My older brother sent me the link to this site about hope and humanity
http://www.humanmedia.org/catalog/home.php
Full Length Audio Programs as Heard on Public Radio
Satellite Radio • CDs • Online MP3 Audio Downloads
++
He had just listened to a program featuring Nancy Carlsson-Paige and told me, “There are some interesting articles there to read. The interview mentioned that Nancy is the mother of actor Matt Damon.”
http://nancycarlsson-paige.org/
“Childhood is dramatically different today than it was just a generation ago, but children still need an environment that encourages healthy play, a sense of security, and strong, loving relationships. Whether you are a parent or teacher, my goal is to help you prepare and succeed in supporting children’s optimal growth in these challenging times.”
– Nancy Carlsson-Paige
++
Refer also to this interesting news article on pills and memories. If those of us with horrific childhoods had a choice, would we choose to erase our ‘bad’ memories? Part of what is so significant to me about what I have learned about early abuse and brain formation is that even if specific memories could be erased, the changes that the brain and body had to make to adjust to the conditions of the toxic and threatening, dangerous environment have already been made, and these changes are permanent.
But would elimination of specific toxic memories give us a different degree of peace within ourselves, and hence of a sense of well being?
http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/neuro/memory_drugs_sd.html
My father had brain surgery for a pituitary tumor in 1990 but ‘forgot’ to tell the brain surgeon he had a bleeding disorder. As a result, he suffered massive brain hemorrhaging but survived it. Along with an assortment of substantial deterioration, he lost all his long term memory. He did not remember he had a wife and could not remember why he had divorced her. He could not remember his childhood or his children. He could not remember homesteading or the life time of work he had done as a civil engineer. But he DID know that he couldn’t remember himself in his past and that he had forgotten everything good and bad, and he suffered greatly with this knowledge until his death 10 years later.
++
Animals enact genetic memories about how to get along in the world and reinforce behaviors for their offspring through play. Humans have an additional critical brain development layer. As we get older our brains sort out complicated information that we receive from our daily experiences in our dreams during our sleep time. Part of the disruption that occurs for PTSD sufferers happens because the traumatic experiences are so overwhelming that the brain cannot find a use for the experiences and they are not integrated. They often continue to trouble our sleep and our dreams as a result.
I found it fascinating to learn that migrating geese, for example, can go lengthy periods without sleep because they are engaging only in repetitive motor actions and do not have anything new or different happening while they are flying. They therefore don’t need to sleep. Sharks also don’t need to sleep because their repetitive motor actions consume most of their lives, and without new and unusual experiences, their brains have nothing new to process during dreaming states.
++
So what does childhood play have in common with dreaming? Children process incoming information during their play in the same way that we process incoming information in our dreams. Because the foundation of our brain’s processing of information that we can later access consciously through thought and with words is first formed in our right brain as wordless images, our species has developed ways of working with these images in ways that do not involve words — including dreaming and playing.
All our processing ‘techniques’ below consciousness still involve efficient transmission of information back and forth across our corpus collosum — the two hemispheres communicate via dense bundles of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. Early childhood trauma is known to alter the development of both hemispheres, and of the corpus callosum. These alterations interfere with processing of memory and learning, and this interruption shows itself both as problems with dreaming and especially with small children, as problems that appear in play.
++
One of the ways that intergenerational unresolved traumas are communicated to future generations is through alterations in play behavior between mother and infant. Dr. Allan Schore’s writings on early brain development so clearly describe the importance of mother-infant play that he makes me think that just watching a mother’s play interactions with her infant would provide enough information alone to be able to detect potential danger — or not — in how that mother handles raising the infant in every way.
When I return to the work of ‘translating’ such research findings into common word usage, I will write posts with more specifics about what the experts are finding about mothers, infants, play and early brain development.
++
For now I will just say that once I discovered this research and then looked back over my childhood, I realized that the deprivation I experienced by having play interfered with and removed from my early life had profound consequences both on my brain’s development and on my ability to process the traumas themselves.
I have written about one memory regarding the removal of play from my school experience in first grade: FIRST GRADE — NIGHT ON THE STOOL and of another about playing alone when I was the same age: THE MARBLES
Part of how my mother controlled me from birth was by controlling my ability to play, and as the above memories indicate, she found ways to even control my interaction with peers when I was away from her just as she controlled my interactions with my siblings when I was at home. Childhood play has evolved as a way our species engages in social interactions as members of a social species. Play affects our development from the time we are born, and without play we lose an important aspect of becoming our best selves possible, both in our relationships with ourselves and with one another.
++
In addition, we need to realize that the same region of the brain that is exercised during physical play and activity, the cerebellum
and http://www.waiting.com/brainanatomy.html) is the same region of the brain we use to coordinate thoughts when we cognate. Our body’s movement in interaction with our mother’s movements when are within her womb are thus building our capacities to coordinate our thoughts well before the time we are born. Our body’s movements continue to participate in this process during our entire lives.
Interestingly, this word cognate is directly connected to the female – or mother: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307&defl=en&q=define:cognate&ei=w2cASvP1MJ7etAOM_o3uBQ&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title). Mothering is critical to the development of humans inside and out!
A connection between movement and well being in newborns can also be seen in the fact that rocking a premature infant vastly improves their growth
including even their breathing. Is being held and rocked play to a newborn? What happened to us if our mothers couldn’t even do this? What potential monster did we create when we invented bottles for feeding babies? (I believe that this was the monster that began to harm my mother from the moment of her birth, as well as the monster that began harming me. Even monkeys won’t become attached to a propped bottle!)
http://jap.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/77/3/1548
++
As Nancy Carlsson-Paige proposes (in the link at the start of this post) our culture’s children today are at risk of developing long term socialization disabilities related to their lack of active physical play, and of positive socially interactive play experiences. An area of basic human needs that developed throughout our evolution is being tampered with and neglected, and there will be negative consequences for future generations. Play is a part of the development of well being on crucially important levels.
Realizing this fact has opened a whole new level for me to understand how my mother’s abuse of me affected my development. I believe that as ‘recovering’ survivors taking a thorough inventory of everything we know about our childhood play becomes an important tool to claiming our lives. Play is a dramatic expression of inner experience (and continues to express itself through the ‘trauma dramas’ we enact in adulthood), just as dreams are, during our entire life.
What DO we remember about our childhood play? Play occurs in an arena of safety and security. Therefore our play activities from birth are like litmus paper indicators of the degree of benevolence present in our environment, surrounding not only our caregivers but ourselves as well. In this way knowing our play history can provide us with extremely useful information about our attachment patterns to and within the world at large. Quality play does not indicate a malevolent environment. Lack of it does.
++
Thank you for reading — your comments are welcome and appreciated. Linda
Stop the Storm 
I first learned how important play is in an anthropology class — amidst a discussion about how our society puts such a premium on “productive” uses of time (“time is money”) that play is often seen as frivolous, without realizing how important it is to socialization (among other things!).