Our very first school - the nine months in the womb

The Canadian prenatal psychologist Thomas Verny describes this so brilliantly: "Where do we first experience the nascent emotions of love, rejection, anxiety, and joy? In the first school we ever attend - in our mother's womb. Naturally, the student brings into this situation certain genetic endowments: intelligence, talent and preferences. However, the teacher's personality exerts a powerful influence on the result. Is she interested, patient, and knowledgeable? Does she spend time with thé student? Does she like him, love him? Does she enjoy teaching? Is she happy, sad, or distracted? Is the classroom quiet or noisy, too hot or too cold, a place of calm and tranquility or a cauldron of stress?

Numerous lines of evidence and hundreds of research studies have convinced me that it makes a difference whether we are conceived in love or hate, anxiety or violence. It makes a difference whether the woman desires to be pregnant and wants to have a child or whether that child is unwanted. It makes a difference whether the mother feels supported by family and friends, is free of addictions, lives in a stable and stress-free environment, and she receives good prenatal care.“

And Verny describes the impact of prenatal bonding in these words: "A secure person has a deep-rooted self-confidence. They know that everything will work out. They know this with the wonderful certainty of someone who has been told since the first spark of consciousness, and who has been told again and again, that they are wanted and loved. From this feeling, specific character traits naturally follow, such as optimism, confidence, openness to others and extroversion" (Extract from the book: "The secret life of the child before birth", page 29/30).

 

THE „A.P.P.A.“ METHOD 

ACADEMY TO PROMOTE PRENATAL ATTACHMENT
(PRENATAL BONDING)

Over the past few decades, scientists and researchers from all over the world and working in different disciplines such as molecular biology, gynaecology, psychology, epigenetics, neuroscience and brain research have intensively explored the experience of prenatal babies and the impact of the inner and outer circumstances of their intrauterine life.

Quite a significant number of methods and approaches have thus emerged, all of which aim to improve the physical and psychological health of the unborn child and to ensure that the pregnancy goes as smoothly as possible for the pregnant woman and her baby. These concepts include hypno-birthing, haptonomy, various forms of yoga, meditation, to name but a few.

But it is above all prenatal psychology that has endeavored to find out what the baby feels in utero, what experiences it is already undergoing before it is born and what impact this has on it, for example, if its mother is very stressed or disturbed by a possibly unwanted pregnancy? Or what are the effects of MAP on the development and the quality of the emotional bond between mother and baby when conception takes place outside of a loving act between a woman and a man but in a plastic Petri dish standing in a cold and sterile laboratory? As many questions as answers.

Two Hungarian psychoanalysts, György Hidas and Jenö Raffai, developed a very special method they called BONDING ANALYSIS. I took the 3-year training course Raffai offered in Germany to learn this method and I graduated as CERTIFIED BONDING ANALYST. At first I just accompanied pregnant women with BA, then I went on developing my own teaching concept based on what I had learned in my BA training course and adding further elements such as my "Self-Parenting" concept that I will explain in detail in my courses.

My courses are especially intended for all maternity and childbirth professionals, as well as body therapists, natural health professionals, social workers,  pregnancy counselors and anyone interested in prenatal bonding.