Trying to write the story of my childhood in a logical, chronological, coherent way is an almost overwhelming task. As I’ve said before an inability to tell a coherent life story is perhaps the MAIN symptom of an insecure attachment. This dis-ability to either live a coherent life or to tell the story of one’s own life in a coherent fashion manifests itself by degrees of damage in accordance with how insecurely attached a person is.
These degrees of damage move down the scale from being slightly insecurely attached to extremely insecurely attached. For those of us like my mother and myself, the most severe insecure attachment pattern, that of disorganized-disoriented, means that we are not even securely attached in our fundamental relationship between our self and our self. As a result, we cannot possibly either live a coherent life or tell a coherent story of our life. That is what the disorganization and disorientation of our insecure attachment pattern, formed into our early developing brain, did and does to us.
Our condition is a direct result and manifestation of living through traumas at a very early age that built themselves into our developing brain, body and mind. I understood very early in my own research about the reality of my condition that what is known as ‘peritrauma’ is key and central to my understanding of a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern. Peritrauma is what happens in the middle of the experience of a traumatic event during what the experts call the Acute Trauma stage.
I suspect that we will gain far more information about how the experience of trauma affects us when we begin to connect what the medical profession knows about how trauma affects the physical body with what the psychiatric profession knows about how it affects us psychologically. At this point in time I find that descriptions of peritrauma are mostly contained within the Acute Trauma medial realm as it relates to the physical body as if our physical body can be separated from what happens within the brain and mind.
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I always use the online Websters dictionary to find definitions for words I require so that my findings can always be consistently tracked back to this one main source of information for the Modern English I use in my thinking. Yet not even Websters seems to contain the word ‘peritrauma’ or ‘peri-trauma’ within its data banks. I see this as further indication that we have not yet as a culture put the most important information about what truly creates disaster in our lives into the collective data banks of our own thinking.
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Dictionary: trau·ma (trô‘mə, trou‘-)
n., pl. -mas or -ma·ta (-mə-tə).
- A serious injury or shock to the body, as from violence or an accident.
- An emotional wound or shock that creates substantial, lasting damage to the psychological development of a person, often leading to neurosis.
- An event or situation that causes great distress and disruption.
[Greek.]
traumatic trau·mat’ic (-măt‘ĭk) adj.
traumatically trau·mat’i·cal·ly adv.
From : http://www.answers.com/topic/psychological-trauma
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I discovered this link through my efforts to connect physical trauma to mental trauma. I can think of no more of an accurate place to begin to think about the effects of peritrauma as it relates to child abuse than this one:
[PDF] Psychology of Terrorism
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
pressure to define terrorist behavior in terms of psychopathology, and he clearly suggests …… peritrauma and posttrauma risk factors, are central …… Webster’s New Collegiate Dic- tionary. Springfield, MA: G & C Merriam Company. …
bourbonandlawndarts.googlepages.com/Psychology.of.Terrorism-0195172493.pdf –
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Acute trauma is the physiological stage we are in while we experience any trauma. Acute trauma affects every possible aspect of who we are as human beings with bodies — including our brain-mind. Peritrauma is the ongoing experience of being in an acute trauma experience as we are enduring it. Post traumatic stages are the result of not completing the acute trauma stage adequately so that it can be ‘passed through’ rather than NOT ‘passed through’.
In my thinking, it’s that simple. Either we experience the acute trauma stage and come out the other end having completed the trauma cycle, or we don’t. If we do not complete the trauma cycle this means that aspects of the peritrauma we experienced AT THE CENTER of the acute trauma stage are carried within us in our bodies, brains and minds. We have not, therefore, re-stored ourselves to the state we were in before the trauma happened. We have not re-covered our previous state. We have not re-membered the being that we were before the trauma occurred.
We are left fragmented within ourselves and will not be able to tell a truly coherent story — not even to ourselves — of what the experience was like for us because we are actually still in it. When we are left with unresolved, uncompleted traumatic experiences within us — in the form of continued and ongoing peritraumatic reactions that originated during the acute trauma experience — trauma will continue to live itself through us. We are therefore correspondingly robbed of our own ability to live our own lives free from trauma. It owns us. It possesses us. And it can consume us.
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If severe traumatic experiences happen to very young infants and children, the traumas so build themselves into the fabric and structure of the early developing brain-mind that the peritraumatic spectrum of these experiences can never be later extricated. They instead determine how the survivor will process information about being in the world for the rest of their lives. Dissociation, I believe, becomes the operating system of these brain-minds because the ongoing peritraumatic experience of the traumas were integrated into the brain-mind itself.
This is how a brain-mind built in, by and for a malevolent world continues to operate as it knows and is forced to always remember that the world is not only unsafe, but is also a disorganized and disorienting place to have to survive in. It will never be able to re-member itself as having lived before in any state other than a peritraumatic one. This kind of malevolently-formed brain, created in a severely traumatic early world, can never re-store to or re-cover back to a state it never knew in the first place.
