Attachment- the importance of love

Dr. John Bowlby is often referred to as the Father of Attachment within the perinatal community. Much of his research was dedicated to this behavioral system that connects child and his or her primary caregiver (mainly the mother, unless circumstances dictate otherwise). Bowlby’s studies have found that children who did not receive the physical and emotional bond of attachment grew to lack affection and emotion. These children often become criminals or display juvenile delinquency (Bowlby, 1969). Without the comfort and closeness of early attachment, children have been observed to demonstrate excessive hitting and biting of themselves and each other. They have shown signs of low self-esteem, shame, and guilt. The effects of deprivation are significant and scary. The effects of mother deprivation and attachment deprivation have been and are currently being studied by The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), a part of National Institutes of Health. Research has supported Bowlby’s theories.

Early positive attachment is an innate biological need, essential for survival. Whenever natural biological needs are neglected or denied, there is both physical and psychological harm. (Emerson, 1995).

The infant-mother relationship is closely related to the adult-adult relationship, and a positive influence and stimulation early on helps to support a positive adult social life (Waters et al 2002).

Pre-birth bonding as the foundation for Attachment Parenting. Simple exercises and games to interact with your womb baby, such as reading stories, playing games with a flashlight, and massaging your baby’s tiny body, is extremely powerful in a child’s healthy development . “Love is so important that babies can die without it,” Dr. Fred Wirth.

References:

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. New York: Basic Books.

Emerson, W. PhD. (1995). "The Vulnerable Prenate." Paper presented to the APPPAH Congress, San Francisco. December 4, 2003.

Waters, E. Crowell, J.Elliott, M. Corcoran, D., and Treboux, D. (2002). Bowlby's Secure Base Theory and the Social/Personality Psychology of Attachment Styles: Work(s) in Progress A Commentary on Shaver & Mikulincer’s Attachment-related Psychodynamics. Attachment and Human Development, 2002, 4, 230-242.

Vital Love

There is a popular belief that preterm infants, those born before 37 weeks gestation, are positively affected by touch. It is important to both parents and practitioners to understand the context of this touch. When a baby is born significantly before his or her “due date” this newborn is subject to more poking and prodding than a full term baby would typically receive. Infants are subjected to a battery of tests and measures to ensure their safety and health. These babies are at a high risk for developmental delays, such as weak fine and gross motor skills, slow cognitive skills, late developing language skills, as well as attention and behavioral disorders

Physically, their bodies are just not ready for the world outside the womb and they may experience breathing difficulties and respiratory dysfunction, sight impairment, and jaundice, due to incomplete development of the liver. They are also at a risk for Necrotizing Enterocolitis (NEC), which is an infection of the stomach and intestines. NEC is most common in preterm and especially low weight babies. There is currently no cure. In order to prevent, catch, or diagnose a dysfunction or illness with preterm babies, close watch must be kept on all of the newborns’ functions and fluids. Blood tests are preformed several times a week, and often several times a day. A prick in the heel to check bilirubin for jaundice seems as simple as a finger prick to test a diabetic’s blood sugar, but when your heel is the size of a thumb with fresh new skin, and you have no idea why you’re being held down on a cold table and stuck with a painful object, it’s pretty traumatic.

I can still see my preemie baby’s confused look turn to horror every time they pricked her teeny heel. Often, a preemie will be subjected to even “scarier” and more painful procedures, such as IVs, catheters, feeding tubes, and phototherapy. Preterm infants have been studied to show adverse reactions to this negative touch, such as “hypoxia, bradycardia, sleep disruptions, or increased intracranial pressure.”

Because of this connection between touch and pain expressed to preterm infants, it is imperative that parents and practitioners counteract the negative connotation with positive examples of touch, so a baby can learn and grow from these interactions.

Gentle and loving touch will not only teach a baby that touch can be a positive thing, it will physically assist in physical and psychological growth. A study performed at the University of Alabama at Birmingham evaluated the effects of gentle touch on 42 preterm infants. “Nurses placed one hand on the back of each infant's head and one on each infant's lower back for 10 minutes, twice per day for 10 days. During these periods, infants showed significantly fewer stress behaviors (eg, clenching fists, facial grimaces)” (AORN, 2001).

In Bergen Community Hospital in NJ where my friend’s son was born 3 months early, they promoted Kangaroo Care for tiny 1 ½ pound Tyler. Every day, although he was attached to three monitors and several tubes all over his little body, his mommy was encouraged to put him against her body and allow him to feel her skin. Kangaroo Care is a method of holding a preterm infant directly to his or her parents’ skin. First initiated by two South American neonatologists, Edgar Rey and Hector Martinez, Kangaroo Care has been used throughout the world to increase bonding and emotional closeness, as well as regulating baby’s heartbeat, body temperature, and initiation of lactation.

