Babies Are The Best of Us! with Kate White

Aline: Kate, you have written that prenatal and perinatal somatics is not just a niche in the somatic field, but the foundation upon which somatics is built. I believe this important statement to be true, which is why I want to introduce you and your work to our community. The pre- and perinatal field reveals the foundation from which our somatic work with the body originates.

Kate: The prenatal and perinatal experiences lay a template. Of course, it may be corrected and rewritten, but the foundation will always remain. My teachers used this metaphor: take a piece of paper, crumple it up, then try to uncrumple it. The lines of the crumple are like the imprints of our early layers. They're always there, though you can get to a place where they don't bother you very much.

Aline: Connecting with the prenatal brings what is implicit and unconscious to awareness. It's a special skill to bring words and meaning to this prenatal time that has no language—like finding words for those crinkles in the paper.

Kate: Birth psychology has a long history. It began psychoanalytically and evolved into the study of how we incarnate and how we come into form and make our bodies. We form our bodies in relationship with our parents and the conditions in which we develop in utero. Underneath our experiences is a blueprint for health and well-being which is within our reach. I teach that our greatest spiritual nature is right there. The early layers are right next to that residence of our greater spiritual nature, which is the best of us. Babies are the best of us.

"Prenatal and perinatal somatics
 is not just a niche in the somatic field,
but the foundation
 upon which somatics is built"
—Kate White

Aline: You are a pioneer in this field. Pioneers are those who recognize that something is not being addressed and make the decision to change behavior by bringing it to consciousness. In our field, pioneers are the ones who say, "I'm going to bring this into the therapeutic discourse." Can you share your discovery of your important work?

Kate: It's a seminal story. It happened a long time ago. A client awakened this in me. Her psychotherapist referred her because she'd experienced an assault and was very confused. My intake form asked: "What was your birth like?" I'm a biodynamic craniosacral therapist, and we're taught that there can be compression at birth, which leaves a memory. The client came back after her first visit and said, "I think my lifelong depression stems from my birth, and I want to heal it with you."

I had just had my first baby, so I knew about childbirth. This woman had been a large breech baby in the late 1930s. Her mother started to hemorrhage during delivery. She turned herself around in utero during labor, a heroic feat that saved both her and her mother's lives. 

While working on her and holding her in my hands, I started experiencing panic attacks. I reached out to William Emerson, who is one of our pioneers in birth psychology. I had met him at our first biodynamic conference in North America. He said, "You're having a birth memory of your own. What was your birth like?”

I was also a very large breech baby. That statement set me on the path of recalling the near-death experience I had, which was triggered by the client's memory of her birth that woke up my early template. 

Instead of fearing what that was, I became deeply curious and passionate, and started studying with everyone. I was in love! 

My work is a love story

I have seen this happen to others as well. They get smitten: "What is this experience?" You realize you're tracking your own spiritual essence as it manifests in the body. We accumulate layers of experiences, some not very good, and come to live in those unconscious imprints. But we don't have to. 

“You realize you're tracking
your own spiritual essence as it
manifests in the body.”

My work focuses on preventing and treating birth trauma, including the baby's experience. I am a third-generation pioneer, following in the footsteps of Ray Castellino, William Emerson, Anna and John Chitty, and others who studied with them. I am training people, as you are, Aline, aiming to share this knowledge with professionals so they can treat and support people through healing these early, overwhelming experiences.

Aline: I am also getting smitten with this work. It's beautiful to enter that world, especially the prenatal stage—that part of our lives we experience in the womb. I am in awe of the various phases and how each one leaves a lasting mark on the blueprint. 

One of the questions I often hear is, "It can't be valid because the brain wasn't fully formed, and we had no words…there's no way we can remember that far back." Yet, when the memories come, that time of our life in the womb seems intimately near.

Kate: Yes, indeed. Anna Chitty taught me the most about the blueprint and the imprint. We now have scientific data showing chemicals can create a response in the body, and the body remembers. That's accepted, thanks to Bessel van der Kolk and other pioneers, such as Babette Rothschild and Bob Scaer. I spent my life going into the weeds, trying to find the data, so I can convince people that there's truth in this.

Anna teaches from the Diamond Approach, as well as alchemy, including Randolph Stone’s work on how we incarnate and come into our energetic centers, which draws on ancient Ayurvedic medicine. We enter through our lineages, into the DNA, into the one cell inside our parent, and then multiply and divide. The environment in the womb impacts us on a cellular level, as discussed by Cherionna Menzam-Sills, Bruce Lipton, and others.

I wanted to figure out when our memory begins. People have a felt sense of, "Where did I come from? Did I want a human life? And how was my conception journey?" We now have a written map to help us understand the body in this way. Our limbic system starts developing as early as 3 weeks in utero with Schwann cells.

I've experienced the purity of our humanness within my own system. My students and I are often moved to tears when we feel that vibration of love, compassion, joy, delight, power, and peace. These feelings lie just beneath the imprints. Imprints aren't all negative.

The imprint and blueprint are connected. As Anna Chitty teaches, the blueprint contorts to hold overwhelming experiences. Therefore, we must go to the painful place. When you spend time there, it begins to unwind, and some of our pure, essential qualities emerge.

Aline: You are saying that we need to recall or go through the imprints to access some parts of our blueprint that have been covered over.

“These painful places are portals and opportunities.
The wound is the way,
not the destination.”
—Anna Chitty

Kate: These painful places are portals and opportunities. Anna Chitty taught me that the wound is the way, not the destination. We use a somatic approach to integrate and stay present—through pendulation, titration, broadening, deepening, feeling, backing away, orienting to the present moment, and spending time co-regulating within the relational space. As practitioners, we need to be solid. We can't get swept up in the imprint like I did with that person in 1999. To become a prenatal and perinatal somatics practitioner, we must work on and integrate our early material.

Jenn: In the IBPJ issue you guest edited, Kate, you discussed how these intensely difficult early states can be imprinted in us, but the flip side, so to speak, brings deeply ecstatic states. With such early material, the difficulty is great because it's so profound, but it sounds like there's incredible goodness that can come through with healing.

Kate: Some things in prenatal and perinatal somatics may take your breath away because they're so beautiful! Yet, there's also the energy of survival and terror. I was terrified when I started studying my imprints. There are things that happen in utero only the baby knows, which trigger our autonomic nervous system that starts operating at a certain point in the womb.  

Some of the things that happen have a life/death feel to them. When people tell me they want to learn this, I ask, "How are you with life and death?" You have to know where you're going, meaning, you have to have a felt sense of the blueprint. 

I often tell a story that illustrates this. In 2013, I took a class from Ray Castellino and Anna Chitty. They offered an in-person training while Ray was alive called Body into Being. Anna was teaching parasympathetic rest. I'd discovered that when I have a very deep sense of parasympathetic rest, my body panics, and I was hot on that trail of understanding that in 2013. 

I'd been asking everybody, "Do babies have near-death experiences?" Jaap van der Wal said, "You're having a near-life experience." John Chitty would say, "Every time your mother looked away from you, you had a near-death experience." 

I knew I had a physiological response. I discovered I was breech because I was stuck behind the anterior placenta. If I rested, I would impinge on my cord. So, I had to stay in motion for a month, which is probably a long time for a baby. If the cord was impinged, my body would panic. So, in the present, the experience of exquisite parasympathetic rest would create adrenaline in my body as part of the memory of being in the womb and birth.

There I was on the table, with a packed class and a really good practitioner working on me. I fell into this parasympathetic rest. I felt my body start to ramp up, so I said to the practitioner, "I'm going to have a panic attack." She called Anna over. By the time Anna got to the table, I was deep in a full-blown panic attack, frozen in terror. I said, "I'm going to have a heart attack. My heart is beating so fast, I'm going to die on your table." I couldn't move, but I could see Anna's feet. 

She said, "Really? Tell me more." I thought, "If she's not panicking, I'm not going to panic." 

She initiated a form of inquiry driven by her curiosity, which is one of the skills I now teach to practitioners. She asked me, "Is your heart beating really fast, or is it shivering?" 

