Caesarean Personality
The following summary of some of the characteristics of people born non-labor caesarean is based on my own personal process, on observation of and conversation with other caesarean born people, and on observations by therapists, doctors, nurses, and parents of caesareans. These characteristics are by no means unique to caesarean born people; they are perhaps just more pronounced. This is a preliminary formulation of this material, and the process of gathering more information is continuing.
One way of conceptualizing this material that I have found useful is in terms of the drama of non-labor caesarean birth. Union with the mother is disturbed by the anaesthesia used in the surgery, followed by the experience of the cutting open of the mother with whom the child is still unified physically and psychially. The child then begins to emerge into the world still very much in a state of cosmic union, then experiences being unwillingly and abruptly pulled out of the womb. Though the actual birth could be considered complete at this point, I have found it necessary to include as part of the birth the encounter with the obstetrician. The struggle with the doctor who forcefully stimulates breathing is not unlike labor, and there also seems to be something that can best be described as bonding with the doctor following this struggle. Soon after this, the bond is broken as the child is taken away to the nursery, and a physical and emotional shutting down may follow. This drama may be different for some recent caesareans as some hospitals are using local anaesthesia, allowing the father to be present, and allowing the mother to make eye contact with the baby and even to hold and breastfeed it immediately. The last stage of birth extends over a period of may years as the caesarean born person person transforms the melodrama learned from the experience of caesarean delivery and learns to choose to give birth to his or her self as an individual in the world.
Among the habits, expectations, and patterns, some of them paradoxical and contradictory, that might be learned in non-labor caesarean birth are:
-The expectation that nourishment will be followed by poisoning and attack.
-Defensiveness in relation to all approach; touch sensitivity and paradoxically a love of physical contact once the defensiveness has passed.
-Habit of opening only when exhausted or invaded.
-Some different residual body tension patterns, e.g., neck tensions related to the head being pulled rather than pushed in birth.
-Dependence, a feeling of needing to be rescued, inability to act on one's own, and paradoxically, an unwillingness to ask for help.
-Anger toward would-be helpers who fail to satisfy on a physical level the impossible demand of total rescue.
-Distortion of relationship and sexual patterns with people of the same sex as the obstetrician. Expectations of struggle and defeat, and of merging, bonding, and being totally cared for.
-Perception of self as separate, and paradoxically, less sense of personal boundaries.
-Easy access to transpersonal awareness but lack of appreciation of this capability because of having less sense of personal boundaries.
-Continual testing of limits and boundaries.
-Relationship patterns that are colorful, abrupt, intense, and arrow-like rather than like the waves of contraction and expansion that would be learned in labor.
-Little sense of process, expectation that a relationship either exists and doesn't need to be nourished, or doesn't exist and is impossible.
-Being not particularly goal oriented, feeling criticized for this, wanting to have goals but feeling unable to find any that seem real.
-Strong negative self-judgement that seems to be connected with not meeting others' unconscious expectations that the cesarian born know the relationship patterns and sense of limit learned in vaginal birth.
-Trust that help will always be there without one having to ask for it.
