Month: September 2009

+I WAS ONLY A MOTHER TO MY CHILDREN

alchemynow1 Comment

092209 post Not My Children’s Friend

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I am thinking this morning about disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorders as they exist – in my thinking – at the root of every supposed ‘mental illness’ known to the human species.  I believe that as time marches on scientific research is going to find out that what I know at the center of my being is true.

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It is the nature of every organism to orient and organize its being around something.  I see a massive sunflower field in my mind’s eye.  Every single flower in the field turns its head continually from sunrise to sunset, following the rays of the sun.  Just as there are plants that organize and orient their existence to sunlight, there are those that have to orient themselves in the shade.

As members of a social species humans are designed to orient themselves first and foremost to other members of their species.  This organization and orientation begins with conception.  When the optimal patterns do not exist to create optimal orientation and organization as members of our social species, alterations, adaptations and distortions will manifest themselves in the body, including the brain-mind, of every ‘deprived of optimal’ member.

I cannot understand why this fundamental fact seems to be the last one specialists in human beings seem willing to consider.  To me, it is first and central.  Put any growing sunflower under a closed barrel and watch what happens to it!

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Thinking about orientation and organization today has led me to a consideration of how I parented my 3 children differently than how my parents parented me.  How did I know what I knew and do what I did?  I am not entirely sure what the answer to this question is, but I do know what it seems like to me.

I innately knew, primarily, that I did not want to raise my children the way I was raised – particularly by my mother.  Following that, I knew that my intention was to help my children to know exactly who they were as individuals.  Next my job was to help them in any way possible to better know who they were, and to be the BEST at being themselves as they possibly could be by the time it was time for them to leave home and enter their own adult lives.

In order to accomplish my above stated mission, I somehow absolutely knew that I was not ever supposed to be my children’s friend.  There are lots of words and ideas that could be pasted on top of this most simple concept, but when all is pared away, that is the MEANS by which I was (and my children will agree with me) able to be a nonabusive, successful mother.

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My thinking runs up against a fork in the road at this point.  On the one hand I want to say that for the 35 years I had a child under the age of 18 in my home, being their mother was the single, most powerful orienting and organizing factor in my life.  I did not know this, and my blindness set me up for an absolute and near total collapse of my being once the youngest walked out the door and stepped onto the Greyhound bus that took him off to Air Force boot camp when he was 18.

The other fork in the road of my thinking continues forward with the time that is passing in my life and in my children’s lives.  Ultimately today – just at this moment – I am facing a strange version of a fact.  Even though my mother appeared to despise me and abused me in one fashion or another for 18 long years – ultimately, she had me in the ‘friendship’ rather than in the daughter-mother role.

We can either hate or love our friends, but in the end we owe them nothing vital.  Yet even as they exist separately from ourselves, we can project as much of our own internal messiness onto them as we can get away with.  I see that the same problems my mother had with every single other person in her life, she also had with me, even though her troubles with me were on the most extreme end of her relationship continuum because I was the most helpless and vulnerable.

Because she did not make it out of her own early childhood with a strong, clear self, and hence could not possibly have a good relationship with this non existent self, I was simply a projected extension of her inner psychic world.  If, as adults, we are anything less than perfectly well adjusted and healthy, every relationship we are likely to have with another adult – FRIEND – can contain within it some degree and version of projection.

Even if we were deprived of the development of a strong, clear and healthy self, we can – down the road – take responsibility for ourselves and begin to realize what projections from within our self we are sending ‘out there’ onto others.  We can make a commitment to ‘bringing it all back home’.  Piece by piece, bit by bit, we can learn to recognize when we are in the process of participating in a trauma drama with those around us by realizing that what we are seeing ‘out there’ is most often simply a projection of what is messed up within ourselves.

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By making that simple decision as a mother to never place my children in a role of friendship with me, I freed myself to be their mother and I freed them to be my children.  I understood – and still understand today – that they are completely separate entities from me.  They are their own individual selves.  They are my children.  They are not my friends.  They exist within their own boundaries, are sovereigns of their own separate nation of their selfhood.  In other words, I bore them into this world, assisted them the best that I could to turn around, take their selfhood and walk away from me, marching off into the future that is their own life.

My mother could not do this.  Because of the way her brain-mind worked, she did not have this choice available to her.  Her orientation and organization around her family was anything BUT healthy.  She spewed out her own psychic traumas and contaminated her relationship with her children — and with everyone else who ever came into range of her.  I cannot say that I don’t project out my own trauma ‘issues’ on all kinds of other people in my life.  But what matters to me is that I somehow – through a miracle I am MOST GRATEFUL for – am able to spare my children from being included as pawns in my dramas.

In the last analysis, there is nothing in this lifetime that could possibly matter more to me than this.  I was able to mother my children.  I was able to let them be free to be themselves.  I do not today orient or organize my being, my existence, or my life around them.