How she knew to ask that question, I still don't know. She must have sensed something else was happening. I got really quiet and went inside, and I realized my heart was oscillating quickly, back and forth. I said, "I think my heart is shivering!" It was an amazing discovery. Suddenly, my body filled with pure love. It took my breath away.

Then a voice appeared in my head and said, "Forgive them, forgive them." 

I said to Anna, "This other thing's happening now. Beautiful energy is flowing through me, and a voice is saying, "Forgive them." 

She asked me to tell her more. The voice was more mature than mine, and it radiated and pulsed through me.

We realized that my heart had been holding onto that because of my near-death experience. They had to resuscitate me with harsh stimulation, squeezing my chest. I can still feel the chest compressions in my own work sometimes.

When I got off the table, the people in the class asked me what happened. When I told them, they said, "It's no wonder your work is about the baby's experience." 

I call that experience I had "the compassionate baby." It is an example of our humanness. Babies have such love, compassion, and forgiveness—essential qualities in our blueprint. They are right there beneath the surface of what happens to us as babies.

Aline: That is so hopeful. You're speaking of the nature of life force coming into form, and you're saying that its essence is spiritual, enlightened, and compassionate—that it is love…

Kate: It's also peaceful and joyful. Before imprints, babies are naturally wired for connection and delight. They can delight in laughter, hiccups, tearing a piece of paper, or a dog licking their hand. There's amazement, wonder, and pure love in all of us because we were all babies, but many of us have been deeply hurt. 

Aline: When you go to that early place, emotional shocks and relational breaks become, as you were describing, moments of life and death. It's so direct and so real.

Kate: Because it's preverbal and stored in our bodies, something in the present triggers a memory, and we perceive it as if it were happening now. We believe the person there with us is causing it. We go to alert and alarm. This can be tricky when you teach the work. There are specific skills you can teach, the primary one being presence. As you integrate your history, you become more solid. People who come to see me say, "I can feel your knowing." 

“I know where I'm going…
I'm going to the blueprint.
I know how to get there with the skills I have.”

I know where I'm going: I'm going to the blueprint. I know how to get there with the skills I have. I'm not familiar with the other person's territory. Often, they're also living in the imprints of their parents and in their generational imprints—whatever their parents or ancestors didn't metabolize.

Aline: I love that! "I know where I'm going. I'm going to the blueprint." That should be in 30-foot-tall neon letters! Do you find that for some, there's so much imprinting on the blueprint that it's difficult to trust it can happen? 

Kate:  Some people need a corrective experience first. I do a lot of stabilizing by creating coherent states in people's bodies and simply appreciating the present moment with them.

I make referrals when they need the kind of care that can come from a psychotherapeutic relationship, such as mothering or fathering. Sometimes people will say, "I'm ready. I want to get to the root of all this," and I can tell other things need to happen first. We recognize the layers of experience in someone. Sometimes, something in the present must be addressed before we can delve into deeper layers.

Aline: Touch is powerful in creating an experience that bridges into the blueprint. There's something about holding and creating an experience in which the body can yield into trust that opens a doorway allowing a person to bypass some of their imprints and drop in. They might say, "Oh, that's what it feels like to be held." The blueprint, that pure life force, begins to have a stronger voice.

Kate: I also teach touch. It is the language of the baby. Many people who have birth trauma cannot relax or yield into the feeling of being held. That's the first thing. I know your work helps with that first rite of passage, the right to exist. The first layer is to be held sensitively. When you hold somebody in their blueprint, in their positive nature, what wants to integrate will show up. 

As you deepen into coherence, which I describe as positive, good sensations, what needs healing and integration will surface. But you also need to be ready for the imprint to show up, which is a portal into the Blueprint sensations. Simply name it, and work to relieve the imprint by working with practitioner skills. When you can sit with the pain with support, the imprint will often integrate, and something deeper emerges. For some of the very hard, early imprints, you need to build enough good, coherent states in the body so that there's an equal balance between what is coherent and present in the Now. Otherwise, they'll get swept away.

