Breaking the Bond

(all quotes below excerpted from

Joseph Chilton Pearce’s Magical Child, 1977)

"First, as Suzanne Arms has detailed so well, the entire procedure of [hospital] delivery gets seriously delayed and complicated out of all bounds . . . Drugs, particularly anesthetics, specifically slow up the synchronous movements by which the infant is expelled from the womb, and delivery gets extended to torturous lengths. Fear and anxiety build in the mother, and pain follows swift and sure. The pain calls for more medication, as does the anxiety. And what of the infant? His body has begun a massive outpouring of adrenal steroids preparatory to the great push and adaptation, but the movement does not come. His body continues its outpouring of hormones. Stress piles on stress; the expected natural cycle of stress-relaxation is not forthcoming. After hours of this, both mother and infant are exhausted.

"Then there are all the medical interferences, the carelessness, and the callousness. Coupled with the conditioned reflex of fear are the operating amphitheater atmosphere, that deadly table, and being forced to lie down (or even be strapped down), which completely eliminates any last hope of muscular coordination. This is followed by drugs that incapacitate both mother and infant. (The average anesthetic passes through the placenta to the infant in forty-five seconds. Long before delivery (deliverance), mother and infant have been kept at a climactic point of tension, able to achieve no resolution. "What happens? Because the natural expulsion process is by now thoroughly fouled up, instrumentation is used to "assist" the mother in expelling the baby. In addition to the now commonplace practice of episiotomy (severely cutting the mother in a manner that would be considered major surgery at any other time and often causing permanent damage), forceps and suction machines are casually used to claw or suck the infant out of the mother's body, by grabbing that fantastically fragile, all too sensitive, and utterly precious head. The vast majority of the time, such instrumentation is not necessary; and only in a rare emergency could an episiotomy be justified, even with all the complications caused by the medicine man's bag of tricks. The simple truth is that he likes to used his tricks; he likes the drama and importance of his image, wielding all his mechanical toys, showing the incompetence of nature, and establishing his own superiority.

"The semidrugged, overstressed, and exhausted infant is, of course, generally unable to get his breath, even if given ample time to do so. The many new, unused coordinates of muscles are confused and malfunctioning. His body is reacting only; all synchronous interactions have long since been destroyed. In addition to his prolonged body fear of oxygen deprivation, when he is finally sucked or clawed out of the mother, his entry is into a noisy, brilliantly lit arena of masked creatures and humming machines. (The hum of fluorescent lighting alone is an overload, much less the fluorescence itself, which, as the world’s greatest authority on lighting, John Ott, makes perfectly clear, is disastrous to infants.) Suction devices are rammed into the mouth and nose, the eyelids peeled back to that blinding, painful light and far more painful chemicals dropped into the open eyes. He is held by the heels and beaten on the back or subjected to a mechanical respirator; at this critical, oxygen-short period, the umbilical cord has been cut. He is cleaned up a bit from the blood of the episiotomy (which will knock his mother out of the picture for quite some time); placed on cold, hard scales to be weighed like any other piece of meat in a factory; wrapped up (of all things, to protect him from those demon drafts); bundled off to a nursery crib, screaming in pain and terror is he is lucky; or rushed semiconscious and half dead to an incubator, far worse fate than a crib, if he is less lucky.

"This rush is necessary because attention is focused on the cut, bleeding, injured, drugged, and depressed mother. Her comfort is the issue. Her postpartum blues will be discussed in some psychological journal, which will ask whether there really is such a syndrome. She herself, somewhere in her daze, feels that it was all so wrong. Something magnificent, earth-shaking, universal, godly, numinous, near mystical was supposed to happen and did not. She wants her baby, and all she gets are sharp commands and reprimands.

"Nature has done everything possible to make the newborn’s venture into the unknown a success and a great learning by guaranteeing a return to the known. What the infant actually learns at birth is what the process of learning is like. He has moved from a soft, warm, dark, quiet, and totally nourishing place into a harsh sensory overload. He is physically abused, violated in a wide variety of ways, subjected to specific physical pain and insult, all of which could still be overcome, but he is then isolated from his mother.

"It is impossible to overstate the monstrousness of this final violation of a new life. No book can ever express the full ramifications of this crime against nature. This isolation neatly cancels every possible chance for bonding, for relaxation of the birth stress, for the activation of the sensory system for its extrauterine function, and for the completion of the reticular formation for full mental-physical coordinates and learning.

