Month: September 2009

+HUMAN AND HORSE MOTHERING – WHAT’S IN COMMON?

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I wanted to share something from a book I’m reading, The Body Language of Horses by Tom Ledbetter, Bonnie Ainslie.  My brother gave it to me while I was visiting him in Alaska.

I’ve never really had the longed for luxury of being able to spend time with horses.  I’ve always been too poor, too involved in keeping my children clothed and fed with a roof over our heads.

I find as I read this book that I feel like the authors are talking about me.  How can that be?  I am not a horse, yet I am like them.  Because of the extreme abuse I suffered from the time I was little, and because of the overall and overriding insanity present in the home I grew up in, I did not grow up to be an ordinary person.

I have tried to fit in.  I’ve tried to learn the ‘human language’ that others speak not most importantly with their words, but with their body language and the expressions on their faces.  Because my mother was psychotic, because she could not interact with me normally, I simply did not get the same brain circuitry.  Not even the regions of my brain developed according to ‘ordinary’ experiences or patterns, as I have been explaining in my writings.

I can, therefore, more closely relate to what these authors are saying about horses than I can any book I ever read about people.  I might understand a book about all sorts of other kinds of animals if one was written like this one is, but these authors express a rare and comprehensive understanding of how it is to be a horse.  I am amazed and I am feeling calmer as I read it.

Ainslie and Ledbetter explain that every time a human overwhelms a horse with human demands and misconceptions, the horse has no choice but to act like less than what it is – less than a horse.  I understand.  I was not allowed to be a child.  The way my mother treated me did not allow me to be a child just like some humans do not allow horses to be horses.

All the many parallels I find between horses and myself create inside of me a sense that I am so much more correct in my understanding of the changed body and brain of a severely abused child compared to how a child is SUPPOSED to have been allowed to develop that I really do feel like I am a member of nearly a completely different species than are ‘ordinary’ people.

And I know I am not alone.  Therefore, as I share this single paragraph from this book (so far) I wish readers to understand that human mothers create in their offspring the kind of person their infants and children grow into.  I am aware that genetics plays a part in who we become, but researchers are becoming more and more clear that severe abuse alters how genetic potential expresses itself.

Every time an infant and a young child is not given what it needs to develop into its optimal self some life long consequence to the negative is going to appear.  Only in situations where the most important resiliency factor of the AVAILABILITY of some other adequate early caregiver’s interference in the harmful influence of the severely maltreating mother is there, in the end, hope that the effects of the mother’s severe abuse will not permanently and seriously alter the person her offspring turns out to be.

I encourage readers to FEEL the following words.  Enlarge your perspective and imagine what these words are saying if you think about them in terms of the variances in the quality of human mothering and caregiving.  In human terms mothers are not forced, for the most part, to compete with other mothers for what is needed to care for their infants and children.

And yet the end result of a human continuum of living a quality, happy and successful life is still directly connected to what our mothers (or other early caregivers) gave to us.  Harm and hatred to infants DOES NOT allow them to develop into fundamentally happy people – and I don’t care how financially well-off such an offspring turns out to be.  Look at their relationships as well as financial standing.

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From The Body Language of Horses by Tom Ledbetter, Bonnie Ainslie:

“The lead mare wins dominance by physical and psychological means.  She rules as long as she remains vigorous.  Her powers serve twin purposes – first choice of food and space (a) for herself and (b) for her young.  By natural selection, the other mares organize in declining order of priority, with the lowest and most subservient getting the last and least for herself and her foal.  Unless the pasture is inhumanely crowded, everyone subsists.  But the psychological effects on the foals are substantially important.  As Number One in its own age group, the lead mare’s baby becomes habituated to the deference of its peers and their dams.  If well bred, soundly constructed and not too severely disoriented by premature weaning, the Number One foal emerges as Number One weanling, most likely to succeed in what humanity calls the Game of Life.”  (P. 64)

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We are not used to thinking about human success, including psychological success, in these terms.  We do not FIRST and FOREMOST understand that it is the health and well-being of mothers (early caregivers) that MOST affects the lifelong outcome of her offspring.

In American, in particular, we want to believe that everyone is equal, and that all can “make it” if they want to and if they work for it.  We do not want to face the fact that deprivations of a serious enough nature from conception to age 2 (and then through age 7) can so set a person off course that they will never be able to completely make up the difference.

