Trends in Birth Psychology: Prenatal and Perinatal Somatics and Working with the Blueprint-Imprint Connection

Otto Rank first published his little book, The Trauma of Birth, in German (Das Trauma der Geburt) in 1924, one hundred years ago. Looking back along the timeline, we can see a common thread that focuses on the traumas of birth, or the imprints. These are overwhelming events at the beginning of life starting preconception, and include conception, implantation, discovery of the pregnancy, prenatal life, birth sequences, and after birth experiences. Our field of practice has really grown from a group of psychodynamic psychological professionals to a wide range of practitioners including birth workers, neuroscientists, parenting experts, brain and nervous system researchers, somatic therapists, bodyworkers, trauma therapists, and educators of all kinds. However, in birth psychology, the focus remains on the traumas, or the imprints, until now. There is a new trend in birth psychology emerging through the study of prenatal and perinatal somatics that is connected to what its developers call the Blueprint.

The Blueprint is described as an original matrix of intelligence and health that is in all living things (Anna Chitty). Originally talked about in the work of Randolph Stone (Stone, 1999), the Blueprint has its roots in Indian Ayurvedic and Asian medicine. Stone elaborately mapped the body’s energetic capacities (Digital Dr. Stone, 2024). Another root of the Blueprint is documented by A.T. Still in his creation of Osteopathy. His work was heavily influenced by Indigenous practices of the Shawnee people from whom he learned about intelligence of the energetic matrix expressed as health and the body (Lewis, 2012). A.T. Still founded Osteopathic Medicine and a form of physical and energetic manipulation that aligned the body with its innate health. He called upon physicians to see the health in the person they are treating, and famously said “To find health should be the object of the doctor. Anyone can find disease.” And so it is with prenatal and perinatal imprints. Once you understand what the early roots of trauma are, they are easy to see. What do you do once you see them?

In prenatal and perinatal somatics, we work with the health in the person, and understand that this basic potent matrix in the body receives the challenges that come as we develop, meets them and for those challenges that can’t be digested, it meets them and shapes itself to hold them. This binding of the imprint createsinertial fulcrums that the osteopaths called “lesions,” and we can see them as patterns in the body and mind. These early layers of experience are memories held somatically, and so birth psychology really is the study of early somatics. We come into form in our parent and make our body there, so we are relational beings from the start. Our early layers can be read as a somatic pattern language. Our story is told through the body through posture, gesture, sound, energy, and thus should be treated that way. Birth psychology has its roots in discovery by psychodynamic professionals, but now has a deeper truth as a somatic practice.

Our Blueprint practices come through somatic professionals such as body psychotherapists, osteopaths, and Biodynamic craniosacral therapists. Our psychological professionals can learn somatic practices to round out their work. Even the early birth psychology practitioners have body practices of laying down and breathing to illicit early patterns, especially with music (vibration) to stimulate the memories (Janov, Grof, Orr). This early work still exists today in the floor work of William Emerson, his followers, the regressive work connected to Stan Grof and breathwork. However, current trends in the work of Anna Chitty and the Colorado School of Energy Studies represent the evolution of birth psychology as a somatic practice of “finding the health.”

Anna Chitty developed her work over decades of practice of Biodynamic craniosacral therapy based on osteopathic principles and Polarity therapy developed by Dr. Randolph Stone. She also includes her experiences as a Diamond Heart and Zen practitioner. She partnered with her husband, John Chitty and Ray Castellino, Founder of the Castellino Training to create Blueprint practices to work with earliest trauma. Castellino was a student of William Emerson and brought forward the understanding of how imprints form in the body through compression and drag as the baby moves through the birthing parent’s pelvis. He understood the early layers of the baby’s experience as they make their body in relationship with the parent and the sensitive nature of the umbilical affect and more. The shapes of and patterns impact our body, especially the cranium, and consequently shape our perceptions. What is unresolved may shape how we perceive the world, hence the importance of resolving prenatal and perinatal trauma.

