Month: December 2009

+”MOTHER! WHERE ART THOU?” — RESPONDING TO AN INFANT-CHILD’S CRY OF NEED

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I did not intend to write about what found its way out the ends of my finger tips on this keyboard today.  Degrees of deprivation of a young human’s developmental needs cause degrees of deprivation adaptations to happen – translated by the tiny growing body as degrees of trauma – as they build the body from its start. When mothers cannot, or will not provide the necessary care to their infant-children during their critical early developmental stages some degree of Trauma Altered Development will occur.

‘Response-ability’ – are mother’s losing their ability to adequately respond to the needs of their offspring?  Is our society losing its ability to respond to the needs of mothers so that they can no longer adequately respond to the needs of their young?  My mother was simply on the far end of the infant-child deprivation of need spectrum.  How many other mothers share this offspring-deprivation spectrum with her?

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Humans are presented at conception with a package of material that is our portion of our species’ memory contained within our genetic material.  Within our DNA is the information needed to send and receive signals of communication within our growing self in relationship to the environment outside of us.  Within this DNA package we were also given abilities to accomplish an impressive range of flexible adaptation to and within our first environment.

By the time we are born our genetic memory as contained within our DNA, including the memory of what to DO with this DNA, has already accomplished an impressive amount of remembering work.  If we are fortunate, all has gone well and we appear into our next arena of development healthy.  Whatever adjustments we needed to make in order to survive and grow within our first environment were made efficiently and well.

We carry all our communication and flexible adaptive abilities right out of the womb with us, along with the rest of the package of our DNA material.  But being born has nothing to do with us having completed all of the most critical stages of our early development.  Nature was faced with two interconnected problems:  How to make an increasingly complex human being even though if left in the womb too long it would be too big to get out without killing its mother, and how to provide continued required nurturing for the infant while it completed the rest of its critical early development.

Nature solved these two problems through a sophisticated maternal preparation process that genetically and hormonally gives mothers what they need to not only carry the unborn but also to be prepared to care for the newborn as it passes through the rest of its early body-brain critical-windows of developmental stages.

All this probably sounds common knowledge to the point of, “Ho!  Hum!” until we begin to understand that HOW the mother cares for her offspring continues to determine the course of its development post-birth just as profoundly as it did pre-birth.  The mother IS an infant’s universe, and it is to THIS universe that an infant’s DNA-communication-adaptation package is going to continue to respond to in its development.

Certainly there are usually other caregivers present surrounding a newborn.  All the interactions an infant has with these significant others are important, but it is to women, the females of our species, that Nature gave the specific biological, physiological nurturing abilities an infant requires to continue its postnatal development in the best way possible.  Any deviation from what is best for an infant will result to it having to make some form of alteration as it adapts to a less-than-best environment.

Deprivations signal to the infant’s growing body that stress exists in the world it is being made for.  Changes that happen in an infant’s course of development depend on the degree of deprivation it is exposed to during the critical windows of its early growth stages.  These changes can and will be made because the original DNA package the infant received at conception contains information that not only tells the infant what conditions of its world ARE less-than-best, how to detect them, but also HOW to adjust to them in order to survive.

Depending on temperament and personality of an infant as contained within its DNA, there are allowable degrees of deprivation to which infant-children can adapt without noticeably altering the direction their overall development has to take.  Results from many years of twin study research has shown that while 50% of temperament and personality stem directly from DNA the other 50% comes directly through the experiences a developing infant-child has within its environment.

In the sophisticated juggling act that an infant-child engages with in interaction with its early primary caregiver, the margin for allowable deprivation-before-adaptation is much smaller than we might think.  I believe that we have reached a point in civilization where the given boundaries of what an infant can flexibly adapt to without having to fundamentally CHANGE itself for survival in a malevolent world can be usefully identified.

In line with the adage that “When a disease appears so will its cure,” it is now, at this point in our evolution, as women make major changes in their lives that affect the quality of care they provide to their young offspring that we must understand how these changes are impacting infant-child development.  Just because cultures allow women increasing opportunity to change their lives during their childbearing years does not in any way mean that the critical needs of developing infant-children can or will change in equal measure.  If these needs are not met, trauma-based changes will occur within the developing body-brain that will last a life time.

Advancing attachment research and increasingly sophisticated findings from the field of development neuroscience are beginning to show us in detail exactly what the best early caregiving environments are that meet the needs of young infants in the best way possible.  If mothers are no longer prepared to take care of offspring the way nature designed them to within a benevolent world in the first place, their little ones are going to suffer changes in their own development as they adapt to the deprivations present within their early environment.

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I am obviously not simply writing today about the long term and permanent adaptive adjustments an infant-child body-brain has to make to survive a severely abusive malevolent early environment as it prepares for a lifetime of living in the same.  I am talking about the universal human needs of children.  Any deprivation of basic need an infant-child suffers exists on a continuum of severity, as do the developmental changes these deprived little ones will experience and suffer from for the rest of their lives.

We have to ask ourselves, “How much deprivation of an infant-child’s fundamental human needs is OK?  How much deprivation is allowable?”  Given the 18 years of severe maltreatment I suffered from birth and throughout my childhood, I am sensitized to concern about the developmental needs of human infant-children from the far end of the maltreatment continuum.  At the same time, it is because I have been forced to learn about the permanent adaptive changes a developing little one will have to make to deprivations that I can stand on the line of this continuum and see how these degrees of deprivation cause changes all the way along its length.

I have thought long, hard and deeply about the topic of human infant-children’s fundamental needs during their early developmental stages.  I have honed my thinking to the point where what I know about the topic appears to be fact.  Best-possible human development requires that certain fundamental human needs be met adequately or some degree of deprivation-trauma will cause adaptive changes to occur during these developmental stages that create corresponding degrees of deprivation of best well-being for a lifetime.

When a society loses sight of the critical role mother’s play in the quality of their offspring’s development that society is in a state of decline.  This slide will take such a society past ‘shabby’ right into ‘a shambles’.  With 75% of our nation’s 17-24 year old young adults being currently unfit for military service I would say our national slide is moving quickly into the ‘shambles’ state.  I will also say that I strongly suspect this rapid decline of quality of life among our nation’s youth can be directly correlated with mothers’ increasing exit from their job of providing for the fundamental human developmental needs of their young infant-children.  (Keep in mind, my maniac abusive mother was a stay-at-home mom!)

I absolutely believe that when a mother brings offspring into the world it is her naturally given responsibility to meet the best-possible developmental needs of that infant-child.  If she chooses to pursue her own life away from her offspring, it is her responsibility to know exactly what the needs of her infant-child are, and to make absolutely certain those needs are being met elsewhere.  If mothers cannot or will not take care of their offspring, even with encouragement and assistance, those little ones need to be removed and be cared for appropriately – elsewhere.

In cases such as my mother’s was, it was (or should have been) obvious that something went terribly wrong during her own young development that caused her to adjust in ways that prevented her from being a mother to me at all.  But it is easy to point a finger at such a complete disaster of a mother while at the same time not paying attention to the kinds of deprivations that cause deprivation/trauma-related changes to happen in the body-brain development of little ones in much less obvious ways.

Any deprivation of ‘best’ will create a deprivation-based memory to be built into a human being’s developing body because memory builds our body in the first place.  Every single adjustment away from ‘best’ treatment in a ‘best’ environment is translated by the body into a need to prepare for a ‘less than best’ future.  When these changes happen particularly during the first year of life, they affect all of development from those foundational changes onward in ways that are permanent and can never be reversed.

It is the degree of quality in mothering during the first developmental years of life that causes these changes to happen.

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+EARLY TRAUMA MEMORY CHANGES ‘THE BODY’ WE DO ALL OUR REMEMBERING WITH

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It is not possible to talk about how we developed into the people we are today without talking about memory.  It is not possible to talk about our Trauma Altered Development without first considering how all our experiences were processed by and stored within our body as memory that built us from our beginning.

Experience forms us.  If this were not true, early infant-childhood trauma would not have the absolute power to change our development that it does.  We cannot talk about how a human being develops or how it remembers itself in the world without thinking in terms of early attachment experiences.  Memory is not only built into the body-brain, it builds the body-brain that does the remembering.

I am including information in today’s post written by Dr. Daniel J. Siegel in his book The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (The Guilford Press, 1999).  Please see the scanned image below of his chart about the types and characteristics of memory.

It is much easier to think about ‘memory’ in terms of this single, simple word.  But there is nothing simple about memory.  Memory is what our DNA is made of.  We carry genetic memory within us from the instant we are conceived.  From that instant our experiences within the environment begin to tell our DNA about the conditions of the world we find ourselves within so that we can adjust ourselves in every way possible to survive within the conditions of the world we are being made in and for.

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All of the terms that Siegel uses in his chart (below) describe different kinds of memory processes.  Siegel says:

“From the first days of life, infants perceive the environment around them.” (page 28)

More accurately, humans “perceive the environment around them” — and within them — from the instant of their conception.  Their DNA has already begun the process of adapting within the conditions of a person’s earliest world.  What Siegel is saying here is that the postnatal infant, once it has been born and now lives independently in a body outside of its mother, continues to process experience in the form of memory.  Memory happens at the point an individual encounters the world outside of its own skin, takes information about the world and uses it to create an increasingly advanced ‘self in the world’ (which of course includes the body).

Experience and early growth and development of an infant-child’s entire body, INCLUDING the brain, are intimately, fundamentally and absolutely intertwined and interconnected.  Siegel writes:

“At birth, the infant’s brain is the most undifferentiated organ in the body.  Genes and early experience shape the way neurons connect to one another and thus form the specialized circuits that give rise to mental processes.  In this way, experiences early in life have a tremendously important impact on the developing mind.  The differentiation of circuits within the brain involves a number of processes including (1) the growth of axons into local and widely distributed regions; (2) the establishment of new and more extensive synaptic connections between neurons; (3) the growth of myelin along the lengths of neurons, which increases the speed of nerve conduction and thus…enhances the linkage among synaptically connected nerve cells; (4) the modification of receptor density and sensitivity at the postsynaptic “receiving” cell making connections more efficient; and (5) the balance of all of these factors with the dying away or pruning of neurons and synapses resulting from disuse or toxic conditions such as chronic stress….Experiences lead to an increased activity of neurons, which enhances the creation of new synaptic connections.  This experience-dependent brain growth and differentiation is thus referred to as an “activity-dependent” process.”  (page 14)

The entire process described in the above paragraph is how memories make us.  This is not an arbitrary choice.  Memory makes everyone through this same interactive experience-memory-body making process.  Looked at in this way, who and what we are on every level of our existence is a result of how we interact in our biological-physiological very real body with the experiences of our life within the environments we pass through — from conception to death.