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I continue to have intense and major problems with my own disoriented-disorganized insecure attachment disorder – and with the multiple so-called ‘mental diagnosis’ that originated from the horrible experience of childhood that I had.  I do not have a strong and clear self, or a strong and clear connection with my non-self.  It’s my job to find my own way, however.  It is not the job of my children to parent me.

Today I have a few wonderful friends.  I see that the fundamental quality that they share most in common is that they all have a strong, clear sense of their own self – and their connection to their self is a good one.  They do not in any way project their ‘garbage’ onto me.  We do not, therefore, share any form of trauma drama between us.

I could not and cannot yet say this about the intimate relationship I am trying to emotionally extricate myself from – but I am in the process of learning, learning and learning some more of what I most need to learn for centered calmness to enter my life instead of either joy or suffering connected to this person.

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Each day I have to take conscious tiny steps as I try to locate and identify my self, LINDA, as she exists in this body, in this life, in this world.  I try to attend to every detail about what she-I orients herself toward and organizes herself-my self around.  I doubt that I will ever in my lifetime be able to take for granted what my children fundamentally know – that they ARE a self, that they know who that self is, and that self is absolutely FINE!

By not placing any other relationship construct onto them – including friendship, by allowing them to be ONLY my children, by my being ONLY their mother, I was able to keep my trauma drama propensity away from them.  By being ONLY my children’s mother, I was able to provide what they needed to grow up to be ONLY their own individual self.  There is nothing more important I could possibly want for each of them.

Yes, I have a great relationship with all my children, but as their mother, not as their friend.  This, to me, is what parental love is all about.

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+THE MAD WOMAN MOTHER MOVES US ALL AGAIN!

alchemynow5 Comments

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I was nine years old when my mother wrote the following letters to her mother (in Los Angeles).  My mother had given birth 2 months prior to my brother, the 5th child.  We had left the homestead fall of 1960 and moved into a one bedroom apartment in Anchorage.  Of course that apartment was too small for six of us, so everything was hauled up the stairs into a two bedroom apartment later in the fall of 1960, the one that we are in the process of moving out of the next spring — when these letters were written.

As I work with the very few of mother’s letters I can find for the early summer of 1961, I am beginning to understand why this process is the ONLY way to begin to construct anything like a coherent time line of my childhood.  At this time (see below) we were moving back into the log house in Eagle River AT THE SAME TIME mother intended for us to return to the homestead for the summer.

In effect, this meant that at least for May and part of June 1961 we were living in three places AT THE SAME TIME — all of them in a terrific mess with boxes of things packed, piled, loaded, moved — truly insane!

What is really interesting is that not one of the older four children, myself included, have any actual memory of the moves!!  That’s part of what motivates me to go looking for them — to solve this mystery!

I had no real idea until this point in my letter transcription process of how my mother’s insanity was completely reflected in the continual changing of our place of residence, and even in the overlapping of residences!!  The following letters act as ‘signifiers’ of the states of my mother’s mind that both created the moving conditions and was itself created by the moving conditions!

I notice again and again that her maniacal cleaning was a continual thread tying all the living environments together, even on the homestead without electricity or running water.  In fact, it was even so before we made it up the mountain — in her April 14, 1959 letter where she describes how we had no water for meals because she used it all up during the day scrubbing and waxing the tiny trailer floor as it sat in another homesteader’s snow covered field — as if dropped from the air by some giant passing bird.

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May 31, 1961

Dear Mother,

It hurts me terribly to write this but I must.  The dam has broken and the flood is loose – our home is threatened by it.  I must tell you now – please cancel your plans, at least temporarily.  You mustn’t come in July at least.  Please understand.  We cannot possibly have things straightened out by then.

The past 3 years have been HECTIC in so many ways.  I don’t know, I think I’ll wire Spoerry [landlord of log house] and cancel the house.  Perhaps we should spend one more winter in town and put all in storage for the summer.

The house is 135 plus 50 oil + + +.  We have more jeep repairs as of today.

I might come down instead and next summer you could come up.

All is a mess.  I’m very unhappy.  I can’t stand it any more.  My nerves are shot to hell.  [triple underlining]

Really Mom – please tell me you understand.  All is a mess – my private life too!!  [multiple underlining]

I love you – and will write later.  Love, Mildred

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June 13, 1961

Dear Mother,

Just a note – I’m sorry but I’ve so much to do.  It’s been this way ever since moving day – 13 days of it only it started of course away before then.

2 nites ago on our (ha, ha) anniversary I slept on bare floor here – last nite on a cot (work, work, work!)

Well this is [can’t read word] that you’re to cash our check for 150 [underlined 6 times] on June 20th.

All is O.K.  We’re just busy.  Log house has had all walls washed and floors scrubbed and waxed – it was absolutely filthy which made me furious after I’d had to per-fect apartment before I left for inspection!

Now I’m doing windows on inside and out and painting bed-rooms.

Last nite went to Anchorage and bought pots, pans, stainless steel flatware and towels etc. for the place.  It’s all strictly business!

