Podcast Episode #25 – An Overview of Healing Stories

Healing Stories

Do babies remember birth? How can you heal after a difficult birth? Join Rebecca and Lianne March as they discuss Healing Stories in this three-part podcast series.

This first episode in the series explains what Healing Stories is all about, as well as more detail about how Healing Stories can help families in the early days and weeks after birth.

It’s a common misconception that babies don’t remember things from early in life. It’s true, they may not consciously remember (though some do). However, their bodies definitely remember, and events from the womb and during birth do often have an impact. Rebecca and Lianne have worked with families to help them solve troubles with new babies from excessive crying and sleep troubles to difficulty feeding. Amazingly, making space for the story of what happened, and for everyone’s feelings around the experience, can bring healing and help to solve common early parenting issues.

Realizing that early experiences do matter can often be upsetting to new parents. It’s so easy to accept blame whether we had control of the circumstances or not. But take heart, for this is not a “doomed” situation! Healing Stories is a tool that offers so much hope to families because those experiences don’t have to have a lasting negative effect. It’s possible to help heal even very difficult trauma using this method. This empowers parents to help their children to move through deep emotion and come out on the other side more connected than before.

Transcript:

Rebecca: I wanted to talk about Healing Stories. It’s been part of my work for the last five years or so, maybe a little longer, and it was a profound thing to begin discovering. Two things, really. One, the importance of talking about what happened. And two, that babies have experiences. They have a story, and they’re trying to show you what happened to them.

When I first heard about it, I was talking with Ray Castellino, and he was describing how babies have experiences. I heard the words, and it was one of those moments where I thought, that’s very interesting, Ray, but I don’t really understand what you’re talking about. Then I started having my own experiences with these ideas, and I could see the profound nature of what I was looking at, and the importance of creating space for our experiences and for our babies’ and young children’s experiences. It dramatically changed the way I was working. So I kept going, and developed this idea of a healing story.

I’m here today with Lianne March to talk about it. Hi Lianne, thank you for being here.

Lianne: Hi, thank you so much for having me. I love this topic.

Rebecca: I know it’s near and dear to your heart. It’s something we’ve spent a lot of time working on together, and we’ve both had our own personal and professional experiences with it. So you’re a perfect person to talk about this with.

Let me start with what prompted this particular conversation. A friend of mine had a really traumatic early experience, a difficult birth with her child. And someone else, who had just enough of this information to be dangerous with it, said to her: oh, you’re doomed. You are so doomed, because this horrific thing happened right at birth.

But when I look at my friend’s child, this child is happy, healthy, developing normally, precocious, very intelligent. So I understand why my friend said, you know what, I don’t see it that way.

And that points to one of the biggest challenges we have as a culture: this idea that babies have experiences of birth, of early life, even in the womb. They have experiences, and the body holds them, and they show us, through their bodies, their facial expressions, how they’re showing up in relationship with us.

So let me name some defining ideas. Yes, babies do carry body memories of early experiences. Yes, they show us. And Healing Stories is about creating the space for us, and for them, to show what their experience was.

The other thing I want to say right at the start: not every so-called negative early experience has a lasting negative impact. You and I were both born by C-section, and it shows up completely differently in our two lives. For neither of us is it simply a negative. It’s part of who we are, part of how we show up.

I was joking with you about how I’m really good at starting things, especially if I can see the whole project, and I have a hard time with the last steps of any process. I’ve known that about myself for a long time. And you, Lianne, are very good at the last step, at finishing and completing. We were born the same way, but the stories around it, the way we each metabolized our births, were very different. Even the circumstances of the two C-sections were different.

So it’s not “you were born this way, therefore this.” It’s that our beginnings have an impact, and our job is to pay attention to what that impact might be, how it might be showing up, and to notice the places where we, or the people we love, get stuck.

If you have a baby, that baby might show up with difficulty sleeping, or difficulty feeding, the things babies do. Those struggles can be part of a story they’re trying to show you. It’s about recognizing that.

So with that basic understanding, I’d love to turn it over to you. What have you experienced with Healing Stories, in your own family or professionally? What is it about this work that appeals to you so much?

Lianne: Oh, wow. It’s interesting, thinking about that early time, when a baby is first born and maybe something’s going on, a sleeping issue, a feeding issue. At that point, it’s such a huge piece to help a mom listen to her own intuition about what’s happening.

