A bit confusing, that title, but... I am afraid, down to my boots terrified, of being alone and forgotten. Recently was pointed out to me by my mum that I was in an incubator after being born prematurely (and rather substantially so, about 6 weeks), and then in the ICU and unable to be held much, especially at night. I was born the week before Halloween, and finally went home the week after New Year's. Mum thinks there might be a connection, she says "cellular memory" which looks kinda sketchy, and she buys into a lot of pseudoscience stuff. I was also neglected by an alcoholic dad (not like some, but still neglect), left with him for joint custody by mum, and had a number of 'friends' throughout my life that'd abandon me whenever I was boring or otherwise pick on me. I think those might be more likely causes. But realized today that this big fear is kind of damaging to my relationships. I'm still in the process of finding a therapist, but mostly wanted to see if the whole "being mostly alone and/or untouched for the first two and a half months of my life" might be part of this deeply ingrained fear I have, since every time I mention it it gets brought up by my mum as having a definite connection. So... yeah. How much would something that happened [strikethrough]before I was off oxygen[/strikethrough] when I was a baby potentially be affecting me now, two and a half decades later?
tl;dr: Even if those experiences did affect you in some long-term way, which I feel is not likely, the experiences you had later are probably more important to your adult mindset. Even if there is some effect, it might not even matter in the bigger picture of whether you can recover from that fear. I do not know of any evidence for "cellular memory" and I am pretty sure that it's bullshit. The rest of this post is me babbling about all of the psychology shit I know that might be relevant to the question. Starting off: It is really hard to do psychological experiments with newborns, because not only can they not communicate very clearly, they can't even move very much. So it's probably impossible to give any definitive answer on how much that experience could have affected you psychologically in the long term. The way an infant experiences consciousness is thought to be very different from the way older individuals with some level of language experience it; this is theorized as a major reason that people typically can't recall events before about age four. Premature birth in itself is a risk factor for mental health problems later in life. The exact chain of causation is unknown. It could be that the same factor affects both the odds of premature birth and mental health problems, or that premature birth causes mental health problems through the physical process in some way, or the lack of contact factor that your mother brings up, or something altogether different that I'm not coming up with off the top of my head. Hospital stays early in life are associated with failure to thrive, which can be the result of limited human contact. Failure to thrive is something we can really only measure in terms of physical measures such as slow weight/size gain relative to expectations, because (as mentioned earlier) it's really really hard to figure out what infants are thinking, particularly because they don't think in the same sense that we think. It's also complicated by the fact that failure to thrive can be caused by a whole lot of things, nutritional deficiencies being one of the most common causes. I don't think there has been research done to explore any effect (or lack thereof) that failure to thrive in infancy might have on later mental health outcomes. Even if there was an effect established, failure to thrive has a lot of causes other than psychological ones, and later mental health problems could be the result of the physical effects of the condition instead. Psychologists measure attachment in toddlers using the Strange Situation Protocol. This is later than what your mother was talking about, but we could suppose that attachment as a toddler would be affected by earlier experiences and those might extend as far back as infancy. Toddlers don't really seem to remember infancy in explicit terms any more than adults do, but some kind of conditioned reaction could have taken place. Measures of attachment in early childhood are related to attachment in adulthood. The most salient limitation here is that attachment assessment is measuring what you're doing and not what you're feeling. An adult might display a secure attachment style but feel terrified when alone, or display a disorganized attachment style but not be distressed by its results. There are also cultural problems with the SSP, and the whole thing where we're trying to comprehend the entire emotional security of a small child based on their behaviors over a twenty minute period when in a situation that is by definition unusual. As far as recovery goes: Nothing that goes on in the brain is because of just one thing. There's no actual border between "nature" and "nurture" because they feed into each other. Actions that you take and things you experience effect your brain chemistry and structure which effect what actions you take and what things you choose to experience. And even disorders like PTSD that spring up in reaction to traumatic events aren't just dictated by that trauma, but also the physical state of your brain at the time surrounding that event. So let's say that your experiences as a newborn have some kind of psychological effect extending into the present. That doesn't make them the sole reason that you have a fear of being alone or problems in relationships with others, and it doesn't mean you have to do something about those experiences in particular to change how you feel and act now.
If it has any affect, I imagine it is more that you are currently(and how ever long your mom has talked to about this) aware that you were once very alone. The other experiences are a much bigger influence on why you feel this way, but knowing about your infancy could just feed into your fears. If that makes any sense?
Thank you both. That makes sense and sounds about like what I'd thought, and is also really interesting besides.