Yes, humans may be far more complicated than horses are.  That means to me that we are at an even higher risk for negative consequences from malevolent mothering – not less.  Once our culture truly understands this fact, they will be able to give us the chances we TRULY need to find a way to live well in spite of our malevolent childhoods.

In my thinking, we have to be very clear and very careful about how we assess who and how we are in the world made mostly by people who had the benevolent childhoods we all deserved – and some received the opposite of.  Most do not become members of the ‘lower hierarchy’ because we choose to be there, any more than a horse chooses to me maltreated by a human being.

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+LINKS FROM THE PAST – MY MOTHER AND HER MOTHER – A LETTER

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All Borderlines, all abusive parents had mothers of one kind or another.  I am always asking the questions in the back of my mind, “What kind of mother was my grandmother to my mother?  What kind of mother was my great grandmother to my grandmother?”

It is of course extremely difficult for me to engage in my forensic autobiographical search to find any answer to my questions.  Yet I do have the written words of both my mother and my grandmother contained in these piles of old letters I am in the process of transcribing.

This is the link to the first of my grandmother’s letters I have transcribed.  Like drawing a single drop from a vast ocean, this single letter remains as only that single drop, yet also contains within it some reflection of the ocean of interactions my mother had over her lifetime with her own mother.

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Follow this link and see what you think!

*Grandmother’s 10-2-1961 Letter to Mother

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I just completed transcription of an earlier letter from my grandmother to my mother.  It contains these words of wisdom:

“Get a hot water bottle and a new diaphragm, Mil.”

*Grandmother’s 3-3-1960 Letter to Mother

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Newest transcriptions:

*Grandmother’s 1-9-1960 Letter to Mother

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*Grandmother’s 3-2-1960 Letter to Mother

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*Grandmother’s 3-19-1960 Letter to Mother

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*Grandmother’s 4-9-1960 Letter to Mother

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*Grandmother’s 4-17-1960 Letter to Mother

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+LINK – “WHAT DO BABIES THINK?”

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NPR – National Public Radio Program

Radio program and transcript on ‘What Do Babies Think?”

Alison Gopnik, author of The Philosophical Baby, dug into the long-avoided question about what’s going on in little ones’ noggins. Psychologists have long thought of babies as incomplete adults, but Gopnik thinks they’re smarter than we think, and even, in many ways, more intelligent than adults……….

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As we consider that severe abuse changes the way the young brain develops, it is important to gain some insight on how babies are designed to think — naturally!  Check out this link!

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+NEWLY TRANSCRIBED – MY MOTHER’S 1960 LETTERS

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Please note that only the last letter for November 1960 is newly added today

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+LINK TO TODAY’S WRITING: MEETING MY BORDERLINE MOTHER’S FRIEND

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J.V. was probably the calm to my mother’s storm.  J.V. was unshakable.  She was invincible.  She was consistent, steady, not emotionally involved, clear, outspoken and wise.  My mother could not throw the lasso of her insanity around J.V. and yank her in.  She could not employ J.V. to join with her in craziness in any way.  My mother could not cajole J.V. into any role in her ongoing destructive drama of her life.  Somehow J.V. had something rarer than any precious gem.  She had the ability to be a severe borderline’s friend for 46 years.

This link below connects to this piece that I wrote today about my visit in Alaska with my mother’s friend:

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*Age 58 – MEETING MY MOTHER’S FRIEND

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+LEFT, RIGHT, CENTER AND HIGHER BRAIN: MY RIGHT TO WRITE!

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While Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard Medical School research group have at least – and at last – finally told us the facts about how early brain development can be altered from extreme early child abuse, I can find no one who talks about what this altered brain feels like from the inside.

I am living with such an altered brain.  Every day I discover how that changed brain impacts on my ability to life anything like a quality life.

Since my return from Alaska, and since my decision to actually write a book rather than simply pouring all my words down the hole (whole) in the cup of my blog, I find that I cannot do it.  I think I know part of the reason why.  Perhaps if I articulate what this seems like I can move past what it is that is stopping me?

As Jill Bolte Taylor describes it in her book ‘My Stoke of Insight’, the right brain does not process anything like a sequence of time.  It also cannot write a book by itself.  Taylor describes how her thoughts operated in words even though she lost the ability during her left brain stroke to either verbalize or to comprehend others’ spoken words.  I wonder how a brain allows us to speak to ourselves within our skulls in word-thoughts even at those times that we cannot use language to communicate outside of ourselves?

