Very excited to present my trauma-informed care workshop at the National Perinatal Association's conference this year. I'm hoping to provide caregivers and professionals with the resources it takes to foster superior treatment of and care for families in the NICU, based on the most cutting-edge psychological research out there. Looking forward to collaborating with other professionals looking to change the way we communicate whilst in crisis.
Guest Post: Finding Strength and Healing Through the Holidays
Sona with friends JoAnn and Darrin, holding a photo of their sweet Brighid
By: Sona Mehring, Founder of Caring Bridge
As founder of CaringBridge, the nation’s most established social networking platform for people immersed in difficult medical journeys, my exposure to the struggles of patients, family caregivers and loved ones seems reason enough to just skip the holidays! Instead, I feel inspired. Across more than 550,000 CaringBridge websites that have received 2 billion visits over 18 years, I am awed by the power of hope and compassion that shine through a health crisis. In moments of celebration – Outside the Incubator!– and in the terrible times, too, I have come to believe in the gift of healing.
I can’t pretend to explain this gift, but I experienced it when I created the first CaringBridge site in 1997. My dear friends, JoAnn and Darrin, had endured a life-threatening pregnancy, days in the NICU and the devastating loss of their newborn daughter, Brighid. I never imagined what Darrin’s exhausted request for me to “Just let everyone know what’s going on,” would become. I also never imagined the sea of caring people whose waves of love and support had surged through the Internet to comfort her parents while in the NICU. During those days, I saw what healing looks like.
Any time you can give – or receive – the gift of healing this holiday season, do it! The gifts come as much from taking time to express encouragement as they do from pausing to take in encouragement. My hope is that for a brief minute, you, too, may experience the essence of the “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”
Sona Mehring is founder and CEO of the global nonprofit organization CaringBridge.org, based in Eagan, MN, and author of “Hope Conquers All.”
You Are Not Alone: Fostering Prematurity Awareness Around the Globe
Photo credit: World Prematurity Day
My new post about global prematurity is up at Preemie Babies 101 today! In it, I interview Aissata Sacko, founder and CEO of Assistance to Maternity Centers of Guinea. Aissata shared some of her personal story with me (she was born prematurely in Guinea, and her daughter was a 27 weeker) and told me about AMC Guinea's mission to help create more of an infrastructure for Guinean hospitals to be able to handle premature birth more aptly. The connection between NICU parents, even so far apart from each other, is incredible. Check it out here!
"The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"?
A documentary discussing an interesting issue was recently brought to my attention. It's about the plasticity of the brain, and talks about the potential for scientists to either place false memories or remove traumatic memories from individual's minds as a way to "heal" from trauma. Pretty science fictiony right?
It got me to thinking about traumatic memories, particularly those of NICU parents. NICU parents have a unique situation: one in which the trauma that they've been exposed to had to do with witnessing their baby or babies fight for their lives in the hospital-- horrific-- but not necessarily in the same way that witnessing a car accident or physical abuse might be, as our trauma is intertwined with our babies' entrance into the world. On this topic I was quick to realize that there's no way I would prefer to forget my traumatic memories; not only do they contain critically important details of my sweet boys' lives (and William's passing), but at the same time, the experiences gave me a completely different sense of the world around me. It wasn't necessarily a positive sense, but it felt powerful and important. It most definitely changed the way I perceived things; the way I think.
Trauma is essentially the experience of something terrible-- it can be either through our own experience of crisis or through watching someone we care about struggle with something extraordinary. Our brains work hard to make a discrete memory of traumatic circumstances for the evolutionary purpose of being prepared if something along the same lines should happen again. For example, one of my earliest memories is that of grabbing a metal railing to pull myself out of the pool at a swimming lesson-- it was burning hot-- I let go and sunk back into the pool. My mind stored that memory as an extremely important thing as my fear of drowning and the reality of it took over at that moment-- I believe I was only two years old.
Our experience of trauma becomes "disordered" (I hate that descriptor) when elements of our reaction to it continue to affect our lives in a negative way long after the trauma has ended. Many NICU parents have experienced this in ways like hearing a beeping noise that brings you back to the constant alarm of the apnea and other monitors in the NICU and becoming anxious, perhaps even sweating or developing insomnia in response to it. Many times it is our bodies that respond to these triggers; I remember once smelling hand sanitizer that had a similar fragrance to the one at our NICU and becoming physically ill. In fact, many newer theories about the experience of trauma posit that we hold much of these experiences in our physical bodies. It makes sense, as traumatic memories are often stored in a different part of the brain than our autobiographical memories; it is nonverbal, and has much to do with the sensory perception associated with specific memories: the limbic system.
The neuroscientist Dan Siegel writes much about the notion that the attachment a parent has with their child can be gauged by that parent's own narrative memory and whether it is coherent or not. Additionally most trauma literature within the field of psychology puts forth the notion that in the treatment of trauma, the goal is for the client to develop a cohesive memory that incorporates the traumatic event within it. Siegel talks about how when a parent has gone through a traumatic circumstance, it's essential for them to integrate the memory into their own personal narrative in order to have an optimal attachment with their baby (Siegel, 2001). It reminds me of a conversation I had with a good friend when she was pregnant with her son. I told her that I hoped he would "always be happy". Her response surprised me at the time; she said that "I think it's also important for him to learn about sadness too". The conversation shifted the way that I perceived parenting significantly, and in actually becoming a parent, I realized that her words held even more power and honesty than I had previously thought. To imagine human beings as ideally being two-dimensional super-happy people leaves out a huge piece of the human experience. Without sadness or pain, what would happiness look like?
So, what of it when we are confronted with the idea that we could forget the NICU and everything that happened there? Everything that at once deconstructed our lives but at the same time brought our children into the world? What would it mean for our attachment with our children that we wouldn't have any information about our most painful experiences, that were innately intertwined with their lives, to share with them? What of the gaps in our narratives? What if instead of "removing" traumatic memories from our conscious/unconscious mind, we instead worked to figure out how to perceive them differently-- perhaps in ways that serve us, our children, our families and friends in moving forward?
What if, instead of holding on to the end goal of "forgetting" trauma, we chose to carry it with us, perhaps in the hope that in communicating what we have been through, we could help others to understand it?
Siegel, D. (2001). Toward an interpersonal neurobiology of the developing mind: attachment relationships, "mindsight," and neural integration. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22(1-2), 67-94.
If your interest is piqued by this subject, the documentary I referenced here is called "Breakthrough: Decoding the Brain" and on Sunday, November 15, at 9 pm ET it will air on the National Geographic Channel.