I’m so tired I could die.

Well John is on his way so I want this mailed.  He received gift from you and opened it.  He loves it – so nice!  Will spend his Birthday at Homestead at his request.

I did get David’s ‘suit’ and it’s darling was so rushed forgot to mention it.

Will write later, Love, Me

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Rest of letters here:

PRESENTING THE HOMESTEADING

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+LEFT BRAIN, RIGHT BRAIN — ‘WHO’ HAS THE TRUTH?

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I’ve been wondering today about how our left brain can make up stories and believe that they are true even though it only has some portion of the facts and truth – but never wants to admit it’s wrong!!  How about ‘the chicken and the shovel‘ research?  The left brain doesn’t care if it doesn’t have the full context.

It can be very inventive and imaginative!

And I think our left brain is completely capable of terrorizing us with the conclusions it ERRONEOUSLY makes with only a portion of relevant information — without a full context — and without an accurate knowledge of facts or the TRUTH — particularly if we have a history of trauma and a situation awakens

our sleeping trauma memory giant!

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ALSO, HOT OFF THE PRESS:

New Resource for Parents: CDC Parent Portal

Posted: 21 Sep 2009 02:53 AM PDT

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has created a Parent Portal to help parents find information to give children healthier, safer lives. The CDC Parent Portal organizes and presents information for parents and provides resources from across CDC, all in one location, making it easier for parents to find what they are looking for.

The Portal is a great source for credible, accurate information in helping parents raising healthy kids and providing a safe home and community. It also is a resource for diseases and conditions that can occur, and for developmental milestones and schedules. The Parent Portal also provides information on physical activity, diet, physical and mental health, injuries and violence, peer relationships, and a special section on risk behaviors geared for the parents of teens.

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+INFO ABOUT BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER (BPD)

alchemynow2 Comments
http://www.about.com/

Borderline Personality Disorder


In the Spotlight | More Topics |
from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
People with BPD and their family members are often desperate to find help. Unfortunately, this leaves the door open for opportunists who pedal phony treatments or therapies with no research support. This week, learn about some therapies for BPD that you can trust– all of these treatments have solid research backing.

In the Spotlight

Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality Disorder
An overview of empirically supported psychosocial treatments for BPD – all of these treatments have been shown to be effective in reducing BPD symptoms.
More Topics

Dialectical Behavior Therapy
Of all the psychosocial treatments for BPD, Dialectical Behavior Therapy or DBT has the largest body of research support. DBT is also now offered all over the world.
How to Get the Most Out of Treatment
Now that you’ve found the right therapy, how do you make sure that you get the most out of it? These tips will help you on the road to recovery.

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+INSPIRATION FROM MOTHER TERESA’S WORDS

alchemynow4 Comments

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The following is taken from pages 98 – 99 of Mother Teresa’s words found in the book Mother Teresa’s Reaching Out in Love: Stories Told by Mother Teresa by Edward Le Joly and Jaya Chaliha (Hardcover – 2002)

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I Love You, God

After a long and lively interview with Mother Teresa, Mr Kato, a Japanese journalist, admitted, ‘I still have trouble believing in God’s love.  What can you do with someone like me?’

Mother said:  ‘What you have to do is go down on your knees and pray:

My God, I believe in you.

My god, I love you.

My God, I trust you.

I am sorry.

‘Then do some small things with great love.  Help somebody.  Maybe just smile.  Is there a person who has hurt you?  You go and forgive that person.  Is there some bitterness?  Go and say it is forgiven.  And you will find Him.  God cannot be found when we are unforgiving.

‘Look at this flower.  It is so beautiful.  Can you make it or can I?  Only He can.  See the colours.  This is the presence of God.  Everyone here, each one has something beautiful.  Take your body, it is so beautiful, so pure.  Why?  He has made it.

‘Life?  No one can give it but God.  You find Him in you.  You will find that He was there all the time.  He is in your heart, only you have covered Him up.’

Pointing to the instrument on the table, Mother continues, ‘It is like this tape recorder.  You don’t see what is inside, but it is a beautiful tape recorder.  God is inside your heart, but He is covered up, and you must believe.

‘How do you believe?  Say often during the day:  “My God in my heart, I believe in your faithful love for me.  I love you.”  Can you remember that?  Can you write that?  God loves me.’

Mother gave Mr Kato a card with the drawing of a child at rest in the Hand of God.  Writing his name on it, Mother continues, ‘You are that little child in the Hand of God.  YOU.’  She quoted from the Holy Bible:  ‘I will never forget you.  I have carved you in the palm of my hand.  I have called you by your name.  You are mine.  You are precious to me.  I love you.’  (Isaiah)

Mr Kato said, “I understand that this child is me but I don’t know if this is God’s Hand or not!’

Mother replied, ‘Do you find it difficult to believe that?  Well, there is no need to believe.  It is like that.  Two and two make four.  You don’t have to believe.  God is.  There is nothing more to say than that.’