Positive touch such as Kangaroo Care, breastfeeding, and rubbing a baby’s back is beneficial to both baby and parents, leading to stronger emotional, psychological and physical well-being.

References:

AORN (2001)Touch Reduces Stress Behaviors in Premature Infants. Association

of Operating Room Nurses, Inc. [Online]. Available:

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0FSL/4_73/73308175/p1/article.jhtml

[2004, January 19].

Harrison, L, RN, PhD, FAAN (2001). The Use of Comforting Touch and Massage

to Reduce Stress in Preterm Infants. Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

Newborn and Infant Nursing Reviews, Vol 1, No. 4. 235-241.

Robles, M., R.N., B.N. (2004). Kangaroo Care. Department of Obstetrics,

Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences [Online]. Available:

http://www.umanitoba.ca/womens_health/kangaroo.htm [2004, January

This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE

Hypnosis, with its long and checkered history in medicine and entertainment, is receiving some new respect from neuroscientists. Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.

The new experiments, which used brain imaging, found that people who were hypnotized "saw" colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought that they were gibberish.

"The idea that perceptions can be manipulated by expectations" is fundamental to the study of cognition, said Michael I. Posner, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon and expert on attention. "But now we're really getting at the mechanisms."

Even with little understanding of how it works, hypnosis has been used in medicine since the 1950's to treat pain and, more recently, as a treatment for anxiety, depression, trauma, irritable bowel syndrome and eating disorders.

There is, however, still disagreement about what exactly the hypnotic state is or, indeed, whether it is anything more than an effort to please the hypnotist or a natural form of extreme concentration where people become oblivious to their surroundings while lost in thought.

Hypnosis had a false start in the 18th century when a German physician, Dr. Franz Mesmer, devised a miraculous cure for people suffering all manner of unexplained medical problems. Amid dim lights and ethereal music played on a glass harmonica, he infused them with an invisible "magnetic fluid" that only he was able to muster. Thus mesmerized, clients were cured.

Although Dr. Mesmer was eventually discredited, he was the first person to show that the mind could be manipulated by suggestion to affect the body, historians say. This central finding was resurrected by Dr. James Braid, an English ophthalmologist who in 1842 coined the word hypnosis after the Greek word for sleep.

Braid reportedly put people into trances by staring at them intently, but he did not have a clue as to how it worked. In this vacuum, hypnosis was adopted by spiritualists and stage magicians who used dangling gold watches to induce hypnotic states in volunteers from the audience, and make them dance, sing or pretend to be someone else, only to awaken at a hand clap and laughter from the crowd.

In medical hands, hypnosis was no laughing matter. In the 19th century, physicians in India successfully used hypnosis as anesthesia, even for limb amputations. The practice fell from favor only when ether was discovered.

Now, Dr. Posner and others said, new research on hypnosis and suggestion is providing a new view into the cogs and wheels of normal brain function.

One area that it may have illuminated is the processing of sensory data. Information from the eyes, ears and body is carried to primary sensory regions in the brain. From there, it is carried to so-called higher regions where interpretation occurs.

For example, photons bouncing off a flower first reach the eye, where they are turned into a pattern that is sent to the primary visual cortex. There, the rough shape of the flower is recognized. The pattern is next sent to a higher - in terms of function - region, where color is recognized, and then to a higher region, where the flower's identity is encoded along with other knowledge about the particular bloom.

The same processing stream, from lower to higher regions, exists for sounds, touch and other sensory information. Researchers call this direction of flow feedforward. As raw sensory data is carried to a part of the brain that creates a comprehensible, conscious impression, the data is moving from bottom to top.

Bundles of nerve cells dedicated to each sense carry sensory information. The surprise is the amount of traffic the other way, from top to bottom, called feedback. There are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying information down as there are carrying it up.

These extensive feedback circuits mean that consciousness, what people see, hear, feel and believe, is based on what neuroscientists call "top down processing." What you see is not always what you get, because what you see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to interpret the raw information - as a flower or a hammer or a face.

The top-down structure explains a lot. If the construction of reality has so much top-down processing, that would make sense of the powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor will make you ill), talk therapy and meditation. If the top is convinced, the bottom level of data will be overruled.

This brain structure would also explain hypnosis, which is all about creating such formidable top-down processing that suggestions overcome reality.

According to decades of research, 10 to 15 percent of adults are highly hypnotizable, said Dr. David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford who studies the clinical uses of hypnosis. Up to age 12, however, before top-down circuits mature, 80 to 85 percent of children are highly hypnotizable.

