Primal Parenting

Do we have to keep repeating the past?

By Pat Törngren

Few adults today would associate the way they were treated as babies, with problems they may be experiencing in their adult lives. Yet people undergoing Primal Therapy or the Deep Feeling Regressive Therapies, on the other hand, often become only too aware of them. For a long time I have been battling in therapy with the pain of my overwhelming loneliness as a baby. I was not fed often enough and not picked up nearly enough to meet my needs and I was made to sleep alone at night from birth on. Recently my therapist gave me a book to read, because it confirmed so clearly what I was reliving in my sessions with him. I'd like to share it here. It is an archaeologically-based book called The Prehistory of Sex, and is written by Timothy Taylor and published by Bantam Books, 1997. The relevant section is on pages 189 - 191.

Taylor states that in hunter-gatherer societies, children continue to breastfeed until the age of five of six. They get great comfort from the "unconditional" love that breastfeeding provides. From this they learn trust, reliance, and sharing. The author points out, that far from becoming dependent individuals, they display a remarkable autonomy, because they have a strong, inner sense of their own value.

He makes the point that in warrior societies, the opposite is often the case. Colostrum is withheld from the baby, and this is often followed by early weaning. As a result, the baby is left with unresolved pain, anger and rage which it cannot understand, and cannot express. Later in life, this will emerge in the form of aggressive and violent tendencies, which will be acted-out against someone else, or a group of other people. Thus, such a society becomes a war-like one. (Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller describes a similar phenomenon in her books).

There is a practice currently being taught by doctors and child-care professionals, called "controlled crying." (A local child-care magazine recently ran an article promoting it.) Parents are urged to use it to make their children more "independent." Timothy Taylor has other ideas on the subject of what it is actually doing to the baby.

He says that for weaning to be successful, the child must be made to sleep alone, and its crying ignored. In the approach called "controlled crying," the child is allowed to cry a little more each night before its needs for food and comfort are responded to. As a result, the child eventually shuts up. (At this point, everyone is delighted because they believe the child has been "trained" into better habits).

In contrast, what Timothy Taylor suggests has happened, is that a basic animal instinct has come into play - one observed in the young of most mammals and birds. The baby instinctively feels, If you signal your distress and no one comes, you have been abandoned. You will die unless you conserve energy. Crying expends energy. Therefore in order to survive, you must stop crying, and shut down. Before it stops crying, however, the baby must adopt the knowledge that it has been abandoned.

The outcome of this is very serious. Taylor links it to Martin Seligman's theory of "learned helplessness." He argues that if a child cries and its cries go unheeded and its needs unmet, it begins to detach from reality. The feeling is, No matter how hard I try, nothing changes, and no relief comes. So why try anymore? My efforts are in vain anyway. Such knowledge is overwhelming to a baby, and in order to survive, it represses it into unconsciousness, and instead tries to numb itself to sleep.

Experiencing such futility to affect its environment or summon a care-giver becomes the basis of what is called learned helplessness. The child has learned from the beginning that trying to get its needs met, or asserting itself in any way, are futile. Tragically, learned helplessness is the forerunner of life-long depression. How many parents are aware of the fact that their "good, well-trained" babies, are already in danger of becoming depressed, and will continue to be so in later life, unless they go through years of costly therapy? Even then, the depression that results from learned helplessness is very difficult to treat. So it has become essential that we do something to remedy the situation now.

In a paper read at an international conference on "Kangaroo Mother Care" in 1998, a Cape Town doctor, Dr Nils Bergman, cites the research of Lozoff et al (1977) who studied the way hunter-gatherer peoples raise their children. He says, "Common to all groups is the fact that newborns are carried constantly. They sleep with their mothers, there is immediate response to crying, feeding takes place every one to two hours, and breastfeeding continues for at least two years". He goes on to urge parents to give this kind of nurturing to their children if the human race is to survive.

For most of us, tragically this information has come too late. What makes me sad, is that although my mother was not a warm, cuddly person, she was very conscientious. If the childcare books of her time had told her to hold and comfort me after birth, to pick me up and carry me around close to her body, let me sleep with her, feed me when I was hungry, and not leave me to starve for 8 hours every night of my life, she would have followed their instructions. And the story of my life would probably have been very different.

Instead the doctor told her not to pick me up too often and not to feed me under any circumstances from 10.00 pm till 6.00 am, because my stomach needed to rest. (Some of my most agonized baby primals have been about this terrible nightly ordeal of loneliness and starvation). Because she was a conscientious mother, she followed the doctors instructions to the letter.

My crying did concern her though, so she phoned the doctor and said, "I can't leave my baby to cry like this, what should I do?". His response was, "Whatever you do, don't feed your baby before 6.00 am, because it's bad for the babys stomach." So from about 4.00 am every morning, she walked the floor with me for two hours while I cried, but she never fed me. She told me later that it made her feel desperate. It made me feel desperate too.

I was telling her as plainly as I knew how, that I was starving and in pain. Yet it seemed that nothing I did could get her to understand what I needed. This has contributed in my life to the fear that I will never be understood, no matter how clearly I try to express myself. It has also left me with great insecurities about food, and fear of there never being enough. In addition I was left feeling that I was bad and undeserving of receiving anything (even food when I was starving), because I could feel my mother's irritability and resentment at being woken so early each morning.

So in my adult life I have had to battle my way through problems of low self- esteem, feelings of being undeserving, lack of assertiveness, learned helplessness and depression. All this has contributed to my having to spend many years in Primal Therapy, recovering from my childhood.

Much of this could have been avoided if the doctor had told my mother to simply follow her mothering instincts and listen to what her baby was trying to communicate to her. But he didn't, and I've had to spend the rest of my life paying the price. Unfortunately we can't undo the past, but what we can do, is attempt everything in our power to see that the parents of today get this information. They need to be re-taught how to nurture their children, and encouraged to trust their mothering instincts. That way the children born today will grow up happier and healthier than we did, and hopefully the world will become just a little bit saner.

To help parents, there are several good sites on the internet. Two that I suggest are, The Natural Child Project and The Primal Parenting Page. I highly recommend them to anyone who is having a baby or who is planning to have one in the future. They promote 'attachment parenting' - keeping the baby in close, loving contact with it's mother's (or father's) body for the early months of life, feeding the baby whenever it is hungry, and allowing it to sleep close to the warm bodies of its parents at night. Hopefully, this nurturing and loving style of caring for children will become the parenting of the future. If it doesn't our future is bleak indeed. Dr Nils Bergman closed his article on 'Kangaroo Mother Care' with these words, ". . . it is a Public Health Imperative. It is the design of the past, and our future depends on it."