Birth (500627)
Date: 27 June 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Birth is a rather trying experience on a child, an experience which has a long continuation and which brings about a condition of great weariness because of its excessive length and its high emotional content in most cases. It can continue from—well, it can continue for fifty hours. The first contractions are not considered terribly important by the child. But as they go on along the line they get worse and worse and worse, they become very important. They become very painful. Until the last half an hour of birth before the head emerges, it’s somewhat like being in a cotton press or a jute mill. Now, it so happens in birth that a woman who is sexually frustrated doesn’t develop very well, the standpoint of the pelvic region. Sometimes it’s much too narrow and a lot of difficulty ensues. At this moment a doctor, when he doesn’t order a Caesarean, usually starts in with instruments. And then you get a real picnic in birth.
The practicing theory of the last twenty or thirty years was to get the woman as frightened as possible, anesthese her utterly so her muscles wouldn’t work and she couldn’t push down anything, get her into a complete nightmare state and then scream at her to “push.” And harangue her for not cooperating and so forth. This is standard birth.
Birth is a very engramic period, extremely so. As a consequence, headaches from birth are very common. The doctor is always saying, “Hold still now. Now push. Now push down. Now push down. All right, it’s coming now. It’s coming. It’ll be here in an instant now. All right.” Things like this, which pull the person down the time track into birth. It’s very common to find people latched up in birth. Well anyway, I know I wouldn’t like to be born again.
The first thing that happens when the child’s head comes out, usually, is that his eyes are facing a strategically located blazing white light, square in the ceiling. This is to render him conscious of the fact, no doubt, that this is the world. If you want to give somebody a bad cold, give him a sudden light flash in the face. It’ll very often work on a person as a restimulator. And very shortly afterwards, why, hell start to sneeze or blow his nose. So anyway, the next greeting that he gets is somebody grabbing him by the ankles, usually, swishing him up into the air with a great deal of energy, spatting him very securely upon the rump. Lots of conversation in the meantime. The fellow has just been pushed through hell and returned back and pushed through again, you might say, and now somebody spanks him. And then they lay him down and put things in his eyes, lots of chatter like, “Now, hold still, hold still. Oh, that’s a good baby.” Then somebody always comes along and says, “My, what a beautiful baby” or “Aren’t you lucky” and lots of things which puts a manic on the end of birth. This is pretty standard as a birth that I’m giving you. Then they take the baby and put him in a room with a lot of other squalling infants to din his ears in. And the nurse comes by, and people stand around, and for about three to five days the baby has a headache.
Come on up to present time. (laughter) So in short, there you have about four or five days of material. Fortunately this stuff will come up in chunks. The longest run you give birth normally won’t take over an hour and a half to run birth right through from beginning to end, usually. You can count on birth—we talked about it the other day whether it was accessible or not—but you can count on birth being, at the very least, quite a trying experience.
It produces a headache which is a severe headache and which is variable. Because as the baby’s head starts to emerge, first there’s the headache which just covers the crown of the head and down. Then there’s the headache which covers the forehead as a band. Then there’s the headache which covers the lower part of the jaw and back of the neck. Then there’s the headache which just merely chokes the child and ruins the back of his neck. Next his shoulders and so on as they come through—bursitis can set in about this time.
Now, if the doctor has placed his instruments expertly, he can give the baby a very fine traumatic condition of the gums and jaw, so that the baby will have tooth trouble for the rest of his life. And if the doctor is very, very clever at it in the old days, he can say at that moment, “Don’t be anxious. Now, hold still Now, I’m pulling him now, I’m pulling him down now. Now here he is. Now here he is. Now, hold still, Baby Now, we just get another grip here, just get another grip here. Goddamnit, Nurse, I told you to get that sterilizer out. Now, there’s no reason to be nervous, madam, there’s no reason to be nervous. Now hold still for a minute. Now push; now push once more.” And about this time, when you get to an engram along this line, if it’s a fairly normal birth, the baby is terribly tired. And the patient about this time will start to get tired. A baby goes to sleep about two minutes after he’s been born, in most cases. And this weariness will settle over the patient as you try to erase the engram. And you can clip birth and after that a person will just be ghastly tired, just for days. I clipped a birth one time and for two and a half months the patient was exhausted, because we couldn’t get back to it again. And finally we got things squared around and got that up, and I don’t think the patient’s been tired since. But chronic weariness is something that comes directly from birth. Conjunctivitis is something that stems from it.
Male voice: Conjunctivitis?
Yes. Yeah, chronically injected eye whites and so on. Sinusitis is very common in birth.
Now, you’ve already heard a discussion of the reason a person can take a warm shower and then step out into cold air—the reason this often gives people colds is because it’s moving as a baby moved from a warm, dark interior to a cool, light exterior with his nose full of mucus and his throat full of mucus. And it’s a restimulator on birth. So anyway, there is actually the source of the common cold in its psychosomatic aspect.
There’s all sorts of material back of birth, but birth can lay down the injury on which these things can feast. A person says headache. He knows what a headache is, “Oh, poor little boy, you’ve got a headache.” Mm-hm. Now he knows what a headache is. It means getting born.