That’s something I’ve done with mothers. I’ll say, okay, this is what’s going on. What do you feel this has to do with? What thoughts or ideas come up for you when you look at your baby and wonder what’s happening for them? And then I really encourage them to trust that intuition. As the mother, as the father, they know their baby best. They have that connection. And so often the ideas and feelings that come up for them are exactly it, the very thing the baby needs to integrate.

I love how empowering that is for parents. Because when we talk about potential birth trauma, or big things that happened early in life, so much guilt can come up. You tell a parent that yes, your baby does carry this experience, and it’s very common for us to talk about birth. We know we need to tell our birth stories. We write them, we share them in groups, and that’s wonderful, especially if the baby is there, because then the baby hears the story too.

We can acknowledge that the mother who gave birth needs to tell the story and process what happened. But we don’t always realize that the baby experienced it too, went through all the same things. So I love being able to share that piece.

But then what often follows is, oh no, it would be easier if we just believed they didn’t remember, because then we wouldn’t have to worry about it. And yet we know that they do.

So here’s the thing about Healing Stories: it’s not doom. It’s hope. There’s so much hope, because healing can happen. If you know what to do, and how to support everyone involved in the story, you can heal it. You can come through it, and it doesn’t have to leave a lasting impact.

And helping parents realize that they are a big part of figuring out the puzzle, that they can use their intuition and their relationship with their baby to discern what it’s about and what to do, that’s very empowering.

Rebecca: The parents are a critical part of this process. We can’t do it without them. You are pivotal, because you’re the one with the connection to your baby. You were there when they were born, or if a child was adopted, you were there when they came into your presence, and there’s a story there too. You’re the one who knows your child best.

So many of our systems disregard the intuition and the knowledge of the parent. And this is the opposite of that. Not only is what you have to say important, it’s critical. It’s the relationship between you and your baby that actually creates the healing space.

Lianne: Definitely. And even in the stories where a child was adopted, or had years of experience before they joined their family, even if you don’t know all the details of everything the child went through, it’s okay. Because of your relationship with the child, you can still help them. Even if the story you tell isn’t full of all the details, it’s still about the connection you have and your willingness to be there with them, no matter what feelings come up. You want to hear what they have to say, or if they’re pre-verbal, what they have to show you. And that’s where the healing happens.

Rebecca: That’s right. We show the story of what happened. In the case of a child who was adopted, or a child you gave birth to and have been with the whole time, you may not know exactly what it is, but by creating a space of curiosity, your child remembers in the cells of their body what happened. They’ll show you, if you make the space and enter it with curiosity. You’re creating a space to connect, to be curious, and to discover together what the story actually is. You use your intuition to watch, and then to name it, and your child, baby, young child, older child, will tell you whether you’re right.

I’ve seen it so many times. A parent has an intuition and says, I wonder if it was hard for you right after you were born, when you couldn’t stay with me. I think that was really hard. And then you watch, even a very young baby will start crying hard, as if to say, that’s it. Thank you for getting it, for seeing it, for naming it. And then everyone can move through that wave of feeling and settle together, and there’s a very definite sense of, oh, that was it. That mattered to my baby.

I’ve seen that with newborns, with babies a day or two old, with babies a couple of months old, and of course as they get older and more verbal, they’ll tell you directly. You get real confirmation of what their experience was, as long as you’re creating the space for it to unfold.

So this isn’t “let me tell you what happened to you.” It’s, I’m going to tell you a little about my experience. I’m thinking about this thing we went through together, birth or something else, and we’re going to go through it slowly, so I have space for my feelings and my experience, and space for yours, maybe the space I didn’t have in that original moment.

Lianne: Yes. And it’s not a one-time thing. You’ll go through the story once with certain details, maybe focusing on one part. And another time you might remember something you’d completely forgotten. Once you start to explore the experience and tease it out, more details surface, things you didn’t realize had an impact. Oh, that’s right, that happened. I didn’t like that. More comes out just by giving the story space.

Rebecca: Right. I’ve seen that a lot with parents telling the story of the birth, because so much traces back to that time, especially with a young child who’s only had so many experiences yet. So we go back and tell the story. The first time, there’s often a lot of feeling, the difficult parts, the parts full of love and joy, the surprises, good and bad. Then we create space for the baby to show their story. And we do it again, the next day or the next week, and the story shifts, and the feelings in it shift. Sometimes something forgotten in the first telling comes up, because other things had been so big and all-encompassing. And when they tell that forgotten piece, the baby becomes very animated, yes, that was hard for me. That’s what I wanted you to know.

