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First of all, I would like to apologize to any readers of yesterday’s post, +HOOKED ON ‘D’ SMILES – THE HAPPINESS CENTER, who may have inexplicably ended up feeling blue after they read it.  I understand now that I should have placed a “This Post May Trigger” warning at the top of it.  I didn’t because I had no idea that such a reaction to ‘happiness’ might happen.  I did not know that post would trigger my loss and grieving that would wash over me for the rest of the day, and that I would have to go to work to understand where it came from.

I ended up understanding what had happened to me yesterday after I wrote that post because I found myself about a half hour later feeling not like a frog who could blithely and easily hop off my lily pad onto a different one and go on my way, but like a frog whose feet were glued to a stone as I sank into the depths of a sadness that seemed to come from nowhere.  My insecure attachment system had been triggered in all its complicated glory, and powerful body-memory emotions nearly swallowed me whole.  In fact, I don’t feel today quite like the same person I was yesterday when I wrote that post in the first place.

I understand that as we learn, grow and heal change is SUPPOSED to be part of the process.  At the same time I know there is risk involved, risk of feeling what our body has to tell us about the reality of our present life as we have been deeply and permanently affected by the severe deprivations, traumas, abuses and maltreatments of our infant-childhood.  When these changes happen, our first response is not likely going to be one of those glowing, authentic, genuine ‘D’ smiles tied to our happiness center that I wrote about yesterday.

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As I began today to think about what my next learning-writing step was going to be, I realized that what I encountered yesterday is affecting me today.  What I found in the next pages of Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, confirms what I know in my whole body.  I see that as an extreme infant-child trauma and abuse survivor that most often what is presented by experts to be accurate and truthful, even ‘proved’ information simply ends up making me feel worse about myself.

In its subtle way, nearly everything I encounter about well-being in the world makes assumptions that are not the truth for everyone, certainly not for us survivors.  Something that is presented as truth across all people and ISN’T is, most fundamentally, a lie.  Perhaps the most important accomplishment of my work on this blog is to highlight the fact that when we read this kind of information our body will ALWAYS rebel against the lie.

We can train our self to recognize when swallowing the lie creates what is actually a wise immune-system response of rejecting toxic poison.  The lie resonates with the contamination our connection with our own self that our early abusers did to us.  We will know when this happens because our body-feelings well TELL US.  It is time for us to pay attention.

It is for presenting the lie as truth yesterday that all of us are ‘born equal’ in regard to our ability to experience the ‘D’ smile that I apologize for.  I mentioned yesterday something of the fact that when happiness was not the fare of our early attachment experiences, our happiness center in our left brain simply lost its neurons as our body-brain developed.  But I didn’t say enough.  My body told me soon after the post was published that all I did was drop a sprinkle of truth into a sea of suspicious lies.  I might as well have dumped a pot of boiling water over my head and then stupidly wondered why I didn’t ‘feel so good’.

Let me try to present an example of the disguised lie being cleverly presented with the so-called truth.  I found it nicely presented in the very next section of Keltner’s book that appears after what I wrote about yesterday.  After my crashing experience of yesterday, I was hyper-alert today to this kind of information that can hurt severe early abusers because assumptions are made about the ‘truth’ that are not true for us.

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A longitudinal study is one in which the participants are followed over long periods of time.  Repeated ‘measures’ are taken over time about certain characteristics, or variables, these longitudinal studies are designed to understand.  Keltner presents one of these studies, and states:

“Ravenna Helson is a pioneer in the study of women’s lives.  In the early states of her scientific career in the 1950s, she was interested in the intellectual creativity of women – an area almost entirely ignored by psychological science – and interviewed female pioneers in mathematics and the physical sciences.  She then turned her scientific imagination to the question of how identity develops….  In 1959…Ravenna initiated what would become the longest longitudinal study of the lives of women ever conducted, the Mills Longitudinal Study.  This study has followed the lives of approximately 110 women who graduated from Mills College in 1959 and 1960 for the past fifty years, and continues to this day.  It has led to basic discoveries about how identity shifts over the course of life for women, and how it remains the same.”  (page 113)

Ravenna contacted Keltner in 1999 to ask him to add a branch to the study.  Because he is an expert at understanding human facial expressions, she wanted him to take a look at the high school yearbook photographs of her study’s participants in order to explore

“…whether her Mills participants’ smiles, captured when they were graduating from college, would say anything about the next thirty years of their lives….  Relying upon one yearbook photo as a potential measure of the person’s identity was problematic in this regard, to say the least.”  (pages 113-114)

Keltner agreed to accomplish this photographic analysis and

“…took this measure of the warmth of the smile and related it to the treasure trove of measures Ravenna had gathered on these Mills alumnae…when they were twenty-seven, forty-two, and fifty-two.  This included measures of their daily stress, their personalities, the health of their marriages, and their sense of meaning and well-being as they moved into middle age.”  (pages 114-115)

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Now right here is where my risk-for-contamination from the ‘toxic lie’ meter went off today – loud and clear.  Keltner is NOT saying that any measure of early childhood trauma that might have affected these participants’ development from the start of their lives is included in the research analysis.  I found online the University of California at Berkeley laboratory that continues to work with this Mills study, and see that over 100 research articles have been published about some combination of findings related to this study.