Castellino softened the cathartic approaches that Emerson introduced. The old guard practitioners such as Emerson, Leonard Orr, Arthur Janov, and Karlton Terry taught (and still teach) pushing on the body to stimulate early memory, regressing the adult to the baby’s experiences, and recreating early experiences. The cathartic approach seeks healing through recapitulation. Castellino and Chitty turned to the Blueprint to help shift the state of the imprint. It was gentle, slow, and aligned with the health in the human system and the physiology in the body connected to the present.

So, what exactly is the Blueprint? And how does a therapeutic approach work? Anna Chitty’s Blueprint Resonance work describes the Blueprint as an original invisible matrix in the body. We manifest our cells, structures, and our body from this invisible matrix. Randolph Stone details how we “step down into Creation” from the invisible to the visible through the energetic centers in the body representing the elements ether, air, fire, water, and earth. Out of this early elemental foundation, an energetic flow emerges that is slow, purposeful, and moves from the center to the periphery and returns from the periphery to the center in rhythmic cycles that can be felt. HeartMath has famously measured this energetic experience that forms in layers around the heart, then the full body (HeartMath.com). It shows up in our heart and is impacted by our emotions and stress related states. Heart rate variability helps define our health. The more we focus on the healthy rhythm of the heart, the greater our health. HeartMath practitioners teach stress reduction and positive emotions as the way into this Blueprint for Health.

Chitty teaches five practitioner skill categories and basic trauma relieving practices to allow imprints to shift and be integrated into the body and therefore the psyche of humans. These five practitioner skill categories are presence, relationship, listening, recognition, and conversation (see energyschool.com). The five practitioner skills orient us and bring us into relationship with the original matrix that we call the Blueprint. The skills combine to allow our health from this foundational layer to rise and integrate trauma, including earliest trauma. The most important skill according to Anna Chitty is the skill of presence, saying, “if there is enough presence, anything can transform.” For Chitty and prenatal and perinatal somatic practitioners, the most important skill is the quality of presence of the practitioner and their capacity to be with earliest trauma. As a practitioner, you can only take the person seeking healing as far as you have gone yourself. Seasoned practitioners have worked on their prenatal and birth imprints.

Ray Castellino incorporated the connection with the Blueprint into his Foundation Training through his work with Anna Chitty, and he and Chitty developed skills to recognize earliest layers of experience through touch and movement that are gentle. He introduced his approach in the Womb Surround Method, which itself was an evolution of birth psychology. Healing experiences moved from large groups of people that were many facilitator/experiencer dyads on the floor to small groups that worked together in mutual support and cooperation. He developed a series of Principles (White, 2014) and more (Teachings of Ray Castellino, 2024) that informed the group work that he also applied when working with families. This family work formed the Building and Enhancing Bonding and Attachment (BEBA. See beba.org) clinical approach. Teams of practitioners work together online and in person to support families that want to heal early imprints.

Chitty has moved the work of healing early imprints even farther along, which is the newest trend in healing earliest trauma. It is another avenue that coexists along with those who want the more cathartic approach, and the family and Womb Surround approach. Professionals who graduate from Chitty’s training are called Polarity Life Coaches. Chitty, who also studied Somatic Experiencing© with Peter Levine, has her own way of helping people with traumatic experiences that are fixed, stuck, and/or looping in the body. With the five practitioner skills categories, practitioners are taught to help people recognize early experiences as memories, and then using sensation and facilitation, deepen or broaden in order to relieve the hold of the traumatic state.

Bodies will hold onto the memories unless they are relieved with healing forces and these healing forces are varied. Science has shown us that sometimes it is just the environment that can help heal the imprint (see Rat Park Experiment, based on research by Alexander, Beyerstein, Hadaway & Coambs, 1981), or early parenting practices (Behavioral Epigenetics, see Szyf and Meaney, 2008). One thing that is clear when working with adults and children is that earliest memories can be very compelling. They can have a life and death feel to them, and they can show up in many layers of a person’s early life and then just recapitulate without consciousness, creating havoc. Prenatal and perinatal somatic practitioners are taught to recognize the layers: preconception, conception, prenatal life, birth sequences and intervention, and the things that may happen after birth. These layers are in the family dynamics, societal or cultural aspects of that human life. This approach takes time to learn and practice. However, we are getting clearer on the skills needed to heal earliest layers of experience, and practices for clients and practitioners. Awareness of these layers can also be taught to birth practitioners, lactation consultants, behavioral health specialists, psychological professionals, trauma specialists, medical and pediatric professionals for prevention and treatment right away so humans don’t have to carry their overwhelming experiences their whole lives.