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When my brother described how writing a book is like forming a shape from carving a block of wood, my right brain understood exactly what he was saying.  Yet I am now stuck with the dilemma of knowing that a book is a tangible, physical THING.  That means to me that my creative right brain efforts must become directed to the formation of an object.  That must require a multiple level of word-thinking, goal direction and focus that I don’t seem able to do – at least not right now until I LEARN how!

My experience with making anything creatively is that I enter what I understand is a right brain creative space that does not require words.  Some might call this FLOW.  In fact, only during brief periods of needing to organize specific actions (like getting materials together, or actually deciding how big to make something, etc.) do words ever enter my ‘making’ process.

How, then, do I creatively write a book?  My brain seems stuck in this dilemma.  Blogging is writing.  It is not about making a tangible, physical object.  I can evidently utilize my familiar brain circuitry and patterns while blogging that do not seem remotely available to me if I try to force my brain to make the switch to ‘writing the book’.

How interesting!  And currently, how impossible!  I suspect that an ‘ordinarily formed’ brain can enter FLOW space and not lose its orientation and organization in the process.  Based on my current experience, I don’t think my ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain can do that!

I understand that it is the higher cortical areas of the brain that are designed to direct the entire show of how we use our brain-minds to BE in the world.  Teicher’s group and other infant brain development specialists talk about how extreme early child abuse alters the development of BOTH brain hemispheres, of the corpus callosum that lies between them and sends information back and forth between them, and also changes how the higher cortices develop (causing early atrophy rather than normal development).  And these are certainly not the only regions, circuits and operations that are affected!

Great!  And we are supposed to live an ordinary, normal life with THAT brain?  Or write a book with it!  I can make jewelry, crochet rugs, make mosaics, draw a picture, make a clay pot, spin wool, weave, make a garden – in short, do all kinds of creative things with this brain because ‘making things’ has always been a part of who I was born to be.  But the process, or the FLOW of making things seems dissociated for me in certain ways from being able to set a concrete goal toward a specific concrete expression of that FLOW.

Throughout my childhood my mother berated and belittled me for being a stupid child because I sat in the middle of the living room floor making and remaking necklaces out of pop beads before I was two years old.  I doubt that as a young child I had any plan as my tiny fingers ‘worked’ with those beads.  I could interact between process and objects in the material world so that some ‘thing’ came out of it.  It was a natural, nonarticulated process that could happen without any higher cortical goal in mind, without self-censorship, and without any ‘attachment’ to outcome.

How do I do that with words?  Taylor has a lot to say in her book about how silent her brain became as her left brain lost its ability to ‘run the show’.  She applauds the benefits of finding ways to access that silence for ourselves as a good thing even when our whole brain is in operation.  (After eight years of focused and dedicated effort Taylor repaired her brain after her stroke at age 37.)

I say that along with thousands of other suggestions given by people who had safe and securely attached childhoods and were thus able to build ‘ordinary’ brains, that those of us with these malevolently-formed changed brains need to be very careful about taking what an ordinary brain person says about how THEIR ‘ordinary’ brain works and applying it across the board to ourselves.

I can assure you that having a silent brain caused by disconnection with the left hemisphere, and having predominantly right brain experiences without correct cooperative processing of information with the left brain, and being denied ordinary-kind supervision and direction from an ordinarily-formed higher cortex is NOT a blissful experience.  It is unsettling, difficult, challenging, disorienting, disorganizing, and SCARY!

Again, I highly recommend reading My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Ph.D., Jill Bolte Taylor.  It at least gives us a clear language and frame of reference to BEGIN to understand – from deep within our own altered experience – how an ‘ordinary’ brain works in contrast to how our ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain does!

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Enough words about this for the time being.  I do not have a co-writer or a publisher or an invested editor to help me write my book – or to act in place of the higher cortex I need to complete this task as I wish to accomplish it.  I have to find a way to argue this out for myself.  If I cannot do this, the blog will remain as my continual FLOW repository for words that seem to stream out easily in this format, but flee into invisibility if I try to direct them toward a final, finished, tangible, physical object – a book!

The silence that Taylor describes as her left brain shut down was in part about the vanishing voice of judgment and criticism that the left brain seems so prone to offer us.  Blogging is not about being right or wrong, not about succeeding or not, not about approval or any of the operations and expectations that the left brain sinks its teeth into.

If my efforts at ‘making a book’ are being sabotaged by my left brain’s critic, does it have to respond by holding its ability to process language at bay where my right brain can’t get to it?  Does it have to seal my words off from my writing, creating right brain that needs them?  “Come on, you two!  Let’s do better than that!  Cooperate, already!”

