The Core Principles of the Integrated Model of Early Development are defined by Wendy Anne McCarty in 2005.  

1. We are sentient beings—conscious and aware from the beginning of life. We have a sense of self as we enter physical form that is present prior to, during, and after our human life.

2. From conception on, we have dual perspectives of awareness: a transcendent perspective and a human perspective. Our earliest experiences involve an intricately woven relationship between these two distinct perspectives. Together they form the Integrated Self.

3. From the moment of conception we perceive, function, communicate, and learn on nonlocal consciousness, energetic, and physical levels.

4. We have an ability to transmit and receive communication during the prenatal and perinatal period and participate in a reciprocal relational process.

5. During our gestation, birth, and early infant stages, we learn intensely and are exquisitely sensitive to our environment and relationships. Through our transcendent perspective, we have omni-awareness of our parents and others’ thoughts, feelings, and intentions that arise from their conscious and subconscious mind. Through our human self, our experience is intricately related to our mother’s experience, the health of our womb, and the physical and emotional journey at birth. During this period we form a foundational holographic blueprint from our experience.

6. This blueprint becomes the adaptive unconscious core infrastructure from which we grow and experience life at every level of our being—physical, emotional, mental, relational, and spiritual.

7. Our early experiences become part of our implicit memory reflected in our subconscious and in our autonomic functioning. These affect us below the level of our conscious awareness and directly shape our very perceptions and conceptions of reality.

8. We already are making intentional choices and forming adaptive strategies in the womb and at birth that establish potentially lifelong patterns.

9. Young babies show us established life patterns already developed from their experiences in utero, birth, and the early postnatal period (McCarty, 2002). The majority of babies born in the United States show signs of stress or traumatic imprinting (Emerson, 1998).

10. Many of the needs we have considered essential for healthy development during infancy and childhood are needs we have from the beginning of life: to be loved, wanted, welcomed, safe, nourished, seen, heard, included, and communicated with as the sentient beings we are. From the beginning of life, stress and trauma inhibit or interfere with the natural relationship between the baby’s Transcendent Self and human self.

11. As many indigenous cultures have done for centuries, communicating with babies and relating to them as conscious beings during the preconception, prenatal, birth, and infancy period on is one of the most powerful ways to support babies and can mitigate the impact of potentially traumatizing events.