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+HOW MUCH STRESS-DISTRESS DID MY PARENTS CREATE FOR THEMSELVES?

alchemynowLeave a comment

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When people talk about ‘normal’ families that some children grow up in — what in the world are they talking about?

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*Age 9 – October 4, 1960 Letter — Terrible Parental Financial Stress

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This letter is contained with the rest of my mother’s homesteading letters:

PRESENTING THE HOMESTEADING

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+EXTREME STATES AND BRAIN REWIRING

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PLEASE READ THIS ARTICLE BEFORE READING THIS POST:

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Mind & Brain / Senses

Extreme States

Out-of-body experiences? Near-death experiences? Researchers are beginning to understand what’s really going on.

by Steven Kotler, Photo illustration by Josef Astor

From the July 2005 issue, Discover, published online July 24, 2005

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HERE ARE SOME POINTS I PONDER AND QUESTION:

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”…I was also watching the chute’s open-close-open routine, despite knowing that what I was watching was technically impossible to see.”

Those of us with extreme early and chronic child abuse histories are very likely be able to ‘do this’.  We can have access to information about ourselves in the world that seems to defy ‘scientific’ or ‘rational’ explanation.  What’s more, these abilities appear to have been built into our growing brains.

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Interesting statement:

“…most out-of-body tales do not take place within the confines of an extreme environment. They transpire as part of normal lives.”

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“The out-of-body experience is much like the near-death experience, and any exploration of one must include the other. While out-of-body experiences are defined by a perceptual shift in consciousness, no more and no less, near-death experiences start with this shift and then proceed along a characteristic trajectory. People report entering a dark tunnel, heading into light, and feeling an all-encompassing sense of peace, warmth, love, and welcome. They recall being reassured along the way by dead friends, relatives, and a gamut of religious figures. Occasionally, there’s a life review, followed by a decision of the “should I stay or should I go?” variety. A 1990 Gallup poll of American adults found that almost 12 percent of Americans, roughly 30 million individuals, said they have had some sort of near-death experience.”

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Take a look at the information about this:

“When Whinnery reviewed his data, he noted a correlation: The longer his pilots were knocked out, the closer they got to brain death. And the closer they got to brain death, the more likely it was that an out-of-body experience would turn into a near-death experience. This was the first hard evidence for what had been long suspected—that the two states are not two divergent phenomena, but two points on a continuum.”

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It makes me wonder about how a very young growing brain processes traumatic information.  Because an infant-child person is too young to even have a completely formed sense of self when traumas occur, how would their brain even process information related to “Am I out of my body or am I dead?”

It seems to me that a very young child would first have to develop enough of a brain ability to even know they were a self-alive-in-the-world before these kinds of concepts could even apply.  What happens if the trauma-generating experiences build the very question itself into the growing brain – “Am I alive or am I dead?”

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“The simplest conclusion to draw from these studies is that, give or take some inexplicable memories, these phenomena are simply normal physical processes that occur during unusual circumstances.”

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“What researchers have studied is the effect of a near-death experience. Van Lommel conducted lengthy interviews and administered a battery of standard psychological tests to his study group of cardiac-arrest patients. The subset that had had a near-death experience reported more self-awareness, more social awareness, and more religious feelings than the others.

“Van Lommel then repeated this process after a two-year interval and found the group with near-death experience still had complete memories of the event, while others’ recollections were strikingly less vivid. He found that the near-death experience group also had an increased belief in an afterlife and a decreased fear of death compared with the others. After eight years he again repeated the whole process and found those two-year effects significantly more pronounced. The near-death experience group was much more empathetic, emotionally vulnerable, and often showed evidence of increased intuitive awareness. They still showed no fear of death and held a strong belief in an afterlife.”

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So what might that mean for those of us severely abused and traumatized at a very early age?  Might there be something about those experiences that makes us perceive our being-in-the-world in a different way – from the very start?

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“Morse, too, did follow-up studies long after his original research. He also did a separate study involving elderly people who had a near-death experience in early childhood. “The results were the same for both groups,” says Morse. “Nearly all of the people who had had a near-death experience—no matter if it was 10 years ago or 50—were still absolutely convinced their lives had meaning and that there was a universal, unifying thread of love which provided that meaning. Matched against a control group, they scored much higher on life-attitude tests, significantly lower on fear-of-death tests, gave more money to charity, and took fewer medications. There’s no other way to look at the data. These people were just transformed by the experience.”

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To me, there’s obviously an incomparable difference in experience between what a 10-year-old might know from a childhood near death experience and what a 10-week or 10-month old infant might know.

What happens when a very young infant-child perceives that their survival is being threatened LONG before they can even begin to THINK?

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So what might out-of-body experiences, near death experiences, coma experiences and religious experiences share in common?