One adult in five is flat out resistant to hypnosis, Dr. Spiegel said. The rest are in between, he said.

In some of the most recent work, Dr. Amir Raz, an assistant professor of clinical neuroscience at Columbia, chose to study highly hypnotizable people with the help of a standard psychological test that probes conflict in the brain. As a professional magician who became a scientist to understand better the slippery nature of attention, Dr. Raz said that he "wanted to do something really impressive" that other neuroscientists could not ignore.

The probe, called the Stroop test, presents words in block letters in the colors red, blue, green and yellow. The subject has to press a button identifying the color of the letters. The difficulty is that sometimes the word RED is colored green. Or the word YELLOW is colored blue.

For people who are literate, reading is so deeply ingrained that it invariably takes them a little bit longer to override the automatic reading of a word like RED and press a button that says green. This is called the Stroop effect.

Sixteen people, half highly hypnotizable and half resistant, went into Dr. Raz's lab after having been covertly tested for hypnotizability. The purpose of the study, they were told, was to investigate the effects of suggestion on cognitive performance. After each person underwent a hypnotic induction, Dr. Raz said:

"Very soon you will be playing a computer game inside a brain scanner. Every time you hear my voice over the intercom, you will immediately realize that meaningless symbols are going to appear in the middle of the screen. They will feel like characters in a foreign language that you do not know, and you will not attempt to attribute any meaning to them.

"This gibberish will be printed in one of four ink colors: red, blue, green or yellow. Although you will only attend to color, you will see all the scrambled signs crisply. Your job is to quickly and accurately depress the key that corresponds to the color shown. You can play this game effortlessly. As soon as the scanning noise stops, you will relax back to your regular reading self."

Dr. Raz then ended the hypnosis session, leaving each person with what is called a posthypnotic suggestion, an instruction to carry out an action while not hypnotized.

Days later, the subjects entered the brain scanner.

In highly hypnotizables, when Dr. Raz's instructions came over the intercom, the Stroop effect was obliterated, he said. The subjects saw English words as gibberish and named colors instantly. But for those who were resistant to hypnosis, the Stroop effect prevailed, rendering them significantly slower in naming the colors.

When the brain scans of the two groups were compared, a distinct pattern appeared. Among the hypnotizables, Dr. Raz said, the visual area of the brain that usually decodes written words did not become active. And a region in the front of the brain that usually detects conflict was similarly dampened.

Top-down processes overrode brain circuits devoted to reading and detecting conflict, Dr. Raz said, although he did not know exactly how that happened. Those results appeared in July in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A number of other recent studies of brain imaging point to similar top-down brain mechanisms under the influence of suggestion. Highly hypnotizable people were able to "drain" color from a colorful abstract drawing or "add" color to the same drawing rendered in gray tones. In each case, the parts of their brains involved in color perception were differently activated.

Brain scans show that the control mechanisms for deciding what to do in the face of conflict become uncoupled when people are hypnotized. Top-down processes override sensory, or bottom-up information, said Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn, a neuroscientist at Harvard. People think that sights, sounds and touch from the outside world constitute reality. But the brain constructs what it perceives based on past experience, Dr. Kosslyn said.

Most of the time bottom-up information matches top-down expectation, Dr. Spiegel said. But hypnosis is interesting because it creates a mismatch. "We imagine something different, so it is different," he said.

Mellisa's article published in MESSAGE Magazine, Paris, France summer 2005

HypnoBirthing®: Letting go of Fear & Giving Birth with Ease
By: Mellisa Dormoy CHT, CNMI

Even as a clinical hypnotherapist I was fascinated when I first heard the word HypnoBirthing. I know the power of Hypnosis for pain relief, but my first concern was that a mom would be so far relaxed that she’d miss out on the birth of her child. Actually this is a common misconception and I fell right into the trap.

HypnoBirthing® teaches a mom to use self-hypnosis, but not to go away on some distant secluded island all by herself. Developed officially in 1989, HypnoBirthing® does not cover up the pain by distracting a mom away from it, but teaches that pain need not even be in our vocabulary when it comes to birthing our children. What?! Read on…

Marie Mongan (aka Mickey), the founder of HypnoBirthing® teaches that childbirth is a natural function of a women’s body. When muscles are not tense and in a “Fight or Flight” response, a normal, natural, comfortable birth can take place. Logically, this makes sense. Think about when you go for a long bike ride for the first time in 10 years or you do continual heavy lifting for hours and hours. You’re not necessarily sore or crying in pain at the time… it usually takes effect the next day! So what is wrong with our wonderful bodies that the uterus is the ONLY part of us made incorrectly?

