The basics of my thesis are as follows :
In Utero the natural child lives in near perfect empathy with the mother .... this is easily understood given the sheer physicality of their connection. Ask a few mothers about this.
In Utero learning is now reasonably well understood and documented. The foetus is learning all the time. The psychological and phsysiological state of the mother is part of that learning. As is the Society into which the child will be born into, as that will inform the mothers psychology..
It is now well understood that birth is a conscious experience for the baby, and that near perfect recall of all the events of a birth is possible and with empathetic parents very likely...
Thus the birthing experience is a conscious one for the baby....
Now, in utero the baby is learning all the time, writing or creating neural pathways for life...
This learning is experiential.
Thus learning is occuring during birth...
At birth the baby has twice as many neurons as an adult, with far fewer neural pathways - suggesting that the baby is ready to learn huge amounts very rapidly.
The first learnings are to do with safety and re-connection with the mother... with that which nurtures the baby.
The baby 'lands' on the mothers left side and lays his or her head against the mothers body, and hears the heart beat of the mother, a heart beat they have lived with for all of their life, a heart beat they know very, very well.
The baby hears and recognises that particular heartbeat and feels safe, as he or she did in the womb. This experience writes neural pathways that go deep, deep... these learning’s at the earliest stage are to do with learning empathy as a separate body….
Empathy is a biological imperative, it is the ability to read the world accurately. The baby has lived with empathy in utero and now needs to have the experiences that help crafty the neural networks for empathy as a separate body..
Then the baby will look towards the mother and make that empathetic connection visually and it is then that the baby goes for the nipple, for sustenance...
Thus the sense of safety, of being held and nurtured goes deep. And is the basis for the following movements....
Any untoward intervention or un-natural event during the birthing will have a profound effect. Remember this is a learning experience that is ultra intense!
This continues to apply throughout the first 6 years of the child's development and pertains though-out life.
Trauma, especially repeated trauma (think Gitmo, abusive family setting, extreme poverty, war etc etc) will craft neural pathways and physiology in dysfunctional ways, and if unresolved and widespread in any community will lead to structures that reflect that dysfunction and fear, and be expressed as a need to control the environment.
If this is unresolved, then it will write or cause a new genetic to emerge over time....
DNA is written by the environment, and responds to the environmental experience... DNA is all about form and the environment drives behaviour..... which is learned.
The Dominant Culture is one that exercises extreme control, to the point of lethality, to the point of threatening the very basis of life, of nurturance in much the same way an addict may drive towards self destruction.
Work with addiction shows that it takes some form of self control to break the habit and exert yet more control to stay on the straight and narrow or it takes a full realisation of the elements in ones childhood or forgotten trauma learning’s and with that understanding comes empathy for oneself as a child, and an understanding of the elements that led to the trauma…
We also know that children do repair damage to their brains and even transfer functions from one part of the brain to another part as they recover..... if they have the appropriate nurturing environment around them. So we have some hope that this dynamic can be halted and that we can recover from it.
Spread this dynamic across an entire community, and it is easy to understand how a community that is traumatised will engage in various control patterns, some of which are structural, some of which are destabilising, to manage the unresolved feelings associated with the trauma.
This is what Prescott’s research bears out.
When reviewing what was known about indigenous peoples, he was able to delineate two strands of society. One was violent, hierarchical, religious, rule bound. The other was egalitarian, spiritual, non-violent and devoid of rules. The former were the in the minority. That is to say, most of the known gatherer hunter societies were egalitarian, empathetic and nurtured the child mother bond. However the majority were vulnerable to the less empathetic societies. For obvious reasons…
He was able to predict the emergence of violence based only on what happens between the mother and child and found one other indicator - the suppression of adolescent sexuality. Both of these biological imperatives are very powerful and it takes power to thwart them, power that is exercised by a few over the many.
And The Dominant Culture is an expression of this dynamic. Power is suppressing the natural at every turn and creating toxic mimics of the natural, quite often consciously (PR, Marketing, Propaganda, Indoctrination) as an attempt to hoard wealth and protect it, and to undermine any possibility of those people caught in this dynamic from breaking from it...
The cure?
Meeting the natural empathetic learning requirements of children........ and all that that entails. It's a long term cure, and parenting is at the very heart of it. Informed parents are a vital part of the process of recovery.
There are some very good writings on Indigenous Mothering that show some of the possible pathways for this recovery.
Revolution as a reaction to the dominance dynamic will always fail, because it contains within it the very same psychological dynamic...
Here's a neat one page presentation of the social behavioural characteristics found in both streams of society - the high nurturant and low nurturant.
my song 'The Expectations of Every Child"
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Do what you love, it's your gift to universe