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“Britton hypothesized that people who have undergone a near-death experience might show the same altered brain firing patterns as people with temporal lobe epilepsy….Britton thinks near-death experience somehow rewires the brain, and she has found some support for her hypothesis regarding altered activity in the temporal lobe.”

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What might they have to do with depression?

“She [Britton] then asked a University of Arizona epilepsy specialist who knew nothing about the experiment to analyze the EEGs. Two features distinguished the group with near-death experience from the controls: They needed far less sleep, and they went into REM (rapid eye movement) sleep far later in the sleep cycle than normal people. “The point at which someone goes into REM sleep is a fantastic indicator of depressive tendencies,” says Britton. “We’ve gotten very good at this kind of research. If you took 100 people and did a sleep study, we can look at the data and know, by looking at the time they entered REM, who’s going to become depressed in the next year and who isn’t.”

Normal people enter REM at 90 minutes. Depressed people enter at 60 minutes or sooner. Britton found that the vast majority of her group with near-death experience entered REM sleep at 110 minutes. With that finding, she identified the first objective neurophysiological difference in people who have had a near-death experience.

Britton thinks near-death experience somehow rewires the brain, and she has found some support for her hypothesis regarding altered activity in the temporal lobe: Twenty-two percent of the group with near-death experience showed synchrony in the temporal lobe, the same kind of firing pattern associated with temporal lobe epilepsy.

She also found something that didn’t fit with her hypothesis. The temporal lobe synchrony wasn’t happening on the right side of the brain, the site that had been linked in Penfield’s studies to religious feeling in temporal lobe epilepsy. Instead she found it on the left side of the brain. That finding made some people uncomfortable because it echoed studies that pinpointed, in far more detail than Penfield achieved, the exact locations in the brain that were most active and most inactive during periods of profound religious experience.”

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What about religious experience?

“Over the past 10 years a number of different scientists, including neurologist James Austin from the University of Colorado, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, and the late anthropologist and psychiatrist Eugene D’Aquili from the University of Pennsylvania, have done SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) scans of the brains of Buddhists during meditation and of Franciscan nuns during prayer. They found a marked decrease in activity in the parietal lobes, an area in the upper rear of the brain. This region helps us orient ourselves in space; it allows us to judge angles and curves and distances and to know where the self ends and the rest of the world begins. People who suffer injuries in this area have great difficulties navigating life’s simplest landscapes. Sitting down on a couch, for example, becomes a task of Herculean impossibility because they are unsure where their own legs end and the sofa begins. The SPECT scans indicated that meditation temporarily blocks the processing of sensory information within both parietal lobes…..

When that happens, as Newberg and D’Aquili point out in their book Why God Won’t Go Away, “the brain would have no choice but to perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses. And this perception would feel utterly and unquestionably real.” They use the brain-scan findings to explain the interconnected cosmic unity that the Buddhists experienced, but the results could also explain what Morse calls the “universal, unifying thread of love” that people with near-death experience consistently reported.

These brain scans show that when the parietal lobes go quiet, portions of the right temporal lobe—some of the same portions that Penfield showed produced feelings of excessive religiosity, out-of-body experiences, and vivid hallucinations—become more active. ….”

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And, this article’s conclusion:

“None of this work is without controversy, but an increasing number of scientists now think that our brains are wired for mystical experiences. The studies confirm that these experiences are as real as any others, because our involvement with the rest of the universe is mediated by our brains. Whether these experiences are simply right temporal lobe activity, as many suspect, or, as Britton’s work hints and Morse believes, a whole brain effect, remains an open question. But Persinger thinks there is a simple explanation for why people with near-death experience have memories of things that occurred while they were apparently dead. The memory-forming structures lie deep within the brain, he says, and they probably remain active for a few minutes after brain activity in the outer cortex has stopped. Still, Crystal Merzlock remembered events that occurred more than 19 minutes after her heart stopped. Nobody has a full explanation for this phenomenon, and we are left in that very familiar mystical state: the one where we still don’t have all the answers.”

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For myself, I am most interested in this statement:

“…in the parietal lobes, an area in the upper rear of the brain. This region helps us orient ourselves in space; it allows us to judge angles and curves and distances and to know where the self ends and the rest of the world begins. People who suffer injuries in this area have great difficulties navigating life’s simplest landscapes.”

I think when severe threat-to-life trauma in a malevolent early brain-forming stages of brain development happens, the entire orientation of a forming ‘self-in-the-world’ is changed.  Such a growing self does not receive the right information to orient themselves in the world.  That is why, in my considerations, malevolent early developmental caregiver interactions create a disoriented disorganized insecure attachment between the growing self and the world.

How does a growing brain orient itself in an environment of trauma and chaos?  Are we to believe that such an infant-child translates its threat-to-life experiences into expressions of ‘love and bliss’?

How ludicrous an idea is that one?  Yet I do believe all these same states of being described in this article – as they exist as human potential – are involved with the alterations a trauma-built brain has to go through in order to survive in a malevolent early world.