Treatment sequences applied by the Blueprint practitioner might be:

• Recognize and name the early layer of experience.
• Reflect the strengths, adaptations, and survival strategies as the intelligence of the person they are sitting with.
• Work with them to create an intention for their life, patterns, or some specific experience.
• Apply practitioner skills to relieve the pattern using facilitation, touch and most importantly, presence and awareness of the Blueprint. We relieve the stress of the past by bringing our present skills and capacities to meet the past and integrate the experience.
• Create an integrative space, where the person can then find themselves again, their health, their own way of understanding their innate and instinctual capacities for life and living.
• Support the person’s wholeness and reconnect them to their true essential nature.

Chitty has a way of helping practitioners find what is deeper and more true in the people they support. Her work combines the energetic matrix with ministry in Diamond Approach and Zen practices that see the deeper essential qualities we all have. Built on many years of reflection and practice in the Diamond Approach, the Blueprint approach employed by Chitty integrates the essential qualities written about and practiced by A.H Almaas with Polarity and the energetic anatomy of Biodynamic craniosacral therapy. Everyone has these essential human qualities that reveal our greater spiritual nature and the polarity/energy patterns that are the basis for our earliest physical forms. When we relieve the fixations caused by trauma (integrate the imprints), our essential nature emerges. These are beautiful human qualities such as compassion, forgiveness, strength, will, discernment, joy, delight and are aspects of the Blueprint. All these elements are in us as babies, and in our relationships with them. That is the beginning. These earliest healthy states and our spiritual nature are right there in the initial layers of experience. Birth psychology has spent that last century exploring the imprint. Let us now explore the Blueprint, and its connection to the imprints. This is an evolution of the work.

Resources

Discover Kindred’s Birth Psychology Resources

Watch Kate White talk with Ray Castellino in this Kindred Video

References

Alexander BK, Beyerstein BL, Hadaway PF, Coambs RB. (1981) Effect of early and later colony housing on oral ingestion of morphine in rats. Pharmacol Biochem Behav. Oct;15(4):571-6. doi: 10.1016/0091-3057(81)90211-2. PMID: 7291261.

Lewis, J. (2012) A T. Still: From the dry bone to the living man. Dry Bone Press. Rank, O. (1924). Das Trauma der Geburt: und seine Bedeutung für die Psychoanalyse. Dover Press.

Stone, R. (1999) Polarity Therapy: The Complete Collected Works Volume I and II. Book Publishing Company.

Szyf M, Meaney MJ. Epigenetics, behaviour, and health. Allergy Asthma Clin Immunol. (2008) Mar 15;4(1):37-49. doi: 10.1186/1710-1492-4-1-37. Epub 2008 Mar 15. PMID: 20525124; PMCID: PMC2869339.

White, K. (2013). Interview with Ray Castellino, DC, RPP, RCST©, “The principles.” Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health 27(3), Spring pp. 263-275.

Topics and Websites

Digital Dr. Stone: http://digitaldrstone.org/

HeartMath: HeartMath.com

Ray Castellino: castellinotraining.com

Anna Chitty: energyschool.com

Kate White: ppncenter.com, belvederearts.com, ppnsomatics.com,

Building and Enhancing Bonding and Attachment: beba.org Teachings of Ray Castellino Short Course: https://prenatal-and-perinatal-healing-online-learning.teachable.com/p/teachings-of-ray-castellino Rat Park Experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

Behavioral Epigenetics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_epigenetics#cite_note-24

Arthur Janov: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292477441_Epigenetics_and_Primal_Therapy

Leanord Orr: https://www.rebirthingbreathwork.com/leonard-orr

Stanislav Grof: https://www.stangrof.com/

William Emerson: https://emersonbirthrx.com/?page_id=969

Karlton Terry: https://ktbabytherapy.com/