Being Born Caesarean: Physical, Psychosocial and Metaphysical Aspects

“In a non-labor caesarean birth, union with the mother is disturbed by the anaesthesia used in the surgery, followed by the cutting open of the mother, which is on some level experienced by the child who is still unified physically and psychically with the mother. The child, still very much in a state of cosmic union, then begins to emerge into the world and experiences being unwillingly and abruptly pulled out of the womb. Though the actual birth could be considered complete at this point, I have found it necessary to include the encounter with the obstetrician as part of the birth. The struggle with the doctor who forcefully stimulates breathing is like labor, and there may be bonding with the doctor following this struggle. Soon this new bond is broken as the child is taken away to the nursery, and a physical and emotional shutting down follows. This drama may be different for recent caesareans as some hospitals are using local anaesthesia, allowing the father to be present, and allowing the mother to make eye contact with the baby and even to hold and breastfeed it immediately. The last stage of birth extends over a period of many years as the caesarean born person transforms the patterns learned in the caesarean delivery and learns to make a more conscious choice to give birth to his or her self as an individual in the world.

• Caesarean birth has an intense all-or-nothing quality, not like the give and take of the waves of labor
• A caesarean birth is fast, taking only a few minutes rather than hours. Yet even within this quick experience there are abrupt swings between positive and negative feelings.
• Or, looking at it more comprehensively, a caesarean is very slow, taking years to complete the sense of being born.
• The caesarean born child is very sensitive to the ambient tone of the operating room, especially since he/she does not have the boundary-giving experience of labor through which to filter subsequent stimuli.

Habits, expectations, and patterns
(some of them paradoxical and contradictory) that might be learned in non-labor caesarean birth.

• The expectation that nourishment will be followed by poisoning and attack.
• Defensiveness in relation to all approach; touch sensitivity and paradoxically a love of physical contact once the defensiveness has passed.
• Habit of opening only when exhausted or invaded.
• Residual body tension patterns that are different from those in vaginally born people, for example, neck tensions related to the head being pulled rather than pushed in birth.
• Dependence, a feeling of needing to be rescued, inability to act on one’s own, and paradoxically, an unwillingness to ask for help.
• Anger toward would-be helpers who fail to satisfy on a physical level the impossible demand of total rescue.
• Distortion of relationship and sexual patterns with people of the same sex as the obstetrician. Expectations of struggle and defeat, and of merging, bonding, and being totally cared for.
• Perception of self as separate, and paradoxically, less sense of personal boundaries.
• Easy access to transpersonal awareness but lack of appreciation of this capability because of having less sense of personal boundaries.
• Continual testing of limits and boundaries.
• Relationship patterns that are colorful, abrupt, intense, and arrow-like rather than like the waves of contraction and expansion that would be learned in labor.
• Little sense of process, expectation that a relationship either exists and doesn’t need to be nourished, or doesn’t exist and is impossible.
• Being not particularly goal oriented and feeling criticized for this; wanting to have goals but feeling unable to find any that seem real.
• Strong negative self-judgement for not meeting others’ unconscious expectations that one know the relationship patterns and sense of limit usually learned in vaginal birth.
• Trust that help will always be there without one having to ask for it.

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