Depression and the Effects of Emotional Deprivation and Manual Care in Childhood

A few years ago, I came across something that changed my life and gave me a more profound understanding of certain things I was going through. I want to share something personal; I know that many people have been through a similar experience, and what I have discovered may help understand things better.

I don't want to generalise because perhaps you may have been through the same experience and not feeling the same, but if you do, this may help you understand why it's taking you so long to recuperate some things or feelings you feel were missing in your life.

When my mum went into labour, she lost the water, and the doctors told her that she was going to have a dry birth and it was too late for a cesarean. She had to keep pushing to get me out, and the nurses had to go on top of her and break two of her ribs to get me out of her womb.

They finally got me out, and I was asphyxiated; I was very dark (purple), and I wasn't breathing; the doctor grabbed me from my calves and slapped me a few times (on the bottom) so I could breathe and then put me away into the incubator.

I don't know for how long I was there by myself, but what happened was that I didn't receive any manual care apart from the slaps on my bottom. They put me there, and then I had to stay there until I breathed normally. I also had what they call a "birth tumour", basically a bump on my head. God knows for how long I wasn't breathing, and we know how dangerous that is for brain development.

After a certain amount of time, I think that finally got me back to my mum. She couldn't breastfeed me because she didn't have any milk, that's what people told her). I think the window was missing, and she didn't receive any training or help to understand how breastfeeding worked.

The experience itself, the way I came into the world, is symbolic, and it was essential for me to understand this over and over in this life, to comprehend why I carry certain traits and why I respond to specific circumstances in a certain way, especially the one related to touch and intimacy.

On top of that, I didn't really receive much manual care when I was a child, there wasn't much affection or understanding of the skin-to-skin contact, and there's always been growing up a kind of a sense of distance between me and other people, he always felt that it was wrong to ask for that kind of affection or to ask for a hug or a kiss.

Of course, people were present in case of emergency, they were there if I needed help, but when it comes to physical presence or that kind of comfort, being held, feeling your edges, your boundaries, your physical boundaries, I always struggle with that, it was emotionally overwhelming and really intense.

Developing a sense of self or identity was a real struggle for me because I felt I was a different person every day; it was hard for me to define who I was, as I was everything in nothing at the same time.

I was curious about 100 different things but never able to focus on specific things at times, and I didn't even know that because, as a child, you don't know these things; nobody explains these things to you, and my parents didn't have knowledge of that either, so I had to work hard to get an understanding of who this is.

One of the constant traits of my life was malicony, sadness and overall depression. Since childhood, I was very invested in dark reflections. I became interested in philosophy and literature at a very young age. I think I was nine, but it was my own world, and nobody indoctrinated me in that direction. I also started showing interest towards very tormented artists or people who didn't really have much peace within.

Somehow, maybe I was trying to find some answers about my nature and why I felt so unsettled inside, constantly battling with this depression that I can now define as depression, but at that time, I didn't know what it was.

It was a sense of disconnection, feeling like an outsider, invisible at times, misunderstood, repressed, not fully present, like floating into other dimensions, in places very far away from reality.

This depression never left; it has been my best friend all over my own life, so we had to learn how to live together.

I think I reached the peak of that when my father passed away when I was 21; then, I reached the bottom of my capacity to suffer. I felt that the pain I had experienced through my childhood and then moving on to my adolescence was not just pain related to adverse experiences, but also pain regarding feeling unsettled within my own body, and my heart couldn't take it anymore.

Thank God I had somebody there who saw that, for the first time, somebody noticed that there was something very wrong with the way I was feeling, and it proposed therapy.

For the very first time, I felt validated and entitled to suffer. I had somebody helping me, a healthy mirror helping me understand things a little bit better, not just me guessing, learning, studying or doing my own research but actually an adult explaining things to me in a way that I could grow.

That was the very turning point in my life because after that, I started my therapy journey that never really ended, and I started working actively in researching things, also from a scientific point of view in understanding why I struggle so much in my life with self-identity and depression.

One of the things that really helped me understand and make peace with certain things within myself was when I came across the studies of RENÉ SPITS, a psychiatrist studying newborns in hospitals deprived of manual care and emotional presence.

What he noticed was that all these newborns that were deprived of manual care, attention and presence were more willing to develop depression through life because they didn't have a healthy sense of self. They didn't receive that physical connection that helps them bond with other humans and, most of all to feel safe within the body and their relationship with the mother. This relationship will influence you for the rest of your life, that sense of connection and belonging, that sense of safety and reinsurance, that sense of definition of the self.

In the animal kingdom, it is crucial for babies to have contact with their mothers and to receive manual care at the very early stages.

The knowledge of understanding what happened at the very beginning of your life can be fundamental to undestand where you are right now. When you know you can find resources within yourself to overcome these obstacles, you may have to develop new parts and aspects of the self, or you may need to get some help.

If you've been through a similar experience, I will put the link below so you can find all the details. I highly encourage you to look into this research.

https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/parentingfamilydiversity/chapter/spitz/

You can find more resources on the Internet.