Running Out Birth (500624)
Date: 24 June 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Due to the filing system, which is not too orderly, sometimes the later incidents in a case are approachable. There are some lying out by themselves. There are injunctions against running birth in the book. Birth is not an incident which should be willfully avoided. If the file clerk ever gives you birth without you asking for it, or you find the person bouncing into birth, take hold of what you get and run birth. If the guy can get words and somatics on birth, whether or not he has gotten out basic-basic, run it! So here—because you’re going to get a convulsive aspect, the case is going to have a lot of tension taken off of it, there may be a lot of prenatals latched up in birth. And therefore the thing can be run with profit, if it can be run. But don’t pick a birth which is very mild, which is not well developed. That is to say, he isn’t showing much of a manifestation because of it. Don’t take that one, where he can’t discover the words, where he doesn’t know where he’s going or what he’s doing there; and a birth into which you have had to place him, willful again, with some resistance. That is to say, he didn’t know anything about birth.
If he goes into birth, he’s got somatics, then for God’s sakes run it because you very often deintensify the case and make it possible then to get basic-basic-Mike’s case, for instance, is progressing at the rate it’s progressing for an excellent reason. He happened to have been latched up in birth most of his life. Now, the file clerk handed over birth. Birth was the number one convulsive incident in his case—the first incident really run out in his case that was worth a damn, that produced a change. Okay, now he feels fine. Now we’re going back down the prenatal area and the stuff’s coming up left and right. See?
He ran birth and he even got into his own valence on birth. We ran all the perceptics out of birth.
Let me give you an injunction about birth, however. If you’re running out birth, try and run out every perceptic separately as you run through it. You’re running out birth now without the earlier material out. Run it out with anything you can get the first time through, then try and find the rest of the perceptics and one by one you’ll sort the things out in birth until the man has tactile, he’s got odor out of it and so on. If birth is ready to pluck, those things are available. You can tell whether or not birth is ready to pluck by the manifestation of the patient you get when you slide back into birth.
If it is very calm, not terribly interested, the somatics aren’t very large, boy, leave it alone because that birth is going to go down to recession only. But if he is afraid of birth, if he is jumping around the second he hits birth, if the somatics are strong, if he can contact word content in birth, run it and you’ll run it with profit.
In a case that answers you, “Oh, Christ, no! I don’t want anything to do with birth,” that’s the very birth you want to run. Because the guy’s saying, “Oh no, I don’t want to go through that.” It’s always a good sign when a fellow says, “I don’t want to go through that one. No, I don’t want to go through that one.” You rub your little paws together and you say, “Aha! Aha! Now we’ve got an incident which is really painful and really aberrative, let’s roll it.” And you’ll get an improvement in the case, very marked improvement, because that’s the one he’s skipping around, trying to avoid. This two-year-old incident—you were trying to run a two-year-old incident and it went into birth, is that right?
Male voice: No.
It went into a prenatal?
Male voice: No, 1 was trying to slam him into the earliest prenatal I could find.
All right, and what happened?
Male voice: I got it I got something in the basic area. Coitus chain . . .
Okay. And you ran that. You ran that and he bounced; he bounced into birth.
Male voice: No. Once I’d gotten my fingers on it, it didn’t bounce.
Well, but when you were trying to get your fingers on it, it bounced into birth, is that right?
Male voice: When he lay down on the couch, he was in birth and in . . .
Well, I would like to give you—just set it up as a test. If you take him back there again you’ll find out that you can run the hell out of birth. And that the case will deintensify, that he will feel much better, and the incidents on the track will be lying out straighter and more accessible; that he can be gotten into his own valence more easily.
That’s important to know about birth. It’s equally important to know that a nitrous oxide, late dental or something like that, can be run out if it presents itself But the moment you try to run out any incident above the basic area, above the first missed period, which has no very large content, which isn’t presenting itself very easily, about which he is not very interested—the second you try to do this you’re liable to find yourself working with an engram which will only reduce to recession, which will only make him uncomfortable.