"This failure to return to the known matrix sets into process a chain reaction from which that organism never fully recovers. All future learning is affected. The infant body goes into shock. The absorbent mind shuts down. There will be little absorption again because there is only trauma and pain to be absorbed. The infant then surely exhibits only two states, fulfilling Spitz’s expectations: "quiescence, which means semi- to full unconsciousness, and unpleasure." If awakened from his survival retreat from consciousness, he is propelled back into a state of unresolved high stress. He cries himself to sleep again. The air of general excitement noted by Bridges surely reverts to distress. Pleasure and smiling will . . . be much later in appearing, just about two and a half months later, because it will take that long for this unstimulated and isolated body to compensate if it is to survive at all. The infant’s body must manage slowly to bring its own sensory system to life, get that reticular formation functioning, and come fully alive through whatever occasional physical nurturing it gets. Stage-specific processes, once missed, must be laboriously rebuilt.

"During this period of shock, sensory closure, and retrenchment, there is virtually no development. How could there be? And all the other preprogrammed stage-specific developments are systematically missed, throwing the system farther behind.

"Consider now the male child, whose hold on life is automatically more precarious than the female child’s (see Chapter 22). In nearly all cases, the doctors circumcise the male infant on the second or third day of life. They cut off the foreskin of his penis, nearly always without anesthetic. After all, the infant--suffering excessive stress, in a state of shock, and all too often with a crippled reticular formation--seems to be a vegetable, so why not treat him as one?

"Does it hurt? Of course it does. How could it help but hurt? And this is just one more of those massively negative learnings etching into that new brain-body system.

"I can only dare parents, if they are going to allow this criminal act, to demand they be allowed to watch the performance. Just go watch, remembering that the infant registers pain just as you do. If the infant is not already in a complete state of shock before the operations, he certainly will be afterward, as parents would be if they were to observe and comprehend what is happening. Remember that the practice is a recent addition to our century’s atrocities committed on children; bear in mind the growing incidence of sexual inadequacies and dysfunctions; remember that 80 percent of all silent crib deaths are male infants. Ask your doctor, though, and he will scathingly dismiss criticisms, reassure you that it’s perfectly all right, and make you feel rather stupid for even asking.

"One of the more intriguing differences between the naturally delivered and nurtured child and the technologically delivered and abandoned child is in the matter of sleeping. Our newborns sleep massively, yet are easily awakened, in which case they cry heavily. The reason is not hard to find. Lack of physical stimulus at birth has resulted in a failure of the reticular formation’s completion. Then sensory information cannot be processed properly, and sensory intake creates confusion and anxiety. The nurturings needed were also the means for reducing the high production of adrenal steroids. The combination of unrelieved birth stress and inability to assimilate and cope with sensory intake reinforce each other, they continue the flight-fight effect and adrenal overload, making the wake state intolerable.

"The Ugandan child sleeps far less, is alert and awake far longer, and sleeps under a wide variety of conditions. His mother makes no accommodations for the infant’s sleep. She carries him with her at all times and sleeps with him. During the day, he sleeps whenever the need arises, amid the hustle and bustle of his mother’s daily life. Motion is the natural state for this infant, and he sleeps far better in motion than in stillness. Stillness, in fact, is the most alien of all states to the newborn and early infant. The Ugandan infant never leaves the known, and yet, safely ensconced with that matrix (in sling or backpack), he moves continually into highly stimulating new experiences. New sensory data comes pouring in with the mother right there for continual reinforcement of the basic set of conceptual patterns to which all newness can be referred. This is the ideal learning situation, an automatic stress-relaxation cycle giving continual stimulus and security. . . .

"Return, then, to the hospital-delivered infant, in a state of extreme stress, whisked off to that safe, germ-free nursery. Mother does need her rest, exhausted from that prolonged hard labor, dazed from surgery, badgered and drugged, plagued by a vague sense of wrongness. Hospitals do have to have their rules, of course, and even if the mother actually tries to respond to her instincts for nurturing her baby, she stands no chance at all. Scheduling is all important, you know. . . .

"According to rules and schedules, the time comes for a presentation to the mother. Baby is removed from the crib, jostled out of his sensory retreat and stress reduction, placed on a cart with the other basket cases, and trundled off for a five-minute session during which "look, but don’t touch" is the rule. If feeding is part of that particular hospital’s dogma, he may be fed, though seldom within the first few hours, and virtually never by the mother. Although the mother’s milk is now known to be very much stage-specific and keyed to certain postbirth needs (of both mother and child), the hospital-delivered infant seldom gets to nurse for twenty-four hours, if then. Each of these crisply efficient awakenings propels the infant into a high-stress state all over again; again no physical nurturing takes place, and he is then returned to his crib and isolation screaming. (Everyone smiles: "Ah, a good lusty bellow in that one, obviously a fine, healthy one with a great future.")