You will find most normal births difficult enough to lift. But now we get into births which are not as normal. These produce some quite remarkable psychic conditions in people. The cord very often gets around a child’s neck and strangles him so that he is born in a strangled condition. He is unconscious from lack of oxygen. The cord is not giving him oxygen and he can’t breathe the air. The doctor once in a while will say, “Well, the baby’s dead” and other helpful remarks will occur at this time which give the child a horror of strangling.
One case, a woman who was sure her husband was going to strangle her at any moment, was found to have had in birth a cord around her neck with a holder, with a doctor an ally. But the doctor was just like, according to her reactive mind, her husband. So her husband restimulated birth and restimulated a strangulation. And because of an antagonist in her case who was also the husband, she achieved the remarkable judgment there that her husband at any moment was going to strangle her. She was terrified of strangling. If you touched her throat, it would upset her considerably.
Another thing that you’ll run into is false labor. You may think you have found birth, and all of a sudden it will turn out not to be birth. Labor pains, contractions and so forth, Mama screaming and sure that she’s going to die or something of the sort. And she gets all nervous and tensed up. When she gets so nervous and tensed up she can’t deliver, why, they wheel her out of the delivery room and it may be three or four days until that birth is accomplished. Well, during this time the baby may be out of position, all sorts of things may be wrong with the child, so it’s a rather nasty period.
Women in the past have not reacted too well to birth, and I have reason to believe that birth in a natural sense where a woman has very few engrams can be a fairly . . . . . . certainly an easy experience. Now, birth is very much impeded by fright on the mother’s part. And when you hear while you’re diagnosing somebody that he had a very difficult birth, you peg Mama. Mama’s a loop. It’ll work out one for one. I have found no exceptions to this.
Male voice: How about the converse? If you know Mama to be kind of loopy, can you automatically assume a difficult birth?
If you get a blocked second dynamic; you say blocked second dynamic, there’s nasty births around here someplace. Mind you now, you can still find women who were too small to give birth and who were not nervous and who weren’t particularly loopy. Nevertheless it is true that blocks on the second dynamic cut down various fluid flows in the body, glandular excretions. The body does not construct itself along lines to give birth. You get very narrow-hipped women and other things very undesirable. And here is your blocked second dynamic and it’s very definitely at work. Well, if the second dynamic is blocked, Mama is going to abreact some of it. So you probably have a loopy prenatal background too, if you’ve got a bad birth.
The next thing that you’ll run into in birth is it is an engram in common with the child. Mother and child have the same engram in common. Postpartum psychosis and so on may be rare. But postpartum neurosis is the standard thing in America today.
Male voice: In other words, they keep restimulating each other.
That’s correct. This is the child that gave her all the pain. This is the mama that I heard screaming. And between the two of them it’s a setup that the devil himself I don’t think would have countenanced. Because later on let’s say the doctor says to the baby, “Now, you’ll forget this in a little while. Okay, little baby, hold still. You’ll forget all about this in a little while. Things aren’t so bad. Things aren’t so bad.” And the kid is just knocked to pieces and head all swollen up.
You ought to see a baby’s head after birth. It gets all swollen. He has actually what, in an adult, would be concussion and skull fracture and so on. And of course, because he’s limber he can take it. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t hurt. “You’ll forget all about this in a little while,” the doctor says, “now hold still.” And you’ll find Mama, after that, occasionally using this phrase to the child Keeps the child nicely restimulated. She doesn’t know where she got these phrases.
Now, you take a doctor who doesn’t know, who can’t be sure, who is being hammered by the husband who is in the area who says, “Will they be all right? Will they be all right?” “I don’t know I don’t know I can’t be sure. Goddamnit, this sure is a mess here. You never can tell about these things” and so on—the doubtful doctor. He really gives you a case, because you will pick this case up later and just from that source alone you can have, “I don’t know. I’m not sure.” The fellow’s all loused up.
Now, the doctor loses his self-confidence most in a case that he believes contains some possibility of death for the mother or child. He becomes very unsure. So here is a tough birth with a tough computation laid on top of it. And there’s more than one fellow walking around today who is a “don’t know and can’t be sure” case straight from the doctor at birth.
Well, not to belabor the situation, but you will find birth is a very interesting experience any way you want to look at it when you’re lifting it as an engram. And you will find that most sinusitis, a lot of bursitis, quite a bit of arthritis, stomach pains (because the stomach is very badly clenched on the final ejection during delivery, and because of instruments which are clamped against the stomach), tooth trouble, eye conjunctivitis and several other conditions stem mostly toward birth.
If you can get up birth, you can ease the guy down quite a bit. As a matter of fact, if you can do so, you can take up birth and nothing but birth all by itself and produce such a marked difference in the case that the fellow will hardly know he’s the same man, as far as his psychosomatic illnesses are concerned.
Birth is quite a target. Okay. [gap] Male voice: Supposing you find someone who doesn’t move easily and is obviously stuck in time. Is there any way you can get data on what she is stuck in?
I would love to have some kind of a mechanical aid which would do that. Rather than ask the patient, just start running off types of incidents and watch for a reaction on something like an EEG or something of the sort. That would be one way to do it. The best way we have now is simply by flash answers and checking over her case and getting a diagnosis on it and so forth.
Okay, is there anything more you would like to know about birth? I’ve covered this very generally. The first few times you’ve handled birth in a case you’ll know more about it than I can sit here and tell you. And you go through your own birth, you’ll have a vast appreciation for the experience. (Recording ends abruptly)