In other words, it’s sort of filed beyond a veil. It isn’t on the side of the valence that you’re working—the side of the emotional wall on which you’re working, so on. You’re working it elsewhere and it’s got too much earlier. So you run phrases earlier and earlier and earlier out of such incidents until you really get earliest. But birth is a wonderful engram! That is quite positively the most magnificent piece of stuff, when it comes to aberrating a human being, imaginable. People stand around Mama when she is delivering. There are women screaming around elsewhere, but the doctor and the nurse close by Mama are giving her more aberrative chatter. “Now, go to sleep. Now breathe deeply. Now push down. Keep pushing down. Now rest between your pains. Now, this is probably going to get better for a little while now, and then it’s going to get a lot worse, so just grit your teeth, you just have to take it. Now lie still. Now hold it, hold it now. Now put your legs up. Now push down. Push down. Now keep pushing down, keep pushing down, I tell you!” Jesus!
This stuff, when reactivated, will bring a guy out of present time, bring him down into the birth engram and there he is. He gets out of the birth engram a little bit and goes on up to present time. There’s more stuff . . . It’s incredible. There’s very often manics right on the end of birth and you have to be very careful because you’ll find the patient’s going to skip those.
The baby’s head is sore for two or three days at least; sometimes they’re ill for about ten days, with everybody coming around, yakity-yakity-yakity-yak. So the first three days you should watch very carefully after birth, because somebody is going to come in and say, “Why, what a beautiful baby, I always wanted a son! Oh, my little darling!” and so on. And it’s probably going to be all the relatives, all the allies and so forth.
There’s a possibility that every person that is going to be intimately connected with this person’s postbirth life, and some of the people who have been around the mother in the prenatal life, are going to come in and say either something derogatory or something complimentary about this baby. So there’s a lot of stuff around birth.
In most any case you can count on running sections of birth, from maybe the twentieth hour to the hundredth hour. And then maybe you’re all set and you’ve got a tough case that’s going up toward three, four, five hundred hours and right at the end there, why, you find this patient is still awfully nervous about a noise. Well, by this time you’re trying to find engrams because there aren’t too many of them left. And this person’s very disconcerted by a noise. Well, we trace around and suddenly here is a little two-second section right in the middle of birth that has been utterly overlooked. And it will be some fool nurse saying something or other and a motor running, let’s say, or a respirator or something else is running in the room. The vibrations of this motor have been terrible to this person all her life.
In other words, chunks of birth, birth in particular will keep coming into view. Even though you think you’ve deintensified birth, always be prepared to find more in it, because birth may have latched up a lot of prenatals and a lot of postnatals. Now, you run that, deintensifies, the track straightens out. But now as you run off the prenatals or as you run off postnatal painful emotion, more birth is available.
You can actually use birth as a sort of a center point on a case. This is the way at least that I handle birth and the way that it has proven satisfactory in the past.
If the fellow can’t get into birth I don’t bother with it. But if he’s scared of getting into it and he goes for a spin every time you start to approach it, just buck him right into the beginning of it and run him right on through.
Male voice: When this occasion presents itself, Ron—if somebody goes into birth at ten o’clock at night, it’s not too wise to run it because of noise and so forth and so on. It’s always better if you can possibly arrange it to try to run it in the morning or in the early afternoon.
Well, sure. But I have run out birth on a fellow in a two-hour session, and yeah, run it through three or four times from beginning to end although it was a long labor.
Second male voice: Something I wanted to ask you about. What’s the correspondence between running the incident out and the time the incident really took?
Oh, the differential there, of the correspondence between the time the incident took and the time it takes to run it out. Well, it’s very interesting but so many sections running out of any birth are missing; so many sections will be missing on it that you will find that generally fifteen or twenty minutes will suffice to run out all he can contact at that time of maybe thirty-six hours of labor Second male voice: But it all has to be run out Yes. You get the whole thing stacked up, so to speak. The contractions, unless the person is revivified at the spot—it’s a very gruesome thing to see a psychotic, by the way, latched up in birth. They scream. We had this girl recently as a horrible example of that. Boy, she really screamed; right on the minute as the contractions were rolling. And she was running minute for minute; that is, a minute of therapy time for a minute of birth time. Now, the fact is when you go through a birth, you’re probably running about a minute to a second because there’s a lot of silence that takes place in this period. And you just keep pushing the guy along and it’s generally coming up. [gap] . . . when the birth is inaccessible, where you can’t get the person into it, where things are not set up so that birth could be run—it’s out of touch, so to speak—you could run the person’s somatic strip through it without getting any content. And it will run one minute per minute. You just start his somatic strip running in birth and it will run. And he’s getting very tiny, mild somatics that don’t amount to anything. But there is a thorough restimulation of birth and that shouldn’t be done. But I’m showing you when a birth is not ready to lift, that the thing is going to take quite a while. But if it is ready to lift, it’s pretty well crowded up and fifteen, twenty minutes should take a run through it. This is just on an average of cases I’ve looked over. A large number of them have behaved this way. Fifteen, twenty minutes, you sweep through birth and you can go back to the beginning of it again.
