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I did not intend to write myself around in a big circle about attachment today, but I did.  I guess that is what my ‘global’ thinking just naturally does.  In the end my conclusion is that child abuse continues to happen quite simply because we let it.

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As usual I have a collection of thoughts that I can’t make sense out of until I write them down.  Once I open a Word page and begin to place all these letters together, one after the other, in rows I begin to see a THING, a post, as it forms itself on my computer screen.

Hum.  What is it I want to say?  I think about myself at age 18, having been sent away from my parents’ home out into the world some thousands of miles away from Alaska and into Navy boot camp.  What did I know of the world outside the doors of my childhood home(s)?  Nothing.

What did I know about interacting with other humans on the level playing field of so-called adulthood?  Nothing.  What did I know about what had been done to me, all the violence and hatred, fear and sadness my childhood had built up inside of me?  Nothing.

Who could I talk to about what had been done to me?  Nobody.  Who cared?  No one.  Did any of this matter to the bigger world outside of my own skin?  No, it didn’t.

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Sometimes I find myself thinking about what good I could do with the profits of a bestseller if I actually could write one and it sold well.  How could one book, or even two or three generate enough capitol to do anything that could make much of a difference toward improving the quality of life – either for survivors of child abuse or for the offspring of those trauma-changed people?

Whenever I think about efforts that might be designed to prevent child abuse my thoughts return to my mother like a compass needle pointing North.  I can’t say that women like me, who become pregnant in their teens and face the world alone are at highest risk for abusing their children.  I didn’t abuse mine.  My mother wasn’t married until she was 23.  She and my father wanted children, planned them, brought them into the world as if they were part of some perfectly orchestrated drama with the stage set and all the necessary actors trained, present and accounted for.

Would it have made a difference in my case if someone had given my parents an infant-child growth and development chart that described the needs of a human social-emotional brain in some up-beat, attractive, catchy format that would have told them clearly what safe and secure human attachment LOOKS like and FEELS like especially between a mother and her offspring?

Well, gee.  Any kind of a cutesy, informative infant-child brain growth and early development chart presented to MY MOTHER in a little pamphlet would have had to say inside as soon as she opened it up:

1)  DO NOT HATE YOUR BABY

2)  YOUR BABY IS NOT SATAN’S CHILD

3)  YOUR UNBORN INFANT DID NOT TRY TO KILL YOU AS SHE WAS BEING BORN

4)  YOUR INFANT-CHILD IS NOT A CURSE UPON YOUR LIFE

5)  YOUR BABY WAS BORN PERFECT AND IF YOU CANNOT LOVE HER, GIVE HER AWAY TO SOMEONE WHO WILL

OK.  So what if I don’t think about my mother and about other mothers and fathers who obviously have something seriously wrong with the way their own early social-emotional brain-body-mind-self developed.  Do I aim at simply trying to heighten the overall public mindset about the critical impact that all early interactions with an infant have on its growing brain?

Would anyone who had been so specifically enlightened have EVER recognized what my mother was doing to me even if they had learned this infant-brain building information.

Nope.

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I reached a dead end in my thinking.  Don’t you hate it when that happens?  Where do I go next?  Toward educating the mates of mothers such as mine was?

When I turn my thinking in the direction of my father the first thing that comes to mind is adult attachment disorders.  In order to begin to think about what kind of information could have reached my father, I think about how I could perhaps put proceeds from a bestseller into an effort to enlighten the public about what human attachment is, about how our attachment patterns are formed through our earliest brain-building experiences with our mothering caregiver, and about how those attachment patterns form how we relate to others – including our mates and offspring – for the rest of our lives.

My mother was a gregarious, charming, extremely attractive woman.  She LOOKED like quite the catch.  She ACTED like quite the catch.  My father was quiet, reserved, gentle, handsome, smart and educated.  He also appeared at quite the catch.  Mildred meets Bill, Bill marries Mildred.  End of story for the next almost 40 years until my father gave up and divorced my mother.

How to have reached my father so that he could possibly have understood that something was terribly, terribly wrong in my home of origin?

OK.  So my father did not abuse me.  So my father never once intervened to protect me.  Nobody would have spotted what was happening to me through studying my father.

UNLESS……What?

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Let me talk for a moment about how infant-childhood formed insecure attachment patterns operate in adult relationships.  First of all, if we still believe that about 50% of infant-children grow up in ‘normal’ families with good enough safe and secure attachment so that their social-emotional brain foundation operates in safe and secure patterned ways, we would pretty well know just from a description of how safe and secure adult attachment operates that even if a securely attached person should choose a mate who is insecurely attached, chances are that relationship will not last.

In fact, given that the securely attached person has a much better formed social-emotional brain from the start, they are likely to recognize the insecurely attached pattern from the beginning and then will smartly avoid any involvement in the first place.

