I've been doing some work on my PTSD. I had mistakenly credited it solely to harsh discipline as a young child. But it started with my breech birth. My birth required turning me in the womb before bringing me out shoulder first. Then in the first several weeks my stomach stopped letting my food into my small intestine. I was starving, losing weight, with salts and other body systems pushed out of whack. The malfunctioning stomach valve was operated on at 8 weeks. The difficult birth, malfunctioning stomach and surgery act together to traumatize a newborn.
In a normal birth, the infant is positioned correctly, and when the time is right, he/she begins to stretch and push off while pointed at the exit. The mother's natural waves of contractions aid the expulsion. The turned-around little guy has the same instincts as the normally positioned baby (to push off, seek the exit with his head, and to begin twisting to start the corkscrew movement through the birth canal.) But the breeched little body registers that something is wrong. There appears to be no exit, the contractions are not helping, the little being has a survival instinct that goes into overdrive against the physical confusion. When the doctor, midwife, helper must reach up into the birth canal to reposition the baby, this is not part of "instinct."
The baby's emergency system kicks in. It feels the unnatural force being applied, including grabbing and pulling. Its protective reaction is to tense up, to freeze, to flex to keep the body together because it appears to be getting pulled apart. Getting the baby out is necessary, or baby and mother will die. But the newborn has a physical memory of a near-death experience that was averted by freezing. Trauma expert Peter A. Levine describes freezing as if a driver were to floor the car accelerator and step heavily on the brake simultaneously. Massive opposing forces clashing. The baby's amygdala records "When things don't go right--FREEZE!" There is NO CONSCIOUS MEMORY at all. Baby appears to remember nothing about the incident. But the little nervous system develops titanium neuro-wiring of the life-saving actions taken by the body, and remembers for all time, to be used whenever "something scary" presents itself.
The definition of "something scary," the trigger, may be as simple as "any novelty." The young nervous system is seconds old, has NO experience, yet wires in beyond the reach of the conscious mind a life-saving procedure that might remain in effect for an entire life. It's reachable to reverse, but by specific methods that take advantage of the body's natural desire to release itself from the accelerator/brake freezing response.
Here's a link to an article I enjoyed on this topic:
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/did/111512
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