Aline: A major discovery for me was that the wounding to the capacity to yield was almost universal. Something as simple as placing my hands under a person's back while they are lying down and suggesting they let go into the support almost always elicited responses like, "If I let myself go, I'll be too vulnerable,' or, "If I let myself go, it's an opportunity for me to be dropped." Also, "If I let myself yield, I'll be too heavy and you won't want to hold me because I'll be such a burden.” Eventually, I realized that we all struggle with yielding and trusting. The fact is that we must yield to open ourselves to receive. We fear that the caring, receptive part won't be there or that we are opening ourselves to further wounding or trauma.

Kate: Many things can happen to babies in utero that influence their perceptions. Sometimes it's the mother's or pregnant person's condition, how they feel in their body, or their distress. Chemicals cause inflammation. Stress can impact the developing baby and their perceptions of the world. 

I would like to work with people as they come of age, whether that's 16 or 14 or 12, to help them understand how people come into form and make themselves within relationship. Babies forgive in a heartbeat. If you can name what happened, they'll look at you and say, “Okay," unless they're horribly wounded, such as babies born of incest or with chronic horrible conditions. Adoption can also be a challenging imprint. As a therapist, if you can name the issues, slow the process, and go toward the challenge of what's going on in their body, you can find the Blueprint.

Even those of us who are wanted can have experiences that overwhelm us. Until recently, there was not a lot of consciousness about how birth conditions affect the baby.

Jenn: Kate, how did you realize that the cord was obstructing your rest in the womb? Was it a felt sense you discovered and then researched? I was breech myself, and I've been wondering what kind of breech baby I was. 

Kate: It's simply a memory. I've done many womb surround process workshops where we slow the process way down and stay grounded in the present. I've been through multiple PPN trainings and multiple somatic trauma resolution trainings, and I've participated in 17 personal process workshops where I explored my early history. 

It took me a long time to figure out why parasympathetic rest led me to a surge of adrenaline that kept me awake. The conditions that create that memory are relational, and a good practitioner knows how to evoke that feeling in my body, allowing my body to remember it —just as I was holding that person in 1999, and she processed memories of being a baby, which were fascinating: how her feet were in the way, and how she turned. I was holding her with my hands and tapping into her cranial rhythm, and my body told me, "This happened to you too." If people are curious, they should seek out a prenatal and perinatal process group.

I also had other memories of ecstatic feelings, mastery, the feeling of sorting everything out, and knowing what I was going to do. Many of my natural gifts come from that. My son says I'm always planning something, and he's right. I spent a month of my nearly 10 months in utero planning how I was going to get out! You need to find someone who can take you there. Be curious and go exploring.

Aline: From the baby's point of view, life in the womb is incredibly vulnerable. I was reading about nesting—the embryo's implantation in the uterine wall—and the many stages in the womb that are so vulnerable to life-and-death. What strikes me is how emotional it is.

Kate: We name the layers for people. There are quite a few. The birth sequence itself has layers, but it begins before conception. We ask, "Did you want to come to planet Earth? Did you choose a human life?" And most people say yes, but some say maybe, and some say "No, I was forced here."

Some of us were kept company by a twin or triplet. Many of us have twin memories. That is even before implantation. 

Jaap van der Wal talks about the four threshold moments of the embryo. First is conception: how we conceive of ourselves — that is, how it shows up in our lives. That’s the beginning. Many don't make it to implantation.

As the baby emerges from the protective zona pellucida and moves into the uterus to attach to the uterine wall, it's very vulnerable. There is a life-or-death urgency to find nutrition. We first come into relationship with our parent at this point, by yielding into the rich uterine wall to access nutrition. But what if it's not rich? What if it's toxic? What if the wall is scarred, and you can't easily implant? This creates the imprint of how we make a home.

Then you make all your organs and body systems. William Emerson shared that his wife was told while she was pregnant with their first child that she had a congenital issue that would make pregnancy hard. That stress created a problem with the development of their first child's face. Many of us have heart issues or congenital conditions that can originate in these early stages of body development. We have ideas about it, but we don't really know; that's the study of embryology.