Think about the groups of brain-changed primates I wrote about in yesterday’s post.  Those primates expertly found one another according to the patterns of signaling that each transmitted, received and understood.  If we understood ourselves better as humans, our changed-brain detection systems are every bit as capable of knowing the truth about one another as any ‘lower’ primate does.

Humans ignore the signals of secure and insecure social-emotional brain patterns.  We ignore the signs of insecure attachment.

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This brings to mind a strange collection of images.  First I think about the Ray Bradbury story that was made into a movie, Something Wicked This Way Comes.  Bradbury wrote the signs of Wicked into the story.  Signs of Wicked exist in humans.  Do we know what they are?  That depends.

In a social-emotional brain-body that has had trauma built into it and then responds to the world with insecurely attached patterns, changes in the Wicked, or Danger detection systems have been changed.  Although primates would still evidently be able to detect signals and signs from one another clearly enough to act on these differences, humans have reached a social evolution point where they can choose to ignore them and still survive.

Another image that comes to my mind is about how all kinds of living creatures can detect and ‘predict’ earthquakes.  They can sense the coming of a Tsunami.  That happens because they have no interference with their ability to remember signs and signals and to act on them the best way that they can.

Living creatures have amazing abilities to know when threat and danger is coming so that they can avoid the consequences of related potential harm whenever possible.  While humans might not have senses refined enough to be able to sense and predict earthquakes and Tsunamis that other living creatures do, we are certainly supposed to be able to do so in regard to human relationships.  If we LACK the ability to sense and detect danger that lies ahead if we chose to become ‘involved’ with another person, that only happens if we have an insecure attachment-formed early social-emotional brain.  Unfortunately, in a best-case scenario, this group includes – on some level – at least half of our adult population.

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If suddenly we gained our ability (I can’t say regained because we never got to build a securely attached social-emotional brain in the first place) to detect ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ both in ourselves and in those around us, we would still have to be able to ACT appropriately (better) in response to this information.  Very few of us with insecure attachment patterns are going to be able to do this.

We would need to be able to recognize the signs of insecure attachment patterns BOTH within our own self and within other people.  It is the nature of insecure attachment patterns that we are lacking in the ability to recognize the signs within EITHER others or within our self.  This does not mean that the signs do not exist and it does not mean that we cannot learn to understand what they are.  Once we do this, we empower ourselves to make different choices every single step of the way.

Those of us trained to drive a vehicle on public roads are trained to know what a green, yellow and red light mean when we encounter one at an intersection.  This brings to my mind one of my very favorite ideas:  BIFURCATION POINT.  A bifurcation point is a decision point where a choice is made.

Some people describe chaos as a state where all possibilities exist.  As we move forward through space and time in our life, we make billions and billions of choices we don’t think about.  For every choice we make we are ordering chaos into patterns.  One of my favorite books, Eskimo Realities, by Edmund Snow Carpenter, describes an ancient cultural approach to bringing life into existence through the ordering of chaos.

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My mother and father reached a significant bifurcation point when they met one another in the winter of 1948-1949.  Both of them ignored (for whatever reasons) the warning signs and signals about the Something Wicked that would come if they continued their relationship on down wedding lane.  What happened to me was obviously a result of their choices – or I would not exist.  The rest of what happened to me, the 18 years of severe abuse I suffered from my mother with my father’s full support of my mother, also happened to be because of the choices they made at their significant bifurcation points.

Trauma Altered Development that changes the way an infant-child’s body-brain-mind-self forms itself in a malevolent environment happens every infitesimally small bifurcation point at a time.  Every single brain neuron that responds to the conditions of an infant-child’s early environment does so at the molecular bifurcation point of early brain development.  The resiliency factors that we have as humans within our DNA operate in response – continually – to and within our environment.  This is how our attachment patterns come into being within us.

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At this point in my writing today as some inner force nudges each letter into existence on this page boils down to one single word.  INFLUENCE.

Our early environment, as it communicated its condition to us during our earliest development through our attachment experiences with our earliest mothering caregiver, influenced the molecular decisions our body-brain chose to make as it built itself.  Every time a bifurcation point was reached our body-brain physiologically, automatically and without our conscious informed consent made a decision and a choice for us.

What we need to understand is that ALL of these influences and the corresponding choices that were made within our body-brain are essentially and fundamentally ABOUT attachment in the world.  Because we are a social species (not something we have a choice over), which means that social attachment patterns are at the core of our existence, and because being a social species means that we have a prescribed range of possible responses to an influence when it occurs, ALL OF OUR RESPONSES at every bifurcation point we encounter and pass through in our lifetime means that we are having a social attachment-related experience.

We have no choice but to be influenced by all the containing parameters of the species to which we belong – our social one – in whose image we are created.

