In my reply to the comment on yesterday’s post I described why I do not believe that my mother had the ability to distinguish right from wrong.
In my reply I referred to my mother’s childhood stories because I believe they include her own description of the break that happened within her own mind and the point where she became not only lost to herself but also lost her ability to connect with the ‘reality’ that most others remain in contact with throughout their lives.
My Mother’s Childhood Stories
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I believe that one of the clearest indicators that unresolved trauma from childhood continues to exist in a person can be found by looking at the ‘trauma dramas’ that repeat themselves in adulthood. This happens because the nature of unresolved trauma is that it cannot be integrated into the body-brain of a person who has been overwhelmed by it.
John J. Ratey, who authored the book “A User’s Guide To the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain”
(Vintage Books, 2002 —
wrote the following:
“The confusing terminology that neuroscience applies to the brain and its functions will itself eventually need to change – and it will as our understanding of the brain deepens. Scientists looking at pathology are still caught up in the unitary hunt for the broken neural component they imagine to be at fault, and are doing their best to match up specific brain functions with specific neurogeographical locations. The sooner we replace our mechanistic model of the brain with an ecologically centered, systems-based view, the better off we will be, for such a model better accounts for much of human experience. (Ratey, p.4)”
“…the brain is largely composed of maps, arrays of neurons that apparently represent entire objects of perception or cognition, or at least entire sensory or cognitive qualities of those objects, such as color, texture, credibility, or speed. Most cognitive functions involve the interaction of maps from many different part [sic] of the brain at once… The brain assembles perceptions by the simultaneous interaction of whole concepts, whole images….the brain is an analog processor, meaning, essentially, that it works by analogy and metaphor. It relates whole concepts to one another and looks for similarities, differences, or relationships between them [bolding is mine]. It does not assemble thoughts and feelings from bits of data. (Ratey, p.5)”
“Although metaphor and analogy are unconventional in scientific circles, I am firmly convinced that a more nonlinear kind of thought will eventually supplant much of the logical reasoning we use today [bolding is mine]. Chris Langton, one of the primary researchers in the field of complexity theory, has speculated that in the future science will become more poetic…..real trust, when emotions are running high, is based on analogy, not calculation. (Ratey, p.5)”
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I firmly believe in the truth of what Ratey is saying, and I also believe that as we move further ahead in the development of our understanding about how the brain actually works — in contrast to how we assume it works — we will know more about what the experience of mental illness actually is for people who have it. We will also know more about what creates the experience of severe child abuse for the offspring of people with mental illness such as my mother had.
As I prepare myself to write +What I Suspect of My Mother’s Early Childhood (Please read this page, it is important!), I also think about another very important piece necessary to the understanding of my mother’s abuse of me. Please follow this link to one of the important writings of Dr. Stephen B. Karpman titled, “Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis.”
http://www.itaa-net.org/tajnet/articles/karpman01.html
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Having the ability to use language means that we can assign words to bits and pieces of our experiences. It is a commonly recognized fact that one of the symptoms of PTSD and unresolved trauma is that the language centers of the brain cannot actively participate in the integration process through verbal articulation of the traumatic experience. I believe that leaves the right brain’s ability to process information in wordless images responsible for attempting to heal the traumas. It does so most actively through reenactment.
Communication through bodily movements is a far, far older means of expression than words or even hand signals are, and directly links to the emotional brain through activation of the amygdala brain region. SEE:
Bonda et al, 1996
Montreal, Canada) eva bonda, Michael petrides, david ostry and alan evans “Specific involvement of human parietal systems and the amygdala in the perception of biological motion” in The Journal of Neuroscience, june 1, 1996, 16(11), 3737-3744 http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/reprint/16/11/3737
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I believe that the ‘cognitive map’ interactions that Ratey talks about become disturbed as a result of overwhelming trauma. This matters MOST when we are talking about severe early chronic child abuse and maltreatment because the child is building its brain during these experiences that will establish what these maps are and how the brain will process information contained in the maps for the rest of their lives. As my mother’s childhood stories indicate, she wrote these stories as her brain was actively trying to form a working Theory of Mind, SEE Google search:
Because the traumas of her early life had overwhelmed her abilities to resolve them, she was forever left in this unresolved state with her right brain’s dramatic, metaphoric processes trying to resolve these traumas by itself without the assistance of the left brain or higher cortical thinking. This, to me, reflects the overriding purpose of repeated trauma dramas in adulthood. The person is acting out and communicating with the BODY what the mind does not have the ability to process within itself.