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MIND is not a tangible ‘thing.’  Brain is not MIND.  MIND cannot operate separately from the physiological body that gives rise to it and informs it for a person’s lifetime.  The entire foundation for our growth and development from birth happens through our earliest interactions with our attachment caregivers.  If our earliest experiences are unstable, toxic, traumatic and malevolent, the direction of our growth and development will be changed.

Siegel writes:

“Interpersonal experiences continue to influence how our minds function throughout life, but the major structures – especially those that are responsible for self-regulation – appear to be formed in the early years.  It is for this reason that we will look closely at the early years of life to understand the ways in which the mind develops and comes to regulate its own processes.”  (pages 14-15)

Siegel proposes “…that the mind develops at the interface of neurophysiological processes and interpersonal relationships.  Relationship experiences have a dominant influence on the brain because the circuits responsible for social perception are the same as or tightly linked to those that integrate the important functions controlling the creation of meaning, the regulation of bodily states, the modulation of emotion, the organization of memory, and the capacity for interpersonal communication.  Interpersonal experience thus plays a special organizing role in determining the development of brain structure early in life and the ongoing emergence of brain function throughout the lifespan.”  (page 21)

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It is not possible to consider human growth and development without considering the kinds of early attachment experiences an infant has with its caregivers.  In my thinking, the kind of interpersonal signaling that Siegel describes here even governs our conception and all our interactive experiences from the time that conception happens.

It is here that I have to say that because I am a survivor of early and long term severe abuse trauma that caused me to change in my development, I begin to take issue with Siegel’s thinking.   I do not have the luxury of taking the kinds of liberties in my thinking that nearly all non-traumatized people can afford to take.

I have found that research-writers frequently make a giant leap between ‘infant’ and ‘child’ in their thinking and this bothers me.  That is why I use the term ‘infant-child’ most often in my own writing.  An ‘infant’ is not the same as a ‘child’.  There is a universe of critical developmental impact and room for Trauma Altered Development to occur between these two stages of being.  Siegel makes that giant leap here as he continues:

“One fundamental finding relevant for developing this “interpersonal neurobiology” of the mind comes from numerous studies across a wide variety of cultures:  Attachment is based on collaborative communication.  Secure attachment involves contingent communication, in which the signals of one person are directly responded to by the other.  Sounds simple.  But why is this type of reciprocal communication so important?  Why doesn’t it happen in all families?  During early development, a parent and child “tune in” to each other’s feelings and intentions in a dance of connection that establishes the earliest form of communication.  Mary Ainsworth’s early studies suggest that healthy, secure attachment requires that the caregiver have the capacity to perceive and respond to the child’s mental state.” (page 21)

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“Collaborative communication” even happens inside our own bodies as our cells signal one another.  It happens on our molecular levels as our DNA interacts with the environment we live in.  Without collaborative communication life cannot continue.  Life happens on its fundamental levels through this “dance of connection” that Siegel is describing.  These signaling patterns and the information that they transmit form our entire body on all levels, not ‘just’ the brain.  Our brain, as a part of our Central Nervous System (CNS) processes all the signaling information going on within our entire body.

Siegel states that neuroscience can now describe

“…the mechanisms underlying how these early reciprocal communication experiences are remembered and how they allow a child’s brain to develop a balanced capacity to regulate emotions, to feel connected to other people, to establish an autobiographical story, and to move out into the world with a sense of vitality.  The capacity to reflect on mental states, both of the self and of others, emerges from within attachment relationships that foster such processes.  These patterns of communication literally shape the structure of the child’s developing brain.  These important early interpersonal experiences are encoded within various forms of memory.”  (pages 21-22, bolding is mine)

These earliest attachment experiences do not ‘just’ form the child’s developing brain.  They contribute to the formation of the entire body including the nervous system and the immune system because they are communicating to the growing body information in the form of memories about either the benevolent or malevolent environment the infant-child is preparing to live in for the rest of its life.

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My thinking continues to deviate from Siegel’s as he begins in his writing to specifically discuss the impact of memory on an infant-child’s development.  I have to read between his lines and begin to translate what he is saying through the filter of my own experiences from birth.  Siegel states:

“Memory is more than what we can consciously recall about events from the past.  A broader definition is that memory is the way past events affect future function.  Memory is thus the way the brain is affected by experience and then subsequently alters its future responses.  In this view, the brain experiences the world and encodes this interaction in a manner that alters future ways of responding.  What we shall soon see is that this definition of memory allows us to understand how past events can directly shape how and what we learn, even though we may have no conscious recollections of those events.  Our earliest experiences shape our ways of behaving, including patterns of relating to others, without our ability to recall consciously when these first learning experiences occurred.”  (page 24 – I added underlining to what Siegel had italicized)

I do not disagree with Siegel’s words, but from my point of view, his thinking is too limited to apply to what I, as a Trauma Altered Development survivor, most need to understand.  DNA is memory.  DNA has recorded within it all the information needed to remember how to make a body from a single cell.  DNA contains the record of what we need to know to be built from conception into a human being rather than into a leaf, a turnip or a toad.

It is not ‘just’ the brain that “experiences the world and encodes this interaction in a manner that alters future ways of responding.”  Our brain does not pursue a course of development that is in any way separate from the ongoing development of our entire body down to its basic molecular operations.  Experience is translated by the mechanisms that tell our DNA what to do every step of the way.  I now have to consider the research discovering and describing epigenetic changes has happened since the 1999 publication of this book.

While Siegel says “this definition of memory allows us to understand how past events can directly shape how and what we learn, even though we may have no conscious recollections of those events” I must expand my thinking to include how “past events” in the form of memories build the entire body.  I have to expand my concept of “learning” to include the learning that is contained within our DNA itself, within the mechanisms that tell our DNA what to do, within the cells of our body that signal one another and receive signals from the larger environment, and within our entire body that contains a brain that eventually grows and develops an ability to inform our mind.

Because I grew and developed from birth in a malevolent environment that influenced my development on all my levels except the fundamental DNA I was conceived with, I cannot take for granted that any of my ensuing development post-birth was not affected by the influence of trauma, and therefore altered.

The only way I can begin to truly understand myself in the world is to begin to understand that trauma and the memory of trauma built my entire body in the first place, and this trauma-formed (trauma in-formed) ‘remembering body built from trauma memory’ is itself the one that I remember every memory with.  Every memory I have, conscious or not, happens within this trauma changed body.

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Siegel:

“In a direct way, experience shapes the structure of the brain.”  (page 24)

Add to this, in a direct way experience shapes the structure of the body itself.

Siegel:

“The infant brain has an overabundance of neurons with relatively few synaptic connections at birth, compared to the highly differentiated and interconnected set of connections that will be established in the first few years of life.  Experience and genetic information will determine to a large extent how those connections are established.  Memory utilizes the processes by which chemical alterations strengthen associations among neurons for short-term encoding and actually activate the genetic machinery required for the establishment of new synaptic connections for longterm memory storage.”  (page 25 – bolding is mine:  I suspect trauma interruptions in the process lead to dissociation)

Experience interacts with our genetic information.  They do not operate separately or independently.  Human beings are created to be adaptable creatures within the realm of what is possible for each of us as individual members of our species.  At its most fundamental levels, all these interactions are stored within our body as memory, and from our beginning these memories are stored as implicit memory that, according to Siegel,

“…involves parts of the brain that do not require conscious processing during encoding or retrieval.  When implicit memory is retrieved, the neural net profiles that are reactivated involve circuits in the brain that are a fundamental part of our everyday experience of life:  behaviors, emotions, and images.  These implicit elements form part of the foundation for our subjective sense of ourselves:  We act, feel, and imagine without recognition of the influence of past experience on our present reality.”  (page 29 – bolding is mine)

People who do not have a body that developed, grew and formed in a malevolent environment of trauma have a different body than does an early traumatized survivor.  The differences in the kinds of early experiences between these two groups formed different memories into the body that will then be the body that remembers everything else in their life time.  That “we act, feel, and imagine without recognition of the influence of past experience on our present reality” includes everything about our self in the world as determined through our earliest caregiving experiences in the world that built us.

People who did not experience Trauma Altered Development do not have to concern themselves with how their past experiences influenced their present reality.  They can roll on down the road of their lives having been built in a ‘good enough’ benevolent world.  Those of us who suffered severe maltreatment during our formative stages will experience the impact of those traumas within the very fiber of our body in which we live our lives.

Nearly all people who experienced Trauma Altered Development have experienced adulthoods that are less than optimal – and most of us eventually are told that we have ‘symptoms’ that place us in some ‘dysfunctional’ category or another.  NONE of us have been told the facts that I just outlined above.  NONE of us have been told that it is not only the terribly harmful things that were done to us that are our problem, not the memory of these experiences that we might or might not consciously remember that is our problem, but that it is the body we live in that was itself built BY THE EXPERIENCES OF TRAUMA we endured and changed as a consequence – through which we live our life and remember everything else with for the rest of our life – that has made us into a different kind of person than non-early-traumatized people are.

This is what Siegel is not telling me.  Severe trauma so changes us in our development that we become what Teicher’s group calls ‘evolutionarily altered’ beings.  I want to know what that means, because I know that without having had these human resiliency factors that allowed me to transform trauma memory from birth into a body that could survive, I would not be here at all.

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from page 33, "The Developing Mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are," by Daniel J. Siegel

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PLEASE NOTE:  Do not take anything I say as a reason to alter any ongoing treatment, therapy or medication you are receiving.  Consult with your provider if you find something in my writing that brings questions to your mind regarding your health and well-being.

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+GIVE US THE FACTS SO WE CAN BUILD OUR BETTER LIVES – NOW!

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We had to negotiate our development through treacherous waters from the time we were born.  We deserve to learn how to negotiate our way through the calmer ones now.

Yes, the changes that happened to us through our Trauma Altered Development in our malevolent infant-childhoods can continue to cascade into bigger and bigger problems in our adulthoods, but I believe a big part of OUR problem is that we find no one around us that truly understands what these changes really mean in our lives, how they affect us in real-time, or how we can begin to live a life of increased well-being AS the changed people we are.

We have to change the track of our thinking about our situation from beginning to end so we can find solutions that truly and helpfully apply to US.  It is within our power as survivors, with the help of accurate research that applies specifically to us, to do so.

From Teicher’s article:

“In our hypothesis, postnatal neglect or other maltreatment serves to elicit a cascade of stress responses that organizes the brain to develop along a specific pathway selected to facilitate reproductive success and survival in a world of deprivation and strife.  This pathway, however, is costly as it is associated with an increased risk of developing serious medical and psychiatric disorders and is unnecessary and maladaptive in a more benign environment.”

Article posted yesterday is here:  *SYMTPOMS: 120909 Scan of Teicher’s Research – Trauma Altered Development Paper

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In further consideration of the word ‘symptom’ it was important for me to realize that the word itself is only talking about ‘happenings’ within the body.  The subjective report we give to ourselves and others about what it is like to be in-with a body is a report of how we experience what happens to us.

Main Entry: hap·pen

Function: intransitive verb

Inflected Form(s): hap·pened; hap·pen·ing \ˈhap-niŋ, ˈha-pə-\

Etymology: Middle English, from hap

Date: 14th century

1 : to occur by chance —often used with it <it so happens I’m going your way>
2 : to come into being or occur as an event, process, or result <mistakes will happen>
3 : to do, encounter, or attain something by or as if by chance <I happen to know the answer>
4 a : to meet or discover something by chance <happened upon a system that worked — Richard Corbin> b : to come or go casually : make a chance appearance <he might happen by at any time>
5 : to come especially by way of injury or harm

I could possibly accept that what happened to me during my extremely abusive infant-childhood of trauma happened to me by chance, but in reference to the work of Dr. Martin Teicher’s research group (as contained in the above link), how my little body changed in its development in interaction with this trauma did NOT happen to me by chance.

Teicher’s work clearly anticipates what I believe future research will show, that how a human infant-child changes in its development within a malevolent early world does not happen to it by chance.  The changes that we experience are evolutionarily connected to the history of resiliency factors possible within our species that allowed us to ‘go on being’ within world environments that were far from good, benign or benevolent ones.

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When I began my own research in my attempt to understand how what happened to me as my mother abused me caused things to happen within me in my early development as a consequence, I first encountered neuroscientific writings that described what seemed to be area of damage after area of damage in my brain-body-mind-self.  The picture that began to appear and form itself about these happenings became bleaker and grimmer the more I studied.  It wasn’t until I discovered the work of Teicher’s research group that I finally found hope.  When I found this research it was as if a brilliant light suddenly turned on that allowed me to begin to understand the entire big picture in an entirely different way.

The article at the above link was published in 2003, and does not directly discuss epigenetic changes because that research is just beginning to clarify how early trauma during infant-child development changes how our genes express themselves.  Epigenetics is a new and rich field of study.  It is also a critical one that will eventually allow us to understand that nature has clear and direct mandates and intentions about how to survive in a malevolent world that epigenetic processes signal to our little body on its most basic molecular, genetic level.  This new information will further inform our understandings about what happens during early trauma that allows a growing body to adapt within malevolent environments through epigenetic forces.

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I believe that researchers who continue to pursue serious considerations of what happens during Trauma Altered Development will find that all these changes happen according to preestablished patterns of possibility within a human infant-child.  These changes represent our species’ range of possible resiliency factors.  I believe researchers will eventually discover how each and every one of the changes we experience are directly connected to the operation of our immune system.

Our immune system, operating down to our most basic cellular level, is involved with all our defense, protection and healing processes.  These process are anything but random.  The end goal of immune system actions is always about keeping us alive – either within the best or within the worst environments we happen to be living in.

I believe there are underlying patterns through which Trauma Altered Development happens during infant-childhood.  They are not willy-nilly.  They are not random.  The processes that occur can be detected, and the wisdom of an adapted, altered, and trauma-adjusted body will eventually not only be understood in terms of natural physiological wisdom, but will also be able to be predicted.

I also unfortunately do not believe that it is in the best interests of our current medical model to channel the kind of support into Trauma Altered Development that we need in our adult lifetime to make the best use possible of the information that this arena of research could provide to us about what happened to us because of early trauma and maltreatment, how that trauma changed us, and what we can best do about it today in our lives.  We are left down here at the grassroots level to explore our own reality.

While we might not have the power to alter current directions in research, we do have the power to rethink our own experience of being alive in one of these trauma changed bodies.  ANYTHING that we might report to our self as a ‘symptom’ can be re-thought in terms of its connection to the resiliency factors that allowed us to survive.

Research concerns itself with what is common among people on the larger level.  We each live in our body in a very personal way.  What is happening to us in our body and in our life HAPPENS because of what was done to us and how those happenings caused our changes to happen!  Teicher’s article refers to “a cascade of neurobiological events” that happens because “early severe stress and maltreatment” produced them.

I think again about Galileo’s brilliant work with the physics of motion.  Something that falls increases in speed the further if falls.  Cascades, like water cascading over Niagara Falls, involve this kind of action in motion.  Once our body in infant-childhood began to make adjustments to trauma, the following changes increased proportionately.  The early the traumas happened, the worse they were, the longer they happened, the more complex and pervasive the cascade of changes became.

While I certainly did not, obviously, have the worst childhood imaginable, it was certainly down there near the bottom.   My own infant-childhood was certainly among those that would INCLUDE Trauma Altered Development rather than exclude it.  If I had been able to find anything like adequate ‘helpful’ information within current medical model thinking as it might have applied to what truly happened to me, I certainly would not have been motivated to begin my own search for information specific to my circumstance.

Thankfully I am living in an era where the developmental-changes information is beginning to appear, and is appearing where I can get to it – of course ONLY because of the internet.  I will certainly not placidly accept current mainstream medical model thinking about how my so-called ‘symptoms’ fit into any current ‘mental illness’ model because I understand that these models are missing at least 98% of the facts about how what happened to me changed my development and how those changes created me to be a different evolutionarily altered person today.

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Have you ever watched birds in springtime searching the world for bits of material they can carry away in their beaks to build a safe and secure nest for their offspring?  The body we all have to live in is the equivalent of our nest.  We can use every single tiny bit of helpful information we can find to improve the quality of our body-nest.

Current medical model thinking about our survivor ‘symptoms’ treats only the ‘symptoms’ because very few people are factually identifying what bird the feathers of our symptoms actually originated from.  As long as we continue to apply misguided misinformation about how what happened to us in our malevolent childhood affects what happens to us today, we are following along on an old pathway that does not really apply to us.

I have a memory as I write today.  Years ago on a warm northern Minnesota spring day I drove out alone into the woods along an abandoned narrow logging trail until I reached a spot where the beavers had built a dam that so flooded the road I could not pass by it.  At the same time I knew I could not clear the road from water enough that I could drive through on this particular day, I considered the future.

I spent the entire day playing in the water.  I removed the sticks and logs of that dam one by one so the water could rush in full force across the road thinking that perhaps if enough water could pass through that the dropping water level would free the road for my next spring’s travel.  Of course that wasn’t logically possible.  Whatever I did to thwart the beaver’s plans for the area on this day would immediately be remedied by them as soon as I turned my car around and left.

It would have taken a huge crowd of people working from the beginning of this stream to the end of it to remove the dams each step of the way in order for that water to return to the course of its natural, unblocked flow.  But why fight the beavers?  Why not just let beavers do what beavers tend to do and simply find another way to pass through the woods?

After all, there’s no way to reason with beavers any more than it is possible to reason with medical model thinkers who have no real intention of altering the way they do business.  That the dams they create do nothing for us but block us from our true means of healing is not their problem.  We are free as survivors to find out the truth of how what happened to us changed us and to find our own alternative way through the woods. 

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PLEASE NOTE:  Do not take anything I say as a reason to alter any ongoing treatment, therapy or medication you are receiving.  Consult with your provider if you find something in my writing that brings questions to your mind regarding your health and well-being.

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+’SYMP-TOM’ – ‘WITH-BODY’: WE ARE CHANGED PEOPLE, NOT ‘SICK’ ONES

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When I write about Trauma Altered Development (TAD) for survivors of extreme, severe infant-child maltreatment in a malevolent environment, I am not making this up.  We must empower ourselves by knowing the truth.

I have spent the better part of the past 48 hours thinking about the word ‘symptom’ in an effort to understand how those of us who suffered from enough early trauma to have TAD must evidently ‘display’ enough similar ‘symptoms’ to end up fitting ‘mental illness’ profiles that match ‘diagnostic categories’.

I KNOW there is something wrong with this picture!!

Yesterday I did a basic Google search for this two word combination, ‘mental symptom’ and received seven million, two hundred and thirty responses.

Today I did a basic Google search for ‘trauma altered development’ and received six million nine hundred and sixty responses.

I believe I am trying to think my way through a very big problem with very little intellectual light to guide me.

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The word ‘symp-tom’ came into modern English in its present form from Greek in 1541.  The prefix part of the word ‘sym’ means ‘with, together with’ and the suffix part of the word ‘tom’ relates to ‘body’ (as in ‘ana-tom-y’).  I know nothing about the Greek language, so I am left simply trying to put together what I think when I consider the English word ‘symptom’ with what it really might mean (see bottom of this post).

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I spent my entire afternoon yesterday searching online for a connection between ‘symptom’ and concepts of medicine.  My search took me backwards in time 5000 years as I looked for the largest ‘tree trunk’ of thinking about medicine in ancient cultures the world over from which any modern day thinking on ‘symptoms’ might have originated.  The thoughts and links I collected yesterday are contained together at *SYMPTOMS: 120809 working notes, and represent what I call ‘interactive thinking’.  These notes are not – yet – even placed into a linear timeline because I am still thinking!  It is clear that the Greeks did not ‘invent medicine’!

The word ‘symptom’ seems to refer to the subjective experience of describing how it is to be within and with one’s body.  It says nothing about what anyone does with that information.  If we use the symptoms that a person reports to place them into any ‘diagnostic category’, physically or ‘mentally’, this happens entirely based on outsider thinking about what ‘bird’ the ‘feather’ of the symptom might be connected to in its origins.

If 100 separate groups of people were to examine the same ‘fallen feather’ (symptom) in an effort to determine what kind of bird it originated from, if they do not all have enough of the right kind of information, they will not all come to the same conclusion.

When those of us who experienced severe trauma and maltreatment during our critical infant-child growth and developmental stages attempt to describe our subjective experience of what it is like to live in and with our body that was forced to adapt through our Trauma Altered Development, what is taken as our ‘symptoms’ leave us only with the option of being stigmatized, labeled, and assigned to a ‘mental illness’ diagnostic category (usually more than one).

It would be a massive understatement to say that at a minimum at least 50% of so-called ‘mentally ill’ or ‘behaviorally disturbed’ people suffered from Trauma Altered Development.  If that minimum of 50% of us were to be simply removed from any consideration of these diagnosis, where would that leave the field of ‘mental’ and ‘behavioral’ so-called ‘health’ professionals?  To put it nicely, they would be left in a quandary of professional disarray.

Our current medical model would rather all survivors rather than the ‘experts’ be left in a quandary and in disarray.  I started my online interactive thinking yesterday by considering what those who held power during his time, as implemented through the Inquisition, did to Galileo in the 1630s.  His radical-thinking book about the position and movement of the earth in relation to the sun was banned by the Catholic Church for over 200 years!  How well does that kind of power-over-information process continue to operate today for anyone who truly challenges contemporary thought regarding the misinformation applied toward anyone who is considered ‘mentally ill’ in our society?

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The work of today’s developmental neuroscientists is giving us enough new information about the consequences of severe early infant-child maltreatment through Trauma Altered Development to challenge current medical model ‘mental health’ thinking in an equally challenging way that Galileo’s findings challenged the whole conception of the arrangement of the cosmos held by the Church nearly 400 years ago.

Although the work of Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard research group is based on an accumulation of research done by many, many people, it is to Teicher’s publication that I point my writing today.  This single article changed my entire life when I found it because it changed how I ‘am with my body’ as a Trauma Altered Development infant-child abuse survivor.

I hope the scanned pages of this article presented here today for readers’ general education comes through on your computer clear enough to read.  I realize the style and content of the writing will probably be difficult and unfamiliar, but read as much of it as you can.  Google search brain regions and terms that are foreign to you.

The information presented in this article, when taken seriously and understood, has the power to completely change the way we consider TAD ‘symptom’ consideration because this information is about the REAL ‘bird’ the ‘feathers’ of our symptoms came from.

The current medical model of ‘mental health’ can no longer be considered to be the center of our conceptual universe regarding ‘symptoms’.  Human resiliency factors that allow a human infant-child to adapt its body-brain-mind-self to malevolent traumatic conditions during critical growth and development must take its place.  It is time to move out of the Dark Ages-Middle Ages in our thinking.

We do not have ‘mental illness’ symptoms.  We are Trauma Altered Development people:

*SYMTPOMS: 120909 Scan of Teicher’s Research – Trauma Altered Development Paper

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‘Sym’ or ‘syn’ as a prefix:

Main Entry: syn-

Variant(s): or sym-

Function: prefix

Etymology: New Latin, from Greek, from syn with, together with

1 : with : along with : together <synclinal> <sympetalous>
2 : at the same time <synesthesia>

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Main Entry: symptom

Function: noun

Etymology: Late Latin symptomat-, symptoma, from Greek symptōmat-, symptōma happening, attribute, symptom, from sympiptein to happen, from syn- + piptein to fall — more at feather

Date: 1541

1 a : subjective evidence of disease or physical disturbance; broadly : something that indicates the presence of bodily disorder b : an evident reaction by a plant to a pathogen
2 a : something that indicates the existence of something else <symptoms of an inner turmoil> b : a slight indication : trace

synonyms see sign

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symptom

1. A characteristic sign or indication of the existence of something else.
2. A sign or an indication of disorder or disease, especially when experienced by an individual as a change from normal function, sensation, or appearance.
3. Etymology: from about 1541, earlier sinthoma (1398), from Medieval Latin (c.700-c.1500) sinthoma, “symptom of a disease”; from Late Latin (c.300-c.700) symptoma, from Greek symptoma (genitive symptomatos), “a happening, an accident, a disease”; from the stem of sympiptein, “to befall”; from syn-, “together” + piptein, “to fall”. Spelling was altered in English by Middle French (c.1400-c.1600) and Late Latin forms.

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+CONSUMERS BEWARE OF TRAUMA TRIGGERS LURKING IN ‘HOLIDAY SEASON MAGIC’

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The Holiday Season can be a Trauma Trigger Trap for unsuspecting infant-child abuse and trauma survivors.

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I am still working on my main post for today about the meaning of the word ‘symptom’, but in the meantime I wanted to present this information from About.Com about Borderline Personality Disorder and the Holidays.  I present this information in memory of my mother, and in memory of her traumatic early infant-child history.

I think difficult emotional states surrounding the Holiday experience can be passed on down the generations just as any other trauma can be.  This is particularly true with holidays that are supposedly child centered.  If trauma surrounds a family’s experience of Christmas in the past, it can be especially true that a child will remember Holiday Season traumas – in their body – without having conscious memory of the facts of the related traumas they endured when they were very young.

I found in my mother’s mother’s own 1930 writings a reference to exactly this kind of Holiday Season trauma when she wrote the following:

“As I remember, the late fall [1929?] everything was normal and happy at home.  Christmas is always an unhappy strain of feelings to me. Constantly I made conscious effort of not throwing arousing antagonistic attitudes in my husband [sic]. “

And where did my grandmother’s difficulties with the Holidays come from?  No doubt from her own early experiences in her own childhood that nobody EVER openly talked about.

Adults can try all they want to try to hide family discord from young children, but humans are emotional detection experts from the time we are born.  It is important to remember that the kinds of emotional distress and traumatic family experiences contained within the Holidays has the power to impact infant-children within their BODY memories for the rest of their lives.

The Holidays thus provide an excellent opportunity to practice changing intergenerational patterns of stress, distress and trauma!  Never that I know of was my mother ever able to admit the truth that the Christmas Holidays were NOT always happy, charming, or pleasant during her childhood.  Why are we so willing in America to practice denial about the truth about Holiday Season trauma?

As I have said before, denial is itself a form of childhood wishful magical thinking.  Because the Holidays are supposed to be these perfect childhood blessed magical times, it is probably exactly HERE that we are most likely to find massive denial present.  Childhood magical thinking (that turns into denial in adulthood) is a perfect fit for Holiday Season emotional set-ups for disaster.

The Holiday Season can be difficult for a lot of people.  From my point of view, it will always be those who did not experience infant-childhood safe and secure attachments, and therefore themselves as adults now have some version of an insecure attachment disorder that will probably be the most high risk people for having emotional complications around this season.

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Just as the Holidays provide a perfect match between the practice of adult denial and fantasy because, after all, Christmas is SUPPOSED to be a magical season, it also provides a perfect stage for trauma dramas to continue their repetition on down the generations.  No matter how much effort caregivers of young children might exert toward disguising their own emotions and internal traumatic dilemmas about the season, their sensitive – and often already trauma sensitized offspring – will be able to detect the underlying truths.  The Holidays thus continue to be fertile ground for the transmission of ongoing adult unresolved traumas.

Any adult who did not experience safe and secure attachments within a benevolent infant-child environment had some form of emotional dysregulation built into their forming early developing right social limbic emotional brain.  This emotional dysregulation came from their caregivers who also experienced the same patterns in their own childhood.  These patterns are formed not only into the early brain, but also into the early forming nervous system on all its levels.

For those who are trying very hard NOT to pass down their own traumas to their own children, this Holiday Season can provide a perfect opportunity for deep, profound and fundamental learning about how insecure versus secure attachments operate.  Insecure attachments happen when adult early caregivers are so consumed and overwhelmed on their own insides by unresolved trauma experiences that they lack the ability to be present for their children.

Children are supposed to be front and center in their caregiver’s life.  Caregivers are supposed to be able to have their own attachment need system turned OFF so that they can care give to their young ones.  When adults cannot experience their own internal state of safety and security in the world, they cannot provide this experience to their offspring.  We can start our efforts to be present for our children by becoming honest and very clear about the truth of how the Holiday Seasons felt to us when we were young.  Trash the fantasy.  We are fooling no one, not ourselves and certainly not our children.

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If you follow the links provided by About.Com concerning helpful information for those suffering with Borderline Personality Disorder and their loved ones, you will find specific ideas about handling the emotional dysregulation that the Holiday Season can so easily present and amplify.  Remember that we are experiencing all of our life with the tools (our brain and nervous system) that were formed in our own early infant-childhood.

Emotional regulatory abilities are not automatically built into an early traumatized little one’s body in an ordinary way.  But it is here that we can begin to practice our growing consciousness about how our changed body-brain-mind-self actually FEELS and how we can consciously change our experience.

We can understand that every difficulty we experience around the Holiday Season is connected to our own early experiences of trauma in unsafe and insecure attachment environments.  Our own unresolved trauma is NOT what we wish to pass down to our children.  How willing and able are we to actually not only KNOW the truth about our own early trauma – and if we had early trauma at all it certainly did not magically skip over the Holiday Seasons of our childhood?  How willing and able are we to actually TALK to our families about the truth of how we feel?

Attachment experts use the presence, absence and quality of child storytelling as a gauge of secure or insecure attachment in children who are old enough to talk.  Adults need to encourage children from the earliest ages to TALK about themselves having the experiences of having the experience of being a person alive in a body in the world.  This is a continuation of the face-to-face emotional-self mirroring processes between an infant and its early caregivers (primarily the mother) that directly build the right brain in the first place.

It is NEVER too late to add safe and secure mirroring processes between people into our lives.  These interactions not only form the early right brain and form the foundation for all future body-brain-mind-self growth and development – but they help to HEAL the same for those of us who did not experience these interactions in the beginning.

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Another extremely important point to remember is that for people like me, the Holiday Season can trigger all kinds of dissociated experiences.  My mother’s chronic and severe abuse of me, that started when I was born and happened for the next 18 years of my childhood, was very likely to be suspended during ‘certain’ kinds of experiences:  Picture taking events.  These included birthdays, any kind of holiday in which a pretend safe and secure attachment HAPPY time was created by my mother inside of bubbles that had nothing whatsoever to do with my ongoing REAL experience of being tormented, tortured and abused by my mother.