This means to me that if there is one thing that would most benefit us from learning about so that we can empower ourselves to make the best and wisest conscious choices at every bifurcation point we reach, it would be about how our human attachment systems operate.

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I could duck briefly under the umbrella of ‘ongoing life’ here and simply state that as long as we remain attached to this world we remain alive.  When we are no longer attached to this world we die.  We need basics, like air, water and food to remain attached and alive.  We have ongoing attachment systems within us that let us utilize this air, water and food.  All of our attachment systems are connected and operate together throughout every instant of our ongoing life.  Our connections to one another as members of a social species are, most simply put, a part of the same ongoing attachment-to-life system.  Our environment influences us, and our attachment systems respond.

Consciousness cannot be in any way disconnected in our thinking from attachment.  The same brain that formed itself within us during our critical windows of early infant-child development allows or disallows consciousness to manifest according to how our early attachment experiences influenced our growth.  This was no less true for my father as it was for my mother or for my self, or for any of the rest of us.

Our brain-building human attachment experiences influenced what we are conscious of and how.  There is only one other point that comes to mind as I write these words:  CARING.  Although what we care about and how is obviously tied to the body-brain we were built with from the start of our life here, I believe that it is at the level of CARING that we can most influence not only one another, but our own ongoing experience in the world.

The saying “You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink” comes to mind.  Interestingly, some say that this might be the oldest proverb in the English language.  If a horse doesn’t care to drink, it won’t.

What might influence human caring?  A donkey or a chicken could detect the signs and signals from the environment that an earthquake or a Tsunami is coming until it was ‘blue in the face’, but if nobody pays attention, if nobody gives a damn, if nobody cares, what is the point?

So, again, what might influence human caring?  One thing and one thing only comes to mind:  PAIN.  Yet the word ‘pain’, as it came into modern English in the 14^th century, has roots to both ‘punishment’ and through Sanskrit roots to ‘he revenges’.  These ideas are connected in our language to ‘vengeance’, ‘payment’, and ‘penalty’.  In order to find the oldest 9before the 12^th century) connecting concept in the roots of our language, I had to go back to the word ‘bear’ as in ‘to bear’.

It all goes back to what influences we tolerate, either through choice or because we have to.  The word ‘tolerate’ in our language goes directly back in its roots to ‘to bear’, which of course goes back to ‘carry’.

As severe infant-child abuse survivors, we had no choice but to tolerate, bear and carry within our body-brains the malevolent treatment we received.  Our deprivation-traumas changed how we developed.  That means our attachment patterns within our self to the world changed.  These changes happened according to the degree of safe and secure or unsafe and insecure attachments we had with our earliest caregivers.

How much we continue to bear remains up to us.  When and if it ever comes down to how I choose to spend any future book sale proceeds, I will allocate them exactly and specifically to public education efforts about the human attachment continuum because attachment is how our life originates and how it continues.

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What each of us had to bear when we were little is exactly what we continue to bear unless and until we care enough to change.  Caring enough will happen as people come to understand exactly what IT is that they are bearing in the first place, and that different options DO exist so they don’t have to bear IT any more.  Neither do they have to pass what they are bearing down to future generations.

IT is made up of the unsafe and insecure attachment patterns that were built into our body-brain when we were tiny while our body-brain was being built.  Conditions of our early life influenced our entire existence in the direction of survival in either a benevolent or a malevolent world.

While everyone after the age of consciousness can be influenced to be informed enough to care enough to learn to make better attachment-related choices, it is only each individual person who can actually make their own choices.  As a social species we have the power collectively to care enough to prevent – what?

I have come around full circle to the concept of free will, free choice, freedom.  Our word ‘free’ (before the 12^th century word) ties back to Sanskrit ‘own, dear’.  ‘Own’ goes back to roots before the 12^th century to ‘owe’.  ‘Owe’ goes back before the 12^th century to Sanskrit ‘he possesses’.  The word ‘dear’ also goes back in our language to before the 12^th century as it connects to ‘costly’.  Not surprisingly, by following the connections through the concept of ‘cost’ back through ‘constant’ to before the 12^th century we end up here:  ‘to stand’.

What are we able to bear?  What are we able to stand?

What are we willing to bear?  What are we willing to stand?

Are we as a society willing and able to bear that little tiny infants and children are being maltreated?  Are we as a society willing and able to stand for infant-child abuse to continue along with its cost to individual and collective well-being?

Or are we willing and able to care enough to stand up and stop it?

Think about the nature and quality of your own human attachment system.  Who do you include and who do you exclude?  If other people do not care about other people’s children enough to take a stand against all maltreatment of all children, the tragedy of child abuse will remain a reality quite simply because we choose to bear it.

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Don’t forget to check out — Brain Facts – A primer on the brain and nervous system

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