This is why I believe Karpman’s writings are so critically important in our attempts to understand what our abusive childhood experiences were linked to. While we might rather believe that some cut-and-dried scientific explanation will eventually appear that will allow us to place our experiences of trauma and abuse in some clinically sterile container, all sealed off and logically explained away, I do not believe such a solution will ever be possible to attain.
Life can be extremely messy, especially when unresolved traumas have to repeat themselves through trauma dramas that nobody, either inside the situation or outside of it, seem to be able to understand. This is why I do not believe that forgiveness has anything to do with healing from the 18 years of severe abuse I suffered from under my mother. She was simply a very big, very mean, dangerous psychotic body trying to actively resolve her experiences of early trauma through the communicative actions of the trauma drama that was her life.
We expect play among children to be their age appropriate means of coming to terms with their lives. Yet we do not realize that when a brain-mind is forced in childhood through malevolent interactions with early environments to take a detour in its development, as adults we still continue to play in a similar way. Where is that magic line where acting something out in childhood becomes dangerous in adulthood? I don’t think we know exactly where that line really is, do we? When does this tendency of the human being to act out dramas become a deadly serious game, where playing for keeps means disaster and the cost is the lack of well being for human lives?
That is why a childhood such as mine was seems like a nightmare and is as illogical and unreasonable as dreams can be. In either case the brain is trying to process information through a left brain-right brain integration effort. In situations where a child’s ability to process trauma is overwhelmed, there is nothing they can do the rest of their lives to resolve it. THAT is only one part of the tragedy.
Other parts of the tragedy include the facts that we do not necessarily recognize when such traumas are overwhelming a young child, we do not actively intervene or prevent these traumas from occurring, and we sure do not make adequate and appropriate therapy available universally to those who suffered from these overwhelming traumas in the first place.
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Any time I see repeating patterns indicating a lack of well being in an adult’s life, my own included, I can now easily see the trauma drama actions of the right brain trying to resolve traumas through action of the body. Those of us caught in these repeating trauma reenactment cycles never learned that life could be about anything other than suffering in an unsafe and insecure world. We were never told that we would act out in our lifetime the traumas that were impossible for our brains to process and integrate in any other way, including through the natural process of sleep and dreaming. It doesn’t take long for the very real consequences of our actual choices and actions in the real world to so encapsulate us in our lives that we have little or no hope of escape.
This is so far past judgment that I cannot even see that it applies. If we ever encounter someone with a severed artery we don’t stop and first ponder how this accident happened before we offer life saving assistance. Yet when it comes to recognizing repeated trauma dramas in our own and in one another’s lives we are rapidly coming to a point when these dramas are occurring so often among us that we think they are normal. This, to me, is creating a nearly overwhelming burden for those who were and are safely and securely attached in the world. Who else is there to show us there is a different and a better way to live other than bleeding to death?
The further we wander away from our meaningful and adequate social attachment relationships with one another as members of a social species, the more at risk we become for suffering from isolation loneliness, depression, addictions, harmful conspicuous consumption, obesity and all manner of neglect of our offspring, ourselves and our environment. We are more and more often spending our lives in a state of lack of well being trying desperately to repair what was never built right in the first place.
People such as my mother was are like the warning canaries the miners used to assess the safety of their working environments. The demise of my mother’s mind happened because nobody was paying attention. My own suffering in my childhood happened for the same reason. The environment of trauma that both of us grew up in happened because we were cut off from life saving assistance from others of our species. Isolation breeds dis-ease in a social species.
And because we are members of a social species we are innately destined to attempt to communicate within ourselves and to others the state of our reality. Trauma drama reenactments, as unconscious attempts to communicate the reality of malevolent experience both within our own brain and to others of our species, are seldom heard and seldom understood. The nature of the traumas simply keep passing themselves down the generations until someone at some time listens to these communications, GETS IT and offers the life saving means to resolving the traumas so that they can finally STOP repeating themselves.
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Repeated trauma dramas always indicate not only that a lack of safety and security existed in the first place, but that this same condition continues to exist in the present. They tell us about our insecure attachments within the world we live in.
Stop the Storm 