Something to think about considering the ‘injuries’ to the development of the self-in-the-world that an abused infant-child experiences.

How do we know we are we alive in a body even though we are not dead – and where exactly IS the line between the two?  After all, the experience of trauma is itself an extreme state experience — and our brain knows it no matter HOW YOUNG WE ARE.   It is entirely possible for trauma to ‘rewire the brain’ just as any other ‘extreme state’ experience can.

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RECOMMENDED – VISIT THIS WEBSITE!!

Randi Kreger
* http://www.BPDCentral.com
* Stop Walking on Eggshells
* Stop Walking on Eggshells Workbook
* The Essential Family Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder

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+NOPE, DON’T SPANK!

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Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog

Spanking Kids Can Do More Harm than Good

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 10:56 AM PDT

Spanking can have negative effects, according to a new study of low-income toddlers. The longitudinal study that looks at how low-income parents discipline their young children found that spanking 1-year-olds leads to more aggressive behaviors and less sophisticated cognitive development in the next two years. Verbal punishment is not associated with such effects, especially when it is accompanied by emotional support from mothers.

Researchers at Duke University, the University of Missouri-Columbia, the University of South Carolina, Columbia University, Harvard University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill conducted the research.

Beliefs on spanking vary across cultures. In this study, the researchers looked at more than 2,500 exclusively low-income White, African American, and Mexican-American mothers and their young children, interviewing and observing them at home when the children were 1, 2, and 3 years old. All participants’ family incomes were at or below the federal poverty level.

The study found that African American children were spanked and verbally punished significantly more than the other children in the study. The authors speculated that this might be due to cultural factors, such as belief in the importance of children’s respect for elders and in the value of physical discipline to instill that respect. Moreover, some African American mothers say that in preparing their children for a harsh, physically dangerous, and racially discriminating world, there is little room for error in their childrearing.

Unlike spanking, however, verbal punishment alone didn’t affect either child’s aggression or their cognitive development. But interestingly, when verbal punishment was accompanied by emotional support from moms, the children did better on the tests of cognitive ability.

Other findings include:
1.    Spanking at age 1 predicts aggressive behavior problems at age 2.
2.    Spanking also linked to lower scores on a mental development test at age 3.
3.    Experts say parents should explore other methods of disciplining children.
4.    Spanking reinforces negative memories in the child’s mind.

News articles on the study can be found here and here.

Concrete Angel: Spotlight on Walk for Children Team Leader George Jefferies

Posted: 15 Sep 2009 02:58 AM PDT

PCANY is thrilled to welcome a new team to the Walk for Children family, Concrete Angel. On October 17, the members of Concrete Angel and other like-minded individuals and teams will meet at the Washington Park Lake House in Albany to walk in support of child abuse prevention. Step by step, they are preventing child abuse and neglect, We applaud their passion and commitment to kids!

Below is an interview I did with Concrete Angel Team Leader George Jefferies.

PCANY: How did you find out about the walk?
George: I’ve wanted to volunteer for a child maltreatment prevention non-profit for a while, and in my scout, I came across the Prevent Child Abuse NY website. Going through it, I read about the Walk for Children, and wanted to participate.

PCANY: Why did you decide to join the walk?
George: Because I’ve always wanted to be an advocate for child maltreatment awareness, when I came across the walk, I thought, here’s a great place to start. After learning about how many people participated the year before, I knew that the impact of this walk would give their message legs (no pun intended), and I wanted to be apart of that.

PCANY: What are you hoping to accomplish by participating?
George: I think I share the same hopes for child maltreatment to end as everyone else who participates in causes like these. It took me a while to come to terms with my own experiences with it, and, I guess, in addition to wanting to raise awareness, I want to join the troop of people who have also conquered similar times. I want to get to know and help the community of people who have dedicated their time to helping others heal, prevent and educate. Abusers often times where abused first, and I’m proud to be on the roster of people who did not allow that cycle to continue, and who live happy, meaningful and love-filled lives. When I was young, walks for prevention didn’t exist, I wish they had, it exposes the hidden, which in itself, makes a world of difference.

PCANY: Have you participated in other kinds of walks?
George: The Walk for Children will be my first walk; however, a few members of Team Concrete Angel have participated in other walks such as the Revlon Run-Walk for Cancer, and have shared with me the sense of enthusiasm, unity and power you feel walking along side people with the same commitment. I’m really excited to feel that for the first time.

PCANY: Do you volunteer with any organizations?
George: I am happy to say that the PCANY Walk for Prevention is my first volunteered initiative for a cause that holds a very dear place in my heart. I hope my participation leads to a lasting relationship within the PCANY family where I can continue to help their purpose.

PCANY: Who are you recruiting to join your team? And how are you recruiting people?
George: I have reached out to my network of family, friends and colleagues. I have been able to recruit a few so far, and we hope to raise funds through the methods PCANY recommends on their site.