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Speaking of books, I am in the process of  reading my way through two of them:

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin

The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature by Daniel J. Levitin

I am not reading them for any particular insight into music, per se.  Levitin mentions that the word for song and the word for dance are the same in many world languages because singing involves body movement.  I know that we had both abilities, and their corresponding brain networks firmly implanted within us long before the 140,000-year-ago benchmark when our FOXP2 gene became activated and we evolved to speak.

It seems obvious to me that we evolved ways to express ourselves and to communicate through song, dance, drama, pantomime and all sorts of gestures from our earliest beginnings.  It was only after those brain regions and circuits were very well formed that we were able to use them – MUCH LATER in our development – to talk and think in words!

I am reading this book because I am looking for ways to think about how screaming, shouting, yelling and all forms of verbal violence and auditory assault in the world of the unborn and the very young child affect the development of sound (and language) processing in the developing brain.

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+ARTICLE LINK ON CHEMO BRAIN FOG

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Those of us who were severely abused as children are at highest risk for developing all the major illnesses that afflict adults, including cancer.

Because our early brain development was at extremely high risk of being interfered with, I know from personal experience that chemotherapy is especially hazardous to our fragile brain construction!  Now this from The New York Times.

It makes perfect sense to me, although they don’t mention it in this article, that chemotherapy designed to stop all rapid cell division in the body would of COURSE affect our memory.  The two brain areas identified as being the only ones known to grow new brain cells, the olfactory center (for the sense of smell so we can add new smells to our brain’s database) and the hippocampus, the part of the brain that processes incoming new memories.

If chemotherapy stops new cell division, it no doubt can (and does) affect the hippocampus.  What I know for myself is that all the ongoing work I put into making sense of the world and of finding my way around IN SPITE of the developmental changes my brain experienced due to chronic, severe early and long term child abuse were interfered with by chemotherapy.  I actually FORGOT all the intricate ways I developed to ‘hide’ my ‘dis-abilities’.

I mention this because those of us with extreme child abuse histories have a right to be heard, listened to, and respected when we tell ANY professional what we are experiencing.  I believe that if researchers knew to ask the right questions, they would find extreme child abuse survivors among the 15% this article mentions that have long term if not permanent brain alterations as a result of chemotherapy and other related cancer treatments.

Take a look at this article!

Chemotherapy Fog Is No Longer Ignored as Illusion

+BEING HUMAN, ANIMAL OR OBJECT?

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This is a complex article (link below) but concerns the important considerations about how does a severely abused young child build into its brain the correct ability to differentiate people from objects and animals if it is NOT treated as human?

Even though experts say, a young child before the age of two just IS and has not yet developed a Theory of Mind, this does not mean that all the underlying brain circuitry necessary for this ability to form after the age of two is not well in place long before that age.  If an infant and child before the age of two has been severely maltreated and does not have the benefit of a safe and secure attachment with an early caregiver, the faulty foundations within the brain will not easily – if ever – allow for an ‘ordinary’ Theory of Mind to form – at any age.

At age 58 I can clearly feel now what I believe is a major difference in the way my brain processes information from contact and experience with people from how I strongly suspect ‘ordinary’ people do.  I can become increasingly aware of HOW I operate in relation to people, but it is far too late for me to change the brain circuitry that formed during malevolent interactions with my mother and is the foundation for who and how I am in the world.

(I talked with a moose while I was visiting my brother last week in Alaska.  It came to graze under his deck and took a nap on my brother’s lawn.  Except for a very few special people in my life, I am far more comfortable conversing with a moose than I will ever be in the presence of humans.)

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Thinking About Actions:

The Neural Substrates of Person Knowledge

ABSTRACT:

“Despite an extensive literature on the neural substrates of semantic knowledge, how person-related information is represented in the brain has yet to be elucidated. Accordingly, in the present study we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of person knowledge.

Focusing on the neural substrates of action knowledge, participants reported whether or not a common set of behaviors could be performed by people or dogs. While dogs and people are capable of performing many of the same actions (e.g. run, sit, bite), we surmised that the representation of this knowledge would be associated with distinct patterns of neural activity.  Specifically, person judgments were expected to activate cortical areas associated with theory of mind (ToM) reasoning. The results supported this prediction. Whereas action-related judgments about dogs were associated with activity in various regions, including the occipital and parahippocampal gyri; identical judgments about people yielded activity in areas of prefrontal cortex, notably the right middle and medial frontal gyri.

These findings suggest that person knowledge may be functionally dissociable from comparable information about other animals, with action-related judgments about people recruiting neural activity that is indicative of ToM reasoning.”

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Two other related article links:

Linking Form and Motion in the Primate Brain

And another related article:

The Representation of Object Concepts in the Brain

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+SHARING LAST NIGHT’S NATURAL WORLD ATTACHMENT DREAM

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I am thinking today about the ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain as Dr. Martin Teicher’s research group describes it, that those of us who were severely maltreated from birth may have developed.

I am thinking about the special gifts, abilities and wisdom (as well as the risks) that having such a brain has given us as we attempt to negotiate survival in the greater, wider world that we ‘hatched’ into once we left our abusive homes.

While I am not presently free to share with you the neighbor homesteader’s email that this one of mine is in response to, I am going to share what I wrote to back to him today (see below).

I am particularly thinking about any relationships with the natural world that those of us so abused might have had in our childhoods that built themselves particularly into our right brains as we grew up.  I am very clear, especially since my recent trip to Alaska, that my experiences with the wilderness were critically important to my development.  As my ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain was developing, information from the wilderness was able to build itself into me in such a positive way that I credit it to the largest extent with creating who I am today.

I suspect that childhood attachment experiences to pets, gardening, anything to do with the out-of-doors in any way fed us as abused children and as a result we have special gifts today that ‘ordinary’ safe and securely attached-from-birth people very possibly do not have.  We very well might have ancient DNA ancestral memories that were activated within us for our very survival that the ‘ordinary’ people did not have any particular use for.

While all people need air, water, food, shelter to survive, our circumstances as severely abused children very well pushed us toward the ‘evolutionary altered’ reality that Teicher’s group describes in more ways than our current thinking has allowed us to realize.

I believe it is worth our thought to consider how our childhood experiences with the natural world not only allowed us to survive, but helped us to do that in the best way possible.  I believe as we define for ourselves who we REALLY became, and shed the shallow half-truths of mental illness diagnostic categories, we will find within ourselves some powerful gifts that belong not only to us, but to the entire human race.  Do we, indeed know a more ancient human reality?

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My email today to fellow Alaskan homesteader who grew up on his family’s homestead at the foot of the mountain in the Eagle River Valley where I spent most of my childhood:

Dear Valley Brother,

Thank you for your words.  I absolutely hear what you are saying.

I went on a 8-mile hike to Rabbit Lake with my brother and his wife, a long one for me as I am out of shape and do not have my same body back from post-chemo.  My left foot has been sore and swollen ever since.  I rubbed an Arnica gel onto it last night, and the pain left instantly.  Yet I wonder if my foot didn’t talk to me in my dream last night.

I so rarely remember my dreams these past 12 years that it seems to me often that they have left me.  Last night I woke many times but could not leave this dream.

I heard that the pristine earth has a language that humankind once knew, but that now is all but forgotten.  I heard that the last person who spoke in that language passed away and I knew in the dream that the language is at present one of human’s lost ancient languages.

Yet in my dream I understood that the language is still spoken by the earth itself in certain places, and when we walk over that land that language speaks to us through our bodies with words that form themselves exactly as our feet touch the land as we walk over it.

I heard many forgotten words, for many aspects of the world.  As I walked in sleep over Alaska in my dream I heard many ancient words that spoke of the ancient world that is itself seeming to pass away as humans change the land in different ways in modern times.

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I am reminded of another dream I had 12 years ago when I lived for two years in Sioux Falls, SD.  The most beautiful black stallion came to me pleading with me to do something to help him and his People.

“We have always before now been able to run and sleep in quiet places on the land.  We can no longer find any place that is peaceful.  Everywhere the land is always noisy now.  It can find no rest and neither can we.  Please help us.”

I knew what the stallion was saying to me.  I felt his desperation and his sadness.  But I could think of nothing I could do to help him.

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My brother and I also went down to Seward while I was in Alaska, and walked down the path to Exit Glacier.  There is a sign post there for where the edge of the glacier was in 1951.  (I hear from your mom that you were born November of the same year that I was).  In my dream last night I knew that where the glaciers are leaving the land there is a quickly vanishing purity still held within the rocks themselves as they lay exposed to the sky, perhaps for the first time.  That is where the ancient words can most strongly be heard.

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I am happy to share these words with you because I know you will understand.

Again, thanks!  Linda

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