newborn, your ‘personal law’ — supposedly all subsequent beliefs build upon that fundamental imprint. People will go through life with attitudes they formed in the context of how they were emotionally received at birth or what was happening to their mother.
There is a Swahili word – Mamatoto (meaning mother-baby) – that expresses the idea that mother and baby are not two separate people. That is my experience as well — young children and their mothers are one energy system. Babies feel what the mother feels, and her experiences and attitudes are imprinted on them as part of the basis of their own personality. When I pair this with the knowledge that most cases of domestic abuse start when a woman is pregnant or soon after she gives birth, it is a frightening testament to how our culture feels about life and the care of a child’s psyche.
Vulnerability is not valued – it’s considered a liability. So what does that mean for our most vulnerable members? Especially at the time that they are most sensitive, and being set up with the subconscious beliefs that will inform a lifetime of choices?
We know that the majority of a child’s learning takes place before the age of 6. Research into early learning gives us evidence that if a child is parented in an authoritarian way, their brain is wired to work along models of dominance & submission. That greatly limits how our society can function: hierarchical organization becomes the one system that works for people who only know top-down models.
Something that I know though, from working with energy, is we can repair damage and re-find those lost psychic pieces and potentialities that trauma takes away. We now have many tools that can allow us to access the subconscious mind. And of course, more whole people raise more whole people – the personal changes then become political choices that we make to support ‘wholeness for all’ as a paradigm. We can choose nurturance for our children from the very beginning.
Birth pioneers such as Elena Tonetti-Vladimirova offer frameworks to reset your limbic (emotional) imprint so that you aren’t limited by trauma and less-than-nurturing experiences as you came into the world. Rebirthing can do similar, using breathwork (getting in touch with memories of your first breath) as the entryway. You can also use EFT or certain kinds of bodywork to release trauma.
I do deep intuitive healing work based on whatever is coming up for you around your children, where I can bring in higher perspective, insights and energy shifts that facilitate positive outcomes. If you are pregnant, this is a great time to start examining your beliefs and early imprints, as giving birth is subconsciously informed by your experience of your own birth. Raising children gives us so many opportunities to shed intellectual, emotional and spiritual limits – parents around the world are realizing they can approach it as a personal growth path, and evolve into those paradigms that produce paradise.