I want to come back to hope, because when you hear that a baby had a difficult experience, that’s exactly the point where we get stuck as parents, especially the conscious ones. We think, if I’d only done this, if I’d only had my baby at the hospital, or at home, if I’d had a different midwife, if I’d stood up when my intuition told me to. Now my baby has this thing showing up, and it’s my fault.

But here’s what creating the space actually does. When we can see, this was my experience, and this was my baby’s experience, we’re already creating a little differentiation. We can start to recognize what belongs to us and what belongs to them. What’s my story, what’s my child’s story? And when you can discover your child’s story, that creates the space to heal.

Because throughout our lives we’ll have misunderstandings. We’ll perceive something from someone that may not be accurate. But if we can come back into that space together and say, wow, I didn’t know. And I couldn’t have known, because I was busy giving birth to you, or it was a car accident, or whatever it was, I didn’t have the capacity in that moment to see your experience, but I can see it now, that seeing, right now, in this moment, is the healing moment. That’s the healing space.

Because things are going to happen. That’s life, that’s part of being human. There will be misunderstandings, overwhelming things, even traumas. But can you reconnect? Can you come back together and see what someone’s experience was, and connect with how it must have felt for them? If you can do that, you’re creating a deep healing bond with your child. That’s what matters. Not that nothing ever goes wrong, but that you can create the space, at any age, for them to come to you and share what their experience was, and then slow down and connect with how they felt. That’s the healing space. It’s right there.

Lianne: I know you’ve seen it. I always call that “where the magic happens.” You’re with a family, they’re telling the story, and suddenly you can see it in their face, they shift. They’ve said their own part and been heard and felt, and then they tell the story to the baby, and there’s this visible shift, like a light coming on, where they can really see it from the baby’s point of view. It’s almost like you can see the connection form between parent and child, where they just get it. And the baby feels that. It’s an amazing thing to witness.

Rebecca: Yes. Especially with a parent and baby who haven’t been connecting, for whatever reason. Suddenly they have that moment, and they’re connecting. I’ve seen it so many times with mothers who’ve been unable to console their baby, the baby’s been inconsolable for four months, they’ve been to the chiropractor, done everything they know to do, and nothing has helped. They end up in my office, we create the space where they can actually listen to one another, and there’s this moment where the mom realizes the baby has been trying to communicate all along, she just didn’t understand what the communication was, and now she does.

And this mom who was feeling incompetent, like she isn’t a good mother, shifts. There’s a moment of, oh, I get it. You aren’t out to get me. That was the story I was telling myself, that I’m not a good mother, but I see it now. And everything can shift.

This is especially true doing Healing Stories with babies, because there are fewer layers of pattern on top of whatever happened. It’s easier to shift the earlier it is. You can still shift it later, but it’s so dramatic when it happens early. I can see the whole trajectory of that family change in an instant, all because they were able to connect and see each other, and see that the child’s real experience may have been very different from the story the parent had been telling themselves. I get it now. What you needed was for me to just get it. That was all you needed.

Lianne: That’s big. It’s such a privilege to help share this, so families can overcome the hard things that feel like doom. It’s amazing to have a tool, a simple tool, that can really transform the trajectory of a family.

Rebecca: It’s all about slowing down together and creating a safe space, and having enough support. Sometimes, depending on your family’s configuration, you need another layer of support, and I’ve done that virtually, just to be another person to help guide the process and hold the emotional space for whatever comes up. It’s such a privilege to see the shifts that happen just from holding space, having support, slowing down, and being curious about everyone’s experience.

We want to make sure we’re not going too fast, because that can be traumatizing. Babies process eight to ten times more slowly than adults, so we have to go slowly to actually see what a baby is showing us. But it’s very doable. It doesn’t need special equipment. If you need a layer of support depending on what happened or on your own history, that’s available, but I’ve seen many families just run with it. That’s what I need to do, I get it now, and they do it, and the healing happens, and nothing else is needed.

Lianne: I’ve had a number of families where I shared about it and gave them just enough that they could do it themselves. It can be a DIY thing. If you try it, it won’t hurt, and you can always get support if you need it. If it feels overwhelming, you can call in someone to be another support person, to listen, to touch your leg if you start going too fast and need to pause.

I’ve had several families do it together, and it’s such a bonding experience for parents to do together, especially where there was a traumatic birth, or the birth didn’t go the way they wanted, and the baby clearly has feelings about it. I shared this with one couple and they were able to support each other and do the story with their baby and heal it. We talked back and forth online, but I didn’t even have to be there in person.

