Is “birth trauma” (on the part of the child) a real thing? Is it a necessary consequence of traumatic births?
By real, I mean the sort of thing most and only people with traumatic births have, as opposed just a narratization of ordinary embodied trauma that accrues over a life.
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Stan Grof seems to think birth trauma is an inherent part of existence. He even describes it as inherent to the material you traverse on psychedelic journeys!
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Yeah that’s the kind of thing I have in mind!
I ask because I had a fairly dramatic birth, but haven’t had any experiences in meditation or on psychedelics that seemed to have anything to do with it (explicitly). Makes me wonder whether there’s a suggestibility thing there.
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i think this thought first vaguely occurred to me reading this bit from SSC's review of PiHKaL and it's just lived in my head rent-free ever since, accreting a shell around itself made of thoughts about self-fulfilling prophecies, evaporative cooling, etc
slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/11/boo
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currently i tentatively believe birth trauma is probably real but likely difficult to access (also circumcision trauma). i mean it's all the way back to the beginning. i still haven't accessed anything that i can definitively tie to a memory from before i was... 13 or so?
Tbf I haven’t done the kind of deep psych work that *would* have turned up that kind of thing and am only recently picking up the whole psychological end of practice so who knows. Maybe in a few months I’ll come back and be like “oh god oh fuck birth trauma was real after all”
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Interesting, yeah I share the sentiment! Good to hold that with this as well
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The same difficult thing could happen to 100 people and there's a distribution of resultant trauma
No value judgement or comparison to be made- seems to just be how things are
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