Because the abuse seemed to be suspended during these events, and because I was more or less allowed to join with the family during them, and because during these events I was given permission by my mother to be ‘happy’, I COULD tend to continue to pretend that these events were truly special, safe, secure and happy.

They were not.  They simply created more dissociational bubbles of experience that I could not remember in any coherent, ongoing story of my life.  Remember, the inability to tell a coherent life story is one of the MAJOR hallmarks-symptoms of adult insecure attachment patterns and of dissociation.  All kinds of pictures still exist of ‘happy Linda’ during these ‘happy events’.  All dressed up, curls in my hair, opening presents, holding an Easter basket – well, come to think of it I don’t know of one picture of me on a birthday being the center of attention.  But, anyway, you get the picture and my point.

See:  *Age 8 – The Reindeer Envelope – My Own Art Work Analyzed By Me – The Art Therapist

My mother’s ‘nicey nicey’ treatment of me on ‘special occasions’ such as holidays fed into, strengthened and perpetuated the trauma bond that I had with her as my caregiver.  You bet my body has the truth about all these memories!

It has taken me a lot of time and effort as an adult to get to the point NOW where I can clearly see that my mother’s creation of ‘happiness bubbles’ around holidays, that supposedly let Linda out of her miserable captivity of trauma and abuse, simply gave me new dissociational experiences that could not be fit into my ongoing experience of myself in my life.  I never even tried.  I was already a refined, expert dissociator by the time these experiences filtered into my reality.

So think about these types of patterns in your own life, and think about how your experiences of them might be impacting your own children’s experiences.  Why perpetuate the hype?  Are we safely and securely attached today in any of our relationships that we can let ourselves know our own internal truth about how trauma has infiltrated all of our experiences, including the supposed ‘happy times’ of our traumatic infant-childhoods?  Are we continuing to try to create dissociated ‘happy bubbles’ out of the Holidays that have nothing to do with the ongoing nature of our reality?

Because current statistics show that about half of our population had safe and secure attachments in their infant-childhoods, we already know, then, that the other half of us suffered from some deprivation related to attachment.  This other half of us ALL experience (my bet is) some form of infant-childhood trauma memory, deep within our body memory if not consciously, related to insecure attachment experiences around the Holiday Season.  This is a REALITY that does not feed into FANTASY.

It is helpful to make this distinction particularly because the Holiday Season is based in fantasy in all but its most direct Christian historical ties.  It is, perhaps more than any other time of the year, a season when unsafe and insecure attachment trauma histories will appear – one way or the other – to give us emotional (from our body’s memory) big trouble if we are not as conscious as possible about the reality of our infant-childhood life. We can take appropriate care not only of ourselves, but of all those around us who depend upon us not to transmit our trauma drama histories on to them.  (HINT:  Think of this as a Trauma Altered Development allergy to all the fantasy perpetuated about the Holiday Season.)

This is so true that we could actually benefit from attaching a huge consumer warning sign to the Holiday Season:  “BEWARE!  This season is most likely to trigger your early traumatic infant-child memories if you have them!”  It is from this point of awareness that many of us need to prepare for the holidays.  What can we learn from — and how can we change and heal from — our own history of early traumas – no matter where they may be lurking?

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About Borderline Personality Disorder: Distress Tolerance for the Holiday Season

In the Spotlight | More Topics |
from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
The holiday season is a really hard time for so many people. There are expectations that we will be joyful, or surrounded by friends and family. But for many this is not the reality, and the holiday season can bring extra stressors on top of the expectations. This week, start preparing by practicing some new skills to help with distress tolerance.

What are Distress Tolerance Skills?

In the Spotlight
The distress tolerance skills are a set of tools that will help you manage intense emotional states without doing anything destructive. These skills will not necessarily wash away the emotional pain you are feeling or even make you feel less distressed. Instead, the goal of these skills is to prevent you from doing something that will make the situation worse.

Not-So-Happy Holidays?
As the holidays approach, lots of people with BPD (and people with BPD in their families) struggle. Holidays are complicated!

“Go-To” Coping Skills
When you are having an intense emotion, it can be hard to know what to do. Unfortunately, many people with BPD turn to unhealthy behaviors in an attempt to cope with emotional pain (e.g., self-harm, substance use, or aggression).

More Topics

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+THOUGHTS ON THE TRIGGER POINT OF SHAME

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I have the advantage of trying to work my way through trauma related information using my own experience as a basis for what I know, rather than being locked into any established patterns of thinking about either trauma or the so-called ‘mental illnesses’ that are directly connected to Trauma Altered Development (TAD).   I am writing a ‘forensic autobiography’.  That means I write from the perspective of being a ‘confessional’ rather than from being a ‘professional’.  I am free to think any way I want to about the topic of trauma as it concerns me and others like me.

I try to understand what the developmental, attachment, and neuroscience experts say about the topic of TAD, but I am certain that if I line up my conclusions on the topic against these expert findings we will not always match point by point.

I want to talk today – again – about how trauma influences our core development as infant-child abuse survivors.  If our earliest caregiver interactions were not safe and secure, our development was altered from the start.

The experience of shame, as I have written before, is a very real physiological Autonomic Nervous System response to explorations within our early environment that caused us to experience conflict – rupture either with or without repair – with our early caregivers.  If there was no serious rupture (we were in agreement with our caregivers about our self in our environment), or there were ruptures that were met with repair through the appropriate actions of our early caregivers, the “GO” and “STOP” balance within our growing Autonomic Nervous System (sympathetic arm = GO, parasympathetic arm = STOP (pair a brakes)) developed optimally and well in a balanced, ‘ordinary’ way.

These ‘shame’ interactions are always based on the experiences prior to the age of one either in a benevolent or malevolent early caregiver environment that has already by this age built our growing brain, nervous system, body and earliest experience of self in a particular direction.  If these interactions were benevolent, a different body-brain-growing mind and self is forming than would be one that is forming under malevolent conditions.

We have to begin to REALLY understand how profoundly our experiences within our earliest caregiver environment affect us – permanently.  Once we are one year old, our development has already been profoundly directed by the kinds of experiences we have had with our caregivers, primarily with our mother.  It is on this earliest foundation that all other experiences will be processed within our little growing body.

By the time we grow a body-brain that is physically developed enough to be able to experience SHAME at one year of age, the course of our development has already been determined – either within and for a safe, secure, trauma-free benevolent world, or for the opposite.

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I mention this today in following my post of yesterday where I described my opinion of our nation as not being completely pro the human rights of children.  The ability to optimally experience shame in a growing body already by the age of one, I believe, is directly tied to how we experience any later event that involves conflict, consciousness, conscience and choice.

I believe the earliest caregiver interactions we have, mostly benevolent or malevolent, color the development of our personality.  Experts still suspect that personality is primarily influenced by our genetics.  However, developmental, attachment and neuroscientists are rapidly uncovering the facts about how our earliest experiences actually tell our genes what to do.  Given these new and extremely important findings, we can no longer ever assume that anyone’s personality follows the same developmental pathways if everyone is not raised with the same Universal Human Rights guaranteed.  Any violation of basic human needs for development, as conveyed through our understandings about basic human rights, causes Trauma Altered Development (TAD) to occur.

Our national personality is built upon the personalities of all the individuals that are a part of the whole.  Because we are a democracy, the most obvious personality we show to the world becomes the personality of the majority of our members.  Each of our own individual personalities, in turn, were built upon a combination of our personal genetics as they manifested themselves within either a primarily safe and secure early environment or within a traumatic one.

If early attachment is not safe and secure, some degree of trauma is present because fundamental universal human rights were not guaranteed.  We are talking humans here.  Humans have basic PHYSIOLOGICAL needs for our optimal development that create us – in an interaction between our genes and the quality of our early environment – to end up being a certain way in the world.

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America prides itself on being a nation of individualists, choosing to consider that within the perhaps one percent of our genes that make us different from one another there is enough individual potential for differences that it outweighs the 99% of our genes that we share in common as members of our social human species.  I suspect, however, that it is only when early developmental needs are met through the application of human universal rights that the development of the foundational 99% of our shared genetic material can manifest itself optimally that the remaining 1% that provides us the buffet of individual differences can grow, develop and shine among us.

If basic human needs are not met in a safe and secure early environment primarily free of trauma (without ruptures for which there are not adequate and appropriate repair) as described within the recognition of basic human rights, the 99% of us has to take a course through Trauma Altered Development that means we have been forced to adjust to the trauma in a way that limits our ability to be far more of our unique, different self as adults.

Early traumatic, unsafe, insecure and malevolent environments seem to me to narrow the ‘channel’ through which we can pass through our early body-brain-mind-self developmental stages – and still survive.  One by one, I can think about everyone I have ever met who suffered from a malevolent early childhood and begin to see how the patterns among them-us-me become more alike in fundamental ways than they are different.

If I simply look at the so-called ‘personality disorders’ that researchers are now finding are nearly ALWAYS tied in their origins to early infant-child abuse and trauma, the end result makes these people enough alike that they can be grouped into ‘functioning categories’ according to the ‘symptoms’ that they demonstrate in their continued lives.

If I look just at three particular people, I see how Histrionic Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and Borderline Personality Disorder lie on a continuum of personality alteration that created these people to be different than I believe they would have been had their Child Rights been guaranteed so that they would have been able to grow up without Trauma Altered Development.

The very best scenario for human growth and development occurs because of development that happens without the mediating and CHANGING affects of trauma.  Only when Children’s Rights are guaranteed within safe and secure environments can a body-brain-mind-self grow up to be free – and by that I mean, free to be MOST flexible and creative throughout their lives in their actions and responses to every life experience (change) that they encounter.

Trauma Altered Development means that we have been forced to sacrifice aspects of our own autonomous development.  We are forced to be more alike than different because SURVIVAL itself has specific requirements that need to be met.  If we are exposed to overwhelming danger, threat and trauma during our early development, our specie’s resiliency factors from within our bodies will be forced into activation.  If the threat to our infant-child well-being endangers our body-brain-mind-self on the most basic levels, the Trauma Altered Development we experience will simply turn us primarily into SURVIVORS    rather into the most unique, flexible, creative original beings that we had the capacity to become.

To the degree that trauma changes a developing infant-child so that they can survive, to that degree will conscious choice and aware decision making be removed from them – unless and until these survivors can learn what the physiological trauma-changes were, how they affect us, and how we can now FORCE ourselves to become increasingly more conscious in our lives.

Non-trauma-altered people who were not forced to physiologically adapt to early traumas naturally end up with a fuller buffet of consciousness – including the ability to empathize, use a broadly built Theory of Mind to understand themselves in relationship to others in the world, and filter their experience through an aware conscience.  They simply have more choices about how to be in the world.

Of course, these non-trauma developed people can choose to be total jerks if they want to be.  Yet we know that a staggeringly high percentage of our nation’s criminal population suffered from Trauma Altered Development in malevolent childhoods.  Compared to people with Trauma Altered Development, the range of potential choices for non-trauma altered people appears to be almost infinite.

The feedback-feedforward information gathering and response loops within the body-brain-mind-self of a non-traumatized infant-child compared to a traumatized one form differently.  When I think about optimal development using the image of the infinity sign, non-trauma development creates an ever expanding, fully operational flow of life force along that “8” pathway.

The more an individual is forced to apply survival-based physiological changes during their infant-child development in the midst of trauma, the smaller the “8” pathway becomes.  In cases such as my mother’s was, the “8” simply broke so that she was left with the repetitive patterns of “0” only, living her life without the ability to allow incoming information to come in without it having to be processed entirely through the filer of the damage she suffered in her development through trauma.  My mother was not allowed to become the fully unique, thriving, creative, flexible person she COULD have become had she not been forced to physiologically adapt in order to survive during her developmental stages as an infant-child.

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The physiological crisis point within our human body-brain-mind-self as we interact with others of our species is at the SHAME point.  No matter how we choose to recognize this point, no matter what word we choose to apply to this very real physiological point in the operation of our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS), it is at this SHAME point that we are notified that there has been a rupture in need of repair between ourselves and others around us.  The SHAME point is where the “GO” and the “STOP” within our body-brain-mind-self happens.  It is at this point that negotiation can happen successfully – or not.

It seems entirely possible to me that this SHAME point is where the two circles of the “8” infinity sign meet one another.  In cases such as my mother’s, it is at this point that she broke and was left with “0”, unable to negotiate herself as a being in relationship not only to others, but also in relationship to her own self.  She lost the ability to consciously identify herself in a complex world of shifting realities.

My mother operated from the extremely limited survival-based point of automatic pilot only.  She could not flexibly and creatively, openly or consciously consider options to solving conflicts because everything about her centered on NOT feeling shame because she could not tolerate it.  When an infant-child’s environment is so unstable, when their basic human needs-rights are not met, when survival becomes the ONLY option, it means that the patterns of rupture without either repair or HOPE of repair have so signaled the developing little person of danger in a malevolent world that all but the most very basic, primitive options have been allowed.

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The problem with overwhelming trauma is that it disturbs the rupture-repair pattern of checks and balances that allows life to continue going on in anything like a normal or ordinary way.  The problem with overwhelming trauma during our infant-child developmental stages is that we are forced to find a way to survive at the same time we have the most limited resources we will have in our lifetime.  Our only option was, in effect, to steal from our own inner bank of resources in order to survive.  This causes the problem to be built right into our developing body-brain-mind-self because we are then depleted from the inside out.

The point of surviving trauma is to eliminate its effects on us.  If we have no power to eliminate its effects (think here, little tiny person) then the next best thing we can do is eliminate our awareness of the experience of being in a state of ongoing trauma that we cannot escape from.  We have no option except to escape on the inside.

Recovery from trauma post-infant-childhood means that we ‘return’ to a normal or near normal state which happens when the rupture that trauma created becomes repaired.  There must be adequate resources available to allow repair to take place so that life can “GO” on, one way or the other.  In the case of Trauma Altered Development during infant-childhood, the resources had to be found within the child itself because they were not available from the outside.

I do not believe it will be much longer before we understand completely that nearly all of what we call ‘dysfunctional behavior’ including ‘mental illness’ is a result of overwhelming trauma during infant-childhood developmental stages that causes survivors to steal from their own inner storehouse of resources at a time when having to do so – in order to stay alive – robs them of the capacity to later experience a full, healthy, flexibly adaptive, creative best-developed-self.

It is for this reason, if for no other, that a guarantee of Child Rights becomes such a critically important factor.  When a child has its fundamental human rights provided, it will not be forced to use up its own internal resources in order to survive.  Those resources HAVE TO COME from the outside of the child.  That is what human childhood is – a developmental period of growing and expanding ability to sustain oneself in the world.  In order for an infant-child to develop optimally, its needs must be attended to and met during these stages of dependency.  If those needs are not met from the outside, Trauma Altered Development will occur, or the infant-child will die.

It is the responsibility of all adults to ensure that all of a child’s rights are guaranteed and protected.  Nature has designed humans so that appropriate and adequate adult caregiving of infants and children is our specie’s primary, number one resiliency factor.  We must lift the yoke of stigma off of the survivors of infant-child neglect, abuse and trauma and place it instead on all the adults in the society surrounding our little ones that allowed this malevolent treatment and trauma to happen to them in the first place.

It is on this level that I place responsibility and accountability on our nation when I say “SHAME on you!”  Either we intend to STOP neglecting our responsibility to our nation’s children or we don’t.  Either we intend to repair the rupture in the fabric of our society that allows the basic rights of children to be violated, or we do not.

If we choose to GO on letting traumas happen to our little ones that is within our society’s power to STOP, then we must realize that the Trauma Altered Development that will happen to these maltreated and traumatized infant-children will change them on their most primary, physiological level — as they are forced to take from inside of themselves what they need in order to survive — because the adults in their world were not there to help them.  Having to do so will change the degree of well-being for these survivors for the rest of their lives.

When the trigger point of shame is touched, it is time to examine conscience and to choose a course of action.  This is true for individuals and for the societies they are a part of.  In cases such as my mother’s, these abilities were removed from her through trauma that caused her Trauma Altered Development.  Is this same kind of pattern also contained within our nation?

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+AMERICANS MUST NOT BELIEVE THAT CHILDREN ARE HUMAN BEINGS — THUS, NO HUMAN RIGHTS

alchemynow2 Comments

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Any violation of an infant-child’s rights constitutes abuse in my book.  Our nation can march itself, fly itself, bomb itself, invade itself all around this globe proclaiming to be the great protector of human rights, while within the boundaries of our own nation we refuse to even accept that children are human beings.  If we DID accept this fact, that children are not possessions and are, indeed human, then we would have to recognize EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEIR UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS.  SHAME ON US!  SHAME!  SHAME!  SHAME!

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First, let me say this:  It is an honor to have Pat reading and posting on my blog.  I was concerned that her post today would be lost in the comment tailing pile from the mine of information accumulating on Stop the Storm.  So I copied it over here!!

COMMENT MADE TO +ALIGNING OUR NATION WITH UNITED NATIONS CHILD RIGHTS IS AGAINST OUR OWN LAWS

BY:  Pat Gordon-Smith
on December 6, 2009 at 6:11 AM

There’s an excellent accessible version of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child at http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/en/docs/Know_Your_Rights_poster.pdf

It’s a poster intended to inform children of their rights and, as such, is great for anyone. The language it uses is important, too. It shows the extent to which the world of children’s rights has moved on since the Universal Declaration on Children’s Rights. Then, the version written for children has them as passive dependants. In this version children are active agents, following the spirit of the CRC itself.

Here is the text from the poster. The numbered points correspond to the articles in the convention:

1)  Everyone under the age of 18 has ALL of these rights. You have the right to…
2)  Be treated fairly no matter who you are, where you are from, what language you speak, what you believe or where you live.
3)  Have adults always do what is best for you.
4)  Have all of these rights protected by your government.
5)  Be given support and advice from your parents and family.
6)  Life.
7)  Have a name and a nationality.
8 )  An official identity.
9)  Not be separated from your parent(s), unless it is for your own good.
10)  Be reunited with your parent(s) if they have to move to another country.
11) Not be taken out of your country illegally.
12)  Have your own opinion, which is listened to and taken seriously.
13)  Find out information and express what you think through speaking, writing and art, unless this denies other people their rights.
14)  Think and believe whatever you want to and practice any religion, with guidance from your parent(s).
15)  Be with friends and join or set up clubs, unless this denies other people their rights.
16)  Have your privacy and family respected.
17)  Get reliable information from newspapers, books, radio, television and the Internet, as long as it is not harmful to you.
18)  Be brought up by your parents, if possible.
19)  Be protected from being hurt or badly treated in any way.
20)  Special protection and help if you can’t live with your parents.
21)  The best care possible if you are adopted or in foster care.
22)  Special protection and help if you are a refugee.
23)  Access to education and any support you may need if you have a disability.
24)  The best health and medical care possible, and information to help you stay healthy.
25)  Have your living situation checked regularly if you are looked after away from your family.
26)  Help from the government if you are poor or in need.
27)  A basic standard of living: food, clothing and a safe place to live.
28)  An education.
29)  An education that develops your personality and abilities, and encourages you to respect other people, cultures and the environment.
30)  Enjoy your own culture, religion and language, even if these are not the same as most people in your country.
31)  Rest, play and relax.
32)  Be protected from work that harms your health or education.
33)  Be protected from dangerous drugs and their trade.
34)  Be protected from sexual abuse.
35)  Not be kidnapped or sold.
36)  Be protected from being taken advantage of or exploited in any way.
37)  Not to be punished in a cruel or hurtful way.
38)  Protection and care in times of war. If you are under 15 you should never be forced to join an army.
39)  Special help if you have been hurt, neglected or badly treated.
40)  Be helped and treated fairly if you are accused of breaking the law.
41)  Be protected by national or international laws which provide better rights than the ones in this list.
42) ALL children and adults should know and learn about these rights.

I’ve just written a blog entry about this on my blog, ‘Children’s rights and other things’ (http://patsky.blogspot.com) that includes some further explanation of certain articles.

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Please refer to the December 12, 1989 United Nations General Assembly document from the Convention on the Rights of the Child from which this above 42-Article List of the Rights of the Child have been condensed for ease of understanding and clarity for our globe’s children and youth.

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I remember years ago when I saw a plaque hanging on the wall of someone’s home I was visiting that simply read, “Clarity Begins At Home.”  Today I found this same phrase incorporated into the thinking represented on the website for ERIC – Education Resources Information Center:  ED201555 – Clarity Begins at Home:  An Analysis of Key Ideas of Invitational Education.

ERIC is America’s Education Resources Information Center – an online digital library of education research and information. ERIC is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education. ERIC provides ready access to education literature to support the use of educational research and information to improve practice in learning, teaching, educational decision-making, and research.

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My search today for ‘United Nations Child Rights’ yielded 257 documents in the ERIC database that represent global action and thought on the topic.

When I added United States of America into the search, 3 documents appeared.  Only one 1991 document “is a curriculum that serves as an introduction to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Designed for the upper elementary and middle grades 5-10.”

I took out ‘America’ and received information on 32 documents, all of which are not specifically about our nation.

Our nation will never begin to bring a discussion of child rights into mainstream educational classrooms as long as we continue to allow corporeal punishment to exist within our schools.  Physical assault, violence and ‘hitting’ by public school staff is still legal in 22 of our 50 states:

Where the states stand on corporal punishment:

Alabama–Legal
Alaska–Illegal
Arizona–Legal
Arkansas–Legal
California–Illegal
Colorado–Legal
Connecticut–Illegal
Delaware–Illegal
District of Columbia–Illegal
Florida–Legal
Georgia–Legal
Hawaii–Illegal
Idaho–Legal
Illinois–Illegal
Indiana–Legal
Iowa–Illegal
Kansas–Legal
Kentucky–Legal
Louisiana–Legal
Maine–Illegal
Maryland–Illegal
Massachusetts–Illegal
Michigan–Illegal
Minnesota–Illegal
Mississippi–Legal
Missouri–Legal		 Montana–Illegal
Nebraska–Illegal
Nevada–Illegal
New Hampshire–Illegal
New Jersey–Illegal
New Mexico–Legal
New York–Illegal
North Carolina–Legal
North Dakota–Illegal
Ohio–Legal
Oklahoma–Legal
Oregon–Illegal
Pennsylvania–Illegal
Rhode Island–Illegal
South Carolina–Legal
South Dakota–Illegal
Tennessee–Legal
Texas–Legal
Utah–Illegal
Vermont–Illegal
Virginia–Illegal
Washington–Illegal
West Virginia–Illegal
Wisconsin–Illegal
Wyoming–Legal

We Must Stop Corporal Punishment Now!

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The focus of my blog is on the intergenerational transmission of unresolved trauma that happens because the Rights of Children are not protected.  Our problem is much larger than corporeal punishment in our schools.  I understand that the sinking Titanic of Dark Age thinking within the current medical model field of mental health services and research remains connected to our public consideration of Child Rights on all levels within our nation, including in our laws, in our homes, and in our public educational system.

The following is included in the Preamble to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child:

“Recalling that, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations has proclaimed that childhood is entitled to special care and assistance,

Convinced that the family, as the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth and well-being of all its members and particularly children, should be afforded the necessary protection and assistance so that it can fully assume its responsibilities within the community,

Recognizing that the child, for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality, should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding,

Considering that the child should be fully prepared to live an individual life in society, and brought up in the spirit of the ideals proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations, and in particular in the spirit of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality and solidarity…”

In the spirit of the aims of this blog, I am particularly concerned that children within our nation experience every possible assistance toward “the full and harmonious development of his or her personality” which can only happen through safe and secure attachment experiences that an infant-child has provided for it “in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding” that happens ONLY when Child Rights are recognized, allowed and protected.

We are not clear as a nation or as individuals about what Child Rights are.  CRIN’s Factsheet on Children’s Rights clearly describes the ONLY way to look at the Universal Rights of Children.  The USA is a nation of materialists.  We must still believe that children are possessions, and therefore believe that children are not HUMAN, they are OBJECTS to be arbitrarily treated in any way we want to – within the boundaries of our laws, which are obviously themselves seriously lacking in regard to the Universal HUMAN Rights of Children.

Is our nation acceptably divided about whether or not children are human beings or not?  I think that is the issue here.  If we believe in the Dark Age thinking that children are possessions and are therefore objects rather than human beings, anything we might assign to them in terms of a ‘right’ or not can remain arbitrary.  I have no illusions about this point, personally.

When my mother and my grandmother engaged in a rage-filled argument over little not quite two-year-old me, it was because they believed I was an object possession, not that I was a human child.

When my mother violently shoved my three-year-old head repeatedly into the toilet bowl and beat me mercilessly, I was not being treated as a human being with rights.  I was being treated more aggressively than if I was a baby’s dirty diaper.

When I was battered and terrorized and forced to spend the night sitting perched on a stool alone in the dark because I got the white cuffs of my parka dirty, I was treated as having LESS VALUE and less rights than the coat did!

When I was made to ride long hours in the car curled in a fetal position on the floor of the back seat ‘like a dog’ when I was seven, I was treated as having less value and rights than a badly abused dog!

When I was 13 and knocked down by my mother over and over again into a giant mud puddle until I crawled around and said over and over again, “I am a pig, I am a pig,” which I refused to do, I was being treated with less value and as having no more rights than would a badly abused livestock animal.

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I realize that I am taking a controversial stand, but believe me, the suffering of the 18 years of my infant-childhood — and the resulting suffering during my entire adult life as a consequence of the violation of my Rights as a Child – backs me up when I say to everyone in our nation:  You either stand on the side of knowing absolutely that children are human beings with Universal Human Rights that must be guaranteed and protected, or you do not and believe instead that children are not human and are objects that are possessions with no HUMAN rights at all.

It is this latter position held by the majority of our citizens that prevents every one of our 50 states, and therefore prevents our entire nation, the United States of America, from ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and from guaranteeing these rights be protected for every American child.

I am sorry, but I cannot find any ‘gray area of the Law’ here.  “Clarity Begins At Home.”  Our ignorance belongs to us.  As long as we deny our beliefs that children are objects, possessions and livestock, we will remain a nation of child abusers on our most fundamental level, because we do not REALLY believe that children are human beings at all, and therefore have no Universal Human Rights to be either guaranteed or protected.

How else can I understand how I could go to public 8th grade PE class wearing one of those little blue gym suits with the entire back of my body covered solid with bruises of every imaginable color and shape all the way down to my heels — black, blue, green, purple, yellow, brown — from the base of my neck, across both of my shoulders and arms, down my back, over my buttocks, down my thighs, my calves — all perfectly visible to those around me on the gymnasium floor and/or in the community girls’ showers?  Nobody blinked an eye or EVER said a WORD!

That was in 1964.  How much progress have we REALLY made since then in recognizing and protecting the Universal Human Rights of our nation’s children?  Where are our laws that tell our children and the world we mean exactly what we say?

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+THE TRAGEDIES OF TRAUMA TOPPLING US LIKE DOMINOES ON DOWN THE GENERATIONS

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I have been thinking about personality disorders today.  One of our homesteading neighbors just sent me a copy of the 1982 letter she wrote to my mother to ‘disown’ her as a friend because my mother had grown so abusive toward her and her husband.  My mother’s life was such a tragedy.  My mother, in turn, caused me the loss of my own best self and my own best life.  Yet I haven’t been able to write today — and now I am thinking of another woman, another best life lost, and another……

Sometimes I can only observe — all of it — feeling more like an historian without any answers, seeing only the causes…….and feeling so helpless.

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I wish I could think of something light and upbeat to write about tonight, but I cannot.  Better perhaps not to write at all?

I am thinking of a woman I passed by as I left the grocery store an hour ago, having just spent a careful hour shopping for the best buys I could find to make it through the next 30 days without spending more than my $150 food budget for the month I spent tonight.  I included some things to do a little Christmas gift baking.  I want to make the cut-out, colorfully decorated tiny cinnamon cookie people I haven’t made for nearly 20 years.

This woman was standing beside the store’s DVD kiosk with two other women I didn’t know.  I wasn’t even sure this woman was the woman I thought it was until I heard her speak.  She has gained a lot of weight since I saw her last – actually except for one very brief passing, it has been about 3 ½ years.

“I should sell my house and take my accordion and go on a long cruise,” I could hear her saying as I passed by with my cart.  The other two women she was with were busy selecting their movie and didn’t appear to be listening to her at all.  “I’m not in good shape.  I’m not doing well at all.”

I tried to be friends with this woman when I first met her about six years ago.  It didn’t work.  She consumes people’s energy and attention in a continual flurry of drama that exhausts everyone who knows her (I suspect Histrionic Personality Disorder).  About three years ago she sold her big house in our little town and made enough money from the sale to buy another big house in the country, on some land about 35 miles away.  I was surprised to see her at the store tonight, after dark, a long way from home.

Leaving town and living in the country.  I remember that phase when it hit her.  Everything was going to be better then.  That’s all she needed, to get away from all the town people, to be in the quiet, to do her art, play piano, play accordion, garden.  Living in a peaceful place, that would be better she had told everyone.  I have always wondered how she would survive without having an audience to feed upon.  Would she find a new one?

I briefly thought about stopping on my way out of the store to greet her.  A quick thought as I continued on my way past her out the door.  I didn’t dare stop.  It would not be good for me.  I would be overwhelmed.  Being anywhere around this woman is so complicated….

Yet I know about her past.  I know about the years of sexual abuse she suffered as a little girl.  Her father’s best friend, her babysitter’s husband.  Pillar of the church.  Nobody heard the little girl.  Nobody believed her.  It destroyed her.  It destroyed her life.  It still does.

This woman no longer uses drugs, which she did heavily during all the years she raised her children.  The children did not turn out well.  No surprise.  Nearly a year ago her drug using, drug dealing daughter’s drug using, drug dealing son was shot to death along with his friend.  The trial for the shooter just ended here a week ago.  He was acquitted.

I heard about the outcome for the trial from my friends while we ate quiche at the laundromat yesterday.  I was told my (laundromat) friend’s son has known the shooter for a long time and used to buy his winter’s supply of firewood from him.  One time while picking up what was the last load of wood my friend’s son would ever buy from this man, he watched him grab his rifle that was standing beside his front door and shoot an alien he saw outside his living room window.  He shot through the glass.  Everyone local knows this guy is absolutely loopy, but nobody asked at the trial, and nobody could say.