Finally, it seems, researchers are including measurements of the participants related both to attachment and to emotional regulation in ongoing research.  That is progress.  But nowhere on their website do I see any direct connection to the kinds of early trauma measurements The Center for Disease Control is using in their Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) studies.  The ACE Questionnaires that the CDC uses are perfectly designed to gather information about early childhood trauma that would directly apply to the findings Keltner presents as truth and fact in his words that follow.

Because Keltner makes no reference whatsoever to the possible impact early traumas had on building the happiness centers and the early brain of the women in the Mills study, as a severe infant-child abuse survivor I have to take his findings with such a huge grain of salt that it chokes me.  In fact, if these kinds of research findings are presented without including both attachment and early infant-child trauma information, I consider them just plain toxic to my own well-being.

Keltner states:

“What we discovered about the benefits of the warm smile [as assessed from the year book photographs] would fit the analysis of the smile developed here….

“Mills alumnae who showed warmer, stronger D smiles when they were twenty reported less anxiety, fear, sadness, pain, and despair on a daily basis for the next thirty years.  The smile mitigates anxiety and pain, most likely through the effects smiling has on stress-related cardiovascular arousal.  The strong D smilers also reported feeling more connected to those around them; the smile helps trigger greater trust and intimacy with others.”  (page 115)

OK, readers, count the flaws in cause-and-effect logic just presented in Keltner’s last paragraph.   I can accept that the D smilers “reported less anxiety, fear, sadness, pain, and despair on a daily basis for the next thirty years,” but there is something wrong with the logic that follows from a severe infant-childhood survivor’s point of view.

We are left swallowing the toxic suggestion that if we were ‘better’ people and we smiled a D smile more often, we would have our ‘anxiety and pain’ mitigated.  Well, wouldn’t that just be so nice!  How survivors must wish to have the same chances as non-survivors do to react to all the experiences of life in the way that they can and do.

For researchers to suggest that there is something superior about “strong D smilers” compared to others is ludicrous.  If early severe infant-childhood abuse survivors had felt “more connected to those around them” – and others had been more connected to them — while their brains were built in the beginning, the traumas and abuse would not have probably happened in the first place.

I find Keltner’s strange mixing of truth with intimations of control of the factors of one’s life by smiling to be toxic to me.  One of the lessons I learned from my post-post experience yesterday is that not only was I nearly NEVER encouraged or allowed to be happy as a child from birth, and therefore could not build a big, strong, D smiling happiness center in my brain, but opposite to that immeasurable loss the corresponding fact that unbearable suffering overwhelmed my right brain in its development, as well.

I don’t ‘simply’ suffer from the consequences of not being able to feel happiness from birth, but also suffer from great pain that I doubt someone like Keltner can ever begin to imagine or understand.  But for researchers to make the stupid assuming jump between happy D smilers having better lives because they self-empowered themselves in their choices and decisions as opposed to non-D smilers who have less lifelong well-being because they evidently just don’t TRY HARD ENOUGH makes me mad.

That’s right up there with saying, “Of course you didn’t fall off the edge of the world.  You simply didn’t walk far enough.  That has to be a fact because the world is flat and if you had walked far enough you would have fallen off.  That you are here now telling your tale has nothing to do with the world being round.  It is simply proof that you didn’t try hard enough to walk far enough.”

Severe infant-child abuse survivors cannot argue with 98%+ of the research findings that ignore the facts of our existence.

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Keltner does not rest with just throwing a poisoned sugar cube at us, either.  He pours an ocean of sappy sweet (toxic-shaming) sugar over his following pages without having a clue about how his statements are completely biased against severe infant-child abuse survivors:

“The warmth of a woman’s smile also predicted a rising trajectory in her sense that she was achieving her goals.  Women with warmer smiles for the next thirty years became more organized, mentally focused, and achievement-oriented.  Forget what people have told you about creativity and achievement emerging out of despair and anxiety.  Not so.  Dozens of scientific studies have found that people who are led to experience brief positive emotions are more creative, expansive, generative, synthetic, and loosened up in their thought.  Our Mills women who showed warmer smiles reflected these benefits of positive emotion across their lives.”  (pages 115-116)

Nothing like a blithe inconsideration for what has been stolen from survivors, or for the weight of the burdens we had to bear from the time we were tiny and that still reside within the fiber of our body-brain.  Rethinking this paragraph from a survivor’s point of view, and realizing the fact that “despair and anxiety” built our body-brain from the start as they built themselves into us, how hard do we have to work to even begin to achieve what non-abuse survivors can with relative ease?  From my point of view, I am not so much interested in how the “good-built” people get better.  I want to know how the “trauma-built” people do.