Rebecca: They were able to do it themselves, and that was really empowering for the two of them. It strengthened their relationship to have something they could do, especially after feeling so disempowered by how the birth went.

That’s such an important thing, because traumatic and overwhelming experiences are disempowering, so the healing process has to include something empowering, or we don’t heal. That’s another thing I love about this process: it’s empowering. It heals the trauma. And again, if you go too fast, that’s disempowering and re-traumatizing, so you have to go slowly, but it’s absolutely something you can do on your own.

And if it’s too much, there are situations where a bit more support makes the difference. I worked with a family whose child was older. I walked the mother through what to do, and she came back and said it really didn’t help. So we talked about what had happened, and then I came in as a layer of support, and everyone was able to drop in deeper. They just needed that extra layer to go deep enough to do the healing that needed to happen. And that was with a ten-year-old, so this isn’t only about babies.

This is a healing space for all of us. For us as adults, for us as families, with our little ones and our older kids. It’s something I offer as part of our gold membership, the Healing Story Circles we do virtually, so people can have the experience of being seen and heard and felt, and then create that same space in their own families, because they know what it feels like.

That was one of the most profound things for me, going to see Ray Castellino in Ojai and doing this work with him, where I could feel it. Once I felt it, I got it, and I immediately brought it into my work. I think parents need that experience of being seen and heard and felt themselves, so they can then drop into this space, whether that’s in a Healing Story Circle call, with a friend, or with a partner. I want to make it accessible so anyone can join.

Having that experience of being seen and heard and felt is critical to all of our mental health, honestly, and definitely to any healing process. We need a safe space where we’re not being judged, where we can let whatever feelings are there come up and move through and out the other side. Some of us may not have experienced that before. Some of these core pieces may already be in your repertoire, things you’ve done since you were little that come naturally. Others may be experiences you need to seek out.

We all come to these calls with our own set of good and hard things that have happened in our lives, and those influence how it shows up when we do a Healing Story with our family. So if you get stuck in the process, that’s probably just part of your own story. Feel free to email me or message me on Facebook, and I’m happy to offer a layer of support, ah, yes, all you needed was to slow down a little here, and let the feelings come up, or, it sounds like there’s more going on, it sounds like you need another layer of support. Is there someone in your community who can be with you? Like the story with the ten-year-old, sometimes a small tweak or an extra layer of support makes all the difference. So if you try this and get stuck, don’t think it just won’t work for you. It means you need a little more information or a little more support, and we’re very happy to provide it.

We’ll be back next week to share more about applications of the Healing Stories process, what it can look like in families we’ve both worked with, and maybe some personal stories too, so you get a sense of what this can look and feel like. We also have a Healing Stories course in the Learning Center. It’s a four-part series with actual video of families doing some of this process and sharing their experiences, another way to deepen your understanding.

Lianne, you just finished listening to it again, what do you think?

Lianne: Oh, I love it. It’s organized so the first part covers the basics of how to do Healing Stories, with a lot about little ones and birth stories. But even if you’re not working on a traumatic birth, it’s all the basic information about how to do a healing story together. I’d say go through all four in order, because they build on each other. There’s more geared toward helping little ones heal, then working toward older kids, toddlers and beyond, even teens, and the final section deals specifically with traumatic experiences. It’s full of great information, practical steps people can take, and stories of how families have used this process to heal from overwhelming experiences, which gives so much hope.

Rebecca: That hope piece is so important. There’s really nothing that can’t be healed in some way, even thirty years later, even if the other person isn’t there. You can heal these things within yourself, integrate them yourself, especially if you’re actively parenting younger children. Even if things didn’t go well, even if something hard happened, there’s so much you can do to support connection and create a healing space in your family.

So we’re going to keep talking about Healing Stories, because it’s such an important part of the work I do and it makes such a difference in the lives of families. Next week we’ll talk more about applications and what it looks like in real life. I hope you’ll join us.

Thank you for being here today, Lianne. I’m looking forward to continuing our conversation next week.

Lianne: Yes, me too. Love it.

Rebecca: For more, visit consciouslyparenting.com. And if you loved this episode, please share it. Thanks so much, see you next time.

We invite you to explore the Healing Stories On-Demand Course in the Consciously Parenting Learning Center. It’s a four-part course about how you can use these techniques yourself, in your own family, to bring more connection and healing.