"Throughout this extremely critical transition period, then, during which the infant’s brain is prepared for massive new learnings, every encounter with people is a stressful situation, with no forms of nurturing or stress-relaxation at all. At the height of this stress, the infant is isolated, which very plainly means abandoned. There, in proximity to only material things (the baby blanket), he must manage again to achieve some stress reduction in order to survive; the need of physical skin stimulus to facilitate this reduction finds only that baby blanket, a nonhuman source of stress reduction. What is the great learning? What is being built into the very fibers of that mind-brain-body system as the initial experiences of life? Encounters with people are causes of severe, unbroken, unrelenting stress, and that stress finds its only reduction through contact with material objects.

"Consider next what the enlightened, educated, conscientious parents do when the mother and child leave the hospital. They take their infant home and set up a miniature hospital (a nursery, or at best a nursery area) to perpetuate the isolation and abandonment. After all (we have been told for generations), the little one needs his rest and quiet. Then there is the pervasive anxiety over germs, impelling some parents actually to wear gauze masks when near the infant for the first few weeks. Everyone tiptoes around while little junior "gets used to us," which takes, well, some two and a half months. Because silence and stillness are most alien, the infant wakes easily and screams. He gets colic, the symptoms of which are almost identical to those of birth stress.

"He cries when not sleeping. No pins are sticking; no pants are wet; he is not cold or hungry. He suffers unresolved stress that builds to hyperanxiety and finally to rage, the mark of prolonged frustration. When rage appears, mother (or father) tries picking him up (occasionally), but the rage makes the baby hard to handle. The parent grows insecure about holding him, literally afraid of dropping the child. And both parents are actually a bit intimidated by this unreserved rage. They place the infant back in the crib at the height of his rage, so that he can "work off a little steam and get a good sleep."

"As often as not, the parent is in a hurry, with more important things to do than pamper baby. Or if the parent is pretty hacked already, his own rage fires up, mixed with self-pity: "Damned if I have to put up with this." For whatever reason, the parent places the raging infant into the crib to "settle him down." That infant has been abandoned again. He is clearly registering and learning the meaning of abandonment, fear of which will shadow the rest of childhood and become linked with an inevitable sense of impotency.

"The net result of this has been a collapsing social order, on the one hand, and a generation with an increased passion for consumer goods, on the other; and this generation can only breed more of the same. That is, the long-range effects of the materially bonded child are a breakdown of interpersonal relations and an obsessive-compulsive attachment to material objects. (A side effect, though hardly incidental, is the attempt to turn the other person into an object both because objects are capable of being manipulated and because they are not high-stress sources.)

"Obsessive-compulsive attachment to objects (Linus with his security blanket, in the comic strip Peanuts, is the tragicomic symbol of this) occurs simply because the organism learned, in its primary learnings, which take precedence over all others, that although stress comes from human encounters, relaxation or escape from stress comes from encounters with physical objects. So we have a nation--and more nations all the time as our disease spreads--in which a breakdown of interpersonal relating is coupled with obsessive-compulsive attachment to material things.

"The anxiety-reduction value in any particular thing is limited, though, because it is arbitrary and unnatural and because, in the growing pressure of populations, the stress of interpersonal pressures grows continually. Anxiety is intolerable, and we will do all possible to try to alleviate it. Therefore, new objects of anxiety reduction must be had all the time. Indeed, we adults express this anxiety by propelling our children headlong into the same cycle of obsessive-compulsive acquisitions we suffer, anxious that they get ahead in the world, which means acquire more and more things as stress reducers.

"Strained as this analysis may seem, it is an accurate presentation of where we stand. Bonding is a psychological-biological state, a vital physical link that coordinates and unifies the entire biological system. Bonding seals a primary knowing that is the basis for rational thought. We are never conscious of being bonded; we are conscious only of our acute disease when we are not bonded or when we are bonded to compulsion and material things. The unbonded person (and bonding to objects is to be very much unbonded in a functional sense) will spend his life in a search for what bonding was designed to give: the matrix. The intelligence can never unfold as designed because it never gets beyond this primal need. All intellectual activity, no matter how developed, will be used in a search for that matrix, which will take on such guises as authenticity, making it in this world, getting somewhere.

"By now, I hope to have questioned your assumptions concerning intelligence, for I have found that we have no real notions of what intelligence is. I hope to convince you that human potential may be vastly beyond our current notions, for I have found an overarching framework that places both our potential and our failures into some reasonable perspective."

* * *

Jock Doubleday

Director

Natural Woman, Natural Man, Inc.

http://www.GentleBirth.org/nwnm.org

http://www.SpontaneousCreation.org

director@spontaneouscreation.org