Male voice: If you start getting a minute-by-minute run in a patient . . . ?
You can conclude one of two things: either he’s thoroughly revivified in birth and has been there for a long time or the patient is psychotic and is dramatizing birth in somebody else’s valence.
Male voice: Would you just let him go about ten or fifteen minutes and then send him back to the beginning again?
No. It’s a tough deal if you find somebody who is pretty well down the line, he starts to run it minute for minute, and you can’t rush it up for you or do anything else. If it’s doing that, it isn’t the incident you want out of a case anyway.
Male voice: Well, then it wouldn’t be quite fair to take him off of it.
Why not? You’re not going to get anyplace. It’s going to take you thirty-six hours to run this one birth once through.
Male voice: I know, but what about the restimulation there? It’s going to be awful.
No. Not if you run them into the first few contractions of birth and so forth. You’ve not run down toward the meat yet. People start getting excited and anxious and so forth. The baby starts down, head starts past the pelvis and starts to come out and then there’s all this barrage of “He’s stuck. Oh well, we’ll have to turn him around now. Well, push. Push harder. Push down! Push! Push down!” and so on. And a lot of commotion.
Male voice: Is that where you really get it, right around the contractions?
Right as the baby comes down. I’d say the last hour would cover about the bulk of the superaberrative material in a birth. And ordinarily the ten minutes just before the baby comes out or just after it’s out in the average birth, boy, those are rough minutes.
Second male voice: From a medical standpoint that could be best described as the second stage of labor. From the time of complete dilatation of the cervix to the time when that baby is born. There is not much movement of the baby until the cervix is completely dilated. And after the cervix is dilated then the baby’s head starts moving down the canal. And that’s where all the pain comes in, that area there. The second stage of labor lasts only, average in the first baby, four to six hours. In a woman that’s had numerous children maybe lasts as long as five minutes.
Well, you should get your hands on a few births and see how they behave.
Well, we’ve gone off here into a bit of a general discussion. I did want you to know, however, the injunctions against running birth are mainly enjoined against the eager beaver who says, “Aha, everybody has a birth,” he grabs ahold of the guy and he runs him straight back to birth and he doesn’t pay any attention to anything else in the case. But birth, as far as auditing is concerned, can be quite a hurdle if you leave it alone and it’s aching to come up.
I have never failed, if the birth was presenting itself, more or less insisting on being presented, to deintensify it and to bring about a better state of workability in the case. But I have never failed to get a case thoroughly loused up if I took birth right at the beginning and tried, by suggesting phrases, to get the fellow to run it when it was not ready to run. Then birth would go into a very nasty recession.
Male voice: Incidentally, it’s not always going to be possible to tell, from what I know now anyhow, just exactly how easy it is—how accessible birth is going to be. Now that . . .
Leave it to physiology to some degree. Look at Ed. Now, you know that Ed probably has a holder down along the lower area. All due respect to you, Ed.
Second male voice: Sure.
Because there is a little bit too much weight and so on. In other words, there’s a physiological disturbance. That must occur fairly early in a case. And you would look for some terrific incident back there someplace with lots of holders in it. Already—we’ve already discovered about six or eight. They aren’t surrendering very gracefully. It may be that by taking his case back into birth, running it from the beginning of birth right straight on through, that you’ll bring about a remarkable increase in workability.
Second male voice: Well, does it have to be that obvious before you . . .
No. No, not at all. I’m just saying use your judgment. There are various ways to tell. Various ways to observe. For instance, I would say that amongst those present, that Ed—just looking over people—that Ed and Lee both had accessible births. Just at a guess.
Male voice: I absolutely know you re right about me and birth, because that’s my most restimulative area. I’m very aware of it now—last day or so.