Keltner continues with the toxic syrup:

“Our results concerning the relationships of the Mills alumnae were perhaps even more striking.  These women were brought to UC Berkeley to spend a day with other individuals, as well as a group of scientists who wrote up personal narratives based on their impressions of the women.  Women with warm smiles made much more favorable impressions upon the scientists in this context, suggesting that the smile enables more positive social encounters.”  (page 116)

Yes, I suppose a warm smile has this effect on others.  But how does this work for survivors whose nervous system was built upon despair and anxiety, who had to develop massive dissociational abilities in order to survive, who have then entirely different body-brains as a result?  I want to know how many severe abuse survivors in the 1950s ever made it into a college in the first place so that they could be included in this study?

“Turning to marriage, those women who displayed warmer smiles were more likely to be married by age twenty-seven, less likely to have remained single into middle adulthood, and more likely to have satisfying marriages thirty years later….  Women with warmer smiles had healthier marriages.

“Finally, women with warmer smiles at age twenty reported a more fulfilling life at age fifty-two.  Across young and middle adulthood, women prone to expressing positive emotions experience fewer psychological and physical difficulties and greater satisfaction with their lives.”  (116)

Keltner has the cart before the horse as far as I can tell.  If a person starts off life advantaged, and that means with safe and secure early attachment that build all the self worth and strong, clear sense of self and a great big happiness center at the same time they are not battered, beaten, shamed, shunned, neglected, tortured, etc. so that their left brain ‘negative emotional center’ is not massive and overwhelming, of COURSE they will have a better life!

So, in the end I am at least most impressed with other researchers who have the smarts to understand that without measures of attachment and emotional regulation all the findings of this 50-year+ study show nothing but the benefits of having an advantaged life.  I will try to locate the findings of studies that HAVE now included these measures, but I see no indication that any of the 100 papers written from the Mills study include any assessment of the most important factor influencing the well-being of a person throughout their lifetime – presence, absence and/or degree of early developmental deprivation, abuse and trauma.

If researchers are not adding in some measurement of infant-childhood traumas such as the Center for Disease Control’s Adverse Childhood Experience questionnaires, the research findings are still going to be incomplete and relatively useless.  By excluding this information from human well-being research, the findings are invalidated.  The problem with trying to gather this information from the Mills Study participants at this late stage is that nobody can ever go back and find out these measures from the participants of the Mills study that are already dead.  Considering the CDC’s finding that severe early abuse survivors die on the average of 20 years earlier than non-survivors, the most important information that this study could have offered will be forever missing.

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At the same time that I am disappointed with important research that takes place from a position biased in favor of non-child abuse privilege, I can refuse to buy the corresponding bias that suggests that there is something wrong, faulty and inadequate about those of us who never had equal positive advantages in the first place.

I would rather these researchers include a disclaimer with their findings:  “We are biased in favor of the privileged people who were not traumatized in their early-infant childhood periods of development.  We don’t care about our biases so we present our findings as fact for all and refuse to include measures of infant-childhood trauma into our research design.  We have the education, the University and federal backing, and all the power so we can do exactly as we wish.  The rest of you be damned.”

Their implied meaning?  “The rest of you could change yourself to be like US if you wanted to.  You just don’t try hard enough to smile that big genuine happy center D smile.  You got what you deserved, and continue to get what you deserve because you just aren’t as good as we are.  Accept your lot or change it, but don’t expect us to really give you any useful, truthful information you can use to improve your lives.  We only care about ourselves.”

Yes, I am disgusted.  Interesting, disgust is a genuine human facial expression connected to an automatic physical response against eating toxic things that will poison us.  Research findings that blame, shame and condemn survivors because advantaged biases are not recognized, and because the most important information is ignored, are toxic to early abuse survivors.

I bought the research yesterday and swallowed the poison that presented and highlighted the kinds of opportunities I never had from birth coupled with the horrible suffering I did have and left me feeling somehow accountable for the consequences of how what was done to me affected me.  The research findings told me about advantages that happy babies and young children have for the rest of their lives in contrast to the heavy penalty we survivors live with in terms of our lifetime of suffering.  Nowhere did I see any compliment given to those of us who endured and survived what many might not have been able to, even though we did not end up able to be like those D smiley people.

I am not so gullible today.  It is my firm belief that any research whose funding can be tracked on any level into a federal ‘giving pool’ source, must be required to include consistent and accurate measurements of early trauma and attachment.  Otherwise, the research is biased toward the privileged against infant-abuse survivors and is therefore polluted, contaminated, toxic and useless.

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