Nobody was there that dark night in the desert to witness when the woman I passed by at the store tonight lost her 20-year-old grandson to his early and violent death not far from his grandmother’s country home.  I think of my own daughter who just found out last Wednesday that she is carrying a boy – my first grandchild.

I can’t go there in my thinking……

There are so many, many places I cannot go in my thinking.  So many, many things I cannot afford to do because of the damage that was done to me through my own history of severe infant-child abuse.  I could not afford to stop and offer my love to this grieving grandmother, this woman I once tried to befriend.  I can only write this much, and no more.

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+SURVIVE OR DIE — DISSOCIATION AND THE ORCHID

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I have heard about endangered species, but until this moment I have not thought in terms of imperiled ones.  I am not certain that this orchid is the one I heard a story about today or not, but I think it is:

Spiranthes delitescens

Family: Orchidaceae  (Orchid Family)
Common Names: Canelo Hills ladie’s tresses, Madrean ladies tresses, Madrean ladies’s tresses

This imperiled plant evidently has a primary custodian:  Desert Botanical Garden

PETITION TO LIST THE

CANELO HILLS LADIES’ TRESSES

Spiranthes delitescens

AS A FEDERALLY ENDANGERED SPECIES

This orchid is also called a ‘sensitive species’

One of the four locations in Arizona where this plant is known to exist is in the mountains of Cochise County near where I live.  Until today I did not know there are native Arizona orchids, so of course I did not know that the very existence of these orchids depends on their relationship to fungi.  The seeds of these Ladies Tresses orchids have no food within them as most seeds do.  Without the fungi to open up the seeds, the plants cannot be born.

And I certainly did not know that there are rare native orchids in the Arizona mountains that bloom underneath the ground.

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When I walked away crying from writing this morning’s post, I knew I had reached a very tender place within myself not far from the deep wounds I carry from 18 years of infant-child abuse I experienced from my mother.  I knew I had to be gentle and kind to myself and I knew it was time to come up for air.

So I met my friend at the local laundromat where she was washing her clothes and we sat visiting, eating quiche made there at the small café.  My friend told me the story of how a friend of hers went with one of the professors from our small local college on an extremely difficult hike into the nearby mountains looking for buried orchids that bloom underground.

According to my friend, her friend experienced one of the most memorable moments in her life when she was shown exactly where and how to dig to unearth these orchids.   The story says the orchids were the color of copper.  I didn’t know copper orchids existed, either.

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Is an orchid a fragile or a hardy plant?  I certainly do not know.  But evidently these Arizona orchids are at risk because the environment they have always lived in is changing around them in ways to which they might not be able to continue to adapt to.  If they cannot change with the changes happening to their world, they will all die out and become extinct.  (Of course this reminds me of tiny infant-children who have to change and adapt within the malevolent environments of trauma they are developing within, or die.)

I have a personal memory concerning orchids.  Not real live ones, just a memory of my version of the essence of how orchids and raising orchids seems to me.  I think about how we grow up through our early childhood to the point where we begin to have a self that begins to be aware of itself in a body in its life so that it can increasingly have the experience of itself experiencing itself having experiences.  This is similar to how I experience my own experience of the essence of orchids, even though in childhood I had no experience of myself experiencing experience at all.

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In 1983 when I left my children with my husband and moved to a town 130 miles away to go through an intensive outpatient treatment program for severe child abuse and trauma survivors, I went through a session one day with the primary therapist who owned this treatment center.  Steve formed a circle with 15 chairs in the middle of the large room that was used for group therapy sessions.  He and I were there alone.  Steve asked me to look into myself and experience as many different versions of myself as I felt safe in doing.

Each time I identified a different version of Linda, I moved to another chair in this circle, sat in it, and allowed that version of me to begin to describe its/my experience.  At one point I found myself as Captain Nemo.  Nemo was a silent, remote, seemingly detached gentleman who shared himself only with the hundreds of varieties of orchids he carefully tended as a hobby when either on land and in his submarine under the sea.  As Nemo began to speak, I learned when Nemo first appeared within me as I learned about his love for orchids.

Every time in the past 26 years since that day when I have had an encounter with orchids I have thought about that therapy session and Captain Nemo.  But never until today did I ever have the image of what it might be like to climb through rocks along a steep and difficult mountain trail until I found a special place on earth where I might dig down and find a sensitive, imperiled, endangered copper orchid in full bloom underneath the ground.

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See:  Personal Checklist of the Wild Orchids of North America, north of Mexico

File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – Quick View
North American Native Orchid Journal. June 2007. Revised September 2009 …. Arizona crested coralroot. Hexalectris warnockii. Texas purple-spike forma flavida … copper ladies’-tresses….}

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+WHEN OUR TEARS TAKE AWAY OUR WORDS – WHAT IS THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR TRAUMAS?

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By the end of this post I cannot write my way through my tears…..

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I decided to take a look today at this book, hoping to find within it some new information that will give me some new insights about how to ‘recover’ from the effects of the 18 years of chronic trauma I experienced from birth and throughout the survivorhood that was supposed to be my childhood.

The Trauma Spectrum: Hidden Wounds and Human Resiliency by Robert C. Scaer (Hardcover – Jul 17, 2005)

Yet, here again, in spite of Scaer’s many years of experience in treating trauma survivors, in spite of his careful writing based on meticulous research, this book does not truly address my condition.  He misses the fundamental fact that those of us who suffered overwhelming trauma while our body-brain-mind-self was passing through our early critical-window growth and developmental stages have been deprived of the most basic human right possible – the right to live our lives in a body that has not been permanently changed by having trauma built right in to it.

Because I live in a trauma formed body, I have NEVER had a body that did not include these trauma adaptation responses in it.  I do not have the luxury, therefore, to return to any pretrauma state.  Well, I do have to make an important distinction here.  Because the full development of my mother’s mental psychosis did not originate until the time she was actually birthing me, the conditions my body formed in while she was pregnant with me were benign and adequate.  Without at least having had those nine months of untraumatized development, I most certainly would not be alive today.

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Except for the critical 9-month reprieve from developmental trauma that I had the luxury of experiencing within my mother’s womb, all the rest of my development occurred in a malevolent environment of trauma.  I now know enough about myself and those like me to understand that everything in Scaer’s book is missing the mark about how trauma ‘facts’ apply to me.

Very few researchers are ready yet to look our situation square in the face.  They treat our reality as if they were trying to consider what a full eclipse of the sun looks like.  We cannot look unaided at an eclipse without suffering permanent visual damage.  Researchers are evidently unprepared to look at our situation without suffering damage to their own vision of what life is SUPPOSED to be like in regard to the impact that trauma truly has on the most powerless and helpless humans on earth – infants and very young children.

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I am sorry, but I just cannot find it within me to get too excited about or to feel too hopeful because Scaer starts his book by paying passing lip service to the reality of Trauma Altered Development (TSD) when he writes on page 12:

“The nature versus nurture, genes versus experience dilemma is especially important in the field of development of the brain and behavior.  Many mental illnesses and behavioral and personality traits are considered to be primarily genetic in nature.  In fact, genes are routinely activated or “switched on” by experience, often only during a window of opportunity in early infancy.  The long-term effects of early life experience on behavior throughout the lifespan must be considered when diagnosing and treating behavioral disorders, especially when considering the perplexing tendency for victims of trauma to repeat behavior closely associated with prior life trauma.”

HOGWASH!   This is just another example of ‘sinking Titanic’ Dark Age thinking.  Yes, “genes are routinely activated or “switched on” by experience” but there’s nothing ‘often’ about this process.  It occurs on the most fundamental level in a continual process during our early infant-child growth and development – it is HOW we get made!  The experiences we have with our early caregivers, either in a safe and secure attachment relationship or not, set in motion all the physiological, biological adaptations to our benevolent or malevolent environment that determine the creation of the body we will live in and with for the rest of our lives.

Those of us forced to endure overwhelming trauma during these ‘windows of opportunity’ in early infancy (and early childhood) that Scaer mentions in passing so change us that we do not belong to the ‘ordinary’ group the rest of his book is designed to help.  I am left, again, with a mind full of ‘yes, but…..’ – WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF US?

If overwhelming traumatic experiences build us in the first place, we absolutely have no chance to EVER ‘return’ to a pretrauma state.  Very few researchers and clinicians seem to get this critical point.

(see an example of an exception: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook–What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing by Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz (Paperback – Dec 24, 2007) )

How do I begin to pick my way through the rubble of thinking that is contained in books like Scaer’s so that I can learn SOMETHING useful about the impact of trauma and hoped-for so-called ‘recovery’ from its effects when I know from the start that this author has no clue about how Trauma Altered Development has changed me?  Filtering what Scaer is saying about trauma through my own body-brain-mind-self that was built through my own experiences of overwhelming trauma from the moment I was born and for the next 18 years of my life is a daunting task.  I have to translate and transform his thinking one word, one concept, one ‘lesson’ at a time.

Scaer’s book would be dense and difficult to read even if I knew ahead of time that he knew what he was talking about as his information applies to me.  Knowing ahead of time that he doesn’t have the remotest clue about who and how I am in the world leaves me ONLY with my own desire to better understand the fundamental nature of trauma as it impacts human beings.  I cannot hope or trust that this author has prepared a pathway for me to travel through this information he considers himself enough of an expert to present.

I have to rely upon my own desire for knowledge and understanding about how the trauma that happened to me changed me from the first breath I took on this earth if I am ever going to be able to achieve any healing.  I refuse to accept my assigned status of being a casualty of a war I was born into as I was forced to fight to stay alive and continue my development with every possible human resiliency factor I had in my little, tiny body.

I find myself at this moment up against my own tears that spring from the deepest levels of who I am as I seek to help all of us who were forced to change on our cellular levels in order to remain alive against all odds.  We were terribly, terribly hurt and we remained alive.  Where are the words that we can use to begin to understand what these hurts did to us?  If the trauma experts cannot even find and use these words accurately, how can I?  How can we begin to articulate what our body knows on its most profound levels about the reality of the power trauma has to impact human beings and to forever change us?

How do we begin to translate our experience and transform our tears directly into words?  I have to get back to you on that.  Right now my tears are taking my words away.  I doubt that’s a problem trauma experts like Scaer ever have to face.

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