A lot can happen as we make our organ systems—and we do it all in just 28 days. By the end of the first trimester, we have come into the uterus, made our amnion and yolk sac, and the placenta takes over with nutrition after week 12. A lot happens during that first trimester. 

Do our parents want us? If we're not wanted, what happens to us? Previous loss may be there, or thoughts of abortion. There can be a lot of history in that womb—and that's just the first 12 weeks. 

The four threshold moments are conception, implantation, formation of a heart, and development of a body. Often, it's when we develop the heart that we don't keep going. The heartbeat starts between 20 to 24 days. Something occurs at that point, around the 22nd day for the heart to begin to beat. After that, we make a body, and once we've made our whole body, our job is to grow. 

Everything we do outside the womb, we have already done in the womb, except breathe air. We even pre-exercise! This is Jaap van der Wal's work. 

Then we go into the birthing process: the interventions, how we're greeted, what happens to us and our parents as we're born, and everything that follows. Many of us who are of a certain age were put in the newborn nursery, separated from our parent, which is life and death for a baby. The babies I work with will often tell me that the most terrifying thing is to be separated from their parent. Many of our adaptation patterns come into play. Today, one out of every ten of us is a NICU baby in the United States.

And then, can we feed? Feeding is a biological imperative. I see a lot of babies with tongue tie, feeding problems, sleeping issues, and stressed new parents. In general, this time of life requires a great deal of support, and we don't do a good job of providing it in the United States. Other countries handle it much better. I get upset because we could do it so much better. This is the formative time that lays the template for our lifelong health.

Aline: Absolutely. We believe that what's wrong with us originated in our childhood or adult lives. However, once this earlier piece becomes clear, it is evident that our blueprint has not been tended to as it should. 

Jenn: I hear so much reverence and care in your voice, Kate, when you speak about this journey that we go on as we come into the world. It's incredibly touching and fascinating, and it also feels sacred to me to be talking about that realm. Aline has been writing an introduction for our upcoming Newsletter, pointing out that the maternal realm challenges the way our U.S. society devalues reproductive labor, caregiving, and embodied maternal knowledge.

Kate: As a practitioner, I've watched us move closer – we have a better understanding of attachment and how it manifests in families. And thanks to all those who recognized that patterns begin very early, there's an understanding of developmental trauma, along with adverse childhood experiences and family dynamics. People are finally realizing that babies have experiences. We are getting closer to the realm of obstetrics and supporting parents. It's not there yet, but I believe I'll see it in my lifetime. It will be reflected in how we give birth and support babies.

David Chamberlain said, "As we treat babies, they will treat the world." With what's happening right now, people bombing each other, and the horrific events in the U.S. between the powerless and the powerful, there's a lot of questioning to be done.

Recently, I was working with indigenous midwives. One of them who works at the border said, "If we welcome babies, this plants the seeds of peace – welcome them for who they really are, not just inert beings who are mere passengers, but someone who participates in being and in coming here, and has agency." Sometimes, all that's really needed is, "I welcome you. I see you. I know where you come from. I know who you are. I come from the same place you came from. Welcome to planet Earth." 

John Chitty taught me that simply naming things for the baby often clears stuff up. Babies are powerful little healers. It doesn't take a lot for them to unfold, if you include them and tell them, "All this stuff that happens — it's not about you, you didn't make it happen — it just happens. There's nothing wrong with you or me. We just found ourselves there." I do that a lot with families.

Aline: Thank you, Kate. This is a beautiful place to close our conversation.

Kate:  It is a special honor to be included in what you're doing, Aline.

__________________

Kate White, MA, BCBMT, RCST©, CEIM, SEP, PPNE, PLC is the Founder and Director of the Center for Prenatal and Perinatal Programs, Prenatal and Perinatal Healing Online, and the Prenatal and Perinatal Somatics Institute. A prenatal and perinatal somatics practitioner who trained with many pioneering teachers in birth psychology, she founded the Department of Education for the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health, and now trains practitioners in the unique field of preventing and healing earliest trauma. She is an award-winning educator and has a private practice.

Website: ppncenter.com or ppnsomatics.com
Email: ppncenter@gmail.com