Who Is This Little One? And What Are Those Markings on her Face About?

This is me, just a few months old – a very long time ago, as you can tell by the picture.  I had a difficult birth, with my mother in labor for many hours.  Finally, the doctor ‘put her out’ and delivered me.  That is all we know.

Birth trauma has become my passion in the Somatic Experiencing work.  The more I learn about how a difficult beginning affects us throughout our lives, the more I see evidence of this in my clients.  Asking what they know about their birth is now a standard part of my intake questions.

So, what do these pictures tell us about what happened during my birth?  Well, the second picture shows that my left eye is closer to my nose and deeper set than my right, indicating compression on the left side of my face.  The third picture shows evidence of a ‘zig-zag’ birth, where the face and especially the nose got pushed as my head descended over my mother’s lumbar-sacral promontory.  In fact, the tip of my nose is darker than the area above it, which indicates that there was enough pressure to crush the cartilage of the nose, and probably the ethmoid sinuses on the sides of my nose.  The final picture shows the dislocation of my jaw towards the right.  Even today, when I study my face in the mirror, I can see that my right jaw is fuller than the left side.  My eyes are also not symmetrical.

In my case, there was no acknowledgment by the doctor that there were any problems with me after my birth.  In fact, the problems didn’t really start showing up until I was in my 30’s.  Then the sinus infections started, two or three a year.  They were very painful and debilitating and required long courses of antibiotics to clear up.  I also had earaches in my left ear.  The canal in that ear is considerably narrower than the right ear and is at a completely different angle – again, permanent damage from birth trauma.  I cannot use ear buds in that ear.

Then there was the dental work.  I had TMJ problems on the right side, according to the dentist, although I could only feel the problems on the left side of my face.  Because my bite was crooked, he ground down my teeth on the left side to make the bite more even.  Dental work was always an ordeal for me, as my right jaw would seize up.  After one dental procedure, I ended up with ‘lock jaw’ which required an injection of steroids to let go.

I didn’t put any of these things together, however, until I started studying birth trauma through Somatic Experiencing.  Finally, my face and my difficulties make sense! I do SE on myself every day, a little bit, and slowly my sinuses have opened up (although the left side will never work right due to the crushed ethmoid bones).  Lately, I have connected into my jaw and it is slowly moving over more to the left and opening up that right TMJ, which has been tight my whole life.  I am even connecting into my left ear and opening up that canal a bit.  I haven’t yet figured out how to lessen the pressure in my left eye much, and it continues to be weaker in sight than the right.  However, I did have a session with an osteopath in which he did some magic to the left side of my face and it felt like my left eye was air-conditioned.  There was more space around the eyeball, not so much pressure.

I have changed what ‘normal’ feels like in my face and will probably continue to chip away at this for the rest of my life.  The more I learn about my own birth imprint, the more I can help my clients.

What are some other effects from birth trauma that I have seen in my clients?  Besides the obvious physical imprints in faces, there are also emotional imprints.  I have worked with children who had difficult births, to help ‘complete’ a birth that finished with an emergency caesarean.  Studies have shown that children who needed an emergency C-section and therefore didn’t complete the birth journey as nature planned often have more difficulty finishing tasks in their later life.  There is also a lot of shock in their system that needs to be worked through.  Their immature nervous system prepared them to die as they were in deep distress trying to be born, so they often have a lot of dissociation. Somatic Experiencing helps to bring ‘aliveness’ back into their system.

Babies who were induced have been shown in studies to often struggle to begin tasks.  After all, every baby knows how and when to be born.  It is the baby who initiates labor, not the mom.  Those first movements during the birth process establish the early neural networks that affect the ability to begin something, or the ability to finish tasks. Babies born by a planned C-section may never crawl but go straight from scooting around on their bums to walking.  They never got to push themselves through the birth canal with their feet and legs, which is the prelude to crawling. 

In a course I took a few weeks ago on ‘Toddler Tantrums’, the presenter linked tantrums to a difficult birth process, where the baby met their first ‘no’ by being stuck or having a difficult time being born.  It is at the toddler phase where children begin to explore their environments, meet boundaries, and encounter the ‘no’ from their parents.  This may trigger a body memory of that first ‘no’ that happened during birth, and a tantrum results.  These toddlers need help to work that first ‘no’ through their system.  We can use structured play activities for this as well as more traditional SE techniques.  Interestingly, the damage to the babies’ faces that the presenter showed us in pictures was very similar to the damage in my own face.  I found myself getting triggered during the presentation and the exercise he had us do.  The left side of my face got hot and tense, showing how the impacts of that original trauma continue to live in me, even with all the work that I have done.  I guess I am a ‘work in progress’.

We are only beginning to understand the long-lasting effects of the birthing process.  Every birth is unique.  What is important to understand is that birth is a rupture, from inter-utero bliss, through a perilous journey, to a bright and cold world.  Sometimes it goes pretty smoothly but other times there are long lasting consequences – like the damage to my face.

I am a firm believer in the benefit of cranio-sacral or osteopathic work for newborns and have heard stories of profound relief in ‘colicky’ babies after treatment.  But for those of us who never had that possibility, Somatic Experiencing can help relieve the effects of birth trauma – both the physical and the emotional - even many years later.  I haven’t had a sinus infection in years now.  I just wish I would have known all this before I allowed my dentist to make such drastic changes to my teeth that cannot be undone!