PCANY: What is the significance of your team’s name?
George: I proudly named my team Concrete Angel after the title of the feature film I am in pre-production of, which tells the story of a young girl and victim of child abuse. Film Concrete Angel is my first grand-scale contribution to the advocacy of child maltreatment prevention, and through this film, I hope to set a standard of social responsibility to be taken on behalf of these affected families. I do also intend for the story to be dynamic enough to inspire those who are the abuses or enablers to change their course of behavior and seek help.

PCANY: Anything else you’d like to include?
George: I stared writing the screenplay for Concrete Angel nearly four years ago. After I completed the screenplay, I decided to team up with a few others who share the same compassion for the subject matter and start the production company Altruistic Productions; whose purpose is to tell stories of under acknowledged issues, currently child maltreatment and domestic violence, raising awareness and evoking corrective and preventative action on personal and community levels.

+MOTHER’S MELANCHOLY, LONELY LETTER 3-1-1960

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One of the things I suspect about a severe insecure attachment disorder — like the disorganized-disoriented one my mother had and gave to me — is that we perpetually long for the closeness of the ones that love us most, and those we most love.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but in part our longing is bigger than life because we cannot summon the inner feeling connection with these people to sustain ourselves comfortably in their absence.

I believe there exists in our brains a fundamental breach or dissociation between our left brain’s attempts to ‘understand and know’ logically and verbally that we are loved and our right brain’s inability to FEEL that we are loved.

Our insecure attachment disorder also manifests itself in the fact that we cannot feel sustaining emotional connections with ‘regular’ people we might encounter or seek out in our lives, either.  Our lack of ability to form safe and secure attachments means that we ache inside all of the time except when we are in the actual, physical presence of our most important attachment figures.

This ache seems permanent.  I believe it is fundamentally connected to the unbearable pain of isolation from secure attachments when we were our youngest and needed them most.  Because sustaining early caregiver attachments were missing, unbearable pain and sadness built itself into our young growing right emotional-social-limbic brain instead of a sense of safety, security and attachment to others in the world.

I think my mother is expressing some of that unbearable pain in this letter, some of her deepest longing for HOME — for the safety and security of loving attachments connected to the HOME of the self in the world.

(Her words in this letter are unusual because she is acknowledging that not even being on the homestead will ease the longings of her heart.)

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March 1, 1960

Dear Mom,

Just walked over to mail box and got your long very much appreciated letter and also received your gorgeous — how do you find time to do it – knitting.  Oh Mom they’re really expert – really!!  The hat is a real beauty and the blue mittens just match her hat – and the socks are so warm.  I love hand knits….

Last week I felt absolutely marvelous – cold cleared up and I had too much pep.  Then Friday evening within one hour I came down with bad cold again!  Head stuffed up – feverish etc. – went to bed early but didn’t help.  Saturday I had so much to do and Sunday went to church again but felt horrible. Came home and had promised kids to go in town to walk around as Fur Rendezvous – Bill won’t even take time to go to movie but each has allowance and could spend it (Linda lost her purse and all her $ saved for camp – 3.50!)  Why she brought it to town I don’t know!  I felt too sick but we went and Monday I was ill.  George Washington’s Birthday but there was school but Bill was home and I stayed in bed all day – believe it or not.  Had sinus so bad it ached and felt sick all over.  Had the girl coming Tuesday (60.00 per month and ho how we need it) – luckily that broke the cold and loosened it.  This is Wednesday and I’m better but oh such mucous and my voice sounds hoarse but over sick part.  All kids have coughs – Linda was sick several days and Cindy threw up other nite all over sleeping bag that I had just finally gotten out of cleaners because it cost 5.00 to be cleaned.  (They’re off to nap and I’ll write more)

Well, they’re in bed for a nap and I find we’re on a better schedule with Suzie here – she’s 5 and so good – quite a homely plain child but so obedient and smart and a very nice play mate for Sharon who was lonely.

We do papers, paint etc. and eat at noon and they nap plus the extra $.  I almost had another child but her neighbor is caring for him.  Well what with more time to put in on homestead – just as well and Suzie’s $ will pay to have La Verne here then.  I wish I could save it but Bill and I will do well if we can get up and down – the kids couldn’t walk that mountain every nite.

We had planned for me to go in with Bill Monday and he was to drive the tractor out but I couldn’t have!  Maybe this week-end.  I dread the bill.  Oh Mom I too will be glad when we hold title.

I worry over where we’ll live next year but we’ll have to wait and see.  I wrote Spoerry one month ago about this house and she never answered (?)

I’m so glad you’re not rushed – it’s most upsetting.  By the way, you asked me if I wanted anything – I would love any of anything if you have it and I guess we could have Army ship up when we come on trip – we’ll wait and see.  Lately I’ve been wishing for a big old house – with library, dining room and all!!  I’m so tired of not having a home and kids are so big now and need their own rooms.  It seems so long since we’ve had a home.  I’ve been wishing we kept my bedroom set, our piano [from her childhood, mentioned in her 1945 diary before they left Boston for L.A.] and all.  Oh Mom, we had such a wonderful home – I wish ours had same now.  I marvel at how you did all you did – I really do – more and more.  Oh Mom, I wish we’d kept that chair Grandpa made – I wish I had our old things, altogether and a road to our homestead and house and all but honestly sometimes it seems it will never be and I get more discouraged now than before.

