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First published in Parenting, Basel Children’s Trust Newsletter, Sept 2018.

Becoming pregnant brings about huge changes to your world, resulting in shifts in relationships with your partner, children and work.  It can all become a juggling act, with expectations, hopes and fears all piling up at once.  Add to this juggling the fact that you live abroad, away from your life-long community and support networks and something that’s absolutely a natural thing can feel quite daunting.

There can be many issues around the pregnancy:

• Not understanding the language of the medical care-givers.
• Not understanding the protocols commonly used in your new country’s medical facilities
• Questions about maternity leave.
• Unaware of the support groups in your area.
• Issues around housing

Issues around birth:

• Trying to find the support that you need.
• Getting the labour you want.
• Being under pressure to give labour on time, as visiting relatives are on a travel schedule.
• Having too many visitors/support.
• Not having enough visitors/support.
• Feelings of isolation and being overwhelmed.

Post-Natal Issues:

• Finding support with feeding, sleeping, medical issues in a language and culture that you are comfortable with.
• Having to find child care support.
• Planning going back to work.
• Who to turn to for support, if things are medically not right.

Luckily, by reading this BCT newsletter, you are already in contact with a great support network and valuable resource.  Another resource that can help expecting and new parents is a super-gentle treatment known as craniosacral therapy (aka cranial osteopathy).

Craniosacral therapy (CST) allows there to be space for all these natural anxieties to be articulated, both verbally and bodily.  Your body holds onto its experiences in your tissues. CST gently works to settle both mother and baby’s nervous systems, through a light contact on the body, at either end of the spine, along with modelling communication skills.  Babies may be cuddled or fed during treatment and older babies can play with their parent and therapist.

Craniosacral Therapy helps the whole journey flow more easily, helping mum-to-be discover a new way of connecting with themselves as a new person – a mother.  By working together with a craniosacral therapist, parents relearn to see, feel and hear themselves and their little ones in a new way.  It is typically a time when one’s own birth dynamics come to the fore and it is useful to learn to differentiate betrween what is yours and what is your baby’s “stuff”.  The anxiety you may feel now can be a reflection of the anxiety you or your mother felt in your own birth experience.

Babies are unable to differentiate between mother and themselves until about 9 months old.  Until they are able to verbalize, their memories are stored as bodily sensations.  Your world is their world.  Your emotions become their emotions and vice-versa.

Are the overwhelming feelings you feel in fact your baby’s overhelming feelings?

It takes baby’s new brain four times as long as an adult to process what is going on around them, meaning they need you to slow down so that they do not become overwhelmed and can “catch up” on a sensory level.

Babies can experience feeding difficulties, colic or perhaps a sore neck.  They may cry a great deal and have difficulty settling down.  This can be their expression of trauma or the frightening effects from their birth.

Birth is remembered through the baby’s body and nervous system.  How baby perceives their birth will unfold under the therapist’s touch.  CST can help you to know yourself and your child in a deeper way, by allowing you to trust your body and make choices from a calm and resourced place.

By treating and helping you react from a calm, resourced space, baby will feel safe and will quickly adapt to new experiences and will often recover in just a few sessions, enabling you both to enjoy this special time together.

To be kept informed of upcoming open-house sessions for parents & babies, please sign up to the email list – and receive 4 tips on how to stabilise your baby’s stress hormones: