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In two of the places I have lived for any length of time in my life I’ve been able to watch one of two kinds of great soaring birds.  Both in Alaska and in northern Minnesota I watched the great soaring eagles.  Down here in the high Arizona desert right on the Mexican-American border I watch great soaring buzzards.  Each of these two bird species operates with completely different energy and drive systems.

I think about these birds today in relation to the forensic autobiographical work I am doing as I try to understand what happened to my mother in her early childhood that pushed her so far over the Borderline wall that it destroyed her life, and nearly destroyed mine in the process.

Common sense tells us that an eagle is not meant to be a buzzard.  A buzzard is not meant to be an eagle.  And yet, strange as it might seem, the developmental alterations and adaptations that a tiny developing human body must make to adjust to a malevolent early world ends up creating some fantastic combinations than we can begin to see as if they were the result of some cross-hybridizing between these two impressive species of birds.

Both species are able to soar around, floating on air currents, surveying the world far beneath them.  They have the same intent — to stay alive.  But how they do so differs greatly between the two.

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Eagles are designed with a super adrenaline system as their source of energy.  They are birds of prey with keen eyes that can see the smallest movement of prey from hundreds of feet in the air.  They can swoop down to earth at incredible speeds and unerringly nab their meal.

Buzzards, on the other hand, are designed with a thyroid-based very low energy source.  They are not solitary hunters that are designed to swoop and kill.  They are designed to hunt dead prey with conspecifics.  They can still see from hundreds of feet up in the air where they soar in great lazy circles.  Once one hunter spots food the rest are notified, and they simply settle themselves down to earth for a shared feast – the more putrefied the better.  This is the easy life!  The buzzard has broken out of the predator-prey cycle.

See:  +TOMKINS ON EVOLUTION OF AFFECT

Contained in a section from the above link Silvan Tomkins notes the following:

“In man, the thyroid is relatively larger than in any other land animal and is larger than the adrenal in comparison with the ape and virtually all the wild land animals who have a larger adrenal than thyroid.  In the fetus and human infant the adrenal gland is larger than the thyroid.  At the time of birth there begins a gradual decline of the adrenal gland dominance which continues until the twenty-first year at which time the thyroid is 2 ½ times the size of the adrenal glands.  Crile attributes some of the volatility of the infant to this early, more primitive endocrine balance.  (Tomkins/aic/157)”   [Affect – Imagery – Consciousness” volume 1:  The Positive Affects and volume 2:  The Negative Affects by Silvan S. Tomkins (Professor of Psychology, Princeton U) Springer Publishing Company, NY 1962]

In other words, what this information tells me is that very young human infant-children are designed with a hyper-drive adrenaline system that will respond to trauma with much more force and power than an adult human is even capable of.  I imagine that this is so that the tiny human’s body can receive trauma-related signals from its early environment while there is still yet time for biological developmental processes to shift all possible growth and development to allow for future survival (with hopes of reproducing offspring) in a most hostile and malevolent world.  Early malevolent conditions thus stimulate massive adrenaline responses in the human infant-child that have the most profound impact possible on the development of a tiny human being — for one single purpose — to give it the best possible odds for continued survival.

Infant-children are by design vulnerable prey.  It is important to understand that Nature has designed both predators and prey with similar, finely tuned compatible stress response systems.  If an infant-young child is born into an early malevolent environment, particularly when the predator is its early caregiver(s), the potential buried in genetic memory that allows prey to survive will become activated so far as is possible — but not without life long consequences being caused by these alterations.

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From the instant of our conception to the instant of our death, we are, as individuals, on some level ‘in charge’ of the property of our body.  We seldom consciously know, however, what direction the ‘development’ of that property is taking.  These changes happen on the molecular signal and response level.  Evolution has provided us with massive amounts of genetic information and sophisticated mechanisms that tell our genetic memory what to do in any given situation.  Is our property dry?  We best find water.  Is our property too swampy and wet?  Find a way to dry it out.  Is our property in need of soil amendments?  Find some.  Is our property in need of protection?  We better find some of that, as well.

All of this works smoothly and effortlessly – no matter what the conditions are surrounding the fetus-infant-child as it grows and develops just so long as physical life of the ‘property’, or the body, is maintained.  Whatever problems forced adjustment to malevolent early conditions create will, however,  show up eventually as the altered body, including altered brain-mind, later experiences conflict with the more benevolent world such an individual might find themselves living in during their life span.

Our body is our real estate.  It is the ONLY estate we will ever have.  But the conditions of our earliest beginnings do the major job of developing this property, and once that major development has occurred, we will NOT be able to change it.

The young human body is geared like an eagle is to respond from its adrenaline base.  If all is well in early childhood, the adult human becomes more like a buzzard who can soar around in a relatively relaxed state with its human social-specie mates in a state of cooperation and sharing of the relatively easy-to-spot-and-devour requisites for staying alive.  What I see of my mother is that her early distress environment signaled her body, including her brain-mind, to anticipate and prepare for a malevolent world of trauma and deprivation.  She existed in a chronic state of amplified anxiety that manifested itself in all sorts of destructive ways throughout her entire life time.

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She also communicated to my growing infant-child body that the world was malevolent, and shared with me – by building it right into my body – that an adrenaline-based anxiety system was needed as the best bet for staying alive.  My developing body-brain-mind-self had to adjust itself to survive the world that she knew from her own early childhood, and then created for me.  Hence, I have all sorts of anxiety-related manifestations within myself that damage my ability to exist in a benevolent rather than then malevolent world I was designed to exist in.

When it comes to the truth of a harsh reality, the problem for both my mother and for myself is that we simply LIVED TOO LONG.  The adjustments and adaptations that our body-brain-mind-self was forced to make as we developed came from our genetic memory ability to manage the property of our body in a world that far more closely matched an evolutionarily remote malevolent world of human earlier beginnings than it later matched the far more benevolent one we left home to join.

As I see it, the length of time we survived comes from a combination of factors.  Our genetic memory contained powerful adaptive potential, and the world we grew into was not completely distressful enough to destroy us physically at an early date.

There is no magic wand to be waved, no simple switch to flip that will ever readjust a human body once it has grown into adulthood to be a ‘different body’ designed to survive in a malevolent world.  The hands of the clock of evolutionary time can not be simply wound forward so that we can NOW live in a wonderful, benevolent world of plenty of safety and security.  What we need to do is face the facts, own the truth, understand the FULL consequences of infant-child development in a toxic and dangerous world of trauma and deprivation, and then learn how to recognize these consequences for what the truly are.

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