Well, there is much to be said for running birth and there is much to be said for avoiding it. But you see the conditions by which you adjudicate whether you’re going to run it or avoid it. And the best way to test it is to ask the file clerk to keep giving you the incident which is holding up the case. And if he gives you birth or if the person seems to do a lot of bouncing into birth or birth seems to be very evident, run it!
You can run a case that will never mention birth, never think about it. And this is probably the majority of cases. They won’t think about birth or mention it or bounce into it or anything else.
A case recently insisted—at any moment, any given moment of the case you would suddenly find the case bounced into birth. Now, I tried to avoid it for a few times and then realized that birth was really asking for it. So I ran out as much of birth as I could get. All I could get out of birth was a sequence, or, what he just called the first stage there, where Mama was screaming a content which put the child permanently in the valence. And that birth had such a severe holder on it that the whole case was running up and down the line out of birth. I ran just that out of birth and then ran it early and got a lot of good material A few days later the case was still acting up most remarkably, the person very disturbed and unsettled, so I ran up into the day after birth and found that there was material there, but it was not accessible. And then went up the line to a moment when an ice wagon started up suddenly and this patient—eight years of age, she was—she fell off the ice wagon, was injured, and Mama just gave her a screaming torrent of abuse for having gotten her dress dirty, and the kid was unconscious but walking around. And then Mama suddenly discovered the child was injured and was supersympathetic. Now, the iceman also had come out and there was a holder in it of—this was a weird one—the iceman screamed “Whoa!” at the horses and the horses started forward suddenly The child fell off the tailgate and hit her head badly on a step. And then the iceman says “Whoa!” up from a porch someplace. And it was a holder. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen “whoa” as a holder, and I hope the last, but it was a real holder. And this person has had chronic headaches.
Male voice: Whose valence was she in, the horse’s?
I don’t know, (laugh) Anyway, here was a headache and here was Mama raving. We ran that incident out. It deintensified, it just acted beautifully. It was gone as far as therapy was concerned—never have to bother with that ice wagon incident again. And then we found ourselves back, not in birth precisely, but one day later. The same stuff that we were trying to run before and we found her manic and ran it out, ran the charge off of it, went back into the early area, found a lot of stuff, went up to the influenza epidemic of 1918, picked up Mama and Papa breaking up the family. (They were going to get divorced because he was unfaithful.) Big tears and Papa, sort of a manic there where he’s talking to the child, you know, “Your mother doesn’t love me anymore and I love you so much and I don’t want to go away” and all that sort of thing. And back we go again down into the very earliest period of the case and we find a coitus and the sperm is now available—and not until. We ran that out and it proceeded just so far and then was not processable anymore. And we ran some more out of birth and then went back to the early one again and the case settled down and the chronic psychosomatic illness sort of—well, it deintensified to a point where the patient is not paying any attention to it at all anymore.
There was the actual sequence of incidents touched. Now, that’s a very disorderly sequence, you might say, but each one of them had a good reason to be where they were.
Male voice: Did you figure that computation out or did the file clerk hand it out in that manner?
File clerk handed me that computation, one-two-three-four.
Second male voice: How did you ask for it?
I just asked for, “Give us the next incident we need to resolve this case,” and the file clerk just kept handing up the incidents. So a reliance upon your own judgment, an observation of the resistance the patient might exhibit toward going into birth . . . For instance, Mike here was the last birth I ran out. That’s why my mind reverts back to this so easily The first time he was into birth he said, “Never again, I’ll never go through that again! You can’t make me go through that again, you son of a bitch! I won’t touch it!” The next time we had him back, “Well now, we’ll avoid birth, etc. All right, now let’s repeat “False alarm.” “False alarm, false alarm.” “Let’s see how early we can get False alarm.’” (Of course “false alarm” is right at the beginning of birth in that particular case.) “There’s no real pain yet, they’re mostly false alarms.” He gets that. We run out the birth. I think it only had to be run about six times to be completely deintensified. His chronic psychosomatic dramatization was rolling back and forth on the bed, holding his stomach and going through labor pains and saying, “If I could just have a baby.” He had told his wife this many times before he ever heard of Dianetics. “I feel that if I could just have a baby and get it over with it would be all right.” (Recording ends abruptly)