When a mom is relaxed and calm, the baby has no restraints. Baby can slide down the birth path with complete ease; your body was designed for this. Your body and your baby already know what to do instinctively. Aside from that, a calm relaxed mom produces endorphins (feel good hormones and natural pain killers). Your body then does not produce catecholamines. Catecholamines are called the “constrictor hormones”. These hormones are produced only in the presence of fear or stress. They cause the muscles of the body to tense up, including the uterine muscles. In this ‘flight or fight’ response, your body then rushes blood & oxygen to all extremities (and therefore away from your uterus) to get you moving! But you’re not trying to run away, you’re trying to birth your child… so this whole scenario is not helpful at all. This is why you will learn how to deeply relax with HypnoBirthing methods during a class (or you can use the book and CD which will also help you receive benefits of HypnoBirthing). In the HypnoBirthing program, you will learn how to instantly let yourself go into a deep state of relaxation, where you can choose to ignore what you want. You will learn how to invoke this state anytime.



There are some Hypnosis for Birth programs that do teach you to go far, far away or to mask pain. HypnoBirthing® is not one of them. HypnoBirthing® will teach you to go deep within your body and to go with your baby through the birthing experience, in love, in calmness. HypnoBirthing® endeavours to bring birthing back to what it was originally meant to be.

A healthy woman carrying a healthy baby has every reason to believe that the birthing of her child will be a wonderful peaceful event! If you want to read incredible stories about actual births, please see www.Hypnobirthing.com under “birthing stories” and “photos and stories”. You’ll be amazed to see how ‘awake and there’ these women truly are! One HypnoBirthing practitioner, Aryn Whitewolf talks about a recent mom’s birth, she says : “….Two weeks ago one of my Mom's (clients) had her 2nd HB baby at home. Her first was achieved in under 4 hours, and this one only took an hour and a half. I spoke with her again on Friday and she is still high on the joy of the birth. She experienced no pain at all and barely had time to call her Midwife before the baby arrived. As the baby crowned she was filled with overwhelming joy and laughed out loud. We even have a photo of this moment. The baby weighed in at 9lb. 6oz. and is as mellow as can be.” This type of story is not novel in HypnoBirthing circles, it’s really the norm.

We have to realize that from the time we are little girls we hear all these stories about how “hard and difficult labour is (especially the first), but it’s SO worth it in the end”, they say. When we are pregnant it’s like we have a huge bumper sticker on our foreheads “Tell me your worst birth story to frighten the bijebbers out of me!” Well, the first thing you will learn in a HypnoBirthing® Class is to NOT listen to unhappy birth stories. Listening can only create fear.. Fear causes tension, and tension creates pain. With HypnoBirthing® you will be creating your own magnificent birthing experience yourself, with your baby.

Even if you are dead set on getting an epidural, don’t think HypnoBirthing® is not for you. Although HypnoBirthing® is a natural childbirth technique and philosophy; it can do a lot for helping you to relax and to pave the road for a very comfortable, wonderful birth.

If you have previously experienced a C-section or a particularly difficult birth, there’s NO reason that will or should reproduce itself! HypnoBirthing® practitioners work a lot with fear releasing in the program and you can work with it at home as well to alleviate any fears that this birth will be similar.

In additional to learning the basic course content listed below, HypnoBirthing® moms use birth affirmations and a relaxation CD throughout their pregnancy. That’s why it’s best to get into a class as soon as you can. However, a mother can take the course at any time during pregnancy and still have a wonderful, peaceful Hypnobirth! Most practitioners offer both intensive weekends and the normal 5 classes which are 2.5 hours long. Your course tuition includes the Cd and book for the class.

In HypnoBirthing® classes, you will be taught:

•to release any fears surrounding pregnancy and birth
•to bond with your preborn baby
•visualization techniques to use during the birthing
•different positions to use during your thinning and opening stage and during the birthing
•how to relax your body completely at will
•how history and religion have affected birthing
•how to keep to a birth plan (and when and why not to)
•learn how your uterus works and how it’s made perfectly for birthing
•different breaths to use during birthing
•toning exercises for muscles used in birth
•how to induce labour naturally
•Light Touch Massage
•and lots more.
Postpartum depression is virtually unknown with HypnoBirthing Families. That’s because HypnoBirthing babies have really become a part of the families life well before the actual birth. The frequency of inductions, epidurals, C-sections and forceps are drastically reduced with HypnoBirthing as well. Babies are received by their mothers, fully awake, ready to bond and feed quickly!

HypnoBirthing: A Celebration of Life

Safe, easier, more comfortable birthing in the way that most mirrors nature