I discovered Brainwave.org this morning, an excellent site devoted to infant brain development through the age of three.  Another excellent site, EQ:  Emotional Intelligence Central, covers a broad range of information on the human social brain that, of course, was formed through the nature and quality of early infant caregiver interactions and affects us for the rest of our lives.

My web search this morning also brought me to a page on brain development of young children written at the university in Fargo, North Dakota where my one of my daughters works!  Another site for The Childhood Affirmations Program covers a wide range of information about “How You Can Shape Your Child’s Brain and Change the World.”

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I have had to narrow my search in my attempt to find the specific information I am looking for today.  I want to know more about when and how the very young infant brain begins to be able to know the difference between who is trustworthy and who is not.  The ability to make this distinction is something that most people can take completely for granted because it is built into an infant’s growing and developing brain so early in life we will never have conscious awareness of how we learned to accomplish this critically important task.

Those of us who were raised in extremely abusive – neglectful, inconsistent, violent, malevolent – early environments could not possibly have developed a ‘trustworthiness meter’ that works in the same way as such a system will for someone who was born into the opposite kind of environment of predictability, benevolence, safety and security.  What our brain never learned as it was built in the first place leaves us with a dis-ability that will make it difficult to recognize critical information from the humans we come into contact with for the rest of our lives.  Who is worthy of our trust and who is not?

Of course humans give and receive signals on many levels that provide us with social-brain information.  If we were formed in, by and for a malevolent world, we will not identify and respond to ANY social signals in the same way as a benevolently-formed person will.  I ask this question today for myself because I know that a person I have trusted for nine years recently ‘flipped sides’ and now appears to be my ‘enemy’.  My mind tells me, “I didn’t see it coming.”

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Whatever the specifics of my history with this man who was so important to me might be, what I think about today are the risk factors that I have carried within my brain from my earliest beginnings.  When I think about all the ‘trauma drama’ that adult child abuse survivors seem doomed to keep repeating, I want to understand more about how my altered social brain knows and does not know about how to recognize in other people what ‘ordinary’ people know so quickly, automatically and unconsciously it would make my conscious mind spin and stagger.

It helps me to realize and begin to know how profoundly my altered brain can affect me at even the most deeply important levels.  I also have to understand that there are degrees of social brain dis-abilities in people that I meet if they come from early abusive environments because their brains did not develop ‘ordinarily’, either!

Unfortunately, the information researchers are providing about how social brain development affects trustworthiness can be complicated and hard to read.  It is important, however, for us to at least know this information is available to us, and that this is a subject that concerns all of us who did not get to develop an ‘ordinary’ social brain in the first place.  Thanks to the internet we can approach the learning of information about our brain’s dis-abilities from either end of the age spectrum.

By looking at information contained in links I provided at the beginning of this post we can learn about how very young infant and child brains learn the important social and emotional information as their brains are forming from the start.  Accessing the information is easier if we look at it from the ‘young’ end.  We can think about our own abuse histories and begin to think about what happened to us, how that affected us, what we might be missing, and how we can begin to change our brains consciously.

We can also look at the information from the adult end.  That information is more complicated.  We CAN understand it with effort, however.  We need to erase that magic, invisible line that we keep in place between what the ‘average’ public can understand and what the ‘brainy experts’ can understand.

We are no longer children.  We have excellent brains, even if their development was altered through our need to adapt to malevolent early experiences.  While we might not consider our need to pay attention to new information about how our social, emotional brain-minds were changed to be of life-saving importance, we can understand that everything about how our brains formed affects the quality of our life and our states of well-being for our entire lifespan!

Even though the study might be difficult, it is worth the effort!  I encourage readers to try it.  Information empowers us on every level.  Even the process of acquiring the information, of learning itself, exercises our brain in positive ways.  Go ahead!  Give it a try!  Follow some of these ‘live links’ I have included in this post.

Even if your studying of this information helps you to better determine safety in ONLY ONE situation, your effort will be worth it!  And have fun with this.  It is not as impossible or difficult as you might think!  Everything and anything that we learn about how our social-emotional brain works will help improve our attachments — to our self, to others, and to the world as a whole.  It will also take the power away from trauma and give it to us.

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