I wish you were settled or knew at least what you want.

Gunter’s plan to sell their house and build up the street this summer.

Poor family with 5 children got burned out Monday up the street.

I never go anywhere or see anyone.  Wish I had 6 children all day – I only charge 15.00 per week (includes lunch) [in her nursery school]

Lately I’ve felt so blue and lonely.  I need to be out and do things.  I’m tired of staying home and dread the lonely, long summer [on the mountain homestead].

Bill will be so busy again – I really dread it – terribly.

Wish you were coming up – I’d be so happy then – oh, that you were – for the entire summer.  I’d sing, I’d fly! – but as it is I dread [underlined 8 times] this summer.

It’s not even as if I had water to make a garden and I refuse to sit up there all summer again – and yet, what else??

Well, as I said no news and on I rattle about nothing.  Hope C and C aren’t mad I didn’t send $ for your hospital bill – oh that I could.

Write me – I wish I could see you.  Take care.  I love you so!!  Mildred

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letter is filed here:

*1960 (IN THE ACT) HOMESTEADING

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+WARNING! WATCH OUT FOR DEHUMANIZING DOCTORS!

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When doctors dehumanize their patients they are actually dehumanizing themselves.

After a year of horribly misery, which included a toxic chemotherapy regime to kill my advanced, aggressive breast cancer, a year of herceptin treatment post-double mastectomy (at which point they discovered I actually had two different cancers in the same breast), my first doctor finished his treatment of me in the following way.

I had my last herceptin treatment and met with him inside the ‘little room.’  He concluded his exam, left the room while I dressed, and waited for me in the hallway.  He was standing there not to encourage me, not to congratulate me for completing a grueling year of cancer treatment, but to tell me the following.

“By the way,” he said.  “I wouldn’t bother having breast reconstruction if I were you.  You won’t live long enough to enjoy it.  Besides, we’d just have to cut them off again, anyway.”

His words and his attitude would have been enough to throw even the most emotionally healthy person into a tailspin.  For me, with an 18-year history of extreme abuse from birth, his words destroyed my confidence in him, in the treatment I had experienced, in myself, and in my hopes for a full recovery.

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It took the combined love, support and assistance of all my family members and friends to turn me around enough to search for another doctor.  A year ago I chose one, and yesterday I had my LAST encounter with that one.

To a large extent because of the multitude of forced confinements in my childhood, it is all I can do to stand being put into a small exam room with a closed door.  After sitting for half an hour in a frigid examination room yesterday with my little paper waist length ‘shirt’ on waiting for my doctor, he finally entered the door, walked directly to me and grabbed my hand in a handshake.  Looking me straight in the eye he gave an Oscar-quality performance of care and concern for my well being.

Which lasted the ten seconds it took him to withdraw his hand, perch himself on his backless swivel stool, open my case file and ask me, “How long has it been since you had a mammogram?”  Not giving me time to answer his question, he added, “You didn’t have chemotherapy, did you?”

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Mammogram?  I haven’t had breasts for a year and a half.  Chemotherapy?  It nearly killed me itself.  Care and concern for my well being?  I think not!

By the time I returned home after that appointment yesterday I felt as icky as if I had been violated.  Because I had been.  There is no excuse for doctors to treat patients this way.  Absolutely NONE.

With a 30-second scan of my chart before that doctor entered the exam room to see me yesterday he could have at least informed himself enough about MY case to have treated me as the human being that man has sworn to assist.

Any of us who have suffered severe maltreatment during the very early developmental years of our childhoods are at extremely high risk for developing adult onset serious diseases – cancer included.  Severe child abuse is a terrorizing experience.  Having cancer is a terrorizing experience.  Having doctors treat me as if I am less than a speck of dirt is – to me – a traumatic reenactment of terrorizing experiences.

Most thankfully there is nothing discernable about me today to indicate the presence of cancer in my body.  For some reason nobody has explained to me, even with the presence of advanced cancer in my breast – even with two cancers in my breast – there was absolutely no ‘cancer marker’ sign whatsoever in my blood that indicated the presence of either one of them from the start.  ‘Stealth cancers’, I call them.

This second doctor told me six months ago that I will know if and when the cancer is back, not a doctor.  OK.  Then I cut myself free of them.  At the same time I would warn anyone, especially those with severe child abuse histories, to be aware and use extreme caution in the presence of doctors!  They are not necessarily human.

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Your Brain after Chemo: A Practical Guide to Lifting the Fog and Getting Back Your Focus by Daniel Silverman MD PhD and Idelle Davidson (Hardcover – Jul 13, 2009)
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