As a result, the disorganization, disorientation, incongruity, and incoherence (and dysregulation) that is by definition a part of the peritraumatic experience during acute trauma will continue to operate through an insecure attachment system within the body and brain-mind of such a survivor for the rest of their life. Organization, orientation, congruity and coherence, if they exist within such a brain-mind at all, will be limited to certain sections of a person’s life. These separate sections might contain large fields of related experiences, but these fields of experience will not themselves be healthily connected to the survivor’s ongoing coherent experience of life.
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Trauma triggers create a shift in the ongoing experience of such a person’s life. This shift is automatic and unconscious, and happens at the speed of light because the electrical communications between the cells of our bodies, including our brain-mind, happen that fast. For severe childhood trauma survivors, both the trigger as stimulus and the automatic reaction to the trigger, directly stimulate their disorganized-disoriented dissociative core foundation of who they are in interaction with life. We should not be surprised, therefore, that these people continue to surprise us. If they COULD become conscious of their patterns, they would even surprise themselves.
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I want to give you a simple and seemingly innocuous example of how my mother’s self was so easily disconnected both from her self as a self and also from the reality of those around her. My sister, Cindy, pointed this out to me after she read this part of my mother’s June 5, 1959 letter ( *1959 Alaska Letters transcribed 060309 (not filed)):
“Oh, we looked funny when we got to town – me with boots, levis etc and all of us looking – well just like homesteaders!! I hadn’t been ‘out’ for a week and hadn’t had a real bath since then! We took showers at the women’s dormitory on the base – and all got dressed up in summer cottons! My, we felt good!!!
I had packed our things in a suit case but had forgotten soap, shower cap and bobby pins and comb! I couldn’t do a thing until I had them and even refused to go to breakfast until we were cleaned up. I went over to the shopping center on Govt Hill and he opened up the store early (he was cleaning it) and I purchased the things. Oh, I hated to be seen that way. Once you’re in the city it’s just like Pasadena or any city and you feel out of place not dressed up—
Anyways later I found my shower cap and wanted a refund of 39 cents on one I’d bought so returned it and I was sure he’d never recognize me BUT he did!”
As Cindy points out, my mother often described her country-woman self by using her first name, Mildred. She described her town-woman self by using her middle name, Ann. Were it not for the inside information that we have about the condition of my mother’s brain-mind, we could believe that these designations were merely playful. Yet the words of her letter indicate that she honestly and genuinely was completely amazed if not shocked and stunned that an outsider who had seen ‘Mildred’ would recognize her as being the same person when she later met him as ‘Ann’.
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Her interaction with the shopkeeper was not a significantly traumatic experience for my mother, yet her experience of the interaction demonstrates a key and central aspect of her brain-mind’s organization, or more accurately, of its disorganization. At the instant she realized that this man actually DID recognize her, some aspect of her inner disorientation affected her. This illustrates only a tiny drop in the sea of my mother’s ongoing disorganized, disoriented, incongruous, incoherent interactions within her own life.
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I believe that my mother’s deepest taproot of being-a-self-in-the-world was embedded in unresolved early peritrauma. On this day, today, I would add Dissociative Identity Disorder to the long list of suspected diagnosis I might attach to her. This list would, in my thinking, run the range from paranoid psychotic, to manic depressive, through Borderline Personality Disorder, some form of schizoid personality disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. She was a very dangerous ‘piece of work’.
Yet all of these patterns nicely fit within a framework of disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment. As untrue as it might be, and as hard as it might be to accept if it IS true, I would say that just as my mother did not choose the malevolent conditions that formed her early brain-mind including her connection to her own self or her connection to the world around her, I do not believe she had the conscious ability to choose her later reactions to anyone or anything that happened in her life, either. That includes even her reactions to a shopkeeper’s reaction to her.
She was therefore no more capable of responding appropriately to the world around her, which included her mate and children, that would be a rapid dog. Anything about her that might have ‘appeared normal’ was simply a part of one ‘larger field of related experience’ or another. These ‘related fields’ were glued together, organized and oriented around particular patterns and themes such as ‘looking good in public’, ‘taking care of the house’, ‘having well behaved children’, and/or ‘homesteading in Alaska’.
These ‘fields’ were only tenuously and fragily connected to the taproot of one version of her self or another that had managed to form in her early childhood and to survive into her adulthood. These fields were not solidly and coherently either bound to one another or to her ongoing self-in-the-world. This allowed ongoing triggers of early traumas to evaporate, on any given occasion, any semblance of ongoing order (or of reasonality) that her fragile psych might periodically be able to construct and maintain.
I imagine these fields as they might exist on floating islands, separated from one another and from the self that creates them. They are incomplete dissociative realities, but in most cases they are the best that a survivor manage to create in their lifetime.
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Life with our mother occurred in the same active peritraumatic mine field that existed within her own self. None of us were able to know ahead of time exactly what would trip the wire that resulted in one of her mines exploding. Her various states of mind and states of being were dis-organized around the ongoing peritrauma that filled her. There was no healing of these toxic-filled gaps and no way to predict their explosions or to protect ourselves from them.
What I do know is that whatever happened to my mother during her early childhood, she came out of it mad as hell, full of uncontrollable hatred and rage, mean and fighting. In some cases, ‘hell has no fury like a scorned child’. Unfortunately my mother’s children were targets of her madness.
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Stop the Storm 