Nature and nurture
We now know beyond any doubt that our life - the realm of encoded experience including cellular memory - very much starts from conception. When we take into consideration epigenetic phenomenas, the incredible connection and permeability of the psychic in early childhood, we may even find, clinically, that our lives start before our birth, and are deeply influenced by our parents' life experiences.
It's important to notice that I don't mean this in a deterministic way: I profoundly believe that we're deeply our own Selves, in our own right, and at the cellular level the amount of creativity even an embryo displays is breathtaking. However, taking into consideration intergenerational transmission is often paramount to deeply understand the challenges and adaptations we undertake in our lives.
Moreover, we are an altricial species, that is one where the majority of the gestation takes place outside the womb. The first 1000 days after childbirth are in fact generally referred to as external gestation. After the bliss of security and freedom, connection and sovereignty experienced in the actual womb, this is a critical window when the incubator of our nascent Self will be the affective relationships with our parents. It is in these 1000 days that the foundations for security, freedom, neuroautonomic balance, emotional regulation, meaning-making, identity and creativity are sometimes irreversibly posed. The ways our parents responded to our "foetus self" during this time will therefore constitute the basis of all our future internalised and subconscious affective responses and cognitions. I would personally go beyond that and state that the first five years are crucial, and will shape the internal dialogue between our Self parts throughout life.
Prevention
During the perinatal period, through the hormonal, neurological and affective changes a woman and her emotionally involved partner go through, nature creates a time of unmatched plasticity - a window of opportunity that is unique to foster the working through of possibly insecure internal working models of attachment and unresolved experiences, with a view to offer the new baby the best possible emotional environment. It's a time of "software upgrade" so to speak, when potential little parts of the mother and/or father hitherto left behind in psychic jails (often in the body) rise up to the surface "like gnocchi in the boiling water", asking or sometimes screaming to be heard and cared for.
The evolutionary designed adaptive sharpening of sensibility in the perinatal period leads caregivers to go back to experiencing the world like a little child would. This has obvious repercussions in the way the parents may anticipate and respond to the baby's needs while maintaining stimulation within the optimum window of tolerance.
The sticky bit is that, when regressing to the experience of being a child, no-one can go back to a theoretical childhood, but only their own. Hitherto unworked-through controlling or otherwise maladaptive internalised ways to deal with affects and needs may then be re-worked and healed thanks to reparative experiences and a heightening of the innate care paradigm that we all carry inside, ready to be activated.
It is a time that calls upon the current environment. It constitutes a formidable opportunity for all the people who care for the family today - one partner towards the other, the family, friends, and all the professionals involved in perinatal care (obs, gyn, etc.) - but also for culture itself, in its capacity to provide an umbrella of meaning, values and expectations that coalesce into a collective discourse - to provide an improved experience of care (trust, respect, validation, space, support, guidance, encouragement, empathy, etc.). As we can only give others what we have in the first place received ourselves.
Working alongside a perinatal psychologist at this enhanced time for reparation can in certain cases be highly beneficial in reaching a healthier and more secure affective field, for oneself's, the child and the family.
Perinatal Mental Pain
When little part of the Selves have failed to make themselves heard in other ways, sometimes they have no options but to create a symptom, an imbalance, a perturbance. This is true for all mental pain, but it is particularly relevant to the perinatal period, specifically the postpartum.
Reaching out in time, before things get out of hand and before maternal distress may come to prevent her from being able to play her crucial role in the experience of going-on-being for the infant, is key to breaking intergenerational transmission.
Often with the support of a network of perinatal care workers, the partner, the family and, when necessary, medical support, our aim is to take the opportunity to heal past traumas, learn how to reach and care for both for one's own little parts and the real baby, while empowering mothers and families so that they may fully and creatively be their children's secure attachment figures.
Parenting support
Living in a culture that has historically denied and persecuted emotional needs and caregiving as forms of weakness ("The taboo of tenderness" - Suttie [2024]), puts us even today in a vacuum of understanding as to what can be physiologically expected from our children at any particular age. The internalisation of the aggressor moreover puts us at risk of repeating our parents' mistakes, often with the best of intentions.
Parenting support pathways inform and empower parents and caregiving figures in breaking vicious circles, often healing past wounds while empowering parents in providing their children the best emotional support to grow and thrive.
Suttie, I. D., & Hadfield, J. A. (2024). The origins of love and hate. Porirua Publishing.